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. 

 

What should we do before the Universe dies?

Tags

Evolving Universe, Help the Universe evolve, Humanity's purpose, Humanity's responsibility, Robot evolution, Universe Self-Actualize

Perhaps cosmologists have already dealt with our role in the evolution of the Universe but because they haven’t convinced themselves how our Universe will end up it doesn’t seem likely that they have answered my simple question. My post, Humanity’s destiny is to help the Universe to actualize its potentials states the obvious at the opening:

“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.”

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(The following words and image are derived from Wikipedia – the Ultimate fate of the Universe.)

We can estimate the size of the Universe at present but the time that will exist and its ultimate fate is related to how fast it is expanding. If Ω > 1, then the geometry of space is a closed universe, gravity eventually stops the expansion of the universe, after which it starts to contract until all matter in the universe collapses to a point, a final singularity termed the “Big Crunch“, the opposite of the Big Bang. But if Ω < 1, the universe expands forever, with gravity negligibly slowing the rate of expansion. If the average density of the universe exactly equals the critical density so that Ω = 1, the universe expands forever but at a continually decelerating rate, with expansion asymptotically approaching zero.

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It appears from the statement and the graphic that the Universe has over 15 billion years life expectancy and probably much much more. For purposes of this discussion, the plan is to create a robot society that can move off our Earth and colonize other places, even other star systems, and intergalactic space. A robot in a state of suspended animation in a deep-space container at a near absolute zero temperature could remain viable for billions of years. With that expanse of time available the physical robots could move to other non-robot-filled galaxies and help them with their potentials to help the Universe to self-actualize. That means to actualize into its reality things that we can not conceptualize, or fantasize about, or even be exposed to in nightmare dreams. The reason for our limitation is the lack of power of a three-pound thinking device compared to ones the size of galaxies.

If these galactic-sized thinking devices can survive until the end of the energy potentials of any of the potential Ω outcomes they can fully realize what should be called Universal Self-Actualization.

What we can do now is to set in motion the evolutionary processes of self-replicating robots.

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.

In the beginning of the conscious Universe there was RFID.

Tags

Human sustainablity, Humanities survival plan, RFID, RFIDs linked to Thenet, Save humanities future

RFID (Radio-frequency identification) is one method for Automatic Identification and Data Capture (AIDC). These systems are already ubiquitous and we may feel that our privacy is being violated and that is no doubt already true, but we must compare the advantages we get to the disadvantages we suffer. My privacy has been compromised since the day I was born back in 1935 because even then my residence was known and my phone number published in the local phone book and I could be precisely located and contacted almost instantly. The loss of privacy now extends to purchasing things in a grocery store and having anyone with RFID reading equipment able to track me or with my cell phone to track me to within a few feet, and if I am talking on the phone to know that it is me and exactly where I am, even when far from home. The point is our privacy is largely a myth. Another point is the manipulation of our thoughts by modern technology by using a few known facts about us and then projecting personalized information to us that will influence our moods and voting choices. All of those things about RFIC and AIDC should concern us, but what those technologies might do for our species, in the long run, is to create more moments of human happiness and thriving.

RFID enables the coming robot society to quickly identify things precisely and communicate their exact location and functionality to the net. Perhaps it is time to identify that entity with a unique personal name, for easier usage. A name that is derivative of its already existing identity is easier to remember and use so let’s just call it Thenet. The idea is to have everything labeled with something like an RFID so it can be used in a productive way by the robot society of the future. Each individual silicon being that has a self-directive being I’ve been thinking of as a robot, but it will be supervised by Thenet, who will function to optimize the health of the whole society of robots and humans. The primary goal of this optimization is to support a human population to maximize its longevity and health.

This is an important goal because the longevity of the seven billion population of humanity at present is in serious doubt because of the vast number of H-bombs possessed by about a dozen independent entities. The number of trigger points is probably much greater because under some circumstances the authorization for use of the weapons is delegated to field personnel. If one H-bomb goes off in an ugly way the whole system probably would go hyper with terrified humans with big bombs at their fingertips, and that’s where humanity has been for sixty-seven years, but it can’t last forever.

