A View of Nature, Universe Where are we going?

Jai-chan Hwang Contents Preface 1. Modern Cosmology: Assumptions and Limits 1. Science and cosmology 2. Modern cosmology begun by assumptions 3. Theory of gravity as an assumption 4. History of modern cosmology 5. Observation and interpretation 6. Observational facts in cosmology 7. Geometry and topology of the Universe 8. History of the Universe 9. Discovering the assumptions 10. Multiverse metaphysics 11. Misunderstandings of physical cosmology 12. Metaphysical questions 13. Meaning, purpose and indifference of the Universe 14. Limits of space and time 2. Astrobiology: Close encounter with our future 1. Where are we going? 2. Life and the universe 3. What is life 4. Conditions for life on Earth 5. Origin and evolution of life on Earth 6. Search for life in the solar system 7. The great silence 8. Arrival of the space age 9. Space exploration 10. The close encounter 11. Course of the future technology 12. Close encounter with the future 13. The great illusion 14. The last man 15. Eternal Silence Recommended readings Name index

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자연의 전망, 우주

우리는 어디로 가는가?

황재찬 목차 책 소개 1. 현대우주론: 가정과 한계 1. 과학과 우주론 2. 가정으로 시작된 현대우주론 3. 가정으로서 중력이론 4. 현대우주론의 역사 5. 관측과 해석 6. 우주론 관측사실 7. 우주의 곡률과 토폴로지 8. 우주의 역사 9. 가정의 발견 10. 다중우주 형이상학 11. 현대우주론의 오해 12. 형이상학적 질문들 13. 우주의 의미, 목적, 무심함 14. 시간과 공간의 유무한성 2. 우주생물학: 미래와의 조우 1. 우리는 어디로 가는가? 2. 우주와 생명 3. 생명이란 무엇인가 4. 지구생명의 존재조건 5. 지구생명의 기원과 진화 6. 태양계 탐색 7. 거대한 침묵 8. 인간의 우주진출 9. 성간 탐색 10. 외계와의 조우 11. 미래기술의 향방 12. 미래와의 조우 13. 거대한 미몽 14. 최후의 인간 15. 영원한 침묵 추천도서 인명색인

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Preface

“Astronomy compels the soul to look upward, and leads us from this world to another.” Plato, The Republic, Book VII, Translated by Benjamin Jowett

1. Modern Cosmology: Assumptions and Limits 1.1 Science and cosmology

Universe constructed by imagination

“The universe is real but you can’t see it. You have to imagine it.” Alexander Calder, Interview in Katherine Kuh, The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists (1962)

“The universe is wider than our views of it.” Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

“The universe stretches beyond our finite powers of understanding.” Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (1938)

“Philosophy, in one of its functions, is the critic of cosmologies.” Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1926)

Condition for science

“The epistemic counterpart to artist Calder’s dictum would be something like: ‘The universe is real, but you can’t grasp it as an object, you have to think of it as a Kantian Idea.’” Roberto Torretti, private communication (2013)

“In my opinion, that knowledge only which is of being and of the unseen can make the soul look upwards.” Plato, The Republic, Book VII, Translated by Benjamin Jowett

“All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836)

Nullius in Verba

“Nullius in Verba” Motto of The Royal Society (1660-)

“Science in reality is more related with the art of ignoring and selecting observations, and manipulating experiments, in accordance with a preconceived theory. Detailed observation is often a hindrance to scientific reasoning. Ignore apparent phenomena and grasp the essence. Thus, in science theory often comes before observation. The trick is to treat the subject as an isolated, simplified, idealized and abstract (preferably mathematized) model, and to test and materialize it by fitting data to a model using the method of analysis and statistical techniques. In this way, the individuality is lost.” JH, Modern Cosmology: Assumptions and Limits, KIAS Newsletter (2011); arXiv:1206.6297

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Creations of human mind

“Physical concepts are free creations of human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.” Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, The Evolution of Physics (1938)

“The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility. … The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.”

“The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.” Albert Einstein, Physics and Reality, Journal of the Franklin Institute, 221, 349 (1936); reprinted in Ideas and Opinions (1960)

“It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we say about Nature.” Niels Bohr, quoted in A. Petersen, The Philosophy of Niels Bohr, Bull. Atom. Sci., September 1963, p. 8.

