The southern Milky Way as viewed above ALMA is illustrative of one way we search for signals of intelligent aliens: through the radio band. If we found a signal, or if we transmitted a signal that was then found and responded to, it would be one of the greatest achievements in our planet's history. As with many of humanity's greatest endeavors, we have not made the critical breakthrough we so desperately seek, but we continue to look, explore, and learn with the best tools we can possibly construct.
It's pretty easy to look at the world we live in today and come away feeling either extremely pessimistic or optimistic, depending on which aspects you focus on. Optimistically, you could look at our life expectancy, our technological conveniences, our high standard of living and the scientific breakthroughs we continue to make and pursue. From biotech to space exploration, from robotics to artificial intelligence, the present is incredible and the future looks even brighter.
Of course, there's the flipside: a pessimistic point of view. Even a coarse look at the world shows agrowing rejection of science in favor of ideology on issues from climate change to vaccinations to dental health to whether the Earth is flat or humans have landed on the Moon. We are rolling back environmental protections and seeing a rise in bigotry, isolationism, and authoritarianism.Our prospects are simultaneously both bright and dim, and what the 21st century holds will depend largely on our collective actions during the next critical decade.
This 1989 image was taken just one year after a catastrophic wildfire destroyed hundreds of thousands of acres of land and burned down countlessly many lodgepole pine trees. However, the very next year, wildflowers littered the burned forest landscape, one of the first major steps in the regrowth and regeneration of this ecosystem. Humans may wreak havoc on the planet, but nature will recover. The question of how resilient human civilization is has not yet been determined.
When you think about your own dreams for the future of humanity, what does it include? Do you think about the existential, large-scale problems the world is facing today, and how we might improve them? Depending on where you live and what issues plague your local corner of the globe, you might see:
all while we burn more fossil fuels and consume more energy, as a planet, than ever before.
The Patagonian glaciers of South America are sadly among the fastest melting in the world, but their beauty is undeniable. This photo was taken by the International Space Station, which completes a full orbit around Earth in approximately 90 minutes. Just minutes earlier, the ISS was flying over a tropical rainforest, showcasing how small our planet truly is and how a huge diversity of ecosystems are threatened by the changes humans have wrought upon our planet.
The history of humanity is a history of survival through endurance, tool-making and tool use, and through outsmarting every other form of nature: animal, plant, fungus, and even non-living threats. We have leveraged our acquired knowledge of the natural world including the laws and rules that govern how it works to rise to prominence and defeat so many of the natural challenges that every other species has been constrained by.
The development of agriculture, first by farming and later through ranching, revolutionized humanity's relationship with food. Sanitation, through infrastructure projects like granaries, sewers, and (more recently) transit systems have enabled our population centers to grow from villages to towns to cities to the modern metropolis. And the industrial revolution, coupled with the rise of electricity, has led humanity to conquer a multitude of inconvenient obstacles, including even the darkness of night itself.
This composite image of the Earth at night shows the effects of artificial lighting on how our planet appears along the portion that isn't illuminated by sunlight. This image was constructed based on 1994 and 1995 data, and the intervening 25 years have seen approximately a twofold increase in the amount of light humans create at night on Earth. We have conquered the night, but only at a great environmental cost.
But our dominance over the environment and our technological progress comes with a cost: as we've gained the ability to transform our planet, we've ended up transforming it in more ways than we imagined. This was true in the 20th century as well, as problems like:
all plagued our society. Each one of these problems, at the time, seemed like an existential threat to our advanced civilization continuing as we know it.
The famed 'dust bowl' of the 1930s occurred in the United States as a combination of sustained drought, winds, and sub-optimal farming practices led to an agricultural disaster. Elsewhere in the world, these conditions, even with better farming practices, are still at risk of arising. Here, young Australian boy Harry Taylor plays on the dust bowl his family farm became during the 2018 drought. This drought was cited by many as the worst in recorded history, rivaling the catastrophe of 1902 that no one who lived through it is still alive to recount. (Brook Mitchell/Getty Images)
However, for each of these problems, humanity was able to band together and address these obstacles. Improved sanitation practices and new medical therapies help manage or even cure those afflicted with a myriad of infectious diseases and illnesses. Better farming practices have ended the risk of another dust bowl. Air and water regulations make it safe for us to breathe air and drink water.
