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| Two excellent books, 50 yrs apart: 2026—1976 |
@6:18…
Dana Bush: Given this thought experiment that you put in this book, what do you think the meaning of life is?Neil deGrasse Tyson: I think people search for meaning of life as though it's under a rock or behind a tree. But we have the power to create meaning in life. And for me, I want to learn something today that I didn't know yesterday and spend each day lessening, lessening the suffering of others. There's something that we all have the power to do, and maybe aliens want to do that too. We always make them evil. And I think it's because we're projecting our own evil ways onto them, knowing that's how we behave when we encounter cultures of lower civilization, lesser technology than ourselves. So yeah, I, I, meaning we can find it. And if we find aliens and they help us get more meaning out of the universe, more power to us.
Indeed.
"...PREVENT US FROM IMAGINING A UNIVERSE NOT TEEMING WITH LIFE?"
Let's rewind 50 years. Doris & David Jonas:
Chapter 1, Where Speculation Begins, pp 7-9
One of these days, our descendants, near or distant, are going to find life in some form on other planets, either in the solar system, in other parts of our galaxy, or in other galaxies.
The very fact that life has arisen on our earth is evidence enough that it must exist in other parts of the universe, for the elements of which the entire universe is composed are remarkably uniform. If some of these elements have combined in ways that produce life here in our solar system, they must, by the laws of chance and probability, have combined in an analogous ways elsewhere. Even in our galaxy, there must be some thousands of other planets, sustaining life, in some form, and all the forces of reason would suggest that it cannot be otherwise in other galaxies.
What miracles of chance and combinations of chances made it possible for life to evolve here on earth?
For life to arise on any planet, certain factors have to be present in certain combinations. The solar system of which the planet is part must have formed in a way that some or one of its evolving planets takes shape at a suitable distance from the blazing inferno of its central sun – neither so near that its surface temperatures inhibit life by intense heat, nor so far that life cannot arise because of insufficient solar radiation. The masses into which the swirling gases originally solidify must be within the range that permits a force of gravity, sufficient to hold and retain an atmosphere, since without a protective atmosphere, solar radiation would be too intense for life forms to be sustained, even if all the other elements of life were present.
The chance that these two factors alone – distance from the center, and the degree of mass that governs gravity occur together in just the right circumstance, puts a preliminary limitation on the possibility for life. Even after this has occurred, there must be a further series of chances following and working upon chances – and again interlocking with other chance happenings – so that atmosphere, water, rocks, and some soil come into being in states that conform a basis for the evolution of life. Of course there is a possibility, remote as it seems, that some form of life might arise on a lightless planet. should that planet be capable of generating heat of its own within a life sustaining range.
The information we have been able to gather from our own solar system suggests that ours is the only planet around our sun that sustained life. It could be that other suns, even thousands or tens of thousands of other suns, sustain no life at all on the planets that circle them. Given the myriad suns in our galaxy and the multiple myriads in the universe, it is impossible to believe that chances similar to those that occurred on earth have not also occurred on many other planets.
Once these miraculous chances have come about, however, the prerequisites for life are rather minimal: An element capable of forming self-replicating chains, like carbon, and another capable of combustion, like oxygen these, together with hydrogen and nitrogen, form and matrix that may merge with other elements to create all the varied, complex, and wonderful forms of life on earth – from amoeba and bacteria to plants and spiders and fishes and man.
What shapes may life have taken in other worlds? Have they developed into intelligent creatures, and, if they have, what sort of intelligences have evolved? Have other kinds of life developed high orders of intelligence capable of developing technologies, and, if so, what sort of technology has arisen from their special kinds of being? Shall we ever be able to communicate with these beings, if they exist, in any meaningful way?
One thing is certain: we have no reason to assume that evolutionary forces on other planets will produce forms or intelligence that are the same as ours, even though the basic raw materials must be similar. Whatever chance factors combined to produce any form of life, infinitely more, must combine to produce an advanced form.
