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The Future is Bright for Our Species
 
 
Toward a Type 1 civilization

Along with energy policy, political and economic systems must also evolve.

By Michael Shermer
Los Angeles Times
July 22, 2008

Our civilization is fast approaching a tipping point. Humans will need to make the transition from nonrenewable fossil fuels as the primary source of our energy to renewable energy sources that will allow us to flourish into the future. Failure to make that transformation will doom us to the endless political machinations and economic conflicts that have plagued civilization for the last half-millennium.

We need new technologies to be sure, but without evolved political and economic systems, we cannot become what we must. And what is that? A Type 1 civilization. Let me explain.

In a 1964 article on searching for extraterrestrial civilizations, the Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev suggested using radio telescopes to detect energy signals from other solar systems in which there might be civilizations of three levels of advancement: Type 1 can harness all of the energy of its home planet; Type 2 can harvest all of the power of its sun; and Type 3 can master the energy from its entire galaxy.

Based on our energy efficiency at the time, in 1973 the astronomer Carl Sagan estimated that Earth represented a Type 0.7 civilization on a Type 0 to Type 1 scale. (More current assessments put us at 0.72.) As the Kardashevian scale is logarithmic -- where any increase in power consumption requires a huge leap in power production -- we have a ways before 1.0.

Fossil fuels won't get us there. Renewable sources such as solar, wind and geothermal are a good start, and coupled to nuclear power could eventually get us to Type 1.

Yet the hurdles are not solely -- or even primarily -- technological ones. We have a proven track record of achieving remarkable scientific solutions to survival problems -- as long as there is the political will and economic opportunities that allow the solutions to flourish. In other words, we need a Type 1 polity and economy, along with the technology, in order to become a Type 1 civilization.

We are close. If we use the Kardashevian scale to plot humankind's progress, it shows how far we've come in the long history of our species from Type 0, and it leads us to see what a Type 1 civilization might be like:

Type 0.1: Fluid groups of hominids living in Africa. Technology consists of primitive stone tools. Intra-group conflicts are resolved through dominance hierarchy, and between-group violence is common.

Type 0.2: Bands of roaming hunter-gatherers that form kinship groups, with a mostly horizontal political system and egalitarian economy.

Type 0.3: Tribes of individuals linked through kinship but with a more settled and agrarian lifestyle. The beginnings of a political hierarchy and a primitive economic division of labor.

Type 0.4: Chiefdoms consisting of a coalition of tribes into a single hierarchical political unit with a dominant leader at the top, and with the beginnings of significant economic inequalities and a division of labor in which lower-class members produce food and other products consumed by non-producing upper-class members.

Type 0.5: The state as a political coalition with jurisdiction over a well-defined geographical territory and its corresponding inhabitants, with a mercantile economy that seeks a favorable balance of trade in a win-lose game against other states.

Type 0.6: Empires extend their control over peoples who are not culturally, ethnically or geographically within their normal jurisdiction, with a goal of economic dominance over rival empires.

Type 0.7: Democracies that divide power over several institutions, which are run by elected officials voted for by some citizens. The beginnings of a market economy.

Type 0.8: Liberal democracies that give the vote to all citizens. Markets that begin to embrace a nonzero, win-win economic game through free trade with other states.

Type 0.9: Democratic capitalism, the blending of liberal democracy and free markets, now spreading across the globe through democratic movements in developing nations and broad trading blocs such as the European Union.

Type 1.0: Globalism that includes worldwide wireless Internet access, with all knowledge digitized and available to everyone. A completely global economy with free markets in which anyone can trade with anyone else without interference from states or governments. A planet where all states are democracies in which everyone has the franchise.

The forces at work that could prevent us from making the great leap forward to a Type 1 civilization are primarily political and economic. The resistance by nondemocratic states to turning power over to the people is considerable, especially in theocracies whose leaders would prefer we all revert to Type 0.4 chiefdoms. The opposition toward a global economy is substantial, even in the industrialized West, where economic tribalism still dominates the thinking of most politicians, intellectuals and citizens.

For thousands of years, we have existed in a zero-sum tribal world in which a gain for one tribe, state or nation meant a loss for another tribe, state or nation -- and our political and economic systems have been designed for use in that win-lose world. But we have the opportunity to live in a win-win world and become a Type 1 civilization by spreading liberal democracy and free trade, in which the scientific and technological benefits will flourish. I am optimistic because in the evolutionist's deep time and the historian's long view, the trend lines toward achieving Type 1 status tick inexorably upward.

That is change we can believe in.


Michael Shermer is an adjunct professor in the School of Politics and Economics at Claremont Graduate University, the publisher of Skeptic magazine and a monthly columnist for Scientific American. His latest book is "The Mind of the Market."
 
We are the final frontier

Copernicus, Darwin, Crick and Watson changed the way people see themselves. Ian Sample asks leading scientists what comes next

Ian Sample
Thursday February 10, 2005
Guardian

Humans have always thought of themselves as special, and with good reason. As far as we know, we are alone in the universe in churning out great works of art and literature, in formulating the laws of physics, and in creating the spectacle that is morris dancing.

But our view of ourselves as the pinnacle of life has suffered huge blows at the hands of science. Every now and again comes an idea so revolutionary that it rocks the foundations on which our hubris is built.

At the University of San Diego, California, VS Ramachandran, director of the Centre for Brain and Cognition, points to three major upheavals in scientific thinking that have served to remind us that we are not so special after all. First came the Copernican revolution in the 16th century. The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus argued that the Earth was not at the centre of the solar system. Instead, he relegated our planet to one of many orbiting the sun.

Copernicus wasn't the first to come up with a heliocentric model of the solar system, but his description was backed up with mathematics that meant it was taken far more seriously. "At once, the whole notion that Earth was special was rendered obsolete and that must have been pretty humbling," says Ramachandran.

If Copernicus ruffled feathers by saying the Earth wasn't special, Charles Darwin got personal more than 300 years later by implying that humans weren't special either. With the publication of On the Origin of Species, Darwin promoted his theory of evolution via natural selection, immediately suggesting that humans were just another kind of animal. "It meant we weren't the crowning glory of evolution, we were just hairless apes that happened to be slightly cleverer than our cousins," says Ramachandran. "It was a great shock. Victorian women fainted when they heard about it."

