This message was in response to: Stephen Hawking does not buy into advanced ETI
On Tue, 16 Jan 2001, Larry Klaes wrote:
> http://www.cnn.com/2001/ASIANOW/south/01/14/india.stephenhawking.ap/index.html
Hello all. As this article puts Hawking into the Tipler camp, I thought it would be useful to provide an alternate perspective. The following is a very condensed explanation for the lack of obvious ETs that has heretofore been insufficiently explored.
It is the implicit assumption in all discussions of colonization by humans or machines (von Neumann probes) that I have seen, that there is some motivation for this. Humans colonize to have access to greater resources (to gain economic advantage). If that is not the case then the argument falls apart. If a civilization (and its individuals) recognize that there is nothing to be gained by this strategy then they will not exercise it as an option.
That is the case when civilizations have reached the limit of what can be constructed as "thought machines" at the limits of the laws of physics (e.g. solar system sized nested Dyson shell supercomputers, a.k.a. Matrioshka Brains).
If you have one of these, there is virtually no point to constructing a second one, or a 3rd, 4th, 5th, etc. because the return-on-investement is minimal (essentially zero). This is because the propagation delays that exist between such entities relative to their large information storage and thought capacities make it impossible to do collaborative thinking in a way that justifies the investment of resources in the construction effort.
Evolution at this point wants to decrease its size scale, not increase it. I.e. to gain more resources (for "thought") one wants to get smaller, not larger. "Colonization", so to speak wants to occur in sub-atomic space, not outer-space. Advanced civilizations would recognize Feynman's statement, "There is plenty of room at the bottom," should be modified to "There is more room at the bottom"!
Our need to "explore" and/or "sample" is (seen in the space program) would be counterbalanced by their massive observation and simulation capacities which provide a greater return for less investment. You also don't "explore" things when you can dissassemble them and turn them into something more useful (its kind of like playing with your food). But if you turned "everything" into computronium, the universe would be a pretty boring place with no natural phenomena to observe.
I suspect that the universe is exactly the way we observe because the optimum "computation" of the phase space of things that can exist is balanced between "consciously" constructed thought machines (thinking about whatever they want to think about) and that which results from the "natural" (chaotic) computation derived from atomic and molecular interactions based on the fundamental laws of physics. Another way of thinking about this is that a computer cannot run a *completely* accurate simulation of a galaxy, faster than the galaxy itself can.
Explanations such as Hawkings, always treat the "aliens" as collections of individuals like us with our drives and motivations. Rapid self-driven evolution of civilizations to the limits of physical laws makes those assumptions fundamentally doubtful. It is also worth noting from my perspective as a computer scientist and molecular biologist that his development time line is way too conservative. I think the moral of the story is that we should always beware the statements of scientists when they step outside of their field of expertise.
I'll give you another example you can add so it doesn't seem like I'm picking on Hawking alone.
Frank Drake, a radio astronomer, has a number of interesting discoveries to his credit. He made early maps of the rings of ionized gas at the center of our galaxy, commonly referred to in Russian literature as Drake Rings. He and George Helou discovered that free electrons in interstellar space have a Doppler effect on radio signals passing through them placing a lower limit on the narrowness of the bandwidth of any interstellar signals. This is known as the Drake-Helou Limit. He is also the author of the infamous Drake Equation that attempts to provide a framework for thinking about the parameters that have an impact on the abundance of communicating civilizations in the galaxy.
However, he too can find himself in error when stepping outside of his field of expertise. In his book Is Anyone Out There? with Dava Sobel (Delacorte, 1992), he discusses the possibility of "immortal extraterrestrials":
"I suspect that immortality may be quite common among extraterrestrials. By immortality I mean the indefinite preservation, in a living being, of a growing and continuous set of memories of individual experience. I think this might come about through the development of methods to eliminate the aging process, or to repair indefinitely the damage caused by aging."Fine and good, he goes on a little further:
"There is nothing in the chemistry of life to require deterioration and death. The system of passing genetic information through the DNA molecule is an extremely robust one, with enormous protections against degeneration. We age and die because we have been programmed to do so, just as salmon grow old and expire within days of laying their eggs. Death is a way for one generation to make room for the next. But death can be outsmarted. Scientists have already located the gene that causes us to age. It lies on chromosome number one in human DNA. When that chromsome is removed from human cells in the laboratory, thsoe cells cease to age."Ouch. Out of one's field and into the swamp!
First and foremost, salmon are not "programmed to die", they do so as a side effect of the massive hormone releases required to get them upstream. Not all salmon do die after spawning. It depends on the environment. If the environment is such that the salmon are likely to survive the trip downstream to be able to return and spawn again, then Nature has adapted them to do so. Evolutionary biologiests know that Nature cannot "program" a species to grow old. Aging derives from two possible sources -- (a) the declining force of natural selection with age (accidents and predation result in the existence of fewer and fewer individuals on which natural selection can act to select "anti-aging" genes) and (b) antagonistic plietropy (the situation where Nature may select for a gene that confers a survival benefit in youth or increases fecundity, but that same gene turns out to be harmful as one ages). Because of the complexity of the features utilized to optimize survival and reproduction -- that are likely to be sub-optimal (due to (a)) or counterproductive (due to (b)) -- there are hundreds of theories of aging (Medvedev-ZA, 1990), many of which are likely to play a role in the process. So there can be no single gene that causes us to age!
The Chromosome 1 gene to which Drake referss is most likely a gene involved in regulating cellular senescence which may be a process that Nature has selected for to minimize cancer. An unfortunate side effect of minimizing cancer may be to cause aging in some organs. Much more work needs to be done to understand the tradeoffs that have been made and how we might engineer around them.
The theories related to "Why organisms age", were worked out by George C. Williams and William D. Hamilton in the 1950's, unfortunately the ideas were not widely circulated outside the evolutionary biology/gerontology community so incorrect memes like Drake's continue to proliferate.
So, it is clear that one must be very careful when scientists step away from that which they know best.