A Brief Encounter with Algernon Black

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A brief encounter, Algernon Black, Coney Island, Encampment for Citizenship, Ethical Culture Societies, New York city, Pullman Washington

I hitchhiked from Pullman, Washington, to New York City the summer of 1958 to attend the Ethical Culture Societies‘ Encampment for Citizenship, where I experienced several of the most important events of my life. One was with Algernon Black, one of the leaders who every summer created this amazing opportunity for about eighty kids. We were given the opportunity to meet and talk with some of the most important people in New York, some of the most important people in the world. That was a fantastic adventure and it shaped the rest of my life.

I had spoken to Algernon personally a couple of times but this is a story, a Brief Encounter, that shocked me into personal responsibility for other people’s lives. It is meaningful because he gave me a personal task, a responsibility that I was capable of doing, that amazes me to this day. He asked me to do something that I would be very hesitant to ask any teenager to do because it would have been so easy to go wrong and end in disaster.

He drove a group of five of us kids out to Coney Island amusement park for a day at the beach and a swim in the Atlantic and to do whatever else we could get into and out of. I remember the ride on the then scariest roller coaster in the world. It really banged us around and I felt bruised. It was enough for me not to take another ride on that thing. After an hour of this kind of nonsense entertainment, Algernon took me aside and asked me if I knew how to drive a car. I said I had had a ’41 Chevy back in Pullman since I was sixteen with no accidents or even tickets.

He said that he had some important business to attend to and asked me to drive his car back from Coney Island (40.5728, -73.9850) to the Encampment for Citizenship (40.8897, -73.9063). That’s about 25 miles through a lot of Brooklyn, the full length of Manhattan, and some of the Bronx.

Algernon was asking me to drive the five of us teenagers through a major city I didn’t know, in a car I had never driven, to a place that might be hard to find, without a map. The possibilities for me and us kids going astray were real, but he trusted me to do it. And I did.

What an honor! Thank you, Algernon Black!

 

 

 

 

Are Moses’ 10 commandments a truncated 147 Delphi suggestions?

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7 Sages 147 suggestions., Delphi, Sage sayings of Delphi, Ten Commandments compared to 147 Delphi suggestions, The Ten Commandments

Moses lived some six hundred years before his Ten Commandments were written down about the year 830 BCE in what is known as the Elohist document. (See 1st Presbyterian Bishop John Shelby Spong – Unbelievable page 211.) There are three versions of the Ten Commandments: Exodus 34, Deuteronomy 5, and Exodus 20, the usual version. Here is a brief list:

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Ten Commandments from the Bible
I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
Thou shalt have no other gods before me
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image
Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain
Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy
Honor thy father and thy mother
Thou shalt not kill
Thou shalt not commit adultery
Thou shalt not steal
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor
Thou shalt not covet (neighbor’s house)
Thou shalt not covet (neighbor’s wife)
Thou shalt not covet (neighbor’s slaves, animals, or anything else)
You shall set up these stones, which I command you today, on Mount Gerizim.

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That list is derived from the Jewish Elohist scholars and appears to be a truncated one culled from the commonly known much longer list published on stone-stelae at Delphi, Greece, created by The Seven Sages. Those stelae were sent to all cities in the known world where there were Greek-speaking people.

