Films from the Future

by Andrew Maynard

  With this biological drive to find patterns and meaning in everything, it’s not surprising that we end up being driven by what we believe to be true (or what our evolved brains tell us must be so) and creating gods (or aliens) to justify this. From a rational perspective, it’s easy to dismiss such tendencies as being mere self-delusion. And yet, the nature of belief is too complex, too ingrained in us, to be dismissed through simple logic. It’s so much a part of us that even the most avowedly logical person reaches a point where they have to depart from the world of evidence, and take a leap of faith, realizing that, in some cases, the value of something transcends whether it can be proven, or the degree to which evidence-based analysis supports it. Even though faith and science are often pitted against each other, I suspect that a surprising number of scientists have their own beliefs that define who they are and what they strive for, regardless of any evidence-based analysis. In effect, life and meaning are about more than science alone, whether you believe in a higher “being,” or a spiritual dimension, or simply understand belief to be an emergent biological property that defines who and what we are.

  In Contact, Sagan wrestles with this seeming paradox at the nexus of science and belief through the relationship between Ellie Arroway and Joss Palmer. Importantly, he sets the issue up, not as science versus dogma, but as understanding the relationship between science and meaning.

  At the beginning of the movie, Ellie represents rational, evidence-based science. She inhabits a world based on what is testable. And she is intellectually honest; she’s willing to sacrifice what she hopes is true in the cold light of evidence to the contrary. In contrast, Palmer inhabits a world of faith. He lives his life on the deep conviction that there is meaning beyond what is testable and validatable by science. He deeply believes that there is more to humans, and more to the universe we inhabit, that lies beyond the ken of scientists and their empiricism.

  Yet, as their experiences through the movie expose their true characters, we see that they are more alike than different. Ellie is driven by a belief that there must be alien intelligence. She doesn’t use the language of belief and faith, but there’s something more that she’s striving for. Ellie is on a journey of discovery. Palmer, on the other hand, is a person whose faith completes him. It fills a need in his life and provides a sense of wholeness, and it helps him make sense of what otherwise would make no sense. He knows where he’s going, and doesn’t need science to point him in the right direction. Yet, at the end of the movie, both Ellie and Palmer are in a similar position, believing in something that they cannot prove, but that nevertheless defines them.

  This said, there’s also a profound difference between Ellie and Palmer. While Palmer represents believers who seek to proselytize—to persuade others to take on their beliefs—Ellie’s mission is to provide evidence to support her belief. And this, to me, gets to the heart of the role of belief in science. Like many real-life scientists, creativity, imagination, and believing in what lies beyond proof are integral to who Ellie is. She is a complex person who is in part defined by her science, but is much more than her science alone. Ellie is a metaphor for the place of science in society, as we strive to understand our relationship with our future and the universe we’re part of. Through her character, we understand that science is a way of knowing ourselves and the world around us that doesn’t preclude faith and belief, but is a means of responding to them. This is not an either/or philosophy of faith versus science; neither is it a rigid set of rules about what is right and what is wrong. Rather, it’s a way of seeing the world and ourselves that, when combined with humility, respect for others, curiosity and wonder, can be positively transformative.

  But—and this is perhaps where the Ellie metaphor diverges most from faith-based belief—this way of seeing the world requires rigor in how we test our beliefs. It needs honesty in our willingness to drop ideas that don’t align with evidence. And it depends on our ability to distinguish wishful thinking from reality. And this brings us to a recurring theme in Contact: Occam’s Razor.

  Occam’s Razor

  William of Occam was a fourteenth-century English philosopher, friar, and theologian. From historic accounts, he was sharp thinker, and a somewhat controversial religious figure in his time. Yet, these days, he is best known for the scientific rule of thumb that bears his name.

  Occam was, without doubt, a religious man. But in his theological work, he challenged people to question the validity of complex explanations for things where simpler ones worked equally well. It wasn’t until after his death, though, that people began to attach his name to this type of thinking.

  The idea that simpler explanations are more likely to be true than more complex ones goes as far back as Greek philosophers like Aristotle—probably farther, given the somewhat obvious nature of the observation. Yet it’s Occam’s name that we now associate with a “simpler is probably truer” approach to making sense of the world.

  Ironically, Occam’s intellectual incisiveness was focused on making sense of faith-based interpretations of the world and how we should live in it. As a Christian, he was a believer in God (publicly at least), and committed to interpreting God’s will and actions, through what was written in sacred texts and what was observable in the world around him. He was a firm believer that the “ways of God” are not open to reason; he’d have probably got along well with Palmer Joss. At the same time, he was no fool. He realized that, where two or more explanations for something existed, the simplest, least fanciful of them was more likely to be closer to the truth.

  This is, of course, something that every parent and teacher knows well. “The dog ate my homework” really struggles to compete with alternatives like “I forgot.” It’s this realization that simpler explanations are more likely to be true that has led to Occam’s Razor becoming part of the canon of twenty-first-century scientific practice. There are multiple definitions of the Razor (so-called because it helps cut away misleading ideas to reveal the truth), but most of these come down to stating that, when there are multiple explanations for something, the one that depends on the fewest assumptions is more likely to be the right one. Simplicity, in this case, comes about because we have to make up less stuff in order to explain something.

