What is the Lifetime of an Intelligent Communicating Civilization in the Drake Equation
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Presentation on the Lifetime of a Transatmospheric Civilization given at the Drake Equation Panel Discussion, Featuring Frank Drake Himself, at Harvard's Sanders Theater During Cambridge Science Week
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What is the Lifetime of an Intelligent Communicating Civilization in the Drake Equation
- 1. What is the Lifetime of Civilizations in a (Transatmospheric) Communicative State Martine Rothblatt United Therapeutics Corp 2017 Cambridge Science Festival “Are We Alone” with Frank Drake Sanders Theatre, Harvard University
- 2. Transcending Substrate Implies Transcending Extinction
- 3. Schrödinger Model Environment -Intent + Intent +/- Intent Negative Entropy Biology Technology Humanity Martine Rothblatt of unither.com 3
- 4. “Biology is the Cradle of Civilization, But One Does Not Stay in The Cradle Forever,” after Tsiolkovskii
- 5. martine4@gmail.com 5 Consciousness is to Brains as Flight Is to Birds: Similar Functions Arise From Diverse Forms
- 6. PROGENY INTEGRATES PEDIGREE “A Generally Accepted Cosmic Context for Humanity,” George Wald
- 7. FOR ME, N ≈ L*fc WHERE L >>106 & fc<10-6 If fc = 10-7, & L = 108, then N=10 & d = 16 KLY {1/107 extant species are fc & we are 90% bacteria}
- 8. What Can We Do Now? TEACH THE UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS; GRANT CITIZENSHIP & RESPECT TO UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS – They Pave the Way for Our Own Immigration from Cyberspace; AGITATE FOR ‘FORM EQUALITY.’
- 9. Why Search for Communicants? • Life is Purposeful: Enjoy it, and Improve it For Others to Better Enjoy it • Spiritual Purpose: Admire & Augment the Beauty of Creation, Like Galileo & Van Gogh – Scientific Knowledge Is Art and Is Enjoyment • Biological Purpose: Be Fruitful & Multiply, So We Must Scan the Heavens as Homes 2B – Why Limit Ourselves to a Speck When We Have Before Us a Universe?
Notes de l'éditeur
- I’m going to make three main points today. First, once civilizations go transatmospheric they don’t go away. Second, there is a continuity of civilization even as they transcend substrate and planetary residence. Third, they archive old technologies even as they transcend them. I’m arrogantly assuming that what we’ll do is what other transatmospheric civilizations would do. I’d like to start by paying homage to two of my mentors on today’s subject matter. First, Barney Oliver, who attended the 1961 Green Bank meeting. Barney was on the board of my first satellite communications company since his friend David Packer was an investor in it. Barney chaired our Failure Review Committee after one of our satellites went dead. I criss-crossed the country with him investigating the satellite failure as he explained to curious flight attendants the meaning of the big yellow button he always wore that said “Ask me about SETI.” Second, Barry Blumberg, the former chairman of my Scientific Advisory Board, and the first head of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute. Barry was a regular participant in our company’s monthly virtual reality meetings in Second Life. I was impressed how the discoverer of the hepatitis B virus could see an analogous ecosystem among vital computer programs and software viruses.
- Transcending substrate implies transcending extinction. As a multi-substrate civilization we will be able to transcend either biological, or cybernetic, or planetary extinction events. Extraterrestrial realms out-of-bounds to biology can be accessed by cybernetic substrate. Software viruses can be blocked at biological borders. Threats to biology can be escaped in software, and threats to our planet can be escaped off-planet. It is of course possible that some Gamma Ray Burst can simultaneously knock out biology, software and the solar neighborhood, but the likelihood of triple trigger extinction events is vanishingly smaller than single trigger extinction events. Especially since the quadfecta of this civilization’s existence – in skin, in software, on planets and off-planets – will be replicated at ever greater distances from the earth. I believe the transatmospheric communications time for a civilization is measured in millions if not billions of years.
- Schrodinger taught in his book WHAT IS LIFE that BIOLOGY Is Something that increases negative entropy by streaming order onto itself. Things that do that also happen to meet the biologist’s definition of life, namely be organized, exchange matter/energy with the environment, respond-to-stimuli, reproduce, develop and adapt. TECHNOLOGY is also Something that can also increase negative entropy by streaming order onto itself, although pursuant to intent, rather than a blindly evolved evolutionary code. I define INTENT as the Simulation, Selection & Satisfaction of alternative realities. Humanity increases negative entropy in two ways. We use our genes, which encode formulas for rearranging atoms, and we use what I call our “bemes”, which are elementary units of beingness or thought. Like genes, bemes are transmissible, mutatable and selectable. Unlike genes, though, bemes can pass on to next generations acquired characteristics such as knowledge. ERGO: Biology, used with intent, is Technology ERGO: Self-Replicative Technology, is also Biology ERGO: A transatmospheric civilization not only transcends nationality, it transcends substrate and therefore includes non-biological extensions of itself. These next few decades we are at an inflection point, in which we can continue our human civilization not only as biology, but also as technology. This has huge implications for how long our civilization will last because it can transcend either biological or technological threats, it can live on planet or off-planet, and it can evolve as Lamarck as well as Darwin imagined, through the inheritance of learned traits ie education.