Even the two most recent problems we faced acid rain and the ozone layer were able to be solved. Through worldwide agreements on what can and cannot be produced and sold to consumers, we've seen the pH of rain return to normal and the hole in the ozone has not only stopped growing, but has begun to repair itself.
From 1998 to the present, the mid-latitudes of Earth have seen a rise in ozone levels in the upper stratosphere. However, the lower stratosphere indicates an offset of the same magnitude. This is evidence that even as the hole in the ozone repairs itself, we must remain vigilant in ensuring this problem is as thoroughly 'solved' as we think our actions should have rendered it.
Of course, the 21st century poses challenges for humanity that we've never faced before. The internet has been a great force for the worldwide spread and access of factual information in places where it had previously never reached, but it's also a great force for the spread of misinformation. We've explored more of our planet than ever, and are realizing that humanity is responsible for a currently ongoing mass extinction that Earth has not witnessed for tens of millions of years.
The CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is higher than humans have ever experienced. Global average temperatures continue to rise, as do sea levels, now at an accelerated rate, and will continue to do so for decades. The human population continues to grow, and the past 12 months has seen our species add more CO2 to the atmosphere than any other 12 month span in history.
Although the CO2 emissions produced by the United States this past year is still 13% below the 2005 maximum produced in this country, the world's total emissions have jumped by 23% since that same time. The past few years have seen a continued increase in global greenhouse gas emissions, as energy use has taken off largely due to the rise of new computing practices like Blockchain and Cryptocurrency.
We now live in a time where the actions of a small group of people whether through malicious or benign intentions are capable of leading to global catastrophe. It's not just climate change or the threat of nuclear war that hangs over us; it's a slew of facts.
It matters that a mass extinction is occurring right now: we're destroying this planet's proverbial "book of life" before we've even read it.
It matters that computers are permeating ever-increasing facets of our life, as humanity's recently rising electricity use (after a plateau earlier this decade) is almost entirely due to new computational uses, like cryptocurrencies and blockchain.
It matters that the population is greater than ever before, as managing and distributing the edible food and drinkable water we produce is a greater challenge than ever before.
This August 2019 photograph shows wheat fields (foreground) and canola fields (towards the horizon) grown for food and oil to be pressed from the plant's seed, respectively. According to the South African government's statistical service, "The agriculture, forestry and fishing industry decreased by 13,2% in (2019's) first quarter. The decrease was mainly because of a drop in the production of field crops and horticultural products". Drought, climate change, economic downturn, security issues in rural areas, and uncertainty about the future of land reform in South Africa all pose difficulties for the food, water, and even the economic security of the country. (RODGER BOSCH/AFP/Getty Images)
The big questions facing our species now is how we will tackle these problems, and many of the other existential worries facing humanity today. Can we survive our technological infancy? Can we overcome our greed, our bigotries, and our squabbling nature? Can we band together to find and enact solutions that benefit us all: friend and foe alike?
This Wednesday, October 2, 2019, at 7 PM Eastern Time (4 PM Pacific Time), Sir Martin Rees of Cambridge will deliver a public lecture at Perimeter Institute entitled "Surviving the Century." Martin's latest book, On The Future: Prospects For Humanity, was released in 2018, and his lecture will closely follow much of the ground covered in that tome.
I'm so pleased to be able to live-blog this talk, which you can follow along with in real-time below, or by reading at any time after the conclusion of the lecture. It's always wonderful to get a firsthand perspective on science and society from someone who's concerned with the ever-changing role of a good scientist who pushes our understanding forward for the betterment of humanity and their responsibility to society.