Model’s utility and limit

Nature replaced by model in science

“The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work.” John von Neumann, Method in the Physical Sciences, in The Unity of Knowledge, ed. L. Leary (1955); reprinted in The Neumann compendium Edited by F. Brody and T. Vamos (1995)

“A theory is just a model of the universe, or a restricted part of it, and a set of rules that relate quantities in the model to observations that we make. It exists only in our minds and does not have any other reality (whatever that might mean).”

“A scientific theory is just a mathematical model we make to describe our observations that: it exists only in our minds. So it is meaningless to ask: which is real, ‘real’ or ‘imaginary’ time? It is simply a matter of which is the more useful description.”

“Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory. As philosopher of science Karl Popper has emphasized, a good theory is characterized by the fact that it makes a number of predictions that could in principle be disproved or falsified by observation.” Stephen Hawking, A brief history of time (1988)

Fallacy of misplaced concreteness

“[Model is a] scientific approximation of reality. [W]hen a researcher begins to be not a methodological, but an ontological materialist, … when he considers his models, useful in other contexts, as cosmic realities, then he has started on a path that, in the end, can lead only to scientific decadence.” Konrad Rudnicki, The Cosmologist’s Second (1982)

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“Error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete.”

“Fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1926)

“Since all models are wrong the scientist cannot obtain a "correct" one by excessive elaboration. On the contrary following William of Occam he should seek an economical description of natural phenomena. Just as the ability to devise simple but evocative models is the signature of the great scientist so overelaboration and overparameterization is often the mark of mediocrity.” George E. P. Box, Science and Statistics, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 71, 791 (1976)

Cosmology

“All science is cosmology, I believe.” Karl R. Popper, The world of Parmenides: essays on the Presocratic enlightenment (1998); The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959) PREFACE TO THE FIRST ENGLISH EDITION

1.2 Modern cosmology begun by assumptions

Beginning of modern cosmology

“Einstein’s first cosmological paper is a purely theoretical exercise containing not a single astronomical constant.” Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (1993)

“From the standpoint of astronomy, of course, I have erected but a lofty castle in the air. For me, though, it was a burning question whether the relativity concept can be followed through to the finish or whether it leads to contradictions. I am satisfied now that I was able to think the idea through to completion without encountering contradictions. Now I am no longer plagued with the problem, while previously it gave me no peace. Whether the model I formed for myself corresponds to reality is another question, about which we shall probably never gain information.” Einstein, Letter to Willem de Sitter, before 12 March 1917, in Einstein, A. and Stachel, J., Collected papers, Vol. 08 Correspondence, 1914-1918 (1998)

Cosmological principle

“The normal physical laws we determine in our space-time vicinity are applicable at all other space-time points.” George F. R. Ellis, Cosmology and verifiability, Quarterly J. of Royal Astronomical Society, 16, 245 (1975)

“The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons.” Edwin P. Hubble, Realm of the Nebulae (1936)

“The problem [is that] there is only one universe to be observed, and we effectively can only observe it from one space-time point.”

“Given this situation, we are unable to obtain a model of the Universe without some specifically cosmological assumptions which are completely unverifiable.” George F. R. Ellis, Cosmology and verifiability, Quarterly J. of Royal Astronomical Society, 16, 245 (1975)

“I dislike making of our lack of knowledge a principle of knowing something.” 5

Karl Popper, Quoted in Helge Kragh, The most philosophically of all sciences Karl Popper and physical cosmology (2012)

““Principles” in cosmology have often connoted assumptions unsupported by evidence, but without which the subject can make no progress.” Martin Rees, Before the Beginning (1997)

Importance of principle

“The theorist’s method involves his using as his foundation general postulates or "principles" from which he can deduce conclusions. His work thus falls into two parts. He must first discover his principles and then draw the conclusions which follow from them. For the second of these tasks he receives an admirable equipment at school. If, therefore, the first of his problems has already been solved for some field or for a complex of related phenomena, he is certain of success, provided his industry and intelligence are adequate. The first of these tasks, namely, that of establishing the principles which are to serve as the starting point of his deduction, is of an entirely different nature. Here there is no method capable of being learned and systematically applied so that it leads to the goal. The scientist has to worm these general principles out of nature by perceiving in comprehensive complexes of empirical facts certain general features which permit of precise formulation.