  A more direct description of Occam’s Razor is that, if an explanation for something involves wild stories and fantastical ideas that cannot be tested, it’s probably not right. This is how Ellie invokes it when she first meets Palmer. To her, there wasn’t any point in talking about faith and belief, because it failed Occam’s Razor at the first hurdle. Faith, to her, especially faith in a higher being, relied on too many untestable assumptions where there were simpler explanations. And, while she discovered that life is often not that simple, the principle remains a powerful way of sifting out attractive but dangerously misleading ideas from those that better reflect reality.

  So how does Occam’s Razor apply to technological innovation? Through the previous chapters, we’ve touched on emerging technologies that could transform our lives in the future: genetic engineering, gene editing, mind and body enhancements, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, geoengineering, and a whole lot more. Each offers the promise of a vastly better future if used wisely. But each also comes with tremendous risks if used irresponsibly. And this, together with the multiplicative dangers of what happens when these technologies merge and converge, demands forethought around how to use emerging science and technology responsibly. Yet here we face a conundrum, in that the best we can do in planning for the future is to make educated guesses based on what’s happened in the past, and what we know in the present.

  Here, Occam’s rule of thumb becomes especially helpful. Just as it helps weed out fanciful explanations of how the world works from more reasonable ones, it can also help separate fantasy from more likely outcomes as we think about the future. For instance, we can make a shrewd guess that future scenarios that depend on more assumptions and more fantastical ideas are less likely
to come about than those that use fewer assumptions and are less fantastical.

  This simple rule of thumb becomes increasingly relevant as we invest hard money in science and technology with the intention of creating a better future. It’s often when there’s money on the table that the hard-nosed thinking starts, and technology is no exception. So, given the option of investing a sizable wad of cash in avoiding “gray goo,” for instance, or in preparing for the advent of superintelligence (both of which depend on a house-of-cards stack of assumptions), or investing a similar amount in avoiding health and environmental harm from new materials, Occam’s Razor would probably favor the latter. It’s not that gray goo or superintelligence don’t have some probability of occurring (although it may be vanishingly small). It’s simply that, because they depend on an increasingly tenuous number of untested assumptions, supporting them becomes more an act of faith than of reason.

  Yet there’s a catch here, which is why Occam’s Razor should never be considered as more than an aid to decision-making. Just because there are simpler, less assumption-filled alternatives to imagined future scenarios, it doesn’t mean that more complex options will turn out to be wrong. What Occam’s Razor states is that there is a lower probability of options that rely on more assumptions being true, but not a zero probability. And this leaves the door open to more complex, more fanciful possibilities being plausible, even though they’re possibilities that have a much lower chance of being right.

  In Contact, this is the hope that Ellie hangs on to as she continues her search for extraterrestrial intelligence. She knows that, intellectually, the cards are stacked against her, that all she has to go on is her conviction that she experienced something real. But, rather than allow the same Occam’s Razor she used earlier with Palmer to defeat her, she is determined to discover something that will defeat the razor’s edge itself.

  This, to me, gets to the very core of science as a human endeavor. Critical thinking alone is almost inhuman in its cold impartiality. On the other hand, creativity on its own leads down a path of fantasy and delusion. But when the two are combined, we have a powerful way of using science and the imagination to find meaning in the universe we’re a part of, and to chart a course toward a future that celebrates who we are and what we might become.

  This is what we see playing out in Contact, and why to me it’s such a powerful reflection of the soul at the heart of science, not simply the process. It’s also where we see the “humanity” of science beginning to shine. This is where science emerges as a disciplined pathway to awe and wonder, and a rigorous way to develop new knowledge that enriches lives and empowers people. Here, it’s the humanity of science that also leads us to not just ask if we can do something, but whether we should, and, if we do, what the consequences might be, together with how we might ensure that they work to the good of society rather than against it.

  As we’ve seen throughout this book, these are tough questions that demand careful thought and input from everyone with a stake in the game. When we’re dealing with science that potentially touches everyone, we all become stakeholders in the process. We’ve seen this with technologies that potentially change who we are: cognitive enhancers, genetic modification, body augmentation, and brain-machine interfaces, for instance. We’ve also seen it in technologies that might transcend us and lead to life that is beyond what we consider “human,” including intelligent machines. But what about technologies that may lead to the discovery of life that didn’t even evolve on Earth?

  What If We’re Not Alone?

  In 1961, a group of ten scientists got together to discuss the search for extraterrestrial life—among them were Carl Sagan and the astrophysicist Frank Drake. What came out of that meeting was an equation that the group felt gave the best stab at estimating (at least to an order of magnitude) the number of intelligent civilizations within our galaxy that are capable of communicating with us. Over a couple of intense days, the group discussed what factors would affect the possibility of planets existing that could harbor intelligent life, the likelihood of intelligence emerging, and the chances of them getting a signal to us that we detected. And what emerged was the now-famous Drake Equation.

