THE POST-BIOLOGICAL ERA
One person who has spent considerable time thinking about these questions is my colleague Dr. Paul Davies of Arizona State University, near Phoenix. When I interviewed him, he told me that we have to expand our own horizon to contemplate what a civilization that is thousands or more years ahead of us may look like.
Given the dangers of space travel, he believes that such beings will have abandoned their biological form, much like the bodiless minds we considered in the previous chapter. He writes, “My conclusion is a startling one. I think it very likely—in fact inevitable—that biological intelligence is only a transitory phenomenon, a fleeting phase in the evolution of intelligence in the universe. If we ever encounter extraterrestrial intelligence, I believe it is overwhelmingly likely to be post-biological in nature, a conclusion that has obvious and far-reaching ramifications for SETI.”
In fact, if the aliens are thousands of years ahead of us, chances are that they have abandoned their biological bodies eons ago to create the most efficient computational body: a planet whose entire surface is completely covered with computers. Dr. Davies says, “It isn’t hard to envision the entire surface of a planet being covered with a single integrated processing system.… Ray Bradbury has coined the term ‘Matrioshka brains’ for these awesome entities.”
So to Dr. Davies, alien consciousness may lose the concept of “self” and be absorbed into the collective World Wide Web of Minds, which blankets the entire surface of the planet. Dr. Davies adds, “A powerful computer network with no sense of self would have an enormous advantage over human intelligence because it could redesign ‘itself,’ fearlessly make changes, merge with whole systems, and grow. ‘Feeling personal’ about it would be a distinct impediment to progress.”
So in the name of efficiency and increased computational ability, he envisions members of this advanced civilization giving up their identity and being absorbed into a collective consciousness.
Dr. Davies acknowledges that critics of his idea may find this concept rather repulsive. It appears as if this alien species is sacrificing individuality and creativity to the greater good of the collective or the hive. This is not inevitable, he cautions, but it is the most efficient option for civilization.
Dr. Davies also has a conjecture that he admits is rather depressing. When I asked him why these civilizations don’t visit us, he gave me a strange answer. He said that any civilization that advanced would also have developed virtual realities far more interesting and challenging than reality. The virtual reality of today would be a children’s toy compared to the virtual reality of a civilization thousands of years more advanced than us.
This means that perhaps their finest minds might have decided to play out imaginary lives in different virtual worlds. It’s a discouraging thought, he admitted, but certainly a possibility. In fact, it might even be a warning for us as we perfect virtual reality.
WHAT DO THEY WANT?
In the movie The Matrix, the machines take over and put humans into pods, where they exploit us as batteries to energize themselves. That is why they keep us alive. But since a single electrical plant produces more power than the bodies of millions of humans, any alien looking for an energy source would quickly see there is no need for human batteries. (This seems to be lost on the machine overlords in the Matrix, but hopefully aliens would see reason.)
Another possibility is that they might want to eat us. This was explored in an episode of The Twilight Zone, in which aliens land on Earth and promise us the benefits of their advanced technology. They even ask for volunteers to visit their beautiful home planet. The aliens accidentally leave behind a book, called To Serve Man, which scientists anxiously try to decipher in order to discover what wonders the aliens will share with us. Instead, the scientists find out that the book is actually a cookbook. (But since we will be made of entirely different DNA and proteins from theirs, we could be difficult for their digestive tracts to process.)
Another possibility is that the aliens will want to strip Earth of resources and valuable minerals. There may be some truth to this argument, but if the aliens are advanced enough to travel effortlessly from the stars, then there are plenty of uninhabited planets to plunder for resources, without having to worry about restive natives. From their point of view, it would be a waste of time to try to colonize an inhabited planet when there are easy alternatives.
So if the aliens do not want to enslave us or plunder our resources, then what danger do they pose? Think of deer in a forest. Whom should they fear the most—the ferocious hunter armed with a shotgun, or the mild-mannered developer armed with a blueprint? Although the hunter may scare the deer, only a few deer are threatened by him. More dangerous to the deer is the developer, because the deer are not even on his radar screen. The developer may not even think about the deer at all, concentrating instead on developing the forest into usable property. In view of this, what would an invasion actually look like?
In Hollywood movies, there is one glaring flaw: the aliens are only a century or so ahead of us, so we can usually devise a secret weapon or exploit a simple weakness in their armor to fight them off, as in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. But as SETI director Dr. Seth Shostak once told me, a battle with an advanced alien civilization will be like a battle between Bambi and Godzilla.
In reality, the aliens might be millennia to millions of years ahead of us in their weaponry. So, for the most part, there will be little we can do to defend ourselves. But perhaps we can learn from the barbarians who defeated the greatest military empire of its time, the Roman Empire.
The Romans were masters of engineering, able to create weapons that could flatten barbarian villages and roads to supply distant military outposts of a vast empire. The barbarians, who were barely emerging from a nomadic existence, had little chance when encountering the juggernaut of the Roman Imperial Army.