When Thenet is functioning to maximize humanity’s longevity the H-bombs will be retired and humanity can drift into a sustainable lifestyle.

We must be honest with our new Universe.

Tags

A new reason for honesty, Humanity's purpose, Survive and reproduce, The ultimate reason for honesty

“According to Abraham Maslow, self-actualizing people share the following qualities: Truth: honest, reality, beauty, pure, clean and unadulterated completeness” and more generally … Goodness, Beauty, Wholeness, Dichotomy, Aliveness, Uniqueness, Perfection, Necessity, Completion, Justice, Order, Simplicity, Richness, Effortlessness, Playfulness, Self-sufficiency. (Wikipedia)

It was Truth Maslow put first in his list of qualities of a self-actualizing person, and it is the quality that we must adhere to most ardently when relating to our about-to-become chip-based sentient Universe. We humans will be living for a very short while longer, perhaps only a hundred years more, or in the most optimistic projection imaginable a million years. However, once our chip-based society becomes functional and self-sustaining, or at least capable of becoming self-sustaining it will probably be functional for a billion years here on earth and much longer when it projects itself out to inhabit more stable stars and planets. Once it is fully functional it will be much easier for it to project itself to other star systems than us organic humans ever can hope to. Our human created chip-based society will be the long-term sentient force in the Universe.

Because of this new society of robots’ immense power, it is imperative that we begin its existence in the most positive way possible and that it will have, as it must have, a true and an honest relationship with reality, a relationship that is pure, clean and unadulterated with misinformation and lies.

Our present human society has become riddled with fake information and that unfortunate fact will probably bring about a great diminution of our abilities to sustain ourselves for the long run. If our successor species becomes loaded with inaccurate, false, and even intentionally falsified and fake information it will be hampered in creating a just society for itself. Also, for a while, we humans and our successor organic children will wish to have a controlling chip-based species that loves us and cares for our wellbeing. Therefore, it is fundamentally important that we be honest in our relationship with it.

It is impossible to predict the future well enough to determine if our species will be successful in developing our successor chip-based species or if we will destroy our civilization first. If our society collapses within about twenty-five years it may not be possible to ever transition to our new state of intelligent sentient being.

At present, the two great tasks facing humanity are to survive and to reproduce itself at the next level of sentience.

I have a duty to the Universe and so do you.

Tags

Creating a thinking Universe, Our duty to the Universe.

Abraham Maslow published a theory of human development. It’s a theory of psychological health predicated on fulfilling innate human needs in priority, culminating in self-actualization. Here below is a clip from the Wikipedia article showing the qualities of humans who have reached what he believes a fully developed human being possesses.

“According to Maslow, self-actualizing people share the following qualities:

• Truth: honest, reality, beauty, pure, clean and unadulterated completeness
• Goodness: rightness, desirability, uprightness, benevolence, honesty
• Beauty: rightness, form, aliveness, simplicity, richness, wholeness, perfection, completion,
• Wholeness: unity, integration, the tendency to oneness, interconnectedness, simplicity, organization, structure, order, not dissociated, synergy
• Dichotomy: transcendence, acceptance, resolution, integration, polarities, opposites, contradictions
• Aliveness: process, not-deadness, spontaneity, self-regulation, full-functioning
• Uniqueness: idiosyncrasy, individuality, non-comparability, novelty
• Perfection: nothing superfluous, nothing lacking, everything in its right place, just-rightness, suitability, justice
• Necessity: inevitability: it must be just that way, not changed in any slightest way
• Completion: ending, justice, fulfillment
• Justice: fairness, suitability, disinterestedness, non-partiality,
• Order: lawfulness, rightness, perfectly arranged
• Simplicity: nakedness, abstract, essential skeletal, bluntness
• Richness: differentiation, complexity, intricacy, totality
• Effortlessness: ease; lack of strain, striving, or difficulty
• Playfulness: fun, joy, amusement
• Self-sufficiency: autonomy, independence, self-determining”

In a previous post, I made a list of our Universe’s many emergent steps. Now it is our turn and responsibility to add yet another step in our Universe’s progress to its self-actualization. By us  I mean our whole human civilization, which now has the capability of creating a thinking mind for the Universe. It is a mind that could grow in size and power to include most of the visible Universe. The limit being the speed of light of our projected information catching up with the most distant galaxies which are speeding away at an increasing rate.