After all, as climate scientist Ben Santer eloquently put it:
"[I]f you spend your entire career trying to advance understanding, you can't walk away from that understanding when someone criticizes it or criticizes you. There's no point in being a scientist if you walk away from everything you devoted your life to."
Our understanding of practically everything is more advanced than ever. Maybe, if we listen to that understanding, we can figure out the best way forward.
(The live-blog will begin, below, just before 7 PM Eastern/4 PM Pacific time. All times are displayed in bold and in Pacific time, and correspond to the actual time the commentary was published.)
The relationship between distance modulus (y-axis, a measure of distance) and redshift (x-axis), along with the quasar data, in yellow and blue, with supernove data in cyan. The red points are averages of the yellow quasar points binned together. While the supernova and quasar data agree with one another where both are present (up to redshift of 1.5 or so), the quasar data goes much farther, indicating a deviation from the constant (solid line) interpretation. Note how quasar redshifts are not quantized in any way.
3:55 PM: Welcome! The public lecture is just a few minutes away, and I realize that many of you might not know who Martin Rees is or why he's such a big deal. Martin is an astrophysicist and cosmologist who's worked on black holes, quasars, the cosmic microwave background, and understanding how cosmic structure forms.
To the older people in physics/astronomy, he's probably best known for using quasar distributions to disprove the idea of the steady-state theory even after the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background. To younger people, he's best known for working on uncovering how the "dark ages" ended (when enough stars had formed that the UV radiation flooding the Universe reionized it), and uncovering the link between black holes and quasars.
The prediction of the Hoyle State and the discovery of the triple-alpha process is perhaps the most stunningly successful use of anthropic reasoning in scientific history.
3:59 PM: More recently, Martin Rees has been more interested in the intersection of science, ethics, and policy/politics, but also in anthropic reasoning: the idea that we can say meaningful things about reality just from the fact that we exist, and therefore the Universe must exist in such a way that makes our existence possible.
If you worry that this treads troublingly close to religion, the short answer is: it can. Let's see how well Martin Rees toes the line tonight!
The signs of the zodiac and horoscopes are common, but the motion of the planets do not affect the lives or dispositions or personalities of humans in any discernible scientific fashion.
4:04 PM: No, Martin Rees will not do your horoscopes. He says that scientists are rotten forecasters, but they're not as bad as economists.
Ha ha.
Let's hope that's the end of "punching down" towards less rigorous disciplines than physics and astronomy.
4:07 PM: Martin Rees is talking about population growth. And yes, it's been fast and enormous recently, but there's not going to be a population explosion that last for infinitely long (or increase exponentially indefinitely). Instead, most models predict that population will plateau at around 10-11 billion humans, and that's it. But yes: 9 billion by mid-century is a big number to feed by mid-century, and it's coming fast.
Agricultural sprinklers giving water by intermission to Leek plants. Conventional farming may not be enough to feed a rising population.
4:09 PM: He's speaking about the need to feed the planet, and talking about Gandhi's famous "there's enough for everyone's need, but not for everyone's greed." He's talking about population projections far into the future, and the big problem of "how do we feed all these people," but there are many reasons to hope.
For one, population levels off as economic prosperity increases. This is happening in Asia already, has already happened in the Americas and Europe, and the biggest uncertainty is when will this happen in Africa. Rees's prediction that "Nigeria alone will have 900 million people" by the end of the century is the most pessimistic one I've heard since Paul Ehrlich's discredited "population bomb" idea.
The concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere can be determined from both ice core measurements, which easily go back hundreds of thousands of years, and by atmospheric monitoring stations, like those atop Mauna Loa. The increase in atmospheric CO2 since the mid-1700s is staggering, and continues unabated.
4:13 PM: And yes, of course, CO2 is increasing, the planet is getting warmer, the sea levels are rising, and all of these problems are getting worse, faster, as time goes on.