Once this formulation is successfully accomplished, inference follows on inference, often revealing unforeseen relations which extend far beyond the province of the reality from which the principles were drawn. But as long as no principles are found on which to base the deduction, the individual empirical fact is of no use to the theorist; indeed he cannot even do anything with isolated general laws abstracted from experience. He will remain helpless in the face of separate results of empirical research, until principles which he can make the basis of deductive reasoning have revealed themselves to him.” Albert Einstein, PRINCIPLES OF THEORETICAL PHYSICS, Inaugural address before the Prussian Academy of Sciences, (1914), In Ideas and Opinions (1960)

Status of cosmological principle

Ancient Hindu cosmological principle

“The Universe is infinitely heterogeneous; our [place] is not an exceptional feature, neither in space nor in time, but it is also not typical, not average (it is impossible to obtain any mean, any average value out of infinitely dispersed parameters).” Konrad Rudnicki, The Cosmologist’s Second (1982) 1.3 Theory of gravity as an assumption

General theory of relativity

Success and limit of Einstein’s gravity

“Experiments cannot be extrapolated, only theories.” D. J. Raines and E. G. Thomas, An Introduction to the Science of Cosmology (2001)

Cosmological correction

Black hole 1.4 History of modern cosmology 6

Equavalence principle

“That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it.” Newton to Bentley, 25th February 1693; in Newton (1756), pp. 25 f. Newton, I. (1756), Four Letters from Sir Isaac Newton to Doctor Bentley containing some arguments in proof of a Deity. London: R. & J. Dodsley

“Science in reality is more related with the art of ignoring and selecting observations, and manipulating experiments, in accordance with a preconceived theory. Detailed observation is often a hindrance to scientific reasoning. Ignore apparent phenomena and grasp the essence.” JH, Modern Cosmology: Assumptions and Limits, KIAS Newsletter (2011); arXiv:1206.6297

Mach principle

Static cosmology by Einstein

“If we are concerned with the structure only on a large scale, we may represent matter to ourselves as being uniformly distributed over enormous spaces.” A. Einstein, Kosmologische Betrachtungen zur allgemeinen Relativit¨atstheorie. (Cosmological considerations in the general theory of relativity) Sitz. K¨onig. Preuss. Akad. 142. (1917)

Friedmann cosmology

Lemaitre-Hubble expansion

“Your calculations are correct, but your physical insight is abominable.” Einstein to Lemaitre (1927); G. Lemaitre, Rencontres avec A. Einstein, Revue des Questions Scientifiques 129, 129 (1958), quoted in Robert W. Smith, Edwin P. Hubble and the Transformation of Cosmology, Physics Today 43, 52 (1990)

“One of the most perplexing problems of cosmogony is the great speed of the spiral nebulae. Their radial velocities average about 600km.per sec. and there is a great preponderance of velocities of recession from the solar system.” Arthur Eddington. The Mathematical Theory of Relativity (1923)

Role of cosmological constant

“The general theory of relativity allows the addition of the term λgμν in the field equations. One day, our actual knowledge of the composition of the fixed-star sky, the apparent motions of fixed stars, and the position of spectral lines as a function of distance, will probably have come far enough for us to be able to decide empirically the question of whether or not λ vanishes. Conviction is a good mainspring, but a bad judge.” Albert Einstein, Letter to Willem de Sitter (1917.4.14)

“This is gravely detrimental to the formal beauty of the theory.” A. Einstein, Spielen Gravitationsfelder im Aufbau der materiellen Elementarteilchen eine wesentliche Rolle? (Do gravitation fields play an essential part in the structure of the elementary particles of matter?) Sitz. K¨onig. Preuss. Akad. (1919) 349

“If there is no quasi-static world, then away with the cosmological term.” 7

Albert Einstein, Letter to Hermann Weyl (1923)

“Observations will never be able to prove that λ vanishes, only that λ is smaller than a given value. Today I would say that λ is certainly smaller than 10-45cm-2 and is probably smaller than 10-50. Maybe one day observations will also provide a specific value for λ, but up to now I have no knowledge of anything pointing to this.” Willem de Sitter, Letter to Einstein (1917.4.18)

“The introduction of such a constant implies a considerable renunciation of the logical simplicity of the theory. ... Since I have introduced this term, I had always a bad conscience. … I cannot help to feel it strongly and I am unable to believe that such an ugly thing should be realized in nature.” Albert Einstein, Letter to George Lemaître (1946) 1.5 Observation and interpretation

“What quantities are observable should not be our choice, but should be given, should be indicated to us by the theory.” Albert Einstein, quoted by Werner Heisenberg in Der Teil und das Ganze; quoted in Leon Rosenfeld, The wave-particle dilemma, in The Physicist’s Conception of Nature, ed. by J. Mehra (1973)

Expanding universe

“Observations always involve theory.” Edwin Hubble, The Realm of the Nebulae (1936)

“The thought is always prior to the fact.”