Nearly a century later, two Cambridge-based scientists, James Watson and Francis Crick, unravelled the structure of DNA. According to Ramachandran, it led to a further challenge to human arrogance. We were, in short, simply vessels of self-replicating molecules, whose only purpose was to pass them on to another generation.

So what's next? What will be the fourth revolution? And will it, like those before, force us to question once more what it means to be human? To find out, Life put the question to some of the world's top scientists.

The leading candidates for the next revolution are enthralling, depressing and mind-boggling. Seth Shostak, of the alien-hunting Seti organisation in California, believes that we will become the first species to invent our successor, intentionally demoting ourselves to intellectual second fiddle. Others say we will finally understand the workings of the mind, and with it grasp fully the nature of self. Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist at the City University of New York, believes that we will discover parallel universes, perhaps floating just inches away from our own. Elvis Presley might even be alive and well in one of them, he says. The Oxford University neuroscientist Susan Greenfield sees a bleak future. We will see a melding of man and machine, she says, leading to the demise of the individual.

Whatever shape the next revolution takes, it may help humans to understand their condition rather than knock it down further. "The big question is why these revolutions don't make us profoundly sad. We're reduced to bags of chemicals with no free will, living on a normal planet, but people still find that exciting," says Ramachandran. "I think it's because with greater understanding, we see ourselves as part of some grander scheme. We're part of something larger than ourselves and once we identify with that, it is not degrading, it's ennobling."

'We will invent our successors'
Seth Shostak, senior astronomer, Seti Institute, California

The amount of computing power you can buy for 1,000 doubles every 18 months. It's hardly speculative to declare that by 2020, your desktop will have more operational horsepower than a human brain.

Many people who work in the field of machine intelligence believe that, with the right arrangement of hardware and software, you really can build a thinking machine. Not just a device that beats everyone at chess: a machine that can write fiction, do physics research, or be amusing at parties. If you doubt this, then you are forced to concede that there's something miraculous going on under our hats. Is there some good reason that one organ of the body - the one in your skull - has a function that can't be replicated? That's hubris of a fine sort; a kind of self-defence concocted by the very organ under examination.

It strikes me as likely that, sometime this century, we will build a thinking computer. That machine will run the planet. Competitive pressures will ensure this (if we don't have a machine running our society, we'll fall behind those that do). We will no longer be the smartest things on Earth. Our mantle of superiority will be donned by our own creations.

Then what? Will the machines get rid of us? A machine that dwarfs our intelligence might regard us as we regard budgies or goldfish: diverting. Our role as second intellectual fiddle may be to serve as pets for the sentients in charge.

All of this would be dismaying enough if it were merely a science fiction story. But I suspect that the first steps will be taken by mid-century. We could well be the last generation of humans to dominate Earth.

'We will understand the human mind'
John Sulston, founder of the Sanger Institute, Cambridge

Along with the late Francis Crick (see The Astonishing Hypothesis), and many others, I expect that in the coming century we shall understand in a general way how the human brain gives rise to what we perceive as the human mind. The solution will be interesting, very complex, but not in the end mysterious. It will be a great philosophical challenge to take on board, but we shall succeed because of our tremendous ability to adapt.

We should not be humbled by any of these revolutions. We should rather feel, first, a modest pride in our ability to achieve such understanding, and more importantly, a huge sense of collective responsibility in what we do with it. A humility that disclaims responsibility for its actions is dangerous, and offers a real risk that our wonderful journey of exploring the universe will be cut off just as we are beginning in earnest.

'The existence of parallel universes'
Michio Kaku, theoretical physicist, the City University of New York

The next revolution will be proof of the existence of the multiverse. Think of fish in a very shallow pond. They live in a two-dimensional world and feel comfortable swimming forward, backwards, left and right. But there are other ponds, and in some they could swim up and down, too.

Physicists believe that we spend our lives in a little pond of three dimensions, thinking smugly that's all there is, but there are other ponds out there. These universes might be right next to us, perhaps hovering inches above our own.

Some of these universes could look just like ours. I've been asked if Elvis Presley is alive in one of these parallel universes and it cannot be dismissed. Maybe Elvis Presley is still alive in a parallel universe and, as outrageous as it sounds, we physicists actively discuss these kinds of questions. It's mind-boggling.

'We will change our genetic makeup'
Norbert Gleicher, director of the Centre for Human Reproduction, Chicago

The next revolution will come from a combination of huge advances in genetics and stem cell research. It will lead to a more egalitarian society.

Assuming that all humanity has access to these advances, everybody will benefit from regenerative medicine, which means we'll cure disease at an accelerated rate, we'll live longer and finally we'll be able to affect our genetic makeup. Once we can affect our genetic makeup we'll become more similar to one another because everybody will want the same thing.

We are not at the point yet where we can define genetically what makes Michael Jordan the greatest basketball player that ever lived, but theoretically, in the not too distant future, we'll understand what it was in the genetic makeup that made him such a talent. While genetics is not everything, we will be in a position to say that if somebody has these genes, that person's ability to jump or play music, or do other things will be advanced.

Once we identify the genetic background for any kind of human capability, we can, at least theoretically, manipulate the genetic makeup of humans by substituting that genetic background into the makeup of the person. It raises huge ethical issues.

There are strong voices in the community who do not wish mankind to achieve these abilities. But we're in an accelerated evolutionary phase and I don't think it can be stopped.

'We will find out if we are alone'
Colin Pillinger, head of planetary and space sciences, Open University

The question I think we have the best chance of answering is, are we alone?

Only 17% of people believe that we are unique; the other 83% believe that we can't possibly be the only ones. Look at the elements that are most abundant in the cosmos: hydrogen, helium and oxygen, making the most common compound water. Next come carbon and nitrogen. So, four out of the five most common elements throughout the cosmos can make the organic compounds we all know and love. That says to me that life is an accident waiting to happen. We would be completely and utterly arrogant to think that life hasn't originated elsewhere in this great cosmos.

What would be really fascinating would be if we were to go to another planet and find life based on another code, other than DNA. That would really be wiz-bang stuff.

How can we answer the question? We have to rule out receiving a message at one of our radio telescopes saying: "Excuse me, hello, we're calling from somewhere in the distant universe to let you know we're here."

We don't have the telescopes to check for life on planets round distant stars, so the first step is finding out if there is life in the solar system. How long until we discover that? In 2009, if they let me launch Beagle 3.