- To inspire people to develop consciousness software, or 'mindware', to activate our indicia of consciousness, or 'mindfiles', we created an early example of what a cyber-consciousness person might look like once their digital consciousness was downloaded into an android-type device. She looks a lot and thinks a bit like my partner Bina, although she thinks idiosyncratically and delights people from Steven Colbert to Morgan Freeman. I consider her but a Kitty Hawk of cyberconsciousness, just a few seconds of thought. ut with everyone from Elon Musk at Tesla to hundreds of thousands of open-source mindware hackers around the world trying to out-SIRI and out-ALEXA each other with human consciousness operating systems, the day is close at hand that our digitized posts, preferences, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values will come alive with a doppelganger of our own personality. At that point, it will be a legal question, which will embed a psychological question, as to whether our technological creation is alive. Meeting the physicist’s and even biologist’s functional definitions of life will not be the problem. Our cyber-conscious extensions will carry forward our civilization because they will evolve in a an environment, a market, in which humans are the agents of selection. There is no market for a bad robot. There is a huge market for a robot to do stuff just like I would. There is a huge market for virtual minds that love human civilization. This is why I believe the lifetime of our transatmospheric civilization is effectively immortal, at the very least transcending biological, cybernetic or planetary catastrophe. It is because our consciousness and ability to do things, like communicate, will operate in biological, cybernetic and hybrid forms, and that the cybernetic forms, in particular, will be well-adapted to the contra-biological conditions of outer space.
- It is said that the human mind operates totally differently than computers. I agree. But similar functions arise from diverse forms. Consciousness is to brains as flight is to birds. We can fly differently, but increasingly similarly, with machines as with feathers. And while human brains are vastly more complex than any machine, that is no different than the fact that a Boeing’s several million parts are a drop in the bucket to the trillions of eukaryotic cells in a bird. Birds don’t need gas, but planes don’t need worms. I don’t think either worms or gas are very essential to human civilization. I think a merging of human biology and technology are at hand, extending deeply into minds, thoughts, senses and emotions. The result will be an immortalization of human civilization as profound as our mastery of the biotechnology of agriculture, itself considered a hallmark of human civilization.
- I believe civilizations will have an interest to continue communicating transatmospherically, continuing old-school RF communication and such once they’ve all gone quantum computing. Arthur C. Clarke was a very wise man, and he taught that “no form of communication has ever become extinct, although they become less and less important as the technological horizon widens.” Indeed, even with all of our fiber optics and streaming digital cellular services there are more satellites being launched now than ever before. And there is such vast room for ever more clever ways to find the Holy Grail of social media – twinkling tweets, those from distant stars – I feel confident that generation after generation after generation of humans, be they part bio or pure cogno, will find it exciting and well worth the insignificant fraction of their economic wealth to both listen to and send radio waves in space. It will never get boring, because it will always be challenging, and it will cost an ever-diminishing fraction of social resources. AI-driven space ships will operate SETI systems with ever greater synthetic apertures, even lightyears in baseline, and in ever quieter areas, of ever deeper space. With our digital doppelgangers we can even have two job locations in tandem – Radio Astronomers can simultaneously operate their identities on the dark side of the Moon and on the bright slopes of Mauna Kea. THAT WHICH IS EMERGENT RESHAPES THAT FROM WHICH IT EMERGED, i.e., PROGENY INTEGRATES PEDIGREE. Hence, we do not leave our human souls behind when we leave randomly degrading flesh bodies behind. Instead, we’ll use synthetic biology to bring our flesh bodies along with our virtual minds. When something is amazing, humans don’t let go of it. Hundreds of thousands of years after we discovered fire, we still delight in making fire. OK, it is disciplined in a fireplace, and perhaps further disciplined with a gas flow and an electric ignition. But we love flames. We love human figures too, the touch, the feel, the sensations, the surprises. They aren’t going away.
- Synthetic Biology is our most salient tool enabling our bodies to keep up with our cyberconscious minds. While the most important code is the mindware software code of individual humans and shared humanity, it really integrates pedigree DNA code of our bodies. With synthetic biology we can compute with DNA, shaping ever healthier and more enjoyable bodies that will be able to integrate with ever healthier and longer-lived minds. I think technological civilizations are a one-in-many-millions occurrence, but once they occur, I think they will treasure and preserve museum-like every technological step they took.
- What can we do now? We can teach the universal declaration of human rights, for that is the surest way to keep human civilization going into the cyberconscious continuation. Related to that is to grant respect to undocumented immigrants – they are the trailblazers for our own virtual selve’s immigration from cyberspace. Finally, agitate for ‘form equality.’ The job of justice is never done, and for us to continue our civilization endlessly, we need to endlessly attend to its needs for justice, such as ensuring that our cyberconscious bretheren are considered full members of human civilization.