What about the wisdom ensuring that our technology is beneficial? We have technology to thank for all the ways in which today is better than the Stone Age, but this is not only thanks to the technology but also to the wisdom with which we use it. Our traditional strategy for developing such wisdom has been learning from mistakes: We invented fire, then realized the wisdom of having fire alarms and fire extinguishers. We invented the automobile, then realized the wisdom of having driving schools, seat belts, and airbags.
For a while, it was OK for wisdom to lag behind in the race, because it would catch up when needed. With more powerful technologies such as nuclear weapons, synthetic biology, and future strong artificial intelligence, however, learning from mistakes is not a desirable strategy. We want to develop our wisdom in advance, so that we can get things right the first time, because that might be the only time we’ll have. In other words, we need to change our approach to tech risk from reactive to proactive. Wisdom needs to progress faster.
The latest Edge Question is cleverly ambiguous and can be interpreted either as a call to pick a news item or as a query about what constitutes interesting and important news. If we define “interesting” in terms of clicks and Nielsen ratings, then top candidates must involve sudden change of some sort, whether it be a discovery or a disaster. If we instead define “interesting” in terms of importance for the future of humanity, then our top list should include developments too gradual to meet a journalist’s definition of “news”—such as “Globe Keeps Warming.” In that case, I’ll put the heating up of the wisdom race at the top of my list. Why?
From my perspective as a cosmologist, something remarkable has just happened: After 13.8 billion years, our universe has finally awoken, with small parts of it becoming self-aware, marveling at the beauty around them and beginning to decipher how their universe works. We, these self-aware life-forms, are using our newfound knowledge to build technology and modify our universe on ever grander scales.
This is one of those stories where we get to pick our own ending, and there are two obvious ones for humanity to choose between: Either win the wisdom race and enable life to flourish for billions of years, or lose the race and go extinct. To me, the most important scientific news is that after 13.8 billion years we finally get to decide—probably within centuries or even decades.
Since the decision about whether to win the race sounds like a no-brainer, why are we still struggling with it? Why is our wisdom for managing technology so limited that we didn’t do more about climate change earlier? Why have we come close to accidental nuclear war more than a dozen times? As Skype founder Jaan Tallinn likes to point out, it’s because our incentives drove us to a bad Nash equilibrium. Many of humanity’s most stubborn problems, from destructive infighting to deforestation, overfishing, and global warming, have this same root cause: When everybody follows the incentives they’re given, it results in a worse situation than cooperation would have enabled.
Understanding this problem is the first step toward solving it. The wisdom we need to avoid lousy Nash equilibria must be developed at least in part by the social sciences, to help create a society wherein individual incentives are aligned with the welfare of humanity, encouraging collaboration for the greater good. Evolution endowed us with compassion and other traits to foster collaboration, and when increasingly complex technology made these evolved traits inadequate, our forebears developed peer pressure, laws, and economic systems to steer their societies toward good Nash equilibria. As technology gets ever more powerful, we need ever stronger incentives for those who develop, control, and use it to make its beneficial use their top priority.
Although the social sciences can help, plenty of technical work is needed in order to win the race. Biologists are now studying how to best deploy (or not) tools such as CRISPR genome editing. 2015 will be remembered as the year when the beneficial AI movement went mainstream, engendering productive symposia and discussions at all the largest AI conferences. Supported by many millions of dollars in philanthropic funding, large numbers of AI researchers around the world have begun investigating the fascinating technical challenges involved in keeping future AI systems beneficial. Thus has the laggard in the all-important wisdom race gained significant momentum in 2015! Let’s do all we can to make future news stories be about wisdom winning the race, because then we all win.
Tabby’s Star
Yuri Milner
Entrepreneur, investor; physicist; founder, Digital Sky Technologies
Fifteen hundred light-years away, in the direction of Cygnus, lies a star that probably doesn’t host an advanced civilization. You might think this is a non-story. In fact, it’s big news.
In September, astronomers from the Kepler mission published a description of the star (officially designated KIC 8462852—unofficially, “Tabby’s Star,” after Tabetha Boyajian, the lead author of the paper).* It’s around the same size as the Sun, but with a “bizarre” light curve—variations in the intensity of the light received from the star. A planet the size of Jupiter, passing in front of such a star, might be expected to dim the star’s light about 1 percent. This particular star’s light has been observed to drop 22 percent, in asymmetric and aperiodic dimming events unlike anything else seen by Kepler.
Possible explanations—none completely satisfactory—include a swarm of disintegrating comets or a disk of matter surrounding the star (which looks far too old to have retained such a disk). Jason Wright, an astronomer at Penn State University who was consulted by Boyajian about the problem, proposed an unlikely but intriguing possibility: that the dimming effect is caused by a swarm of Dyson Spheres—hypothetical megastructures that advanced civilizations might build to capture energy from their stars.
There are three reasons why all this is important.