Rees is also being careful about mentioning uncertainties: in population, in CO2, and in the range of uncertainty of climate models and fossil fuel scenarios.
4:15 PM: This is a good point and one that I normally make in different contexts: world policy is made by the voters (and the incumbents who court those voters for re-election) of first-world countries and what their representatives think will be popular. However, the roadmap to a low-carbon future is challenging, as the benefits will mostly trickle to relatively underdeveloped countries.
That's a hard political sell: do something that makes things more expensive for you, in the short-term, to make the quality of life better for others in the long-term.
A fusion device based on magnetically confined plasma. Hot fusion is scientifically valid, but has not yet been practically achieved to reach the 'breakeven' point.
4:18 PM: So, what are the solutions? For energy, Rees mentions solar, wind, conservation, and new nuclear reactors, as well as research into fusion. This should be a no-brainer option: we need to introduce clean and economical systems of energy generation, because energy use is predicted to continue rising; the only way to reduce our carbon footprint under those conditions is to produce more electricity, and to do it in a greener fashion.
Signs and protesters from the 2013 March Against Monsanto in Vancouver, BC. While there may be legitimate complaints over our modern agricultural system, GMOs are not the evil technology that people make them out to be.
4:21 PM: "We should be advocates of scientific advances and new technologies, not luddites." (Paraphrase.) You would think this would be a non-controversial statement, but there are a large number of green energy advocates who see a rejection of science and technology as the only path towards a sustainable future.
Well, not if we want to meet the modern challenges that we're actively facing and creating. More nutrient dense food, greater food production, better energy usages, and improved resiliency to financial disasters, natural catastrophes, and food/water/political instability are necessities we should all be investing in.
The Patagonian glaciers of South America are sadly among the fastest melting in the world, but their beauty is undeniable. This photo was taken by the International Space Station, which completes a full orbit around Earth in approximately 90 minutes. Just minutes earlier, the ISS was flying over a tropical rainforest, showcasing how small our planet truly is and how a huge diversity of ecosystems are threatened by the changes humans have wrought upon our planet.
4:24 PM: This is a problem that Martin Rees is identifying (specific to vaccines, biotech, or particular public health initiatives): how can we regulate the use (and misuse) of these technologies in a responsible way. As Rees put it, "even the global village will have its village idiots."
Balancing freedom, privacy, and security is of paramount importance. It's hard to see how it will be implemented, of course, but my visceral reaction is to look to the locations that got it the most wrong (*cough* Facebook *cough*), and to learn the lessons of opting out/in, the need for curation of factual, truthful information, and responsible actions.
Ed Fredkin joined contract research firm Bolt Beranek & Newman (BBN) in the early 1960s where he wrote a PDP-1 assembler (FRAP) and participated in early projects using the machine. He went on to become a major contributor in the field of artificial intelligence.
4:28 PM: As AI systems become more intrusive, pervasive; as the cloud begins storing information about all our actions, our locations, our emotions, etc.; as our face gets recognized everywhere we go; we lose our privacy. We lose our connection with technologies whenever computers outpace humans. And we lose our connection with each other (something Rees isn't touching on) as we layer technological barrier upon technological barrier between our old-style face-to-face interactions.
Robots can't learn by watching human beings. Common sense and etiquette cannot be learned by a robot (yet). And agility/dexterity of a robot is far below that of a small child. And yes, computers can defeat humans at Go, but only by using about a million times the energy of a human brain.
4:32 PM: I am not a fan of this current Rees proposal: everyone must work and this should be work that cannot be done by computers. He thinks we can re-employ every unskilled laborer doing this. I just don't see the demand being there, but this is not a question that has a scientific answer.
I just don't see it happening; people are better than a well-programmed machine at only a small number of tasks, and what can be automated out of our error-prone ways should be.
Graduate students might love their work and the knowledge they gain from doing it, but they can ill-afford to be the highest-taxed Americans. Here, Michael Hopkins, left, and Bryce Lee, both graduate students at Virginia Tech. are shown demonstrating autonomous robots.