'Humans become a collective intelligence'
John Barrow, professor of mathematical sciences and author of The Infinite Book, Cambridge University

We as a species have entered a new phase of evolution with the appearance of the world wide web. We share information collectively. You can find out almost anything you want to know at the click of a button, and this happened suddenly, nobody predicted it. This is a collectivisation of human information.

Once you start to act with other people, you can do things you couldn't do as an individual. You become a connected intelligence and just like joining computers together, that increases your effectiveness and power. Most people rely on the web for information to the extent that the memorisation of facts and figures and information is no longer required. In some ways, it's probably not a good thing, but it's how it is. For scientists, it means the world is now one giant research group.

'We'll understand thoughts and feelings'
Steven Pinker, professor of psychology, Harvard University

My choice would be what the late Francis Crick called "the astonishing hypothesis" - the idea all our thoughts and feelings consist in physiological activity in tissues of the brain, rather than in an immaterial soul. Thinking is neural computation; wanting and trying are neural cybernetics (feedback systems, like your thermostat). All this means that humans are not special in having an essence that is separate from the material universe. It means no life after death. That, in turn, means no divine rewards or punishments in a world to come. It means that our minds, not just our bodies, were descended from those of apes and shaped by the morally indifferent forces of natural selection. It means that responsibility can't be equated with the notion of free will, if free will is conceived as autonomous choice utterly disconnected from any chain of cause and effect. It means that we may acquire new technologies to enhance mood, memory, thinking and personality by chemical means. It will take some time for many people to readjust their notions of meaning and morality to this revolution from cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology.

'The end of the individual'
Susan Greenfield, neuroscientist, Oxford University

The merging of carbon and silicon systems, such as the growing of neurons in integrated circuits, could be the next revolution. It would challenge our whole notion of living versus innate things. Many new technologies could lead for the first time to a "de-individualisation". Up until now, especially in the west, there's been an emphasis on nurturing the individual. This rise and rise of the individual might be the natural consequence of 20th century so-called progress, but the new revolution will challenge that for the first time. If you're constantly in front of a computer screen, you're the passive recipient of lots of information. You're just a consumer, living at that moment, having an experience, pressing buttons and reacting, but not having a life narrative any more. You're not defined by your family, or by what you know, or by specific events in the real world, because most of your time is spent in cyberspace. So what are you? Could it be that we just become nodes on a much larger collective thought machine?

'What if God lives in a part of our brain?'
Nancy Rothwell, neuroscientist at Manchester University

The previous revolutions haven't necessarily made our place less significant. We are just discovering the complexity of the natural world. The fact we can begin to understand these concepts at all shows how advanced we are.

A breakthrough would be in understanding the complex functions of the brain, emotions, consciousness and imagination and how they are formed. We might even find that there is a biological basis for religion. Suppose we discovered that God "lived" in a particular part of the brain, and that religion was a biological function which had evolved to help us through difficult times. It's not impossible. For some, it would be fascinating and curious, for others it would just be dismissed. But others might find it very difficult indeed - it would shake their world.

'What it means to be a person'
V S Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California at San Diego

The next revolution will be understanding the organ that made all the previous revolutions possible. Your mind, your ambitions, your love life, even what you regard as yourself, all of it is the activity of little wisps of jelly in your head. Once we figure out the code, that's going to be a big revolution and another humbling experience. The ultimate triumph of the human mind is to understand what the mind is.

We'll understand what it means to will an action, what it means to be a person, what is the self. People say that if you know all that, it'll be terrible, but just because you know the rules, it doesn't mean that you can predict what everyone's going to do. That may happen some day, but in the next hundred years, we'll just know the ground rules. Knowing the laws of physics doesn't tell you exactly how a wave is going to break when it hits the shore.

How did the mind emerge from this jelly? Once we figure that out, we'll have a more mature understanding of the relation between mind and brain, and the nature of the self, which I think is the last great frontier.

'Conscious machines'
Igor Aleksander, professor of neural systems engineering at Imperial College London

I think the next big revolution will be machine consciousness. There are buzzes in our head which are neurons firing away to give us a sensation of the world and our place within it. There must be a way of replicating that.

The assumption that as soon as you've made a conscious machine, you've made an evil machine, is absolute rot. If a machine is truly conscious, it'll be conscious of missions it's been given. A conscious machine will be aware of its own mission without worrying too much about trying to take over the world.

If we come up with something that's conscious, it'll be unimpressive. The things we'll build, even if they have mechanisms of consciousness inside them, may not be that much better than what we have around already. But if you take the classical idea of the mind and the body, that's going to take a knock. It seems the majority of people think consciousness is something intractable, that we can never understand it. I think we can. Certainly in 10 to 15 years' time, anyone who says consciousness is so mysterious, no science will ever touch it, will look a fool.

'Higher dimensions'
Lisa Randall, theoretical physicist, Harvard University

We might find out there are more than three dimensions of space. What is special about three dimensions? We've found that space can have higher dimensions in some places and lower dimensions where we are, so three dimensions might just be a peculiar property of where we are.

It's possible that there are extra dimensions and that we live on an object called a brane, which is a membrane in higher dimensional space. Just like a bead on a wire that can only move in one direction or the other, it could be that the three dimensions we see are special because they're the dimensions along the brane we are on.

We're extremely close to finding out if extra dimensions exist. At Cern, the Large Hadron Collider will look for particles which will be evidence of those extra dimensions. A lot of people will struggle with what it means to have extra dimensions. You can't see them, you can't experience them, so, to some extent, everyone will be disturbed by it. One amazing thing is that this expands your imagination.

'Humans are less miraculous than we thought'
Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica and author of A New Kind of Science

The sets of rules, or programs, underlying how humans work are no more sophisticated than the ones occurring elsewhere in nature.

Nowadays, the most common assumption about the special status of humans is that it must be something to do with the level of intelligence or complexity that we exhibit. Intuition tells us that getting the kind of seemingly sophisticated, rich behaviour we see in humans and society must take a lot of fundamental rules and ideas. But this may not be the case.

In a computational view of the universe, everything is run according to set fundamental "programs", analogous to computers carrying out the rules contained in software programs. But while software programs might be very complex with several million lines of code, the programs in nature could be very simple - maybe one line or less.