“The fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, History (1841)

Cosmic acceleration and dark energy

“Its nature (whether constant, or varying) is a major problem for theoretical physics.” G. F. R. Ellis, Fitting and Averaging in cosmology: Dynamical and observational aspects, a talk in SIGRAV and INFN School GGI, Firenze(2009)

“The deduction of the existence of dark energy is based on the assumption that the universe has a Robertson-Walker geometry - spatially homogeneous and isotropic on a large scale.” G. F. R. Ellis, Dark energy and inhomogeneity, Journal of Physics, Conference Series 189, 012011 (2009)

Cosmological constant

Dark matter

“Consider, therefore, this further evidence of bodies whose existence you must acknowledge though they cannot be seen.” Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, Translated by R. E. Latham

Two hypotheses as saviors of modern cosmology

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“Normal science … whether historically or in the contemporary laboratory … seems an attempt to force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies. No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena; indeed those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all.” Thomas Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)

Cosmic background radiation

“Discovery requires understanding.” Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (1932)

“In the field of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind.” Louis Pasteur, Lecture, University of Lille (7 December 1854) [according to wiki]

Origin of atoms as a myth 1.6 Observational facts in cosmology

(1) Existence of the Universe

“Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, 6.44, Translated by C. K. Ogden

“I wonder at the existence of the world. … how extraordinary that anything should exist, or, how extraordinary that the world should exist.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, A Lecture on Ethics

“Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing?” Martin Heidegger, What is Metaphysics? (1929), Translated by DAVID FARRELL KRELL

“On the ultimate origination of things: why there is a world at all? Why is there something rather than nothing?” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, On the ultimate origination of things, November 23, (1697)

“The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?” Stephen Hawking, A brief history of time (1988)

“The question, “Why does something exist?” is consequently without meaning, a pseudo-problem raised about a pseudo-idea.” Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1911)

(2) Darkness at night

“Why is the sky dark at night? Why are the heavens not filled with light? The answer to this old and celebrated riddle seems deceptively simple: The Sun has set and now shines on the other side of the Earth. But, … The riddle becomes: Why are the heavens not filled with light? Why is the universe plunged into darkness? … Misleading trails of inquiry and strange discoveries abound in the quest for the solution to the riddle of cosmic darkness.” Edward Harrison, Darkness at Night: A riddle of the universe (1987)

“Were the succession of stars endless, then the background of the sky would present us a uniform luminosity, like that displayed by the Galaxy – since there

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could be absolutely no point, in all that background, at which would not exist a star. The only mode, therefore, in which, under such a state of affairs, we could comprehend the voids which our telescopes find in innumerable directions, would be by supposing the distance of the invisible background so immense that no ray from it has yet been able to reach us at all.” Edgar Allan Poe, Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848)

“Copernicus had said little or nothing about what lay beyond the sphere of fixed stars. Digges’s original contribution to cosmology consisted of dismantling the starry sphere, and scattering the stars throughout endless space. By grafting endless space onto the Copernican system and scattering the stars throughout this endless space, Digges pioneered … the idea of an unlimited universe filled with the mingling rays of countless stars.” Edward Harrison, Darkness at Night: A riddle of the universe (1987)

(3) Distance-redshift relation

“Experiments only teach us the relations of bodies to one another. They do not and cannot give us the relations of bodies and space, nor the mutual relations of the different parts of space.” Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis (1905), Translated by W. J. G.

(4) Age of the Universe

(5) Large-scale structure

Observation depending on theory

“The astronomer, the geometer, rely on their irrefragable analysis, and disdain the results of observation.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836)

(6) Cosmic background radiation: history of discovery

“In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.” See a letter to the Editor in The Journal of the American Medical Association 196, 145 (1966) by Maurice B. Strauss

“It is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, History (1841)

Cosmic background radiation: characteristics

(7) Composition

(8) Light element abundance

(9) Number ratio of atom and light

(10) Existence of observer

“What we can expect to observe must be restricted by the conditions necessary for our presence as observers. (Although our situation is not necessarily central, it is inevitably privileged to some extent.)”

