How Likely is Life to Get Laid?

Via Considering the Universe, this fascinating 1998 essay from Robin Hanson, in which he applies the probability theory of hard steps to the Great Filter, the idea that the reason the universe is not already teeming with life is that there is at least one and very likely far more hard steps between dead matter and a wave of colonizing life moving out at the speed of light:

To support optimism regarding our future, we must find especially improbable past evolutionary steps. And in fact we can find a number of plausible candidates for groups of hard trial-and-error biological steps: life, complexity, sex, society, cradle and language. Presuming there are about nine hard steps total here, the Great Filter could be explained if the expected time for each of these steps averaged (logarithmically) to about thirty billion years, if only one percent of stars could support such steps, and if we have only about a one percent chance of not destroying ourselves soon (or permanently banning colonization).

It's a little technical but nothing the educated reader can't handle. It's certainly something to think about, and a little comforting to think that the explanation isn't that intelligent life always manages to wipe itself out when it hits the Singularity.

Also, this excellent essay from George Dvorsky over at BetterHumans, in which he brings everyone up to date on the latest developments in science pertaining to the Great Silence.

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Year Zero

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Year Zero is the best album Trent Reznor has ever done. A concept album whose plot is an alternate reality game is a really great idea, one that lends the album an intellectual and emotional depth that's simply not available otherwise. Here's the wiki if you're already interested.

For those who haven't heard about it, the idea is that the album is a warning from the near future - around the year 2020, as best as people have been able to tell - sent back in time along with a number of cached webpages through some quickly squelched development in quantum computing. The world that is revealed by this information is one in which the sinister cabal that currently controls the US government has metastasized. Democracy has been completely destroyed in all but name, a feat accomplished by scaring the shit out of the population through repeated and ever worse false flag operations, first a nuke and then a bioweapon. The latter gave them the excuse to start dumping a drug into the water supply that was purported to defend against the pathogen, but in reality is simply a drug designed to stupefy the population. The government is using it's newfound power to savage every part of the world with which it has contact: organ-farming the population in Guatemala, mass drug testing in Africa, and of course a continued war in the Mid-East - Iran's been nuked - which has long since ceasing making any sense save as a way of keeping the population distracted (it was those damn terrorists who nuked us and released the virus!)

That's the setup. What happens is that aliens, or God, or the entities that are running our simulated universe - my favored hypothesis, but really it's moot - appear and give humans an unmistakable warning. Either we change our ways right quick, or we get wiped out. They've been watching the species very closely, for a very long time, without interfering in our development, but things have reached a crisis point and they've revealed themselves.

In the end, of course, we get wiped out, deleted utterly from the universe. That's why the warning gets sent back.

This makes a kind of sense to me. We're approaching a time when a single state will be able to control the entire world, and once it's in place it will be stable for a very long time, having subsumed all other competitors. The initial form of that state will thus be of enormous importance to the future evolution of humanity, and more to the point, post-humanity: what spreads out from the Earth will either bless the universe around it or taint it with a horrible blight.

The aliens were hoping for something good. That's why they watched us so long, let us develop and grow. It's probably something they've done many times in the past, on millions or billions of other worlds (or in billions of other computer simulations): patiently watching a world for hundreds of millions of years, waiting for it's life to develop intelligence, and then closely watching the civilization as it advances through the inevitable technological stages. Eventually, the Singularity approaches, and it's at that point, one way or another, that the watchers reveal themselves. If the growing seed looks like it will grow into a benign coinhabitant of the cosmic civilization, it's inducted; if it's become something malign, it's terminated, quickly and without ceremony.

Neither permanent dystopias, which the state in Year Zero would have developed into, nor god-like aliens - the only creatures that could put an end to the malignancy - are exactly new ideas. Nevertheless Reznor has managed (uncharacteristically enough for a musician, though not so surprisingly given the obviously collaborative nature of the project) to combine them into a superlative and thought-provoking work of SF, one that is both deeply thoughtful and creepily plausible. It's not really a warning from the future, but it most certainly is a warning, sincere and frightening, one that all of us should take the time to think over.