Genetic inheritance is only a beginning. Two offspring of the same parents by chance born in different environments will produce eventual descendants so markedly different that after many generations, it will hardly be possible to realize that the ancestors of each line had parents in common.
The variables of habitat, the chance of availability of mates, natural selection, and sexual selection among the offspring will all have combined and recombined to produce members of the same species as buried as a pygmy, a Watusi, a Swede, a Chinese, or a magnesian, and eventually to divide into species, such as man, apes, and monkeys have separately descended from the same stem.
Our own earth provides an illustration of the almost incredible number of living forms that can possibly be derived from a single celled organisms that were once the triumph of evolution on our planet. All the species now extinct, and all those still flourishing form only apart of the total possibilities, for who knows how many new species will yet take shape?
Ch 11, Beyond Human Intelligence, pp 212-217
Intelligence begins with the sensitivity of a single cell, and by a process of biological accumulation and selection, transmitted genetically, reaches a current culmination in the complexity of the human brain. In the same way, the first chipped flint, by a process of cultural accumulation of knowledge passed on verbally and subjected to the selection of experience, reaches a current combination in spacecraft, cyclotron, and satellite relayed television. At the same time, the natural and necessary playfulness of the young mammalian as it explores its environment and learns how to live in it, overtime, and also by a cultural process of imitation, memory, and the transmission of knowledge and skills from generation to generation, reaches another apotheosis in the high cultures and great arts.
For the comparatively weak creature who must cope with an environment and rise to any situation or perish, the resources of mental equipment are applied first to the most urgent exigencies. The earliest application of intelligence is devoted to devising tools as weapons; those that follow aid the amenities of life; finally, religion, philosophy, and the arts make their appearance.
The kind of tools that are made will depend on the material that happens to be available, be they leaves, branches, stones, clay, or the presents or absence of minerals. Thus an interaction exists between the environment and creatures that affects the development of tools and cultures, as well as of census and intelligence.
In ancient Egypt, for example, the presence of the papyrus plant led to the fabrication of ropes, mats, sandals, and eventually paper; the presence of flax made possible the eventual perfecting of supremely fine linens. In central America, the presence of lava led to cutting edge tools of obsidian. Once a cultural habit becomes established, however, it remains impossible to predict either the route it will follow or its ultimate outcome. Who could have told that the sweet-potato washing habit established among the members of the famous Japanese Macau colony, and the subsequent shifting of sand from the grain in the sea, would so accustomed these forest animals playing in the water that they would eventually begin to swim? And in the face of this unlikely outcome of a recently established behavior pattern, who would dare to predict to what the newfound ability to swim might lead?
Yet strangely enough—or perhaps, not so surprisingly, in view of the basic uniformity of mankind’s cerebral mechanisms—no matter where, geographically, nor when, over the entire span of human history, local cultures have developed into advanced civilization, we find that man’s greatest thoughts, as epitomized in the writings of philosophers, show remarkable similarity. Some views on the nature and value of knowledge, intellect, and intelligence propounded by the wise men of China, so distant from us in place in time, are stunning in their modernities and still current validity.
In the misty beginnings of China’s long, cultural history, Lao the, expanding his concept of Tao, the way (of nature and wise living), is reported to have insisted that knowledge is not virtue, and neither is it wisdom, for nothing is so far from it a sage as in “intellectual.“ The worst government would be one of philosophers, he has said to have averred, they botch every natural process with theory; their ability to make speeches and multiply ideas is precisely the sign of their in capacity for action!
At a later period the philosopher, Chuang the, who lived about 370 BC, showed the sophistication of thinking that we find difficult to credit to those in early times. He wrote that problems are due less to the nature of things than to the limits of our thought; that is not to be wondered at that the effort of our imprisoned brains to understand the cosmos of which they are such minute particles should end in contradiction.