Even these simple programs seem to produce essentially the same richness that you would expect in vastly more complicated programs and in the kind of things that happen in nature. There's a whole universe of these possible simple programs and we have only had experience with, and studied in detail, a very small collection of them.

If it's possible to get so much from so little, we get to hold in our hands the very rules of the universe. Which means that there's nothing about the universe that is fundamentally beyond human understanding.

On the other hand, it perhaps seems a little unfortunate that there's nothing more. There's nothing miraculous that can go on in our universe or, more importantly, in humans.

Interviews by Ian Sample, David Adam, Alok Jha and Simon Rogers

Three lessons in humility

Science has a way of painting God out of the picture, and putting humankind in its place. Nicolas Copernicus launched the Copernican revolution in about 1530: Galileo continued it; Isaac Newton completed it more than a century later. It began innocently, when Copernicus tried to make a timetable for the positions of the planets. The calculations added up best if he assumed that the sun was the centre of the universe and that the Earth, like Mars, Venus and Jupiter, was just another planet. This upset the Ptolemaic scheme, which for more than a thousand years placed the Earth at the centre. Christian theology also had the Earth at the centre. So Copernicus offended both the Catholic Church (which listed his book as banned until 1835) and the reformer Martin Luther. Cosmologists now talk of the Copernican principle, which is that there is nothing special about planet Earth, in space or time. Humans are just little specks of sentience on an accidental planet in a corner of the cosmos.

The Darwinian revolution, too, was a 100-year story, and it began long before Darwin. Religious orthodoxy called for a young universe, specially created with its present inhabitants. But miners, canal engineers and natural philosophers kept finding puzzling evidence of creatures that existed long before human history.

Geologists such as Hutton and Lyell proposed an ancient Earth, subject to continuous change. Charles Darwin (and Alfred Russel Wallace, quite independently) went a stage further: life itself was ancient, and subject to continuous change, in which random mutations in inheritance were selected or dismissed by the pressures of the environment. This, too, shocked some churchmen. But humans now see themselves as just another evolutionary by-product, cousin to the apes.

The clinching proof of this has been in the DNA revolution, launched 50 years ago. Where did these mutations happen and how were they transmitted? In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick began to crack the riddle. They revealed the structure of a long molecule, detectable in almost every living cell, which spelled out the genetic code. Comparison of DNA in living humans provides clues to ancestral kinships. It also confirms that all life is linked to one last universal common ancestor.

Science has exposed the machinery of creation, and taught humans a lesson in humility. None of this, however, yet explains why the universe began, or how and why life started in the first place, seemingly only on one planet.
 
 
Parallel universes, the Matrix, and superintelligence

by Michio Kaku

Physicists are converging on a "theory of everything," probing the 11th dimension, developing computers for the next generation of robots, and speculating about civilizations millions of years ahead of ours, says Dr. Michio Kaku, author of the best-sellers Hyperspace and Visions and co-founder of String Field Theory, in this interview by KurzweilAI.net Editor Amara D. Angelica.

Published on KurzweilAI.net June 26, 2003


What are the burning issues for you currently?

Well, several things. Professionally, I work on something called Superstring theory, or now called M-theory, and the goal is to find an equation, perhaps no more than one inch long, which will allow us to "read the mind of God," as Einstein used to say.

In other words, we want a single theory that gives us an elegant, beautiful representation of the forces that govern the Universe. Now, after two thousand years of investigation into the nature of matter, we physicists believe that there are four fundamental forces that govern the Universe.

Some physicists have speculated about the existence of a fifth force, which may be some kind of paranormal or psychic force, but so far we find no reproducible evidence of a fifth force.

Now, each time a force has been mastered, human history has undergone a significant change. In the 1600s, when Isaac Newton first unraveled the secret of gravity, he also created a mechanics. And from Newton's Laws and his mechanics, the foundation was laid for the steam engine, and eventually the Industrial Revolution.

So, in other words, in some sense, a byproduct of the mastery of the first force, gravity, helped to spur the creation of the Industrial Revolution, which in turn is perhaps one of the greatest revolutions in human history.

The second great force is the electromagnetic force; that is, the force of light, electricity, magnetism, the Internet, computers, transistors, lasers, microwaves, x-rays, etc.

And then in the 1860s, it was James Clerk Maxwell, the Scottish physicist at Cambridge University, who finally wrote down Maxwell's equations, which allow us to summarize the dynamics of light.

That helped to unleash the Electric Age, and the Information Age, which have changed all of human history. Now it's hard to believe, but Newton's equations and Einstein's equations are no more than about half an inch long.

Maxwell's equations are also about half an inch long. For example, Maxwell's equations say that the "four-dimensional divergence of an antisymmetric, second-rank tensor equals zero." That's Maxwell's equations, the equations for light. And in fact, at Berkeley, you can buy a T-shirt which says, "In the beginning, God said the four-dimensional divergence of an antisymmetric, second rank tensor equals zero, and there was Light, and it was good."

So, the mastery of the first two forces helped to unleash, respectively, the Industrial Revolution and the Information Revolution.

The last two forces are the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force, and they in turn have helped us to unlock the secret of the stars, via Einstein's equations E=mc2, and many people think that far in the future, the human race may ultimately derive its energy not only from solar power, which is the power of fusion, but also fusion power on the Earth, in terms of fusion reactors, which operate on seawater, and create no copious quantities of radioactive waste.

So, in summary, the mastery of each force helped to unleash a new revolution in human history.

Today, we physicists are embarking upon the greatest quest of all, which is to unify all four of these forces into a single comprehensive theory. The first force, gravity, is now represented by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, which gives us the Big Bang, black holes, and expanding universe. It's a theory of the very large; it's a theory of smooth, space-time manifolds like bedsheets and trampoline nets.

The second theory, the quantum theory, is the exact opposite. The quantum theory allows us to unify the electromagnetic, weak and strong force. However, it is based on discrete, tiny packets of energy called quanta, rather than smooth bedsheets, and it is based on probabilities, rather than the certainty of Einstein's equations. So these two theories summarize the sum total of all physical knowledge of the physical universe.

Any equation describing the physical universe ultimately is derived from one of these two theories. The problem is these two theories are diametrically opposed. They are based on different assumptions, different principles, and different mathematics. Our job as physicists is to unify the two into a single, comprehensive theory. Now, over the last decades, the giants of the twentieth century have tried to do this and have failed.