But history records that as the empire expanded, it was spread too thin, with too many battles to fight, too many treaties bogging it down, and not enough of an economy to support all this, especially with a gradual decline in population. Moreover, the empire, always short on recruits, had to enlist young barbarian soldiers and promote them to leadership positions. Inevitably, the superior technology of the empire began to filter down to the barbarians as well. In time, the barbarians began to master the very military technologies that at first had conquered them.
Toward the end, the empire, weakened by internal palace intrigues, severe crop shortages, civil wars, and an overstretched army, faced barbarians who were able to fight the Roman Imperial Army to a standstill. The sacking of Rome in A.D. 410 and 455 paved the way for the empire’s ultimate fall in A.D. 476.
In the same way, it is likely that earthlings will initially offer no real threat to an alien invasion, but over time earthlings could learn the weak points of the alien army, its power supplies, its command centers, and most of all its weaponry. In order to control the human population, the aliens will have to recruit collaborators and promote them. This will result in a diffusion of their technology to the humans.
Then a ragtag army of earthlings might be able to mount a counterattack. In Eastern military strategy, like the classic teachings of Sun Tzu in The Art of War, there is a way to defeat even a superior army. You first allow it to enter your territory. Once it has entered unfamiliar land and its ranks are diffused, you can counterattack where they are weakest.
Another technique is to use the enemy’s strength against it. In judo, the principal strategy is to turn the momentum of the attacker to your advantage. You let the enemy attack, and then trip them or throw them off guard, exploiting the enemy’s own mass and energy. The bigger they are, the harder they fall. In the same way, perhaps the only way to fight a superior alien army is to allow it to invade your territory, learn its weaponry and military secrets, and turn those very weapons and secrets against it.
So a superior alien army cannot be defeated head-on. But it will withdraw if
it cannot win and the cost of a stalemate is too high. Success means depriving the enemy of a victory.
But more than likely, I believe the aliens will be benevolent and, for the most part, ignore us. We simply have nothing to offer them. If they visit us, then it will be mainly out of curiosity or for reconnaissance. (Since curiosity was an essential feature in our becoming intelligent, it is likely that any alien species will be curious, and hence want to analyze us, but not necessarily to make contact.)
MEETING AN ALIEN ASTRONAUT
Unlike in the movies, we will probably not meet the flesh-and-blood alien creatures themselves. It would simply be too dangerous and unnecessary. In the same way that we sent the Mars Rover to explore, aliens will more than likely send organic/mechanical surrogates or avatars instead, which can better handle the stresses of interstellar travel. In this way, the “aliens” we meet on the White House lawn may look nothing like their masters back on the home planet. Instead, the masters will project their consciousness into space through proxies.
More than likely, though, they will send a robotic probe to our moon, which is geologically stable, with no erosion. These probes are self-replicating; that is, they will create a factory and manufacture, say, a thousand copies of themselves. (These are called von Neumann probes, after mathematician John von Neumann, who laid the foundation for digital computers. Von Neumann was the first mathematician to seriously consider the problem of machines that could reproduce themselves.) These second-generation probes are then launched to other star systems, where each one in turn creates a thousand more third-generation probes, making a total of a million. Then these probes fan out and create more factories, making a billion probes. Starting with just one probe, we have one thousand, then a million, then a billion. Within five generations, we have a quadrillion probes. Soon we have a gigantic sphere, expanding at near light speed, containing trillions upon trillions of probes, colonizing the entire galaxy within a few hundred thousand years.
Dr. Davies takes this idea of self-replicating von Neumann probes so seriously that he has actually applied for funding to search the surface of the moon for evidence of a previous alien visitation. He wishes to scan the moon for radio emissions or radiation anomalies that would indicate evidence of an alien visitation, perhaps millions of years ago. He wrote a paper with Dr. Robert Wagner in the scientific journal Acta Astronautica calling for a close examination of the photos from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter down to a resolution of about 1.5 feet.
They wrote, “Although there is only a tiny probability that alien technology would have left traces on the moon in the form of an artifact or surface modification of lunar features, this location has the virtue of being close,” and also traces of an alien technology would remain preserved over long periods of time. Since there is no erosion on the moon, treadmarks left by aliens would still be visible (in the same way that footprints left by our astronauts in the 1970s could, in principle, last for billions of years).
One problem is that the von Neumann probe might be very small. Nanoprobes use molecular machines and MEMs, and hence it might be only as big as a bread box, he said to me, or even smaller. (In fact, if such a probe landed on Earth in someone’s backyard, the owner might not even notice.)
This method, however, represents the most efficient way of colonizing the galaxy, using the exponential growth of self-replicating von Neumann probes. (This is also the way in which a virus infects our body. Starting with a handful of viruses, they land on our cells, hijack the reproductive machinery, and convert our cells into factories to create more viruses. Within two weeks, a single virus can infect trillions of cells, and we eventually sneeze.)