4:35 PM: There are a lot of fears around autonomous robots, and then brings up Kurzweil's immortality fantasies of AI outpacing humanity, becoming more intelligent, and then humans would begin to transcend biology.
I have thought, for a long time, that people who think along these lines need to understand something: you are not your brain. You are not a computer program; you do not reason the way a computer does, and a computer/brain interface is extraordinarily limited.
Instead, you are the electrical signals that propagate through your brain and body. That, after all, is the difference between a living and dead human: the electrical activity in your brain. Kill someone and the activity stops. Copying your brain to a computer would not keep that electrical signal the same; it would cease to be you. Kurzweil's dream, of downloading your intelligence to a computer, is basically doing "copy, paste, and then delete the original."
Therefore, you die. Only if we accept that aspect of reality can we effectively do something meaningfully positive with the lives we have. (At least, that's what I think.)
The curvature of space, as induced by the planets and Sun in our Solar System, must be taken into account for any observations that a spacecraft or other observatory would make. General Relativity's effects, even the subtle ones, cannot be ignored in applications ranging from space exploration to GPS satellites to a light signal passing near the Sun.
4:38 PM: Martin Rees thinks that the Solar System will be filled, in the future, with militarized probes. Yes, Cassini, New Horizons, Juno, Messenger, and other recent planetary/Solar System missions are now outdated and will be superseded by new technologies. We will be better at doing astronomy, science, and understanding our Universe.
But militarized? I don't see it. Martin Rees also thinks that the era of crewed spaceflight is over. And sure, if we're willing to abandon our bodies, of course there's no point in crewed spaceflight.
My recommendation would be twofold: accept our physical reality as it is (i.e., as we understand it to be), and then invest in science, technology, R&D, and forward-looking endeavors that better the future of humanity as a whole as much as possible. But this is a tall order, too.
The very first launch of the Falcon Heavy, on February 6, 2018, was a tremendous success. The rocket reached low-Earth-orbit, deployed its payload successfully, and the main boosters returned to Cape Kennedy, where they landed successfully. The promise of a reusable heavy-lift vehicle is now a reality, and could lower launch costs to ~$1000/pound. Private spaceflight may play a role in our future, but I hope it's not the only one.
4:42 PM: Now I'm disappointed. After all the talk about banding together as a world for the good of humanity, and what's difficult to sell to various countries with various national ideologies and values, Martin Rees sees privatized spaceflight as the only prospect for humans traveling to worlds other than Earth.
Maybe he's right; maybe I'm the one who's unrealistic. But I still hope that the civilization-scale adventures and enterprises we dream of can be accomplished by humanity if we band together as a world in cooperation. It's my hope for the future of space exploration, for the future of our energy needs, for the future of agriculture and food/water production and distribution, and for the future of basic research, particle and low-temperature physics, and so much more.
I am not looking forward to a post-human era. I am looking forward to a pro-human era.
This is an aerial view of a Solar Farm in the Ukraine, which is a carbon-free power plant once fully set up and installed. (Maxym Marusenko/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
4:47 PM: Here's something you won't get in Martin Rees's talk: what a tremendous tipping point will look like. Right now, sunlight is the most important tool for agriculture: it determines what we grow, where, and in what quantities. But someday, technology will reach a point where it's going to be more efficient to:
We will someday reach the point where this will be better than growing crops with direct sunlight, outdoors. That's quite a dream, but when we reach the tech level, it will transform our civilization.
An artist's rendition of a potentially habitable exoplanet orbiting a sun-like star. When it comes to life beyond Earth, we have yet to discover our first inhabited world, but TESS is bringing us the star systems which will be our most likely, early candidates for discovering it.
4:50 PM: What about life in the Universe? We have detected thousands of exoplanets, and will have the prospect of detecting life beyond our Solar System, from microbial life to intelligent aliens. This will be a tremendous advance that we can expect (and maybe even hope) to start probing this century.