  The Drake Equation is a wonderful piece of scientific back-of-the-envelope mathematical speculation that any physicist should feel immediately at home with. The original equation consists of seven factors, or things the group thought were important in estimating the number of intelligent and contactable civilizations. Because they had no evidence for what values to give any of these factors, they guessed. Or, to be more precise, they came up with order of magnitude estimates.

  At that first meeting of what came to be known as the Order of the Dolphin (the group had a somewhat offbeat sense of humor), they estimated that there were probably between a thousand and a hundred million intelligent civilizations in our galaxy alone. Even allowing for the rather large range, this is a massive number. And this is in just one of the hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe. Since then, the Drake Equation has been modified and new estimates for the various factors made. But the reality remains that, even with conservative estimates, the galaxy we live in is so vast that it is almost inconceivable that the conditions haven’t occurred elsewhere for intelligent life to evolve.

  To Sagan, Drake, and others, this back-of-the-envelope estimate drove their belief that we are not alone. Indeed, it plays into Sagan stating that, “The universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us, seems like an awful waste of space” (something that both Ellie and her father repeat in Contact). The professional and scientific intuition of the Order of the Dolphin suggested that intelligent life existed beyond Earth, and all that was needed to prove it was the evidence that would inevitably come from better science.

  We’re still looking for the evidence that Sagan hoped for. But over the past few years, there have been profound changes in our understanding of the universe that have gotten us closer to realizing that we are probably not alone. And topping these out is the discovery of large numbers of planets circling other suns in the galaxy, or “exoplanets.”

  The earliest evidence for exoplanets dates back to the 1980s. But the game-changer came when NASA launched the Kepler space observatory in 2009. Kepler enabled the search for planets around distant stars by measuring reductions in light from these far-off suns as orbiting planets came between the star and the Earth. And the results were eye-popping. At the time of writing, NASA’s exoplanet exploration program had confirmed the existence of over 3,700 exoplanets in the galaxy, with more than 4,400 additional possible candidates.

  But that’s not all. So far, over eight hundred of those planets could be similar to Earth.

  To someone who grew up reading science fiction and studying science, this is a jaw-dropping discovery. And we’ve only just started on this scientific journey. We are just beginning to realize that we live in a universe that’s rich with Earth-like planets which could be home to living organisms, and possibly, intelligent life.

  Sadly, Sagan died in 1996—a year before Contact was released, and thirteen years before Kepler was launched. But had he been alive, he would have been thrilled at how the scales are beginning to tip toward the likelihood of life existing elsewhere. Yet, even if the universe is teeming with life, the possibilities of us detecting alien beings are small, given the times and distances involved. The chances of making contact with an alien intelligence are even smaller. For distant stars, there’s a good chance that if we ever did receive a signal, the beings that sent it would have long since moved on. Yet this convergence between dreams and science does shine a spotlight on the question of what we would do if we did discover alien intelligence, and how our world would change as a result.

  I must confess, I have a sneaky suspicion that it would be a seven-day wonder; a “that’s nice—what’s for dinner” type of event. And the reason is simply that, in my experience, we humans have a near-infinite inability to remain awed by new discoveries.

>   This may sound a little cynical, but just think of how quickly the awesome becomes the mundane in our lives. Start with the mind-blowing biology that makes us what we are, the unimaginable vastness of the universe, the majesty of our neighboring planets, the incredible ingenuity of nature. And then there are the inventions that we rely on every day: Cars, planes, smartphones, computers, modern agriculture. We live in a stunning, awe-inspiring, pretty damn amazing world, with a million and one things that are just as mind-blowing as discovering aliens. And yet most of us simply don’t care.

  This amazing ability to go from “wow” to “meh” in a matter of days turns out to be a really important survival mechanism. Without it, we’d all be walking around with our mouths open, forgetting to look where we’re going. Because of this, I suspect that we’ll see the same wow-to-meh trend if we ever detect evidence of alien intelligence. Sure, such a discovery will be life-changing to start with, at least until the next seven-day wonder comes along. But soon, the everyday realities of life will swamp the larger significance of the discovery, much as they swamp the discovery that, unless we change how we behave, the earth’s climate’s going to overheat, or that we’re building urban sprawls in areas prone to environmental disasters, or that our eating habits are slowly killing us.

  Of course, there is the question of how such a discovery would affect religious beliefs, and organized religion more broadly. Among intellectuals who like to think about these things, the question of what happens if we threaten God’s existence, either through our own inventions or through the discovery that we’re not special, is an important one. It’s so important, in fact, that academics love to speculate about what people think about the risks of “playing God” (if we’re creating life in the lab), or “debunking God” (if we discover that we’re not special). But even here, I suspect that the religious response to a signal from the stars will ultimately be somewhat ambivalent. In part, I think this will be the case because previous indications of life beyond Earth haven’t had that much of an impact, even before they’ve been disproved. But mainly I suspect that this will be because religious beliefs, like people, are incredibly adaptable to the reality they exist in.