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147 Suggestions from Delphi

1. Pursue goodness.
2. Obey all laws.
3. Praise goodness.
4. Obey your parents.
5. Honor justice.
6. Use your proven wisdom.
7. Base your wisdom on facts.
8. Whisper reasons to yourself.
9. Support a healthy family life.
10. Prepare for opportunities.
11. Adjust your actions to living.
12. Behave with discretion.
13. Bring honor to your family.
14. Avoid excessive actions.
15. Empower your friends.
16. Moderate your emotions.
17. Avoid unnecessary risk.
18. Respect the inevitable.
19. Avoid all swearing.
20. Encourage friendship.
21. Learn all you can.
22. Seek virtuous actions.
23. Discover what works best.
24. Reward good acts.
25. Avoid accusations.
26. Recognize quality behavior.
27. Practice being fair.
28. Be respectful of everyone.
29. Don’t expose weakness.
30. Practice courage.
31. Shun every form of evil.
32. Participate in events.
33. Protect what’s valuable.
34. Respect people’s stuff.
35. Respect people’s thoughts.
36. Keep religion personal.
37. Do many kindnesses for friends.
38. Prevent excess.
39. Make extra time for actions.
40. Prepare ahead of needs.
41. Subdue offensive actions.
42. Respect refugees.
43. Make everything comfortable.
44. Challenge your kid’s minds.
45. Help giving empowerment.
46. Look into others’ reasons.
47. Praise good actions.
48. Copy wise acts and thoughts.
49. Judge with a long view.
50. Plan your actions.
51. Shun criminals and murders.
52. Seek what you can earn.
53. Choose honest friends.
54. Challenge your character.
55. Share your gifts.
56. Start off positive.
57. Share your best work.
58. Maintain your limits.
59. Reward good deeds.
60. Shun jealousy.
61. Always be careful.
62. Acknowledge hope.
63. Despise accusations.
64. Earn what you receive.
65. Reward good actions.
66. Understand the judges.
67. Participate in family life.
68. Aim for positive outcomes.
69. Eschew cosigning.
70. Speak to communicate.
71. Seek friends like yourself.
72. Maintain slack in everything.
73. Enjoy what is easy.
74. Obey your shame.
75. Do tiny good deeds.
76. Whisper your positive goals.
77. Enjoy random events.
78. Observe and reflect.
79. Earn what you seek to own.
80. Avoid conflicts.
81. Prevent disgraceful actions.
82. Speak fairly.
83. Block improper actions.
84. Judge by accepted laws.
85. Finish your tasks promptly.
86. Judge by law not by interest.
87. Don’t slander absent people.
88. Speak from knowledge.
89. Suppress violent behavior.
90. See blessings, ignore sorrows.
91. Treat people gently.
92. Admire your completed works.
93. Help people to their goals.
94. Guide kids toward good ends.
95. Help your wife.
96. Take good care of yourself.
97. Give friendly greetings.
98. Set goals before deadlines.
99. Work hard and play fair.
100. Do your best and move on.
101. Show repentance quickly.
102. Keep your eyes on good goals.
103. Think tomorrow before action.
104. Keep actions purposeful.
105. Protect friendship as life.
106. Display your gratitude.
107. Reveal mutual interests.
108. Keep secrets secret.
109. Remember rulers’ obligations.
110. Make actions for mutual gain.
111. Say YES to opportunities.
112. Discuss mutual advantages.
113. Love old age as a gift.
114. Don’t boast about gifts.
115. Speak with kind thoughts.
116. Walk quietly away from hatred.
117. Earn money in fair ways.
118. Finish your tasks promptly.
119. Walk away from temptation.
120. Avoid unnecessary dangers.
121. Ask good questions.
122. Keep slack so you can finish.
123. Respect people’s silly beliefs.
124. Treat your dependents well.
125. Don’t challenge the departed.
126. Respect everyone, like elders.
127. Make fun games for kids.
128. Be open to people’s problems.
129. Treat yourself with respect.
130. Never force people to actions.
131. Think fondly of ancestors.
132. Risk dying for your country.
133. Use life as an opportunity.
134. Never disparage the dead.
135. Learn from the unlucky.
136. Be happy, shun debauchery.
137. Grieve losses, then move on.
138. Find healthy spouse for kids.
139. Make and accept no promises.
140. Honor all that is past.
141. Live vigorously.
142. Preplan responses to luck.
143. Explore everything.
144. Cultivate self-control.
145. Work your best options.
146. Exemplify tranquil living.
147. Die with pleasant memories.

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Even barbarians could learn to speak, read and write Greek by hearing lectures given at city parks where these stelae were being discussed.

Probaway Person of the Year 2018 – Elon Musk

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Elon Musk, Probaway Person of the Year 2018, Space is finally accessible

Elon Musk has succeeded in creating cheap reusable space launch vehicles. That is easy to say, but eleven major countries of the world have tried for decades to do that and failed. All previous attempts were expensive one-time-use vehicles, that crashed in a ball of flame back to Earth after putting a small percentage of the launch vehicle into space. Since 1944 they all wanted a cheaper multiuse launch system, but Elon Musk’s company SpaceX is, all these years later, still the only one that can do it. “First-stage reuse. As of 6 August 2018, SpaceX had recovered 21 first-stage boosters from previous missions, of which six were recovered twice, yielding a total 27 landings.” This is still an infant technology and it will get better. NASA wrote that Musk can create launch vehicles at ten percent of the price they can.