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The Quantum Solution to the Fermi Paradox

Michael Anissimov at Accelerating Future has an interesting post on human longevity, in which he very correctly points out that if you really want immortality, existential risk is every bit as important as life extension technology.

One of the commenters mentioned the idea of Quantum Immortality, a thought experiment in which the many worlds interpretations offers continuity of consciousness even through events that should have a 100% chance of death (for instance, setting off a nuke right next to you: untold trillions of you die instantly, but in one parallel universe you survive.) Further down, another commenter mentions an idea I've toyed with myself, that this is exactly why we're all still here 60 years after the Manhattan Project.

Going further out, it could explain the Fermi paradox. Intelligent life might be so likely to extinguish itself when it develops that the probability of there being more than one species in any given universe is essentially nil. Every species survives, but in a branch of the multiverse that's so improbable that it never has contact with another species.

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Baby Universes and Space Exploration

A year or so ago I came across a story about Japanese scientists who were planning on making a baby universe (link to news report, link to original paper). And then I remembered this post at Accelerating Future, Space Travel: Not in a Billion Years, and it got me thinking.

Civilization is bound to get a hell of a lot smarter, a hell of a lot faster, over the next few decades. Some of that will come from better human-to-human networking, as the net figures out how to maximize the utility of its human components. A lot of the rest will come from faster, smaller, exponentially more powerful computers. Part of the corollary to that is that problems that look intractable now - in biology, neurology, economics, and in all probability physics - will be solved with ease in the near future. In all likelihood even more fiendishly difficult problems will present themselves, but what sort of technological spinoffs might lie waiting in the problems that have yet to be solved? Those in biology would make life a plastic thing with which we could do what we wished, at every level, engineering it as reliably as we've previously dealt with stone, metal and, well, plastic. The ones in neurology would allow human intelligence to be immeasurably improved, as well as replicated and then improved even more inside computers. But what of those problems that may be solved in physics?

Leonard Susskind's book The Cosmic Landscape shows how recent advances in string theory have indicated that there may be a multiverse in which every constituent universe obeys entirely different versions of the same underlying physics. The number of different possible universes is of course quite vast, but they would all lie on a multidimensional mathematical structure Susskind calls the cosmic landscape. Charting this landscape through brute computation would be an enormous undertaking, likely far more difficult than simply completing the human genome. It is not, however, inconceivable that such a map might be made with the kind of supercomputers likely to be in operation two or three decades from now.

A map alone is of no use, but if those early experiments suggested by Sakai et al. are fruitful, and it proves possible to create patches of space-time on different parts of that landscape, it may also prove possible to specify what part of that landscape they're created on. The paper, of course, envisions the baby universe splitting off entirely from ours so quickly that its existence would be undetectable. It would, just like ours, expand forever, just along different directions. But what if there were regions on the landscape where such a separation wouldn't happen? Where stable wormholes into adjacent universes might be found? There needn't be a lot of them. One in a trillion trillion would be a bounty vast beyond imagining.

That's a lot of maybes, of course. Any one of them could prove to be inaccurate. But if they're not, the possibilities are interesting. In fact, they sort of dwarf piddling little things like mastering the intricacies of life and the human brain. Civilization would become a master of space and time, able to create it according to its specifications, along with the matter necessary to populate that universe. What might remain scarce under such a scenario is a fascinating question to contemplate, but one corollary that might be drawn almost immediately is that space would cease to hold any interest whatsoever. This is so certain that it might serve as an ironclad explanation of the Fermi Paradox: any intelligent species reaching a technological singularity would be guaranteed to figure out the technology of universe creation, and with that, it would turn its back on the outside universe and focus on creating all the real estate it wanted.

Indeed, it's even possible that civilization as such might simply disappear into universes better suited to maintaining it, migrating entirely into those with much higher densities of matter and energy (at least as locally defined.) Perhaps, should they be the type to give a damn, they even restore their home-worlds to their pristine state before tunneling through into superior realities, leaving not a trace of their existence behind.

The lost civilizations that are muttered about in new age theories and SF novels might even have gone that way ... but that would be pushing speculation too far.

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