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“We must be prepared to take account of the fact that our location in the universe is necessarily privileged to the extent of being compatible with our existence as observers.”

“The Universe (and hence the fundamental parameters on which it depends) must be such as to admit the creation of observers within it at some stage. To paraphrase Descartes, cogito ergo mundus talis est.("I think, therefore the world is such [as it is]")” Carter, Brandon, Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology, in M. S. Longair, ed., Confrontation of Cosmological Theory with Astronomical Data (1974)

“The observed values of all physical and cosmological quantities are not equally probable but take on values restricted by the requirement that there exist sites where carbon-based life can evolve and by the requirement that the Universe be old enough for it to have already done so.”

“The Universe must have those properties which allow life to develop within it at some stage in its history.” John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. (1986)

“The conditions necessary for human existence impose narrow limits on the design of the universe.” Edward Harrison, A century of changing perspectives in cosmology, Quatery J. Royal Astron. Soc. 33, 335 (1992)

“The world is the way it is, at least in part, because otherwise there would be no one to ask why it is the way it is.” Steven Weinberg, The cosmological constant problem, Rev. Mod. Phys. 61, 1 (1989)

“Why are things as they are, and not otherwise?” Johannes Kepler, Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596); in Bruce Stephenson, Kepler’s Physical Astronomy (1987)

“What I am really interested in is whether God could have made the world in a different way; that is, whether the necessity of logical simplicity leaves any freedom at all.” Albert Einstein, to his assistant Ernst Straus, quoted in Anthony Philip French edited, Einstein: A Centenary Volume (1979)

Critique of Anthropic principle

“The weak anthropic principle is neither anthropic nor a principle. Either in its direct or in its Bayesian form, it is a mere tautology lacking explanatory force and unable to yield any prediction of previously unknown results. It is a pattern of inference, not of explanation. The strong anthropic principle is a gratuitous speculation with no other support than previous religious commitment or the assumption of an actual infinity of universes, for which there is not the slightest empirical hint. But even assuming so much, it does not work. In particular, the assumption of an infinity of different universes is no guarantee of finding among them one like this one. The loose anthropic way of reasoning does not stand up to the usual methodological standards of empirical science. And it does not signal any anthropocentric turn in contemporary science.” Jesus Mosterin, Anthropic Explanations in Cosmology (2004) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/36444119_Anthropic_Explanations_in_Cos mology

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“It is much better to find a simple physical resolution of the problem rather than speculate that we can live only in the universes where the problem does not exist. There is always a risk that the anthropic principle does not cure the problem, but acts like a painkiller.” A. Linde, Inflation, Quantum Cosmology and the Anthropic Principle (2002) arXiv:0211048v2

“[Anthropic principle] tends to be invoked by theorists whenever they do not have a good enough theory to explain the observed facts.” Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics (1989)

“It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a universe without physicists, and physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an atom’s way of knowing about atoms.” George Wald (1958) Introduction to The Fitness of the Environment by L. J. Henderson (1913)

“We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” Carl Sagan, From Carl Sagan’s narration on a promotional video for the television series Cosmos; available in YouTube: Carl Sagan - "We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLigBYhdUDs

“The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.” Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe (1979) 1.7 Geometry and topology of the Universe

Cosmic geometry

“Although he missed the opportunity to predict the dynamic universe, Einstein’s legacy of establishing modern cosmology over one hundred years ago by introducing the Cosmological Principle and the enigmatic cosmological constant may yet be extended by his choice of the spherical geometry with closed topology.” Hyerim Noh, JH and John D. Barrow, Perturbations and Linearisation Stability of Closed Friedmann Universes, Physical Review D, 101, 123527 (2020)

Cosmic topology

Observations 1.8 History of the Universe

Model and theory

Acceleration in the early universe

Big bang

Precision, concordance cosmology

Precision cosmology made of riddles

Simplicity of the cosmological model

“Unless God created the universe with the limited computational ability of physicists in mind, its simplicity would seem to be very unlikely.”

