Read Online Why Darwin Matters by Michael Shermer - Free Book Online
Authors: Michael Shermer
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I was thinking about what we might find if we went in search of an intelligent designer when I remembered Arthur C. Clarke’s famous Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” 3 This led me to consider what a sufficiently advanced Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (ETI) would be indistinguishable from, which led me to formulate
Shermer’s Last Law: Any sufficiently advanced Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence is indistinguishable from God.
4
God is described by most Western religions as omniscient and omnipotent. Since we are far from the mark on these traits, how could we possibly distinguish a God who has them absolutely, from an Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence who has them in copious amounts relative to us? Thus, we would be unable to distinguish between absolute and relative omniscience and omnipotence. But if God were only relatively more knowing and powerful than us, then by definition He
would
be an ETI! From this I conclude that there is no difference between Intelligent Design, Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, and God, at least a God that is part of our world. This conclusion is derived from the following sequence of observations and deductions:
Observation
. Biological evolution is glacially slow compared to technological evolution. The reason is that biological evolution is Darwinian and requires generations of differential reproductive success, whereas technological evolution is Lamarckian, where change is inherited within the same generation.
Observation
. The cosmos is very big and space is very empty, so the probability of making contact with an ETI is remote. By example, the speed of our most distant spacecraft,
Voyager I
, relative to the sun is 17.246 kilometers per second. The speed of light is 300,000 kilometers per second, so
Voyager I
is traveling at .0000574 percent of the speed of light. The Alpha Centauri star system, the closest to our sun, is 4.3 light-years away. This means that even traveling at a breakneck speed of 38,578 miles per hour, it would take
Voyager I
74,912 years to get there (and it isn’t even heading in that direction). 5
Deduction
. Ergo, the probability of making contact with an ETI who is only slightly more advanced than us is virtually nil. If we ever do encounter an ETI it will be as if a million-year-old
Homo erectus
were dropped into the middle of Manhattan, given a computer and a cell phone, and instructed to communicate with
Homo sapiens sapiens
. An ETI would be to us as we would be to this early hominid—godlike.
Observation
. Science and technology have changed our world more in the past century than it changed in the previous hundred centuries—it took ten thousand years to get from the cart to the airplane, but only sixty-six years to get from powered flight to a lunar landing. Moore’s Law of computer power doubling every eighteen months continues unabated and is now down to about a year. Some computer scientists, such as Ray Kurzweil, calculate that there have been thirty-two doublings since World War II, and that as early as 2030 we may encounter the Singularity—the point at which total computational power will rise to levels that are so far beyond anything that we can imagine that they will appear near infinite and thus, relatively speaking, be indistinguishable from omniscience (note the suffix!). 6 When this happens the world will change more in a decade than it did in the previous thousand decades.
Deduction
. Extrapolate these trend lines out a hundred thousand years, or a million years (an eye blink on an evolutionary time scale, and thus a realistic estimate of how far advanced an ETI will be 7 ), and we get a gut-wrenching, mind-warping feel for just how godlike an ETI would appear to us.
By pursuing a course of inquiry to its natural end, Intelligent Design, as a simplistic scientific explanation of the world around us, can only lead to the discovery of Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. What Intelligent Design
Shermer’s Last Law: Any sufficiently advanced Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence is indistinguishable from God.
4
God is described by most Western religions as omniscient and omnipotent. Since we are far from the mark on these traits, how could we possibly distinguish a God who has them absolutely, from an Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence who has them in copious amounts relative to us? Thus, we would be unable to distinguish between absolute and relative omniscience and omnipotence. But if God were only relatively more knowing and powerful than us, then by definition He
would
be an ETI! From this I conclude that there is no difference between Intelligent Design, Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, and God, at least a God that is part of our world. This conclusion is derived from the following sequence of observations and deductions:
Observation
. Biological evolution is glacially slow compared to technological evolution. The reason is that biological evolution is Darwinian and requires generations of differential reproductive success, whereas technological evolution is Lamarckian, where change is inherited within the same generation.
Observation
. The cosmos is very big and space is very empty, so the probability of making contact with an ETI is remote. By example, the speed of our most distant spacecraft,
Voyager I
, relative to the sun is 17.246 kilometers per second. The speed of light is 300,000 kilometers per second, so
Voyager I
is traveling at .0000574 percent of the speed of light. The Alpha Centauri star system, the closest to our sun, is 4.3 light-years away. This means that even traveling at a breakneck speed of 38,578 miles per hour, it would take
Voyager I
74,912 years to get there (and it isn’t even heading in that direction). 5
Deduction
. Ergo, the probability of making contact with an ETI who is only slightly more advanced than us is virtually nil. If we ever do encounter an ETI it will be as if a million-year-old
Homo erectus
were dropped into the middle of Manhattan, given a computer and a cell phone, and instructed to communicate with
Homo sapiens sapiens
. An ETI would be to us as we would be to this early hominid—godlike.
Observation
. Science and technology have changed our world more in the past century than it changed in the previous hundred centuries—it took ten thousand years to get from the cart to the airplane, but only sixty-six years to get from powered flight to a lunar landing. Moore’s Law of computer power doubling every eighteen months continues unabated and is now down to about a year. Some computer scientists, such as Ray Kurzweil, calculate that there have been thirty-two doublings since World War II, and that as early as 2030 we may encounter the Singularity—the point at which total computational power will rise to levels that are so far beyond anything that we can imagine that they will appear near infinite and thus, relatively speaking, be indistinguishable from omniscience (note the suffix!). 6 When this happens the world will change more in a decade than it did in the previous thousand decades.
Deduction
. Extrapolate these trend lines out a hundred thousand years, or a million years (an eye blink on an evolutionary time scale, and thus a realistic estimate of how far advanced an ETI will be 7 ), and we get a gut-wrenching, mind-warping feel for just how godlike an ETI would appear to us.
By pursuing a course of inquiry to its natural end, Intelligent Design, as a simplistic scientific explanation of the world around us, can only lead to the discovery of Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. What Intelligent Design
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