If this scenario is correct, it means that our own moon is the most likely place for an alien visitation. This is also the basis of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, which even today represents the most plausible encounter with an extraterrestrial civilization. In the movie, a probe was placed on our moon millions of years ago, mainly to observe the evolution of life on Earth. At times, it interferes in our evolution and gives us an added boost. This information is then sent to Jupiter, which is a relay station, before heading to the home planet of this ancient alien civilization.
From the point of view of this advanced civilization, which can simultaneously scan billions of star systems, we can see that they have a considerable choice in what planetary systems to colonize. Given the sheer enormity of the galaxy, they can collect data and then best choose which planets or moons would yield the best resources. From their perspective, they might not find Earth very appealing.
The empires of the future will be empires of the mind.
—WINSTON CHURCHILL
If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.
—GENERAL OMAR BRADLEY
15 CONCLUDING REMARKS
In 2000, a raging controversy erupted in the scientific community. One of the founders of Sun Computers, Bill Joy, wrote an inflammatory article denouncing the mortal threat we face from advanced technology. In an article in Wired magazine with the provocative title “The Future Does Not Need Us,” he wrote, “Our most powerful 21st century technologies—robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech—are threatening to make humans an endangered species.” That incendiary article questioned the very morality of hundreds of dedicated scientists toiling in their labs on the cutting edge of science. He challenged the very core of their research, stating that the benefits of these technologies were vastly overshadowed by the enormous threats they posed to humanity.
He described a macabre dystopia in which all our technologies conspire to destroy civilization. Three of our key creations will eventually turn on us, he warned:
• One day, bioengineered germs may escape from the laboratory and wreak havoc on the world. Since you cannot recapture these life-forms, they might proliferate wildly and unleash a fatal plague on the planet worse than those of the Middle Ages. Biotechnology may even alter human evolution, creating “several separate and unequal species … that would threaten the notion of equality that is the very cornerstone of our democracy.”
• One day, nanobots may go berserk and spew out unlimited quantities of “gray goo,” which will blanket Earth, smothering all life. Since these nanobots “digest” ordinary matter and create new forms of matter, malfunctioning nanobots could run amok and digest much of Earth. “Gray goo would surely be a depressing ending to our human adventure on Earth, far worse than mere fire or ice, and one that could stem from a simple laboratory accident. Oops,” he wrote.
• One day, the robots will take over and replace humanity. They will become so intelligent that they will simply push humanity aside. We will be left as an evolutionary footnote. “The robots would in no sense be our children.… On this path our humanity may well be lost,” he wrote.
Joy claimed that the dangers unleashed by these three technologies dwarfed the dangers posed by the atomic bomb in the 1940s. Back then, Einstein warned of the power of nuclear technology to destroy civilization: “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.” But the atomic bomb was built by a huge government program that could be tightly regulated, while these technologies are being developed by private companies that are lightly regulated, if at all, Joy pointed out.
Sure, he conceded, these technologies may alleviate some suffering in the short term. But in the long term, the benefits are overwhelmed by the fact that they may unleash a scientific Armageddon that may doom the human race.
Joy even accused scientists of being selfish and naïve as they try to create a better society. He wrote, “A traditional utopia is a good society and a good life. A good life involves other people. This techno utopia is all about ‘I don’t get diseases; I don’t die; I get to have better eyesight and be smarter’ and all this. If you described this to Socrates or Plato, they would laugh at you.”
He concluded by stating, “I think it is no exaggerat
ion to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states.…”
The conclusion to all this? “Something like extinction,” he warned.
As expected, the article sparked a firestorm of controversy.
That article was written over a decade ago. In terms of high technology, that is a lifetime. It is now possible to view certain of its predictions with some hindsight. Looking back at the article and putting his warnings into perspective, we can easily see that Bill Joy exaggerated many of the threats coming from these technologies, but he also spurred scientists to face up to the ethical, moral, and societal consequences of their work, which is always a good thing.
And his article opened up a discussion about who we are. In unraveling the molecular, genetic, and neural secrets of the brain, haven’t we in some sense dehumanized humanity, reducing it to a bucket of atoms and neurons? If we completely map every neuron of the brain and trace every neural pathway, doesn’t that remove the mystery and magic of who we are?
A RESPONSE TO BILL JOY
In retrospect, the threats from robotics and nanotechnology are more distant than Bill Joy thought, and I would argue that with enough warning, we can take a variety of countermeasures, such as banning certain avenues of research if they lead to uncontrollable robots, placing chips in them to shut them off if they become dangerous, and creating fail-safe devices to immobilize all of them in an emergency.
More immediate is the threat from biotechnology, where there is the realistic danger of biogerms that might escape the laboratory. In fact, Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy jointly wrote an article criticizing the publication of the complete genome of the 1918 Spanish flu virus, one of the most lethal germs in modern history, which killed more people than World War I. Scientists were able to reassemble the long-dead virus by examining the corpses and blood of its victims and sequencing its genes, and then they published it on the web.