For example, Niels Bohr, the founder of atomic physics and the quantum theory, was very skeptical about many attempts over the decades to create a Unified Field Theory. One day, Wolfgang Pauli, Nobel laureate, was giving a talk about his version of the Unified Field Theory, and in a very famous story, Bohr stood up in the back of the room and said, "Mr. Pauli, we in the back are convinced that your theory is crazy. What divides us is whether your theory is crazy enough."

So today, we realize that a true Unified Field Theory must be bizarre, must be fantastic, incredible, mind-boggling, crazy, because all the sane alternatives have been studied and discarded.

Today we have string theory, which is based on the idea that the subatomic particles we see in nature are nothing but notes we see on a tiny, vibrating string. If you kick the string, then an electron will turn into a neutrino. If you kick it again, the vibrating string will turn from a neutrino into a photon or a graviton. And if you kick it enough times, the vibrating string will then mutate into all the subatomic particles.

Therefore we no longer in some sense have to deal with thousands of subatomic particles coming from our atom smashers, we just have to realize that what makes them, what drives them, is a vibrating string. Now when these strings collide, they form atoms and nuclei, and so in some sense, the melodies that you can write on the string correspond to the laws of chemistry. Physics is then reduced to the laws of harmony that we can write on a string. The Universe is a symphony of strings. And what is the mind of God that Einstein used to write about? According to this picture, the mind of God is music resonating through ten- or eleven-dimensional hyperspace, which of course begs the question, "If the universe is a symphony, then is there a composer to the symphony?" But that's another question.


Parallel worlds

What do you think of Sir Martin Rees' concerns about the risk of creating black holes on Earth in his book, Our Final Hour?

I haven't read his book, but perhaps Sir Martin Rees is referring to many press reports that claim that the Earth may be swallowed up by a black hole created by our machines. This started with a letter to the editor in Scientific American asking whether the RHIC accelerator in Brookhaven, Long Island, will create a black hole which will swallow up the earth. This was then picked up by the Sunday London Times who then splashed it on the international wire services, and all of a sudden, we physicists were deluged with hundreds of emails and telegrams asking whether or not we are going to destroy the world when we create a black hole in Long Island.

However, you can calculate that in outer space, cosmic rays have more energy than the particles produced in our most powerful atom smashers, and black holes do not form in outer space. Not to mention the fact that to create a black hole, you would have to have the mass of a giant star. In fact, an object ten to fifty times the mass of our star may in fact form a black hole. So the probability of a black hole forming in Long Island is zero.

However, Sir Martin Rees also has written a book, talking about the Multiverse. And that is also the subject of my next book, coming out late next year, called Parallel Worlds. We physicists no longer believe in a Universe. We physicists believe in a Multiverse that resembles the boiling of water. Water boils when tiny particles, or bubbles, form, which then begin to rapidly expand. If our Universe is a bubble in boiling water, then perhaps Big Bangs happen all the time.

Now, the Multiverse idea is consistent with Superstring theory, in the sense that Superstring theory has millions of solutions, each of which seems to correspond to a self-consistent Universe. So in some sense, Superstring theory is drowning in its own riches. Instead of predicting a unique Universe, it seems to allow the possibility of a Multiverse of Universes.

This may also help to answer the question raised by the Anthropic Principle. Our Universe seems to have known that we were coming. The conditions for life are extremely stringent. Life and consciousness can only exist in a very narrow band of physical parameters. For example, if the proton is not stable, then the Universe will collapse into a useless heap of electrons and neutrinos. If the proton were a little bit different in mass, it would decay, and all our DNA molecules would decay along with it.

In fact, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of coincidences, happy coincidences, that make life possible. Life, and especially consciousness, is quite fragile. It depends on stable matter, like protons, that exists for billions of years in a stable environment, sufficient to create autocatalytic molecules that can reproduce themselves, and thereby create Life. In physics, it is extremely hard to create this kind of Universe. You have to play with the parameters, you have to juggle the numbers, cook the books, in order to create a Universe which is consistent with Life.

However, the Multiverse idea explains this problem, because it simply means we coexist with dead Universes. In other Universes, the proton is not stable. In other Universes, the Big Bang took place, and then it collapsed rapidly into a Big Crunch, or these Universes had a Big Bang, and immediately went into a Big Freeze, where temperatures were so low, that Life could never get started.

So, in the Multiverse of Universes, many of these Universes are in fact dead, and our Universe in this sense is special, in that Life is possible in this Universe. Now, in religion, we have the Judeo-Christian idea of an instant of time, a genesis, when God said, "Let there be light." But in Buddhism, we have a contradictory philosophy, which says that the Universe is timeless. It had no beginning, and it had no end, it just is. It's eternal, and it has no beginning or end.

The Multiverse idea allows us to combine these two pictures into a coherent, pleasing picture. It says that in the beginning, there was nothing, nothing but hyperspace, perhaps ten- or eleven-dimensional hyperspace. But hyperspace was unstable, because of the quantum principle. And because of the quantum principle, there were fluctuations, fluctuations in nothing. This means that bubbles began to form in nothing, and these bubbles began to expand rapidly, giving us the Universe. So, in other words, the Judeo-Christian genesis takes place within the Buddhist nirvana, all the time, and our Multiverse percolates universes.

Now this also raises the possibility of Universes that look just like ours, except there's one quantum difference. Let's say for example, that a cosmic ray went through Churchill's mother, and Churchill was never born, as a consequence. In that Universe, which is only one quantum event away from our Universe, England never had a dynamic leader to lead its forces against Hitler, and Hitler was able to overcome England, and in fact conquer the world.

So, we are one quantum event away from Universes that look quite different from ours, and it's still not clear how we physicists resolve this question. This paradox revolves around the Schrdinger's Cat problem, which is still largely unsolved. In any quantum theory, we have the possibility that atoms can exist in two places at the same time, in two states at the same time. And then Erwin Schrdinger, the founder of quantum mechanics, asked the question: let's say we put a cat in a box, and the cat is connected to a jar of poison gas, which is connected to a hammer, which is connected to a Geiger counter, which is connected to uranium. Everyone believes that uranium has to be described by the quantum theory. That's why we have atomic bombs, in fact. No one disputes this.