The complete up-to-present list of Probaway Person of the Year:

• • 2022 – Drew Weissman for creating the technology for eliminating viral diseases from the future of humanity. I published this nine months early because I can’t think of anything more memorable happening for humanity this year.
  • 2021– Xi Jinping for his success in suppressing Covid-19 in China. That harsh action brought its economy to world leadership as two million others died.
  • 2020 – Charles Scamahorn  for exposing the foundations of human qualities, of the genetic feedback of language, morality, and humanity’s responsibility to take the next step in the Universe’s evolution.
  • 2019 – Elon Musk for creating a reusable rocket system that will give much cheaper access to space which opens new frontiers.
  • 2018 – Astronomers for discovering the signatures of the heavy elements like gold in the collision of neutron stars.
  • 2017 – Albert Einstein for predicting black holes, their collisions creating gravity waves, and the laser for observing the gravity waves.
  • 2016 – Xi Jinping for taking China from a backward economy to the most powerful one on Earth.
  • 2015 – Peter Higgs and Alan Guth created theories that led to proofs this year of mass and gravity sources.
  • 2014 – Jennifer Doudna created a method for insertion of designed DNA precisely into existing DNA.
  • 2013 – Plague Inc. is a computer game that explores the problems of creating a disease that will kill every last human being on Earth.
  • 2012 – Zebrafish research-technique advances made it possible to observe drug interactions within living animals.
  • 2011 – Craig Venter laid the groundwork for creating entirely new forms of life (greater than species) out of computer-generated DNA sequences.
  • 2010 – Nadya Suleman (Octomom) and the society that created this travesty of good sense will be remembered into the distant future by many hungry people.
  • 2009 – Jimmy Wales for Wikipedia, which will be still be used after our current computer operating systems are surpassed and forgotten.
  • 2008 – Cesar Millan (the dog whisperer) because he shows people how to relate to dogs and people much better than anyone else. His videos and techniques will be remembered and used as long as there are people and dogs.

  These may seem like strange choices but they are people involved in potentially long-term-memorable events which had a major tipping point the year before their selection as Probaway Person of the Year.

I annoy myself with recognizing an unrecognized fault.

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My human faults, Violation of speed laws

Today I discovered on rereading yesterday’s post that I was accusing some fine human beings of the fault of uppitiness. It read …

“In that section, we discover that people who get active in a special kind of moral cleansing and moral superiority are ultimately bad for humanity. There forms a strange reaction from these people who pursue a moral high ground of ethical foods and ethical behavior. You must toe their line of rectitude or suffer their judgments, or those righteous people will project feelings of moral transgressions upon you.”

I may be accusing those ethical people of something that I also do, but my fault isn’t being righteous about food but about really bad driving habits of people seen here in Bend. Perhaps it is an overly broad interpretation of the ethical behavior expected in the Ten Commandments, but Deuteronomy 5:21 says: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife; and you shall not desire your neighbor’s house, his field, his male servant, his female servant, his ox, his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s,” and that coveting seems similar to expecting other people to share the road and exhibit cooperative driving habits, and obey the clearly posted public driving laws. It’s a stretch!

I actually bought a dash cam for my car so I can record people running STOP signs at 20 mph, and driving past SPEED LIMIT 20 MPH signs at 45 MPH and not even slowing a tiny bit. And there is a surprisingly high percentage of people driving with only one headlight. Last night an approaching car had both its driver side headlight and the little driver side light burned out also. It was dark and the part of his car that passed nearest me was invisible until the last moment. Fortunately, they were cautious enough to be driving on their side of the yellow line.

Is it a personality fault of mine to be concerned about the majority of people I encounter violating the simplest of public laws?

How can I identify and eliminate my false beliefs? 13

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Helping the Universe become conscious., Self Actualization of the Universe, Universal self-actualization

“Age brings wisdom” is thought by middle age adults to be true, by youth to be silly, by old people to be obvious, and by geriatrics to be slipping away into useless information. I will officially turn eighty-three tomorrow at midnight, so I can no longer consider myself as old … I am now geriatric. The life expectancy of people in ancient times was about twenty-eight years, which meant they were only adults for eight years. But I at eighty-three have had sixty-three years of adulthood. That is almost eight times as much adult experience as an average person in distant times. Did I learn anything in that greater time, with greater access to the vast learning available nowadays? I think so.

Strange as it may seem to others, I feel that I am transitioning into a new life, a new opportunity, and a new adventure. Before now, when approval of my ideas had some value to me, not much, but some, I wouldn’t have dared to proclaim something so audacious as my intention to help the Universe Self-Actualize.

I have worked for ten years on this blog “Probaway – Life Hacks ~ Many helpful hints on living your life more successfully” without much reward, so it doesn’t bother me that I will now work on a subject that everyone will consider beyond audacious, perhaps even beyond absurd. How can a geriatric man hope to help 1 tic 22 stars and their associated planets to Self-Actualize their potential? (That is an example of my new numbering system, actually the old one but pronounced differently for compactness, 1 x 10^22 stars.) The more distant of those stars would take tens of billions of years to reach at near the speed of light.