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B. J. Carr, On the Origin, Evolution and Purpose of the Physical Universe, Irish Astron. J., 15, 237 (1982)

“Our ability to describe the universe with simple, elegant models stems in large part from our lack of data, our ignorance.” John Horgan, The End of Science: Facing the limits of knowledge in the twilight of the scientific age (1997)

“There is included in human nature an ingrained naturalism and materialism of mind which can only admit facts that are actually tangible. Of this sort of mind the entity called ‘science’ is the idol. … [O]ur science is a drop, our ignorance a sea. Whatever else be certain, this at least is certain – that the world of our present natural knowledge is enveloped in a larger world of some sort whose residual properties [about which] we at present can frame no positive idea.” William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)

Dark matters in history 1.9 Discovering the assumptions

Irony of success in science

The fallacy of dogmatic finality

“The time will come when diligent research over periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single life time, even though entirely devoted to research, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject. … And so this knowledge will be unfolded through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them. … Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memories of us will have been effaced. Our universe is a sorry little affair unless it has something for every age to investigate. … Nature does not reveal her mysteries once and for all.” Seneca, Natural Questions, VII.25; Translated by Carl Sagan in Cosmos (1980)

“Nothing is more curious than the self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind as each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of its existing modes of knowledge. Sceptics and believers are all alike. At this moment scientists and sceptics are the leading dogmatists. Advance in detail is admitted; fundamental novelty is barred. This dogmatic common sense is the death of philosophic adventure. The Universe is vast.”

“The fallacy of dogmatic finality.” Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954)

“There is a special reason for believing that the twentieth-century universe is the universe; that further discoveries will add much in detail but will not alter the general picture.” D. W. Sciama, The Unity of the Universe (1961)

Testing the cosmological principle

“Spatial homogeneity is one of the foundations of standard cosmology, so any chance to check those foundations observationally should be welcomed with open arms.” George F. R. Ellis, Nature, 452, 158 (2008)

The cosmological principle is not in the sky 13

“The cosmological principle is not in the sky.” Chan-Gyung Park, Hwasu Hyun, Hyerim Noh and JH, The cosmological principle is not in the sky, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 469, 1924 (2017)

Theory is not in the nature

“The erroneous premises, in fact, work.”

“On the other hand, the premises work only up to a certain limit, and, at some stage or under certain circumstances, if you are carrying serious epistemological errors, you will find that they do not work any more. At this point you discover to your horror that it is exceedingly difficult to get rid of the error, that it’s sticky. It is as if you had touched honey. As with honey, the falsification gets around; and each thing you try to wipe it off on gets sticky, and your hands still remain sticky.” Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), Pathologies of Epistemology

Difference between model and reality

“I take the positivist viewpoint that a physical theory is just a mathematical model and that it is meaningless to ask whether it corresponds to reality. All that one can ask is that its predictions should be in agreement with observations.”

“I don’t demand that a theory correspond to reality because I don’t know what [reality] is. Reality is not a quality you can test with litmus paper. All I’m concerned with is that the theory should predict the results of measurements.” Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, The Nature of Space and Time (2010)

Misinterpretation of Copernicus

“Copernicus, through his work and the greatness of his personality, taught man to be modest.” Einstein, Message on the 410th Anniversary of the Death of Copernicus (1953)

“The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.” Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), quoted by Stephen Jay Gould in Jove’s Thunderbolts, Natural History magazine, October 1994

Inventing the universe

“Knowing the universe is inventing the universe.” Luc Brisson and F. Walter Meyerstein, Inventing the Universe (1995) 1.10 Multiverse metaphysics

“In this scenario the universe as a whole is immortal. Each particular part of the universe may stem from a singularity somewhere in the past, and it may end up in a singularity somewhere in the future. There is, however, no end for the evolution of the entire universe.” A. Linde, The self-reproducing inflationary universe, Scientific American 99 (1998)

Untestable argument

“It is very questionable whether the study of any phenomenon that is not repeatable can call itself a science at all. It would be sad however to abandon the whole fascinating area to the priesthood.”

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M. J. Disney, The Case Against Cosmology, General Relativity and Gravitation, 32, 1125 (2000)

Regions unreachable in principle

“When a feature of a model is ascertained through imposition rather than by experimental or observational check it is unscientific because it is only based on personal choices. In other words, a certainty achieved that way becomes a dogma. … danger of strongly believing in ideas not confirmed by observation, … without this confirmation we lose the only way we can distinguish science from metaphysics.” Marcelo B. Ribeiro and Antonio A. P. Videira, Dogmatism and theoretical pluralism in modern cosmology, physics/9806011