But if the uranium decays, triggering the Geiger counter, setting off the hammer, destroying the jar of poison gas, then I might kill the cat. And so, is the cat dead or alive? Believe it or not, we physicists have to superimpose, or add together, the wave function of a dead cat with the wave function of a live cat. So the cat is neither dead nor alive.

This is perhaps one of the deepest questions in all the quantum theory, with Nobel laureates arguing with other Nobel laureates about the meaning of reality itself.

Now, in philosophy, solipsists like Bishop Berkeley used to believe that if a tree fell in the forest and there was no one there to listen to the tree fall, then perhaps the tree did not fall at all. However, Newtonians believe that if a tree falls in the forest, that you don't have to have a human there to witness the event.

The quantum theory puts a whole new spin on this. The quantum theory says that before you look at the tree, the tree could be in any possible state. It could be burnt, a sapling, it could be firewood, it could be burnt to the ground. It could be in any of an infinite number of possible states. Now, when you look at it, it suddenly springs into existence and becomes a tree.

Einstein never liked this. When people used to come to his house, he used to ask them, "Look at the moon. Does the moon exist because a mouse looks at the moon?" Well, in some sense, yes. According to the Copenhagen school of Neils Bohr, observation determines existence.

Now, there are at least two ways to resolve this. The first is the Wigner school. Eugene Wigner was one of the creators of the atomic bomb and a Nobel laureate. And he believed that observation creates the Universe. An infinite sequence of observations is necessary to create the Universe, and in fact, maybe there's a cosmic observer, a God of some sort, that makes the Universe spring into existence.

There's another theory, however, called decoherence, or many worlds, which believes that the Universe simply splits each time, so that we live in a world where the cat is alive, but there's an equal world where the cat is dead. In that world, they have people, they react normally, they think that their world is the only world, but in that world, the cat is dead. And, in fact, we exist simultaneously with that world.

This means that there's probably a Universe where you were never born, but everything else is the same. Or perhaps your mother had extra brothers and sisters for you, in which case your family is much larger. Now, this can be compared to sitting in a room, listening to radio. When you listen to radio, you hear many frequencies. They exist simultaneously all around you in the room. However, your radio is only tuned to one frequency. In the same way, in your living room, there is the wave function of dinosaurs. There is the wave function of aliens from outer space. There is the wave function of the Roman Empire, because it never fell, 1500 years ago.

All of this coexists inside your living room. However, just like you can only tune into one radio channel, you can only tune into one reality channel, and that is the channel that you exist in. So, in some sense it is true that we coexist with all possible universes. The catch is, we cannot communicate with them, we cannot enter these universes.

However, I personally believe that at some point in the future, that may be our only salvation. The latest cosmological data indicates that the Universe is accelerating, not slowing down, which means the Universe will eventually hit a Big Freeze, trillions of years from now, when temperatures are so low that it will be impossible to have any intelligent being survive.

When the Universe dies, there's one and only one way to survive in a freezing Universe, and that is to leave the Universe. In evolution, there is a law of biology that says if the environment becomes hostile, either you adapt, you leave, or you die.

When the Universe freezes and temperatures reach near absolute zero, you cannot adapt. The laws of thermodynamics are quite rigid on this question. Either you will die, or you will leave. This means, of course, that we have to create machines that will allow us to enter eleven-dimensional hyperspace. This is still quite speculative, but String theory, in some sense, may be our only salvation. For advanced civilizations in outer space, either we leave or we die.


That brings up a question. Matrix Reloaded seems to be based on parallel universes. What do you think of the film in terms of its metaphors?

Well, the technology found in the Matrix would correspond to that of an advanced Type I or Type II civilization. We physicists, when we scan outer space, do not look for little green men in flying saucers. We look for the total energy outputs of a civilization in outer space, with a characteristic frequency. Even if intelligent beings tried to hide their existence, by the second law of thermodynamics, they create entropy, which should be visible with our detectors.

So we classify civilizations on the basis of energy outputs. A Type I civilization is planetary. They control all planetary forms of energy. They would control, for example, the weather, volcanoes, earthquakes; they would mine the oceans, any planetary form of energy they would control. Type II would be stellar. They play with solar flares. They can move stars, ignite stars, play with white dwarfs. Type III is galactic, in the sense that they have now conquered whole star systems, and are able to use black holes and star clusters for their energy supplies.

Each civilization is separated by the previous civilization by a factor of ten billion. Therefore, you can calculate numerically at what point civilizations may begin to harness certain kinds of technologies. In order to access wormholes and parallel universes, you have to be probably a Type III civilization, because by definition, a Type III civilization has enough energy to play with the Planck energy.

The Planck energy, or 1019 billion electron volts, is the energy at which space-time becomes unstable. If you were to heat up, in your microwave oven, a piece of space-time to that energy, then bubbles would form inside your microwave oven, and each bubble in turn would correspond to a baby Universe.

Now, in the Matrix, several metaphors are raised. One metaphor is whether computing machines can create artificial realities. That would require a civilization centuries or millennia ahead of ours, which would place it squarely as a Type I or Type II civilization.

However, we also have to ask a practical question: is it possible to create implants that could access our memory banks to create this artificial reality, and are machines dangerous? My answer is the following. First of all, cyborgs with neural implants: the technology does not exist, and probably won't exist for at least a century, for us to access the central nervous system. At present, we can only do primitive experiments on the brain.

For example, at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, it's possible to put a glass implant into the brain of a stroke victim, and the paralyzed stroke victim is able to, by looking at the cursor of a laptop, eventually control the motion of the cursor. It's very slow and tedious; it's like learning to ride a bicycle for the first time. But the brain grows into the glass bead, which is placed into the brain. The glass bead is connected to a laptop computer, and over many hours, the person is able to, by pure thought, manipulate the cursor on the screen.

So, the central nervous system is basically a black box. Except for some primitive hookups to the visual system of the brain, we scientists have not been able to access most bodily functions, because we simply don't know the code for the spinal cord and for the brain. So, neural implant technology, I believe is one hundred, maybe centuries away from ours.

Will robots take over?