He spoke of the limits of intellect; the attempt to explain the whole in terms of the part has become gigantic immodesty, forgivable only on the grounds of the amusement it has caused, for humor, like philosophy, is a view of the part in terms of the whole, and neither is possible without the other. The intellect, said Chuang tze, can never avail to understand, ultimate things, for any profound thing, such as the growth of a child. In order to understand the Tao, one must “sternly suppress one’s knowledge“: we have to suppress our theories and feel fact. Education is of no help towards such an understanding: submission in the flow of nature is all important.
And Wang Yang Ming, who lived from 1472 to 1528, practically summarized our present thesis when he wrote: “the mind itself is the embodiment of natural law. Is there anything in the universe that exists independent of mind? Is there any law apart from the mind?“
Experts feel certain that the human brain has not undergone any significant biological change since the time of the Neanderthals, as evidenced in the excavations at the Shandiar caves high in the mountains of Kurdistan in northern Iraq, built fires, cared for their sick, conducted funeral rights, and put flowers with the bodies of their dead. In the last 20 to 30,000 years, we know from archaeological findings of both historic and prehistoric periods, a high degree of intellectual accomplishment that has been formally present in all the branches of our species throughout his existence. The brief excerpts we have given of an ancient Chinese thought about thought would certainly seem to bear out this opinion.
There is, however, an outcome of the cumulative nature of culture that we must not overlook. Increasingly, as intelligence adapt a living creature to its environment by the use of artifacts, and through the cultural transmission of knowledge, the creature and the environment, modify each other at an exponential rate. Perfect adaptation, of the order of the ants for the termites, which has existed in a balance between being and have unchanged over hundreds of millions of years, is not possible for mankind. The rapidity of change in our cultural habitat, presents a perpetual and continuing stimulus to bodily and, above all, to mental adaptation, which of necessity increases the demands on the new brain to device accommodation, and then the process speeds both the rate of change and the need for new changes.
And so, although we recognize that we have been mistaken in thinking that the technological advances of western men might indicate new departures from the human brains’ capacities, yet we have also to recognize that the technology is rapidly creating a totally new environment for our species this new Environment may well ultimately affect our species future development; precisely this technology may prove to be the turning point through which, in negotiating it, we may find ourselves in a process of extinction as Homo sapiens and in a stage of transition toward homo neocorticus
There are, of course, far too many imponderables Involved to feel confident in predicting the future course of our species. Among these are the course of technology itself, and how far from natural processes it can carry us before it becomes subject to its own limitations. There is the matter of human population density, and whether it will be adjusted by natural means or can be adapted to the biosphere that is our habitat by cultural or social means. There is the question of the medical preservation of the “unfit“ and whether we can remain viable at all as a species with the increasing maladaptive dilution of our gene pools. And there is the possibility that ecological interference may ultimately make mankind’s existence untenable.
Our evolutionary development may be reaching the end of a line for biological, if not for cultural reasons, but we ourselves are inclined to discount this. We believe subtle biological factors to be operating that are not yet clearly discernible, but which may be recognizable in retrospect. Another factor as simple and probable as the advent of another Ice Age, for instance, would effectively alter and recalibrate the balance between men and nature, and must also be kept in mind as a possibility.
We believe that the possibility, and even the likelihood remain for a true evolutionary progression in the anatomical and physiological configuration of the brain, much like the progression that occurred between apes and man. In that case, the departure would be just as radical, and it would have as a consequence new behavioral response patterns that at this point we cannot visualize and about which we can only speculate.
To assume that this new superintelligence would occupy itself with creating a new, weird, and wonderful technology is a naïve exercise in human fantasy. Ultimately technology exists to serve the greater comfort of individuals, and a superintelligence may well find other means of achieving this end. Thus, were such a superintelligence to be found in some other planetary systems, we might be confronted with something totally alien to our understanding, and even to our imagination…
'eh?
This book has been out of print for 37 years. It has aged extremely well.
