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MICHAEL DICKEY
The Lifeboat Foundation, which was recently featured in a
Tech Central
Station article (a popular technology, science, and politics web
site)
seeks to raise
awareness about the potential threats humanity as a whole faces,
weather from external threats such as X-Ray bursts, nearby supernovas,
or cataclysmic meteor impacts, or from internal threats such as global
nuclear war, a terrorist or malicious organization or individual
intentionally releasing a biological engineered virus, or even
accidentally releasing a grey goo which could devour all life on earth.
The simple fact is that for intelligent sentient life to survive,
humanity must spread out among the stars. This is something recognized
by many prominent members of the scientific community, including most
recently Stephen Hawking, who said,
warning of earth destroying
disasters, that humans must spread out into space.
In the long term, however, the Lifeboat Foundation would like to
actually see these self-sustaining space stations be created and built,
with humanity spreading among the solar system and eventually to
neighboring solar systems.
I am an adamant supporter of the Lifeboat Foundations goals for three
major reasons, The Drake Equation, the Fermi Paradox, and The Law of
Accelerating Returns. The combination of these three principles
illustrates something terribly jarring; that life throughout the
universe almost always destroys itself through
technology.
Now, I am not a luddite and I love technology and all the great things
it has brought, and I hope to see the day when technology has conquered
aging, all disease, and death in general. But I do not embrace the idea
that many strong proponents of technology do; an absolute blind faith
in everything turning out perfectly well. I hope it does, and I think
that it will, but I also think I will get to work safely everyday yet
still wear my seat belt. I don't expect to come down with a life
threatening illness but I have insurance anyway. In our daily lives we
takes steps to mitigate risk to whatever degree is comfortable with us
all the time. Humanity as a whole needs to do the same thing, we need
an insurance policy. That is what the Lifeboat Foundation seeks to
create.
The Drake Equation is a popular one in Astrophysicists communities. It
is essentially a simple, but long equation, intended to determine how
common life is in the universe. It goes like this, you start with the
number of stars in our galaxy, which is estimated to be about 400
billion. Multiple that by percentage of stars which form stable
planets, and that by the time stable planets are conducive to life
forming on them, times the actual likelihood of life forming, times the
average time life survives on a planet, times the chance it becomes
technologically advanced, etc. etc. etc. Now it's obvious from this
question that besides the very first number; the number of stars, none
of these numbers are actually known. But even if you put very small
numbers into this equation, say one in 10 thousand for each one, since
you start out with 400 billion stars, you still end up with thousands
of space fairing civilizations of intelligent life, and even if they
spread slowly so much time would have elapsed (billions of years) that
they should be virtually everywhere we look. And this leads to the
second principle, The Fermi Paradox.
Enrico Fermi, a Nobel prize winning physicist, looked at this equation
and said "so where are they?" No one had a good answer. Essentially the
Fermi Paradox is stating that even assuming very conservative numbers
for all of those variables, the universe should still be teaming with
life, yet we seem to be all alone. Why is that? Well, there are only 3
logical possibilities. The first is that we are the first, or of part
of the first generation, of life to arise in the universe. This could
be caused by conditions we are not yet familiar with which require
certain cycles to past (just as heavy planets couldn't form until the
first few generations of stars were born and died) to make solar
systems, galaxies, or the universe conducive to life. The second is
that they are all around us, just in forms we can not detect. The third
possibility is that life is common and does grow, but something always
happens that prevents them from spreading out. Of these three
scenarios, only one logically requires any action on our part, the
third. That is, if there is something that tends to wipe a
technological species out just before it starts to spread among the
stars, we better damn well identify it, and if we cant do that, at
least have secondary and tertiary plans to compensate for
it.
Thus we are brought to author and inventor Ray Kurzweil's "Law of
Accelerating Returns" in which he argues that growth of information,
ideas, and technology increase exponentially as well, leading
eventually to such a profoundly rapid change of technological progress
as to create a hitherto un imaginable altering of human life as we know
it. Imagine, by comparison, that the atom was discovered, X-Rays,
Nuclear power, Radio, Lasers, the Internal Combustion Engine was
perfected, and the computer revolution all were discovered within the
course of a few months. And then imagine the same thing happening in
the next few weeks. And then in the next few hours, then days, then
minutes. You get the idea. You should read
Kurzweil's essay and also the good
overview from Wikipedia, along with some criticisms.
Kurzweil's recognition of the rapid growth of technology, something his
essay goes through leaps and bounds to empirically demonstrate, leads
into a corollary principle, that of the
Doomsday Curve. This curve,
demonstrated graphically in a link from the Tech Central Station
article above, essentially draws the logical conclusion of such a rapid
technological growth. That is, the more technology that is available to
a person, the easier it is for them to kill larger and larger numbers
of people. In the middle ages it would take half of humanity all of
their effort to wipe out the other half, being limited to hand to hand
combat. With the advent of chemical explosives and machine guns,
perhaps a 3rd to a quarter of the world could get away with killing all
the rest of the people. With nuclear explosives, perhaps one tenth or
one twentieth would be all that is needed. With the advent of the
internet and its subsequent rapid information dissemination, and the
mass production of complex technology, small groups of people may be
able to biological engineer viruses directed to take out entire races
of people, and a few hundred people could kill hundreds of millions. We
could argue about the numbers, but the pattern remains. In the future,
with things like nanotechnology on the horizon, this could become more
and more of a threat, a future where eventually one person could, even
accidentally, wipe out the entire human race, or even potentially all
life on earth.
With that, we indeed have the jarring answer to the Fermi Paradox.
Despite all the hundreds of millions of stars and likely thousands of
technologically advanced civilizations, none of them survive, or so few
survive that it is a rare event to come across them.
Now, I don't want to be a dystopian alarmist, this is just one answer
to
the Fermi Paradox, personally I suspect we might very well be the
first, or part of the first generation, of technologically advanced
civilizations to arise. A very fascinating and exciting prospect! But
it's easy to fool ourselves into thinking the most promising
explanation
is the right one, and truth be told, I have no clue, nor does anyone
for that matter. But we do know that technological growth, even if
eventually limited, is rapid and very powerful. We do know there are no
other intelligent species yet discovered. We do know all ready the
dangers that can come from technological growth. We do know that we are
talking about the continuation of the human race, indeed the only
intelligent race yet known to exist in the universe, and as such we
*must* act to rationally secure our place in the future, and sign up
for an insurance policy for humanity. Support the
Lifeboat Foundation.
Michael Dickey was the author of this
article and has developed
most of the design of the Lifeboat
Foundation
Ark I
and has done all of the 3D graphics and artwork of the Ark I and the
Lifeboat Foundation's web site. He has spent much of his life pursuing
his deep interests in physics and technology, specifically, self
sustaining systems, mobile biospheres, and philosophy and science in
general. He is an active member of extropian / transhumanist circles
and is an avid inventor and futurist. Michael currently works full
time at a global pharmaceutical corporation, runs his own
small
business and continues to do design and development work on the Ark
I
Space Station.
Michael is an
Aristotlean Eudaemonist and has
authored
A Cure for Aging,
Scandals lead execs to 'Atlas Shrugged' and an introduction to Ayn
Rand,
The Cost of Bias,
Interesting
Things
in Science,
Cancer Among Us,
A response to Cal Thomas on Stem Cell Research,
Terrorism and the US,
A two paragraph anthropocentric history of the universe,
Get 'used' to it!,
Do Cell Phones Cause Cancer?,
The Sociological Advantageous Nature of Buddhism,
Parsimonious Ethics on Abortion,
and
The future of technology.
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