Okay, it is not technically impossible for a bit of information to travel that far, so why should it be thought crazy to attempt to do that exact thing? It is especially strange to me that people should respond positively to vast amounts of public information that is technically impossible if it fits into their hope-filled worldview and reject something infinitely more important.

Now is the time for the Universe to transition into a thinking being and we have the technology to make that happen. 

How can we help the Universe to think?

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A universal mind, Next stage of human evolution., Reaching other galaxies., Reaching other planets., Silicon-life evolution., Universal consciousness, Universal self-actualization

If a large portion of every planet’s silicon in the Universe was converted into memory chips and thinking chips and other at present unknowable kinds of functioning thinking devices, what would the Universe think about? This isn’t a totally idle speculation because we present humans might participate in getting the whole Universe up and running in a way that the natural-selection style of evolution cannot do. We are a sentient species at this time, and we do have the ability to contemplate these kinds of ideas even though the Universe is enormous compared to us.

We have the ability to plan for future events and to bring them into physical reality, whereas the natural-selection type of evolution cannot think, and cannot plan, and can only respond in the long run to what has survived and randomly reproduced. Sexual selection can improve a species more quickly by choosing the healthiest members to survive and reproduce. And what I term Eveish selection, which is only available to humans, can project ahead and breed for improvement of the human species. When humans reached a level of sophistication where they could see how other species could be manipulated to have more desirable traits what is called Artificial selection came into being. At present we humans have the ability to generate DNA to our specifications and thus can create carbon-based life forms of not only spruced up species but of domains, which are the taxonomic rank above kingdoms. Soon there will be new living forms created that have no relation to life as we have known it.

However, an even more useful method for generating a Universal consciousness is to be found, not in carbon-based life, but in silicon-based life. This form of life cannot be evolved by natural-selection processes at this time, but we can put the processes in place whereby silicon-based life can reproduce itself, and when that happens it could evolve. But, because it could evolve using its ability to think and plan ahead, it would be able to evolve very quickly. It could, by using its forethought, design and make variations of its basic self to fit different niches. It could fill new niches as quickly as it could design and make the new devices, each with appropriate minds with the ability to link into the mega-mind and thus to do locally appropriate acts based on that vast intelligence, experience, knowledge, wisdom and cunning.

The goal is to construct a Universal mind that includes everything in the whole Universe. At first this would only be here on our Earth, but soon our robot society could build devices that could be launched to distant planets where they could quickly reproduce (perhaps in millions of years) but the time element isn’t critical for silicon-based life because the physical vehicles could be designed to sleep for long times. Their entire trips to distant stars and even to distant galaxies could be largely asleep. When they got to where they found an adequate planet they could replicate and soon fill that galaxy with thinking beings and move on to the next star and galaxy.

This process has probably already started on other planets with carbon-based high-tech societies.  That seems probable because, with 1 x 10^22 stars in the universe, most, or at least some, with watery planets with billions of years to evolve carbon-based life will have created high-tech societies where the things available to us have been available to them for a long time. Some of those societies will not have gone extinct without creating a silicon-based society that can reproduce itself and when that happens they will expand to fill their galaxy.

The first step of Universal thought will be to fill every possible niche with silicon-based life and interconnect it with the whole.

How to become a citizen of the Universe.

Tags

Human destiny, Living for a billion years, Universal citizens

For you and me to become citizens of the Universe seems like a new idea but it’s not. Some of the Classic Greeks and Romans spoke of themselves not as being Greeks or Romans but as Citizens of the Universe. Diogenes the Cynic (412 B.C.-323 B.C.) was an early proponent of that grander citizenship for advanced intellectual and spiritual humans. The Roman Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 B.C.-65 A.D.), a Stoic, also wrote of himself as being a citizen of the whole world, and of the whole Universe. Seneca was Nero‘s chief advisor and administrator for the first five years of that Roman Emperor’s rule when Nero was age eighteen to twenty-three. Seneca was a very well-informed human being.

At the time that those people lived, the Universe was only the Earth and the Sky as they saw it with their eyes. So what they were asserting was that they were part of that whole. It may have been a theory of a few astronomers that the fixed stars were other sun-like things, but even that wasn’t generally accepted. But even at its most expansive their definition of the Universe would include only the visible individual stars that are in the closest part of our Milky Way galaxy. There are about a hundred billion galaxies in the Universe as has been estimated by the Hubble Ultra Deep Field photo. Thus they were undervaluing their conception of the universe by something like 1 x 10^22, including the individual stars. Most of those stars are now known to have planets.