On the other hand, we have to ask yet another metaphor raised by the Matrix, and that is, are machines dangerous? And the answer is, potentially, yes. However, at present, our robots have the intelligence of a cockroach, in the sense that pattern recognition and common sense are the two most difficult, unsolved problems in artificial intelligence theory. Pattern recognition means the ability to see, hear, and to understand what you are seeing and understand what you are hearing. Common sense means your ability to make sense out of the world, which even children can perform.

Those two problems are at the present time largely unsolved. Now, I think, however, that within a few decades, we should be able to create robots as smart as mice, maybe dogs and cats. However, when machines start to become as dangerous as monkeys, I think we should put a chip in their brain, to shut them off when they start to have murderous thoughts.

By the time you have monkey intelligence, you begin to have self-awareness, and with self-awareness, you begin to have an agenda created by a monkey for its own purposes. And at that point, a mechanical monkey may decide that its agenda is different from our agenda, and at that point they may become dangerous to humans. I think we have several decades before that happens, and Moore's Law will probably collapse in 20 years anyway, so I think there's plenty of time before we come to the point where we have to deal with murderous robots, like in the movie 2001.

So you differ with Ray Kurzweil's concept of using nanobots to reverse-engineer and upload the brain, possibly within the coming decades?

Not necessarily. I'm just laying out a linear course, the trajectory where artificial intelligence theory is going today. And that is, trying to build machines which can navigate and roam in our world, and two, robots which can make sense out of the world. However, there's another divergent path one might take, and that's to harness the power of nanotechnology. However, nanotechnology is still very primitive. At the present time, we can barely build arrays of atoms. We cannot yet build the first atomic gear, for example. No one has created an atomic wheel with ball bearings. So simple machines, which even children can play with in their toy sets, don't yet exist at the atomic level. However, on a scale of decades, we may be able to create atomic devices that begin to mimic our own devices.

Molecular transistors can already be made. Nanotubes allow us to create strands of material that are super-strong. However, nanotechnology is still in its infancy and therefore, it's still premature to say where nanotechnology will go. However, one place where technology may go is inside our body. Already, it's possible to create a pill the size of an aspirin pill that has a television camera that can photograph our insides as it goes down our gullet, which means that one day surgery may become relatively obsolete.

In the future, it's conceivable we may have atomic machines that enter the blood. And these atomic machines will be the size of blood cells and perhaps they would be able to perform useful functions like regulating and sensing our health, and perhaps zapping cancer cells and viruses in the process. However, this is still science fiction, because at the present time, we can't even build simple atomic machines yet.


Are we living in a simulation?

Is there any possibility, similar to the premise of The Matrix, that we are living in a simulation?

Well, philosophically speaking, it's always possible that the universe is a dream, and it's always possible that our conversation with our friends is a by-product of the pickle that we had last night that upset our stomach. However, science is based upon reproducible evidence. When we go to sleep and we wake up the next day, we usually wind up in the same universe. It is reproducible. No matter how we try to avoid certain unpleasant situations, they come back to us. That is reproducible. So reality, as we commonly believe it to exist, is a reproducible experiment, it's a reproducible sensation. Therefore in principle, you could never rule out the fact that the world could be a dream, but the fact of the matter is, the universe as it exists is a reproducible universe.

Now, in the Matrix, a computer simulation was run so that virtual reality became reproducible. Every time you woke up, you woke up in that same virtual reality. That technology, of course, does not violate the laws of physics. There's nothing in relativity or the quantum theory that says that the Matrix is not possible. However, the amount of computer power necessary to drive the universe and the technology necessary for a neural implant is centuries to millennia beyond anything that we can conceive of, and therefore this is something for an advanced Type I or II civilization.

Why is a Type I required to run this kind of simulation? Is number crunching the problem?

Yes, it's simply a matter of number crunching. At the present time, we scientists simply do not know how to interface with the brain. You see, one of the problems is, the brain, strictly speaking, is not a digital computer at all. The brain is not a Turing machine. A Turing machine is a black box with an input tape and an output tape and a central processing unit. That is the essential element of a Turing machine: information processing is localized in one point. However, our brain is actually a learning machine; it's a neural network.

Many people find this hard to believe, but there's no software, there is no operating system, there is no Windows programming for the brain. The brain is a vast collection, perhaps a hundred billion neurons, each neuron with 10,000 connections, which slowly and painfully interacts with the environment. Some neural pathways are genetically programmed to give us instinct. However, for the most part, our cerebral cortex has to be reprogrammed every time we bump into reality.

As a consequence, we cannot simply put a chip in our brain that augments our memory and enhances our intelligence. Memory and thinking, we now realize, is distributed throughout the entire brain. For example, it's possible to have people with only half a brain. There was a documented case recently where a young girl had half her brain removed and she's still fully functional.

So, the brain can operate with half of its mass removed. However, you remove one transistor in your Pentium computer and the whole computer dies. So, there's a fundamental difference between digital computers--which are easily programmed, which are modular, and you can insert different kinds of subroutines in them--and neural networks, where learning is distributed throughout the entire device, making it extremely difficult to reprogram. That is the reason why, even if we could create an advanced PlayStation that would run simulations on a PC screen, that software cannot simply be injected into the human brain, because the brain has no operating system.

Ray Kurzweil's next book, The Singularity is Near, predicts that possibly within the coming decades, there will be super-intelligence emerging on the planet that will surpass that of humans. What do you think of that idea?

Yes, that sounds interesting. But Moore's Law will have collapsed by then, so we'll have a little breather. In 20 years time, the quantum theory takes over, so Moore's Law collapses and we'll probably stagnate for a few decades after that. Moore's Law, which states that computer power doubles every 18 months, will not last forever. The quantum theory giveth, the quantum theory taketh away. The quantum theory makes possible transistors, which can be etched by ultraviolet rays onto smaller and smaller chips of silicon. This process will end in about 15 to 20 years. The senior engineers at Intel now admit for the first time that, yes, they are facing the end.

The thinnest layer on a Pentium chip consists of about 20 atoms. When we start to hit five atoms in the thinnest layer of a Pentium chip, the quantum theory takes over, electrons can now tunnel outside the layer, and the Pentium chip short-circuits. Therefore, within a 15 to 20 year time frame, Moore's Law could collapse, and Silicon Valley could become a Rust Belt.

This means that we physicists are desperately trying to create the architecture for the post-silicon era. This means using quantum computers, quantum dot computers, optical computers, DNA computers, atomic computers, molecular computers, in order to bridge the gap when Moore's Law collapses in 15 to 20 years. The wealth of nations depends upon the technology that will replace the power of silicon.

