with the right values and proper acknowledgment of the risks.
Let’s accept for the sake of argument my paraphrasing of Bill Joy’s
point: that soon any damn fool who was pissed off might be able to
destroy the world. In a world where a couple of teenage video-game
geeks decide to blow away their classmates, where people drop “smart
bombs” on cities and crash planes into buildings, it’s impossible to
believe that nobody would do it.*
Do we have a plan for dealing with these huge new threats to our
survival? Of course not. The human race has no plans. Individuals and
nations do, but not proto-intelligent humanity. Our lack of collective
*Say, could you pass the Xanax?
396
L o n e l y P l a n e t s
identity becomes more of a threat to our survival as certain kinds of
technology become more advanced. No one would deny our cleverness,
but can we find wisdom, and how long can we last with one and not
the other?
As I described in chapter 19, some people have argued that the “self-
destruction hypothesis” is the solution to Fermi’s Paradox. Where are
they? Simple: they’re all dead, having designed powerful technology
without the wisdom to control it. Maybe it’s just natural selection on a
cosmic scale. All those other living worlds out there that don’t produce
idiots savants like us might end up surviving, thus ensuring that the
self-destructive races are not the ones who inherit the galaxy.
Perhaps our kind of proto-intelligence truly is an unstable develop-
ment and does not usually survive. But, even if it happens rarely, I
believe that sometimes proto-intelligence evolves into something else:
true intelligence.
T R U E I N T E L L I G E N C E
When a reporter asked Gandhi what he thought of Western civilization,
he replied, “I think it would be a wonderful idea.” I would say the
same about human intelligence.
If we are not intelligent, then what is? Here’s my crack at a definition:
A truly intelligent species must have the ability to behave, collectively, in
ways that ensure long-term survival. It must have learned to avoid self-
destruction, anticipate and avoid natural disasters, intentionally and
thoughtfully alter its environment and live sustainably within it.
What we have seems pretty special, just as Earth once seemed cen-
tral. But our consciousness may be just a faint spark, an inchoate stir-
ring of what may someday, somewhere, lead to true intelligence. After
all, why should this be the pinnacle? Given our complete inexperience
on the cosmic stage, I would argue that what we have is most likely just
some vague foreshadowing of what would be called true consciousness
by the cosmiscenti. We are not the center of the universe, and our level
of awareness is not the apotheosis of evolution.
If you consider the continuum of increasing consciousness—say from
a rock to a cabbage to a rabbit to an orangutan to you—why should we
assume that it stops with us? Is it so hard to imagine that there are
higher levels on this path and that, for all we know, on the whole spec-
trum, we are more like cabbages than kings?
The Immortals
397
In chapters 5 through 9 I recounted the major turning points in
Cosmic Evolution. Each new stage has involved changing the mecha-
nisms by which matter has organized itself into ever more complex and
stable gatherings: protons, atoms, and molecules. Then a molecular
dance marathon in which the last ones left standing won the prize of
survival. Then some learned how to copy themselves and the rest was
heredity. We went cellular, became organisms, and the whole game
since then has been getting together in new kinds of groups (cells,
colonies, individuals, communities) and repeatedly fusing identity.
At some time in the last million years, some of us cell throngs started
to talk to one another and make big plans.
We have no good reason to believe that this history of forming new
groupings, each with unforeseen capabilities and a new sense of collec-
tive self, has to stop with individual organisms. Is there a way to learn a
group sense of identity strong enough to manifest collective intelli-
gence, without becoming Nazis or Stalinists or the Borg? Can we main-
tain the individual freedom that makes life worth living while gaining a
new kind of freedom: the collective cognitive abilities that will allow us
to survive?*
At present there are some faint glimmerings of a collective, planetary
consciousness growing on Earth. We see them in the bright side of the
World Wide Web, in the growth of SETI@home, in some global non-
governmental organizations, in the pulsing rhythms of world music
that are collectively evolving into something new and wonderful as they
echo around the planet, and in the global, transnational perspective
brought back from space by astronauts and cosmonauts.
Perhaps, like life, true intelligence will not be a trait of individ-
ual organisms, but something new that will happen to a planet as a
whole. Recall the noosphere of Tielhard de Chardin and Vladimir
Vernadsky—the planetary development of a thinking realm, a zone of
intellectual activity that arose out of the biosphere to become its organ
of consciousness. The new-o-sphere. What might it become?
Perhaps here it won’t become much of anything. Nietzsche said that
*The current debate about globalization needs to be seen in the context of these questions.