“We should stand firm and insist that genuine science is based on observational testing of plausible hypothesis. … Theory must be subject to experimental and/or observational test; this is the central feature of science.” G. F. R. Ellis, Dark matter and dark energy proposals: maintaining cosmology as a true science? (2008)

“The fascinating impressiveness of rigorous mathematical analyses, with its atmosphere of precision and elegance, should not blind us to the defects of the premises that condition the whole process. There is perhaps no beguilement more insidious and dangerous than an elaborate and elegant mathematical process built upon unfortified premises.” Thomas Chamberlin, Lord Kelvin’ address on the age of the Earth as an abode fitted for life. Science 9, 889; 10, 11 (1899)

“There is no more common error than to assume that, because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain.” Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics (1958)

Absolute limit of scientific knowledge

“When our models give predictions of the nature of the Universe on a larger scale than the Hubble radius, these are strictly unverifiable, however appealing they may be.” G. F. R. Ellis, Before the Beginning: Cosmology Explained (1993)

“Because we wish to talk about regions we cannot directly influence or experiment on, our theory is at the mercy of the assumptions we make.” George F. R. Ellis, Cosmology and verifiability, Quarterly Journal of Royal Astronomical Society, 16, 245 (1975)

Science free from verification?

“Cosmologists are often in error, but never in doubt.” Lev D. Landau

“What if cosmologists already had, in the big bang theory, the major answer to the puzzle of the universe? What if all that remained was tying up loose ends, those that could be tied up? … One does not become a cosmologist to fill in the details left by the pioneers. … Given this possibility, it is no wonder that ‘strong’ scientists such as Hawking have vaulted past the big bang theory into postempirical science.”

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“Wormholes? Baby universes? Infinite dimensional superspace of string theory? … it is ironic science, science that is not experimentally testable or resolvable even in principle … Its primary function is to keep us awestruck before the mystery of the cosmos. … Ironic cosmology will continue, of course, as long as we have poets as imaginative and ambitious as Hawking, Linde, Wheeler, … Their visions are both humbling, in that they show the limited scope of our empirical knowledge, and exhilarating, since they also testify to the limitlessness of human imagination. … But it is not science.”

“To pursue science in a speculative, postempirical mode that I call ironic science. Ironic science resembles literary criticism in that it offers points of view, opinions, which are, at best, interesting, which provoke further comment. But it does not converge on the truth. It cannot achieve empirically verifiable surprises that force scientists to make substantial revisions in their basic description of reality.” John Horgan, The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age (1997)

Temptation of metaphysics

“It is better to inquire about ‘light’ things, finding some truth, than keeping to wonder about the ‘maximal questions’ without reaching anything.” Galileo Galilei

“It is open to every man to choose the direction of his striving; and also every man may draw comfort from [Gotthold Ephraim] Lessing’s fine saying, that the search for truth is more precious than its possession.” Albert Einstein, The fundamentals of theoretical physics (1940), in Out of my later years (1950)

“Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value the may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder.” Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1997) 1.11 Misunderstandings of physical cosmology

Competing with philosophy

“Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.” Stephen Hawking, The Grand Design (2010)

“To make light of philosophy is to philosophize truly.” Blaise Pascal, Pensées

Showoff of cosmology

“What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn’t prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary.” Stephen Hawking, Interview in Der Spigel (October 17, 1988)

“It has been said that the highest praise of God consists in the denial of Him by the atheist, who finds creation so perfect that he can dispense with a creator.” Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, The Guermantes Way (1920) 16

“I cannot forgive Descartes. In all his philosophy he would have been quite willing to dispense with God. But he had to make Him give a fillip to set the world in motion; beyond this, he has no further need of God.” Blaise Pascal, Pensées

Reality of quantum cosmology

“It is meaningless to ask: which is real, ‘real’ or ‘imaginary’ time? It is simply a matter of which is the more useful description.” Stephen Hawking, A brief history of time (1988)

Ignorance by neglecting limits 1.12 Metaphysical questions

Beginning of the Universe

“Nothing can ever be created by divine power out of nothing.” Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), Book I

“First God made heaven and earth, …” The Bible

“What was God doing before the creation of the world? Some people say that before He made the Heaven and Earth, God prepared Gehenna (hell) for those who have the hardihood to inquire into such high matters. … There was no time before creation, and hence the question was not cogent. Simultaneously with time the world was made.” Saint Augustine, Confessions