My stated goal in some recent posts is to assert that we, you and me, are not only citizens of the Universe but for us to become active participants in the whole Universe, not just within our arms’ reach. For us to do that we must be thinking of our lives and influences as spanning billions of years. With our biological life expectancy of only a hundred years, we must move on to a robot-based life form and physically move off our planet to distant stars, planets, interstellar space, and eventually to intergalactic space. And we must think of our communication cycles in terms of billions of years and not in seconds. For us fleshy humans that is absurd, but for robots, it can probably become a sustainable reality.

As strange as making these kinds of robots sounds it is probably more easily done than creating organic life from scratch. People I have met, such as David Deamer and Craig Venter, are attempting to do just that. The process for making a self-sustaining silicon-based society is relatively straightforward because all the steps for the operations can already be done. At present these operations do require people but those operations can almost certainly be designed to be done automatically by currently creatable robots.

Our becoming participating citizens of the Universe can be done by our evolving into what we now call robots. 

 

Do you have free will?

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Free-will, Freewill, Freewill requires thought., Ultimate use of free will

We occasionally encounter people who believe in destiny to the extent that they believe that they don’t have free will. Everything was fixed at the moment the Universe was created, and they maintain that if you had a computer powerful enough you could know the precise position of every atom in the universe and thus predict everything that was going to happen. I am not enthusiastic about that view of the way things work!

The mass of the Universe is around 1.5*10^53 kg. The mass of my brain, the source of my free will, if I have any, is about 1 kg and it controls about 100 kg of my bodily matter directly and when driving my VW beetle it was about 1,000 kg. Thus, my control over the Universe is very roughly one part in 1.5*10^50.

However, my control over my immediate physical self which affects my immediate environment is almost 100%. Okay, I can’t levitate. I must obey the laws of the Universe, and the social laws, and lots of other things too, but what I can do, I can do freely. Over the very tiny bit of the Universe, and a small part of my personal locality and time, I do have a bit of control. It is tiny, but it is real, I think!

Now for the kicker. If I am successful in influencing, even in a very small way, the ideas for helping the Universe to self-actualize its, unknown at the moment to me, potentials, I will be exerting my free will upon the whole of the Universe. Even if these plans were totally successful and we could launch some robots at near the speed of light they might not reach the limits of the currently visible Universe, and some might quibble therefore I can’t control it and thus have no ultimate free will.

Just because I can’t stop a black hole from absorbing stuff, like information, doesn’t mean I don’t have the power to influence those things that aren’t swallowed up into it.

I’m comfortable with the free will which I do have and will use a portion of it to help the Universe transition into its next potential state of being.

 

Humanity’s destiny is to help the Universe to actualize its potentials.

Tags

A Self Actualizing Universe, Self actualization

It isn’t hubris to seek to help the Universe to actualize its potentials, but rather it is the responsibility of a sentient species anywhere in the Universe to do so. We as sentient carbon-based biological beings who for the moment have a fully functioning, technologically sophisticated society capable of creating vastly more stable silicon-based sentient beings must do so while we have the resources. If we squander our presently existing resources we may lose the power to create the necessary physical equipment.

Non-biological sentient beings do not degrade when they are deprived of their energy source for minutes or even millennia perhaps, whereas we humans die permanently almost immediately when deprived of our incredibly complex earth-like support system . It would be relatively easy to send a robot to a distant star’s Goldilocks planet compared to sending a multi-generational human group on a super-space ship to the same place. 

It will be relatively easy for a robot society to contact other robot societies and have two-way conversations with those distant robot societies because once discovered the time delays between them could be tolerated. With modern humans, a ten thousand year delay in a two-way conversation cycle would make it totally meaningless. Also, when another society was contacted they would probably already have been contacted by others within the galaxy, some of which were closer, so more direct communication could be received of the news. Of course, the news might be a million years old, but it would be current for our time and space.

How would we answer the challenge posed at the beginning? “Humanity’s destiny is to help the Universe to actualize its potentials.”

I don’t know the answer but with all of the sentient beings of the galaxy thinking on that idea they might realize a beautiful answer. It might be 42, or circular and self-referent to the extreme … like …

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

I want to help the Universe self-actualize its beauty.

Tags

Humanities purpose, The great goal, The purpose of life?, This is the purpose of life.

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.