There is no sense in being “antiglobalization.” Globalization must happen if we are to survive long term with high technology. The question is how we do it and what values dominate. Will globalization simply empower massive corporations to control Earth’s resources in a short-term orgy of profit, the future be damned? Or will humanistic and multigenerational values prevail?
398
L o n e l y P l a n e t s
the human race was an intermediate step between ape and superman.
It’s interesting to think of Homo “sapiens” as the missing link between
apes and truly intelligent creatures, between clever animals and wise
beings.
How long could such a species survive? How long have you got? I
believe that a civilization that achieves true intelligence can survive for
the rest of time. As Shklovskii said at Byurakan in 1964, “There is,
however, a possibility that some civilizations, having reached a highly
advanced level, will find themselves past the inevitable crises and inter-
nal contradictions which plague the younger civilizations. The evolu-
tionary timescale of these quiescent civilizations may be considerably
larger, approaching the cosmogonic scale.”*
“Approaching the cosmogonic scale” means approaching the age of
the universe. For the purposes of the present discussion, true intelli-
gence has, by definition, achieved effective immortality.
Humanity’s semismart transition state cannot last. This fragile,
proto-intelligent phase may be one that most species don’t make it
through. An immature noosphere like ours could be a risk that a bio-
sphere must endure, hoping to come out newly empowered. It’s a high-
stakes gamble. Either we get snuffed rather quickly, or we emerge
immortal. A great valley of stability is out there, but the journey is
fraught with dangers, and we don’t have a map.
In this view we are near either the beginning or the end of the human
adventure. I believe that if we survive a tight bottleneck we have
now entered, we will emerge as one of the immortals. I don’t know if
this bottleneck lasts a half century or a millennium, but either way it
is a trivial interval compared to life’s long history. Certainly in a few
thousand years—a “blink and you missed it” moment in Cosmic
Evolution—we will be through it one way or another.
It seems almost inevitable that other sentient beings will have in com-
mon with us this “race between education and catastrophe.”† Will
some learn to use technology in a way that ensures survival rather than
destruction? That will determine whether the universe is lively or
lonely. If even a small fraction choose life, then life will still dominate.
This is a good reason to have some hope for the universe (if not for us).
*This was three decades before he dismissed the early rosy views that he once held, along with his coauthor Sagan and most of the SETI community, as “adolescent optimism.”
†Quoting H. G. Wells.
The Immortals
399
We don’t know the odds, but this is the game we’re in. The problem
of survival is not fundamentally technological. It is spiritual and moral.
It is evolutionary. Technical solutions may provide temporary Band-
Aids, but they do not save us from our nature. If we want to be one of
the survivors, we must create a global society where curiosity is tightly
bonded to compassion, and where (this is hardest to picture) not a lot
of people want to do violence to others. You’re probably not going to
like this next thought, but one solution would be to just surrender to
the machines.
W E L C O M E T O T H E M A C H I N E
Arthur C. Clarke once speculated that “all really high intelligences will
be machines. Unless they’re beyond the machine. But biological intelli-
gence is a lower form of intelligence, almost inevitably. We’re in an
early stage in the evolution of intelligence, but a late stage in the evolu-
tion of life. Real intelligence won’t be living.”
Many futurologists have predicted that we will evolve into machine-
human hybrids with our consciousness intact or even enhanced. Some
feel that this transition might come within the next century. Variations
on this theme range from Bill Joy–type doomsday scenarios to utopian
visions of “uploading” our memories and thoughts into an immortal,
pain-free machine state and building for ourselves any bodies we
choose. The biological stage may be a mere precursor to what technol-
ogist Ray Kurzweil calls “the age of spiritual machines.”
In many ways, we already are human-machine hybrids. I sit thwack-
ing away at my computer all day, my thought processes, memories, and
communications increasingly dependent on it. While I work, I am often
connected to several different computers in different cities. Eventually, I
leave work and head home (don’t worry, there are computers there,
too). As I turn into my driveway, I’m simultaneously cranking the steer-
ing wheel, stepping on the brake, hanging up the phone, tuning the
stereo, and pushing the garage door opener. Every evening I do all this
as effortlessly as Homer at the beginning of each episode of The
Simpsons. We’ve constructed an elaborate high-tech matrix within
which we are merely the organic, semi-intelligent component. Already,
machines are us, and we are them. Goo goo ga joob.