First, something interesting is happening around Tabby’s star. Even if it’s not a megastructure, investigating it will surely increase our knowledge of stars, the formation of planets, or both.
Second, the anomaly was not discovered by astronomers. It was flagged by “citizen scientists” from the Planet Hunters project, scanning the Kepler data for signs of unknown extrasolar planets. This is a significant development in 21st-century science—its gradual broadening beyond academia, research institutions, and corporations to include the general public. Open data has allowed ordinary people to sample the immense harvest of data collected by instruments like the Kepler space telescope. Distributed computing enables them to use their personal computer power to analyze that data. And programs such as Planet Hunters invite them to use their critical faculties to find interesting patterns. We are witnessing the early steps of a revolution in the scientific process: the growth of a planetwide network of specialists, laypeople, and computers, collaborating to create scientific knowledge.
Third, the mere fact that astronomers can investigate a specific planet as a candidate for life illustrates how the Kepler mission has transformed astrobiology—from a heroic but marginal pursuit into a popular and rapidly maturing science. Less than a decade ago, many believed that potentially habitable planets were vanishingly rare. Today, to suggest that there are billions—in our galaxy alone—is a conservative estimate. And more and more evidence, such as the ubiquity of organic molecules in environments beyond our solar system, suggests that life may bloom on some of these planets.
Intelligent life, though, remains a great unknown. We know it has arisen once in at least 3.8 billion years of evolution on Earth. But extrapolating from Earth to the universe is guesswork.
Yet after Kepler, theories about civilizations beyond Earth are no longer stabs in the dark. Now, as Tabby’s Star shows us, the scope for serious science has expanded enormously. Astronomers and committed nonscientists can study large and growing bodies of data for interesting patterns. When they find them, they can focus the wide resources of modern astronomy—from radio searches to optical spectroscopy to computational modeling—on individual candidate planets.
; In this century, we finally have a serious chance of resolving Fermi’s Paradox: Where is everybody?
There is no bigger question out there.
Extraterrestrials Don’t Land on Earth!
David Christian
Director, Big History Institute and Distinguished Professor in History, Macquarie University, Sydney; author, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History
Yesterday, no extraterrestrials landed! Or the day before! Or, despite many claims to the contrary, in any earlier period of human history. Or Earth history.
This is odd. There are several hundred billion stars in our galaxy and at least 100 billion galaxies in our universe. In the last twenty years, astronomers have detected lots of planets around nearby stars, so we know planets are common. In fact, there could be tens of billions, or even 100 billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy alone.
It’s hard not to think that a lot of these Earth-like planets (a few million perhaps?) may have had histories a bit like our Earth. They may have spawned living organisms. On Earth, we have found life in many extreme environments, from deep-sea oceanic vents (where the current record-holder can survive at 120° C), to the inside of rocks, where they have to live very, very slowly in order to survive. Endospores can temporarily stop living (well, metabolism ceases) until things improve. Some bacteria may have jumped from Mars to Earth. So, life can exist in a wide range of environments, and today many astrobiologists believe that life might have existed on Mars and Venus and could exist even now on some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, such as Io and Europa, which have lots of ice. All in all, it’s beginning to seem that life of some kind could be common in the universe. It may be that the universe is quite bio-friendly.
If Simon Conway Morris and others are right and there is a limited number of pathways along which life can evolve, then any organisms that exist on other planetary systems may have evolved in ways not too dissimilar to the organisms on our Earth. Evolution may have converged on similar solutions in other star systems. Perhaps multicellular organisms have evolved many times. Perhaps many had ways of detecting light waves (eyes?), and perhaps many developed ways of computing or thinking (brains?). Our galaxy is 13 billion years old and most of its stars are older than our Sun, so most of its planetary systems should be older than Earth, which means they would have had much longer to evolve complex life-forms.
Here on Earth, life got going more or less as soon as our young planet was cool enough to have liquid water. That’s fast, and hints that simple forms of life may be common. Four billion years later, large, intelligent creatures have appeared, and lots of them. One of those species crossed a critical threshold when it evolved such a powerful form of language that its members began to share their ideas and accumulate more and more information from generation to generation. As a result of its ability to learn collectively, that species (us) has built an astonishing store of knowledge, which enables us to control more and more of our environment, until now we dominate the planet. We have become a planet-changing species and we now live in what many scholars call the Anthropocene Epoch. We’ve even launched a few of us short distances into space and sent robots throughout our solar system.
On planets where evolution began millions of years earlier than on Earth, you’d think evolution might have gone well past the crucial threshold of collective learning, past the production of a planet-changing species, and on, perhaps, to the point of colonizing nearby star systems. Could there be thousands of planets with species capable of collective learning? We can’t know, but such an estimate is not impossible, and many of these planets could be orbiting the 4,500 star systems within 60 light-years of our Earth that make up our galactic neighborhood.