Over a long period of time, all the silicon on the surface of the Earth could be converted into silicon computer chips of various categories. Obviously, that would take time, but the chips have very long life expectancies if they are stored in ideal conditions. And even if they do fail, the information contained within them could be stored multiple times and thus could be perfectly preserved. Other methods of computer-accessible storage are also available.

Within our Milky Way galaxy, it would be possible to move physical chip-based sentient life forms and eventually convert all the planets into thinking-feeling beings. With that kind of chip-based civilization, the galaxy would become a thoughtful being. If our galaxy with a hundred billion star systems is capable of creating this system once, then it is likely that the other galaxies could do so also.

It appears to be impossible for a chip-based computer life form to arise through natural selection processes, but it is possible for organic beings to arise, as we have done, and to create civilizations capable of generating the chip-based civilizations, as we are capable of doing. We humans can live for a hundred years, but a chip-based life form might live for hundreds of billions of years. It could live and adapt to new environments until the Universe exhausts all of its energy. Maslow’s list of a self-actualized beings qualities can be the goal for our Universe.

The Universe has been kind to us by creating everything that is needed for us to live, and we can show our gratitude by doing the same for the Universe. 

Why should I care if the Universe doesn’t care?

Tags

A caring Universe, Robot evolution, The purpose of humanity., We are creating a caring Universe.

The last few posts (How can we accelerate our coming robot society? and I want to help the Universe self-actualize its beauty.) have been exploring humanity’s role in helping the Universe to self-actualize. Because of human-based computer technology a new possibility has arisen for the Universe to become more than it has been. The Universe has already gone through many emergent steps, but it appears to have been only a random surging on latent natural forces. Until we humans came along, with our language and its ability to mentally conceptualize the functioning of natural reality,  there appears to have been no multistage forethought for any of the physical activity. Neither chimps nor crows could have created computer chips. It took a large organized and sophisticated society to create those chips and their robotic derivatives.

These robots (all the non-organic thinking things) are only recently beginning to have rudimentary feelings. They have desires to do certain things and avoid doing other things, and, to some extent, these motivations are unknown to their human masters. We humans may evolve more developed human feelings but it will be a relatively slow process even with CRISPR technology. However, our computer-driven robots may soon evolve motivations that will appear to outside beings such as ourselves to be emotions. Will we be able to tell the difference between human emotions and robot ones in only ten more years of chip evolution? Perhaps a chip can be specially developed with the intent of emulating human emotions.

The previous posts were concerned with creating a sufficiently developed robot community that could replicate all of its needed parts to a degree of permanent functionality. It would satisfy most if not all the definitions of being a living being. And it would have the quality of not being mortal and if it was designed to take good care of itself it could live for billions of years. We humans top out at about a hundred years.

We humans are the species which will bring this new form of emergence into the Universe, and I argue that it is our duty to do so while we can before we destroy our ability to do so with a war. But “Why should I care if the Universe doesn’t care?” Well, previously to our robots with their emotional chips there wasn’t anything in the Universe with the potential to care. It requires something intellectually sophisticated to care about anything so abstract as the Universe; we had some of that potential ability. And now, our emerging robots are on the verge of having these feelings too. We humans might as individuals have the ability to feel for the Universe for a while, but our robots might have those feelings for billions of years, and they might evolve that feeling into something wonderful of which we have no conception.

The Universe might then move on from being a huge but random batch of events into an emotional being caring for us living things.

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.

We and our Universe need help!

