It seemed to me that I was thinking new thoughts, but when I searched my own Probaway site with the word “universe” my new thoughts were already old thoughts. It seems my prayer to help the Universe self-actualize has been written up in some detail in various forms, repeatedly. And yet, I haven’t really had any specific way to proceed with this project, until now.
A request to the Universe put into a prayer-like petition.
“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race….It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”— Stephen Hawking
What is the life expectancy of the human species? If we could dip into any species that ever lived and look at where it existed in its total lifespan, then half the time it would be in the middle half of its existence. That is a very rough estimate as to where we are at present, but humans as a fully sentient species, that is, having a language with a genetic-based syntax potential have existed only roughly a hundred thousand years. Thus, very very roughly, our species has a hundred thousand years ahead of it. Quite frankly, with the super weapons, like H-bombs, which we now possess, it seems improbable we will last a hundred years. But, just to be kind, let’s give us a thousand times more life expectancy than that, which would mean we are presently halfway through our human experience.
How does our species’ life expectancy compare to the life expectancy of the Universe, which is some thirteen billion years old? If we are halfway through that, which seems far too brief a prediction, then our human life expectancy compared to our Universe’s life expectancy is 13,000,000,000 years divided by 100,000 years which equals 1 part in 130,000, and that is being very generous to our species.
Now compare our life expectancy to the potential of the robot life forms we can create. These robotic things could be designed to self-replicate as a society, and it isn’t necessary for them to be individually self-reproducing like organic things, and they could be made into beings that could last forever. They, as a society, can reproduce themselves precisely and could produce progeny directly and intentionally, that would fit whatever environment they were expecting to be sent to.
We humans can already build machines that can “live” on Mars for years and given a billion years to evolve more sophisticated robots, the robots themselves could make that task into a simple one. Moving to another star system from our sun might take thousands of years of travel time, and that is doable by our evolved robot society but not for us humans. A human-livable spaceship of that sophistication would be enormous, but for robots, a physical spaceship might be quite small.
Moving to other galaxies might be a step too far, even for robot societies, but with so many opportunities for robot societies to arise in other galaxies, given human-like beings to build the robots, the robot societies, over the course of billions of years, could make intergalactic communications. Via radio communication, which would obviously take a lot of time, there could eventually be large parts of the Universe communicating and living a life totally beyond our comprehension. It is our duty if we choose to think of it in that obligatory term, to rise to this grand goal and purpose.
We are a transitional species moving over into becoming robots and by doing so we can live until the end of the Universe.
Hmm.. I agree that the only futures that seem both plausible and desirable to me involve continuing to broaden our technical abilities, including the use of synthetic and probably inorganic bodies and brains which we’ll continue to call “robots” roughly until they start seeming more like people than things.
I have a tiny quibble, though, about the scope of our grand, interconnected, prospects. Really, just with the phrase, “large parts of the universe”. If I’ve grasped the current, conventional understanding of astrophysics, most locations in the visible universe are already speeding and accelerating away from us so quickly that even if they could receive radio messages sent from Earth now, their responses could never outpace cosmic expansion and reach us in return. Even granting relativistic ships, our prospects for interactive culture are essentially limited to the “local group”, which is Andromeda, the Milky Way, and the few dozen smaller galaxies gravitationally bound to us (see Kurzgesagt).
Granted, if our ships closely approached c, then we could send out 1-way voyages to colonize areas beyond that fringe, but I believe there’s virtually no hope of getting anything back. Not even information.
Of course… the local group is, itself, reasonably large. And speculating this far out is likely an expression of overconfidence in our current understanding. Maybe we’ll learn superluminal travel or communication are possible, or that cosmic expansion isn’t what it seems, or that there are hidden realms and geometries that make this whole discussion pathetically naive. Who knows? Fun ideas, though :)
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