Today on Earth, ocean water only boils, typically, when lava or some other superheated material enters it. But in the far future, the Sun's energy will be enough to do it, and on a global scale.
4:54 PM: Let's remember something important: life on Earth is organic, but organic life won't be possible forever. Rees sees that human intelligence will outpace human intelligence, and will become the dominant force of "intelligence" not only on our planet, but in the Universe.
He thinks that any alien signal we find won't be biological in nature, but electronic.
I must be crazy to be on the pro-biology side... but I can't help but be sentimental about our own lives and existences. Somehow, to me, they have value intrinsic to themselves, that electronic beings, even an electronic intelligence, wouldn't have. There are my biological biases, laid bare for the whole world to see.
An illustration of multiple, independent Universes, causally disconnected from one another in an ever-expanding cosmic ocean, is one depiction of the Multiverse idea.
4:58 PM: Was there more than one Big Bang, or just one? If there were many, are there varieties in the physical laws and constants that they obey?
If we take inflation as we understand it today, the answers are: many, occurring in forever causally disconnected regions, with the same laws and constants everywhere.
But people do sure love to speculate that there may be more, and if (that's a really big if), as Martin Rees contends, they may have varying laws and constants, then maybe we can use anthropic reasoning (which is a very unappealing substitute for science) to speculate, and then maybe (which I doubt) it will be a question that falls into the realm of physics, not metaphysics.
Ermin Omerovic, a 19-year-old man living in the central town of Jajce, is seen eating pizza using his bionic hand. Ermin had a work accident and lost his right arm. After a surgery, carried out for the first time in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Balkans, he reaches his brain-controlled prosthetic hand. But there is a big difference between a technologically augmented human versus a machine that could be considered alive. (Elman Omic/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
5:02 PM: "Technology needs to be wisely directed, and directed by a value that science alone cannot decide." Well, at least this should be non-controversial: if we wish to act ethically, we need a code of ethics and morality for humanity, and that code transcends science.
Will that include machine intelligence. (Is Data from Star Trek alive, and am I arguing the opposite position from Captain Picard?)
5:06 PM: What about designer babies? Where do we draw the ethical line?
I have a feeling it will be very much like the early days of any technology: things we're uncomfortable with today will become commonplace tomorrow. Ethics erode quickly with the acceleration of the enabling technology's ubiquity.
5:09 PM: Martin Rees is now fielding a question about the anti-science trend, but instead focuses on the optimistic take: people are actually interested in science. Kids love dinosaurs and kids love space: even things that are divorced from their reality and their experience appeals to people. Extreme and ill-informed opinions get more traction, and Rees believes this is what magnifies the rise of populism.
This is astute, to me.
But Rees says it's important that everyone have a feel for science, as most of the decisions that have to be made by politicians involve science (and economics and ethics), and so to be an informed citizen, you need to have some feel for science and for quantitative numbers. And it's a part of our culture, too; it's the only universal culture that straddles all bounds of faith and nationality. (Man, if the rest of this talk was like the answer to this question, I'd be fawning!)
The Future Circular Collider is a proposal to build, for the 2030s, a successor to the LHC with a circumference of up to 100 km: nearly four times the size of the present underground tunnels. This will enable, with current magnet technology, the creation of a lepton collider that can produce ~10^4 times the number of W, Z, H, and t particles that have been produced by prior and current colliders.
5:12 PM: If we wish to succeed as a species, we have to band together as a planet, with multi-national bodies that regulate technology, otherwise the potential for abuses will be too great. This includes a worldwide carbon policy, but not a worldwide energy initiative, as new innovations and technologies will have a monetary payback/payoff, so there's an incentive to benefit the entire world on this front.
5:14 PM: The final question is to speculate about alien life, but maybe it's better to speculate about our own future instead.
Visit link:
Advances Vs. Consequences: What Does The 21st Century Have In Store For Humanity? - Forbes
