From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Sun Jul 13 2003 - 15:23:18 MDT
Anders' vision has much that is appealing and beautiful. A living cosmos,
full of variation and evolution, is far more worthwhile than the mostly
dead one we apparently have today.
However, I don't think it is the best we can do. Life by itself is
not enough. Without intelligence and consciousness, life is just a
set of complex chemical reactions. This is particulary clear in the
vision of Europa being colonized by algae living off the (hypothetical)
deep-sea ocean vents. If it is like Earth, these environments are not
well suited for evolution. They are too small, the energy fluxes are
limited, the organisms can't move from vent to vent.
How valuable is it, really, to add an eternally unchanging colony of
microorganisms to Europa? How much have we improved the situation?
Cells are tremendously complex sacks of macromolecules and chemical
reactions. But why fill the universe with mindless cells, running their
chemical reactions?
If we substituted nanotech "gray goo" engines for the cells, similar
mindless replicators specialized to some environment, how many people
would support spreading these mindless engines throughout the universe?
This transformation eliminates the sentimentality and leaves exposed
the bare question of the value of replicators without sense or awareness.
We might suggest that the value of life is in evolution, in creating
new kinds of life forms and new adaptations. But even that, frankly,
can be done better by people than by natural processes. A large computer
can create and try out enormously more variety of physical or software
structures than natural biological processes. If we want to fill the
universe with an enormous variety of life forms, the best way to do that
would be to create them artificially.
Another problem with evolution, once you get to the point where
consciousness arises, is its terrible immorality. Dan Simmons describes
this eloquently in his book Endymion; the narrator has fallen into the
sea, separated from his companions, thousands of miles from shore and
seemingly with no chance of rescue, and is now bleeding and being attacked
by sharks:
"Part of my tired mind had been pondering theology during all this - not
praying, but wondering about a Cosmic God who allowed Its creatures to
torture each other like this. How many hominids, mammals and trillions
of other creatures had spent their last minutes in mortal fear such as
this, their hearts pounding, their adrenaline coursing through them and
exhausting them more quickly, their small minds racing in the hopeless
quest of escape?"
The process of natural biological evolution is an eternal, ongoing,
heartless war of predator against prey, with no quarter given or expected.
Every step forward on the evolutionary ladder is accomplished through
millions of deaths like the one Endymion faces, filled with terror
and despair.
That's evolution. That's the process which has given us the marvelous
variety of life, including the greatest gift of all, our own minds.
We owe our lives, the existence of our species, to the bloodthirsty
violence which drives evolution. In a sense, this blood is on our hands,
in that we are its beneficiaries. Do we really want to extend and expand
this process throughout the universe? To me, that would only compound
the crime.
I'd suggest that Anders' vision of life spreading through the universe
is incomplete. What is important is not just life, but intelligent
life, conscious life, life that can enjoy the possibility of growth and
expansion and improvement. It almost seemed to me that Anders was taking
an apologetic perspective with regard to the necessity of intelligence
in providing the tools for life to spread. I would instead emphasize
intelligence as the entire justification for the process.
Filling the universe with mindless plants and micro-organisms, or with
animals whose lives are as full of suffering and difficulty as in our
world, is not a goal that I could endorse. I am certain that we can do
better than this, if we have the technology to achieve this goal at all.
We should do more than attempt to replicate the same basic circumstances
that have held on Earth for billions of years.
Our minds are the crowning achievement of natural biological evolution.
Our goals should ultimately be to fill the universe not with Life,
but with Mind. We should transform the entire universe into a cosmos
full of consciousness. The universe can be just as alive as in Anders'
vision, but it will appreciate this precious gift of life and mind,
rather than simply playing its part mindlessly, as a complex automaton.
Hal
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