If we receive an interstellar message we may never know if it was sent
by machines or biological organisms. Perhaps it will come from sen-
400
L o n e l y P l a n e t s
tient organisms who have evolved radio dishes for sensory and commu-
nicative organs and computers for memories and minds, as we our-
selves may now be doing. Even if we meet the aliens in person, will we
be able to tell if they are machine or organism? Will we be able to dif-
ferentiate “individuals” from tightly knit, machine-enabled communi-
ties? These puzzles give us reason to question our cozy categories.
Notice that when I’ve written about “the immortals,” I haven’t said
whether I think it is civilizations, species, machines, or individuals who
will evolve to live forever. I’ve intentionally blurred these lines because I
think that for the immortals such distinctions may have become mean-
ingless.
According to one theory, a kind of mineral life may have existed on
Earth before carbon-based life. Now, carbon has so remade our world
that if this former life ever existed, all vestiges of it have long since been
erased. Will our silicon machines one day erase all vestiges of carbon
life from their world?* Our carbon-based egos recoil in horror at the
thought, but from the point of view of the machines, this may only be
the beginning of something magnificent that we can scarcely envision.
Rejecting the value and sanctity of machine sentience may someday be
regarded as just another form of ignorance, racism, or bigotry. The new
machine-human hybrids may keep us on for a time as useful organs in
their silicon structures. Then, someday, they may leave our fragile,
ephemeral bodies behind altogether and take to the stars. Five billion
years hence, as Earth is roasted dry by our bloated, red, dying star, our
descendants may briefly pause to remember us as they ride off out of
the sunset, seeking other green worlds or the company of like-minded
spiritual machines.
I M M O R T A L F O R A W H I L E
The idea of immortality, I’ve noticed, is troubling. People are quick to
reject the notion. A group of academics at a “philosophy of astrobiol-
ogy” discussion group at the University of Colorado once gave me a
hard time about this. The topic was SETI. When I argued that we should
consider a definition of intelligence qualitatively different from our
own—one that might indeed be immortal—they practically shouted me
*This could be the ultimate Microsoft marketing strategy!
The Immortals
401
down. They only wanted to discuss intelligence as a variation on what
we have on Earth. What good is it to talk of hypotheticals?*
To me, it seems inevitable that in our vast universe at least a tiny
fraction of species will escape self-destruction, attain great understand-
ing of nature, and learn how to avoid natural disasters. The combina-
tion will make them immortal.
A common response is to point out that no species has ever attained
this. Yet, the same could have been said to a cell contemplating animal-
hood a scant billion years ago. It had never been done.
When we reflexively dismiss immortality as a pipe dream, we are
being unduly influenced by our limited experience, and the narrow
&
nbsp; species-level picture of evolution we were taught in high school. It’s
true that species come and go. But, forget about species. On the molec-
ular level, the immortality of Earth’s DNA is a fact of our existence.
And what about the life of Gaia? Earth’s biosphere may well last for-
ever, or at least as long as the Sun keeps nuking along, and maybe
longer if we play our cards right. Indeed we, the noosphere, might be
the biosphere’s ticket out of here, its vehicle for extending its lifetime
beyond that of the Sun. If we think of ourselves as just another species, our odds don’t seem great. But if we are the noosphere, why shouldn’t
we become immortal, like the biosphere that birthed us? And even if we
blow it, wouldn’t you think that some biosphere somewhere has pro-
duced an immortal noosphere?
If some fraction of sentient species might achieve immortality, then
that changes everything. True intelligence is not an easy gang to join,
but once you’re in, you’re in for life—the life of the universe. They’re
not going anywhere, so immortal species would just accumulate as the
universe cooks along.
Why discuss a hypothetical like the immortals? Because their exis-
tence is a reasonable supposition when we drop the pretense that we
are the supreme beings. And because if they do exist, it leads to a differ-
ent picture of our universe and the cosmic role of conscious awareness.
Frank Drake has said that it is the immortals whom we are most
likely to hear from with SETI. As fantastic as this sounds, the more you
think about the timescales of Cosmic Evolution and the inconceivable
*One professional philosopher there told me I was using the wrong definition of definition. Whatever.
402
L o n e l y P l a n e t s
power of technology in the service of a spiritually advanced society, the
idea of the immortals starts to make more sense.
However rare it may be, the birth of an immortal is, by definition, a
one-way, irreversible transition. If immortality can be achieved, then
the immortals must exist in ever-increasing numbers. I do not know
what the average distance is between civilizations. No one here does.
But I believe that it is decreasing.
The universe is progressing in a direction toward greater intelligence,
conscious awareness, and self-understanding. The dark universe
Lonely Planets Page 58