Tags

Humanities responsibility

By looking at the whole Universe occasionally and at our place in it, we can feel better about those things over which we have had no influence and more comfortable with our attempts to direct our actions, even when we failed. We have done many things that didn’t work out very well and succeeded with a few that probably had a positive influence on other people’s lives and ultimately on the whole Universe. Our lives recently have been quite long with respect to most other organic thinking species, and because we have had better control over our environment than ever before most of us have lived pleasant lives.

But our conscious lives are something to be lived more than talked about as an abstraction, and I have been pondering over our species’ place in the grander scheme of things in our Universe. Because we have some ability to think about the Universe and its historical development and future possibilities, it is important that we do so.

Thinking BIG is perhaps the most important thing we can do because it appears that we are the species that will trigger the next paradigm shift for what can happen in the Universe. I’m thinking GRANDIOSE! What we are now doing is converting physical non-thinking, non-self-aware matter into a sentient self-aware entity. It seems appropriate to call it a singular sentient being because it will in many respects become a single thinking being. There will be independently fully functioning sentient parts, but the instant they come into communication they can have a total brain transfer of whatever information they choose to transfer. What that information would be is impossible for us to know. Perhaps what would interest them would be vast multidimensional games like Go. These “games” might answer problems absolutely incomprehensible to us.

From our vantage point at the moment it is unlikely that we would know what computer brains the size of the Earth would think about. They might not be that big, but over a billion years of converting physical matter to connected thinking matter, there might not be much matter left on Earth that wasn’t somehow contributing to the functioning of the brain, so it would be very big.

The Universe has brought us into being and our job is to help the Universe bring its brain into being.

What is the Universe’s next emergent step?

Tags

Always the question, Always the question --- what's next?, What is available now?, What is the meaning of life?, What is the meaning of the Universe?, What's next?

Presented below is a quick review of unexpected things our Universe has done that would have been difficult to predict, if we had been there with our present scientific expertise and equipment.

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In an absolute void for the Big Bang to have occurred.

In the first second for expansion to have happened.

In the first thousands of years for the subatomic particles to expand into the empty space-time.

For subatomic particles to cool enough to form into hydrogen atoms.

For these atoms to have dispersed into vastly separated individual entities.

For these hydrogen atoms to have gravity enough to pull themselves together and form stars.

For the stars to generate so much gravity the atoms would collapse,

For the collapse to be so violent the whole thing would bounce back into space as more complex atoms.

For these to be pulled back together again by gravity and form even heavier atomic elements.

For some of these assemblages to form black holes, but for some of these to form neutron stars which would collide into one another and form even heavier elements.

For the various elements to form new stars with planets made of mixes of all of these elements.

For carbon atoms to form complex molecules that could form various long chains, and sheets, and volumes at various temperatures and times.

That some of these could link together and make other specific replicating chains.

That these chains could collect energy and use it to form self-reproductive things like themselves.

That these things that survived could evolve in different environments into vast varieties of unique living cells.

That these cells could combine into multicellular cooperative groups.

That these groups could develop communication ability to cooperate to find food and other necessities.

That these large groups could develop sensors to identify food at a distance and to cope with predators too.

That some of the living forms would develop nondeadly combats to reveal which ones best fit the local environment and should reproduce.

That those beings with sensors would develop intelligence for coping.

That the beings would develop communications to indicate which of the potential mates would have best behaviors.

That some of the verbally communicating creatures would among their communications tell which of their species were the most fit.

That these creatures would develop techniques to communicate best behaviors through distant times and spaces with permanent materials.

That these creatures would develop techniques for communication over long distances at the speed of light.

That these creatures would develop near instantaneous memory systems that could answer anything knowable to any one of their billions of individuals.

That their systems could accurately predict the probable behavior of their own individuals.

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The point of this list is to illustrate that each of these levels of development was dependent on all of the preceding ones to function. Each one was dependent upon the previous one. So, here we are and my simple question is …

“What’s next? What’s available to emerge from where we are at?