This also means that you cannot project artificial intelligence exponentially into the future. Some people think that Moore's Law will extend forever; in which case humans will be reduced to zoo animals and our robot creations will throw peanuts at us and make us dance behind bars. Now, that may eventually happen. It is certainly consistent within the laws of physics.

However, the laws of the quantum theory say that we're going to face a massive problem 15 to 20 years from now. Now, some remedial methods have been proposed; for example, building cubical chips, chips that are stacked on chips to create a 3-dimensional array. However, the problem there is heat production. Tremendous quantities of heat are produced by cubical chips, such that you can fry an egg on top of a cubical chip. Therefore, I firmly believe that we may be able to squeeze a few more years out of Moore's Law, perhaps designing clever cubical chips that are super-cooled, perhaps using x-rays to etch our chips instead of ultraviolet rays. However, that only delays the inevitable. Sooner or later, the quantum theory kills you. Sooner or later, when we hit five atoms, we don't know where the electron is anymore, and we have to go to the next generation, which relies on the quantum theory and atoms and molecules.

Therefore, I say that all bets are off in terms of projecting machine intelligence beyond a 20-year time frame. There's nothing in the laws of physics that says that computers cannot exceed human intelligence. All I raise is that we physicists are desperately trying to patch up Moore's Law, and at the present time we have to admit that we have no successor to silicon, which means that Moore's Law will collapse in 15 to 20 years.


So are you saying that quantum computing and nanocomputing are not likely to be available by then?

No, no, I'm just saying it's very difficult. At the present time we physicists have been able to compute on seven atoms. That is the world's record for a quantum computer. And that quantum computer was able to calculate 3 x 5 = 15. Now, being able to calculate 3 x 5 = 15 does not equal the convenience of a laptop computer that can crunch potentially millions of calculations per second. The problem with quantum computers is that any contamination, any atomic disturbance, disturbs the alignment of the atoms and the atoms then collapse into randomness. This is extremely difficult, because any cosmic ray, any air molecule, any disturbance can conceivably destroy the coherence of our atomic computer to make them useless.


Unless you have redundant parallel computing?

Even if you have parallel computing you still have to have each parallel computer component free of any disturbance. So, no matter how you cut it, the practical problems of building quantum computers, although within the laws of physics, are extremely difficult, because it requires that we remove all in contact with the environment at the atomic level. In practice, we've only been able to do this with a handful of atoms, meaning that quantum computers are still a gleam in the eye of most physicists.

Now, if a quantum computer can be successfully built, it would, of course, scare the CIA and all the governments of the world, because it would be able to crack any code created by a Turing machine. A quantum computer would be able to perform calculations that are inconceivable by a Turing machine. Calculations that require an infinite amount of time on a Turing machine can be calculated in a few seconds by a quantum computer. For example, if you shine laser beams on a collection of coherent atoms, the laser beam scatters, and in some sense performs a quantum calculation, which exceeds the memory capability of any Turing machine.

However, as I mentioned, the problem is that these atoms have to be in perfect coherence, and the problems of doing this are staggering in the sense that even a random collision with a subatomic particle could in fact destroy the coherence and make the quantum computer impractical.

So, I'm not saying that it's impossible to build a quantum computer; I'm just saying that it's awfully difficult.


SETI: looking in the wrong direction

When do you think we might expect SETI [Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence] to be successful?

I personally think that SETI is looking in the wrong direction. If, for example, we're walking down a country road and we see an anthill, do we go down to the ant and say, "I bring you trinkets, I bring you beads, I bring you knowledge, I bring you medicine, I bring you nuclear technology, take me to your leader"? Or, do we simply step on them? Any civilization capable of reaching the planet Earth would be perhaps a Type III civilization. And the difference between you and the ant is comparable to the distance between you and a Type III civilization. Therefore, for the most part, a Type III civilization would operate with a completely different agenda and message than our civilization.

Let's say that a ten-lane superhighway is being built next to the anthill. The question is: would the ants even know what a ten-lane superhighway is, or what it's used for, or how to communicate with the workers who are just feet away? And the answer is no. One question that we sometimes ask is if there is a Type III civilization in our backyard, in the Milky Way galaxy, would we even know its presence? And if you think about it, you realize that there's a good chance that we, like ants in an anthill, would not understand or be able to make sense of a ten-lane superhighway next door.

So this means there that could very well be a Type III civilization in our galaxy, it just means that we're not smart enough to find one. Now, a Type III civilization is not going to make contact by sending Captain Kirk on the Enterprise to meet our leader. A Type III civilization would send self-replicating Von Neumann probes to colonize the galaxy with robots. For example, consider a virus. A virus only consists of thousands of atoms. It's a molecule in some sense. But in about one week, it can colonize an entire human being made of trillions of cells. How is that possible?

Well, a Von Neumann probe would be a self-replicating robot that lands on a moon; a moon, because they are stable, with no erosion, and they're stable for billions of years. The probe would then make carbon copies of itself by the millions. It would create a factory to build copies of itself. And then these probes would then rocket to other nearby star systems, land on moons, to create a million more copies by building a factory on that moon. Eventually, there would be sphere surrounding the mother planet, expanding at near-light velocity, containing trillions of these Von Neumann probes, and that is perhaps the most efficient way to colonize the galaxy. This means that perhaps, on our moon there is a Von Neumann probe, left over from a visitation that took place million of years ago, and the probe is simply waiting for us to make the transition from Type 0 to Type I.


The Sentinel.

Yes. This, of course, is the basis of the movie 2001, because at the beginning of the movie, Kubrick interviewed many prominent scientists, and asked them the question, "What is the most likely way that an advanced civilization would probe the universe?" And that is, of course, through self-replicating Von Neumann probes, which create moon bases. That is the basis of the movie 2001, where the probe simply waits for us to become interesting. If we're Type 0, we're not very interesting. We have all the savagery and all the suicidal tendencies of fundamentalism, nationalism, sectarianism, that are sufficient to rip apart our world.

By the time we've become Type I, we've become interesting, we've become planetary, we begin to resolve our differences. We have centuries in which to exist on a single planet to create a paradise on Earth, a paradise of knowledge and prosperity.

2003 KurzweilAI.net