So where are the extraterrestrials? This was Fermi’s famous question. The SETI program has been scanning the heavens for evidence of alien life since 1960. We haven’t seen them. We haven’t heard them either, or detected any other signs of their existence. Frank Drake, inventor of the Drake equation, which lists the factors we must take into account to estimate the likelihood of encountering other species like ourselves, thought that one of the crucial factors might be how long planet-changing species like us could survive.
And there’s the rub. We’re so clever that we’ve invented weapons that could ruin the biosphere in a few hours, and our energy-hungry civilizations seem to be degrading the biosphere and the climate systems on which we depend. Is it possible that planet-changing species like us never get past this stage? Do they all hit a wall when they reach their local Anthropocene? If so, such species may last for a few centuries or a millennium or two and then flicker out, perhaps after retreating to impoverished niches where they eke out a miserable existence before going extinct. That would mean that even if planet-changing species—species capable of telling stories and jokes, of painting and dancing, and building pyramids and spaceships—are common, they would all self-destruct. That would solve Fermi’s problem!
Or perhaps some other planet-changing species actually learned their lesson, maybe after a few self-inflicted catastrophes. Perhaps they decided not to aim too high, not to try to dominate their planet or their solar system or neighboring star systems but to live more sociably with their home planet and the other organisms that surrounded them, after realizing this was the only way of surviving. Perhaps we don’t see them because, like Candide at the end of Voltaire’s novel, they are all happily cultivating their own gardens. That would also solve Fermi’s problem!
We Are Not Unique, but We Are Very Much Alone
Andrian Kreye
Editor, The Feuilleton (Arts and Essays), Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Munich
It has been increasingly exciting to follow the recent surge in the discovery of exoplanets. Not only because what started as a needle-in-a-haystack endeavor in the late 1980s has become a booming field of space exploration, gaining momentum with the success of NASA’s Kepler space telescope. As I write, the Exoplanets Data Explorer maintained by Jason Wright at Penn State lists 1,642 confirmed planets and 3,787 unconfirmed Kepler candidates.
There are severe downsides to most of those planets. Only 63 light-years away, for example, a blue-marble planet named HD 189733 b orbits its star. Daytime temperatures on this planet average 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit, wind speeds reach 7,000 mph, and the blue color in the atmosphere comes from rains of molten glass. Only four of the exoplanets found by now have the right distance from their stars to host life. This invites the conclusion that although our home planet is far from unique in the universe, we as humans are very much alone.
Most conclusions drawn from the discovery of exoplanets aren’t quite as philosophical. Great findings about the history of the universe and the origins of life are made. While the glamour of space exploration lives on in the dreams of billionaire entrepreneurs and potentates, pop-culture ideas of settling space are gaining traction again. With the apocalyptic specter of climate change rendering this planet inhabitable, colonizing other planets seems an attractive idea.
Blockbusters like Interstellar and The Martian have used this longing for a life beyond our atmosphere for entertainment. But even when Harvard astronomer Dimitar Sasselov toured the lecture circuit a few years ago talking about the thrill of discovering faraway planets, you could sense the pangs of science-fiction longing in the audience. What if there indeed is life out there? Other habitable planets?
It is exactly those science-fiction dreams that fuel the news about the vast number of exoplanets of import. As symbols, they serve as extensions of the Blue Marble image of planet Earth taken by the Apollo 17 crew in December 1972. Back then, the Blue Marble showed us the reality of what Buckminster Fuller called “Spaceship Earth” just four years before—Earth being a rather small vehicle with finite resources. The Blue Marble went onto the cover of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, the principal manual of the emerging ecological movement.
Even though the recent wave of anachronistic space-age glamour overshadows the great news about exoplanets, t
hey still exemplify a shift in global consciousness. With all escape routes now officially closing (planet HD 189733 b being just one sensational example of the forbidding nature of space), the realization that humankind has to make the best of its home planet is taking hold, and not only in progressive circles. The recent climate talks in Paris have shown that the political will to take action finally transcends borders, ideologies, and national interests.
The symbolism of exoplanets goes beyond the Buckminster Fuller metaphor of Spaceship Earth. It shows that the drive of science knows no limits. When astronomers confirm the first extragalactic planets, the reach for infinity will open even wider realms of understanding of the universe. This understanding, coupled with a new consciousness about the value and fragility of our own planet, can foster a push for solutions right here on Earth—and strengthen the realization that the dream of habitable planets, or even communicating with alien life-forms, is as absurd as ideas about afterlives and deities.
Breakthrough Listen
Martin J. Rees
Former president of the Royal Society; emeritus professor of cosmology and astrophysics, Cambridge University; author, From Here to Infinity
Searching for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has for decades been a fringe endeavor. But it’s moving toward the mainstream. In 2015, it gained a big boost from the launch of Breakthrough Listen—a ten-year commitment by the Russian investor Yuri Milner to scan the sky in a far more comprehensive and sustained fashion than ever before.
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