“Be that as it may, Time came into being together with the Heaven, in order that, as they were brought into being together, so they may be dissolved together, if ever their dissolution should come to pass.” Plato, Timaeus, Translated by Francis MacDonald Cornford

“The universe is created with time, not in time.” John D. Barrow, Between inner space and outer space: Essays on science, art, and philosophy (1999)

Metaphysical questions

Ultimate questions

“Physical cosmology confines its attention to the ‘how’ of the universe and does not deal with the ‘why’.” R. A. Alpher and R. Herman, Genesis of the Big Bang (2001)

“The big bang theory describes how our universe is evolving, not how it began.” P. J. E. Peebles, Making Sense of Modern Cosmology, Scientific American 284, 1, (January 2001)

“Cosmology that could not answer the various why-questions would immediately be felt as lacking something” Konrad Rudnicki, The Cosmologist’s Second (1982)

“I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that elements. I want to know His thoughts; the rest are details.”

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Albert Einstein, Recalled by his Berlin student Esther Salaman, 1925, in Salaman, Talk with Einstein, Listener 54 (1955), 370; reprinted in Alice Calaprice, The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (2011)

“My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.” Stephen Hawking, John Boslough, Stephen Hawking’s Universe (1985)

“The day will perhaps come when physicists will no longer concern themselves with questions which are inaccessible to positive methods, and will leave them to the metaphysicians. That day has not yet come; man does not so easily resign himself to remaining forever ignorant of the causes of things.” Henry Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis (1905), Translated by W. J. G.

Destiny of ultimate theory

“Most thinkers have a faith that at bottom there is but one Science of all things, and that until all is known, no one thing can be completely known. Such a science, if realized, would be Philosophy.” William James, Psychology (Briefer Course)

Future of the Universe

Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice. Robert Frost, Fire and Ice (1920)

This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. T. S. Elliot, The Hollow Men (1925)

“Definite predictions may be made for finite (though very large) intervals of time only, as well as in other branches of science. … we see that the future of our Universe may be not simply very complicated but even infinitely complicated.” A. A. Starobinsky, Future and origin of our universe: modern view (1999) astro- ph/9912054

Comprehensibility of the Universe

“Man is not born to solve the problem of the universe, but to find out where the problem begins and then restrain himself within the limits of the comprehensible.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Conversations of Goethe by Johann Peter Eckermann (1825), Translated by John Oxenford

“I don’t pretend to understand the Universe - it’s a great deal bigger than I am.” Thomas Carlyle, Remark to William Allingham, quoted in D.A. Wilson and D. Wilson McArthur, Carlyle: Carlyle in Old Age, vol 6 (1934); quoted in John D. Barrow, Impossibility: The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits (1998)

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“I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” J. B. S. Haldane, Possible Worlds and Other Papers (1927)

“The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home.” Carl Sagan, Cosmos (1980)

“Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.” Blaise Pascal, Pensées 1.13 Meaning, purpose and indifference of the Universe

Meaning and purpose of the Universe

“The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes: A modem view of the origin of the universe (1976)

“You can see from this how scientific work conceived of its own task under the (indirect) influence of Protestantism and Puritanism. It thought of science as the way to God.”

“Apart from the overgrown children who can still be found in the natural sciences, who imagines nowadays that a knowledge of astronomy or biology or physics or chemistry could teach us anything about the meaning of the world? How might we even begin to track down such a "meaning," if indeed it exists? If anything at all, the natural sciences are more likely to ensure that the belief that the world has a "meaning" will wither at the root!” Max Weber, Science as a Vocation (1922), Translated by Rodney Livingstone

Intentional elimination

“On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and probability.” Theodor W. Adorno, The concept of enlightenment, in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Translated by Edmund Jephcott (2002)

“It is true that a great scientific discovery also bears the stamp of the individual mind of its author. … In the objective content of science these individual features are forgotten and effaced, for one of the principal aims of scientific thought is the elimination of all personal and anthropomorphic elements.” Ernst Cassirer, An essay on man: An introduction to a philosophy of human culture (1954)

“The belief that values could be dispensed with constituted the new system of values.” Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934)

Meaning and context

“All things are moral.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836)

“Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.” Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

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“The person who reads it, who recognizes it, who receives it, is the person who produces the meaning.” Joseph Weizenbaum, Islands in the Cyberstream: Seeking Havens of Reason in a Programmed Society (2006)

“Meaning is only ever meaning in context.” Jaron Lanier, You are Not a Gadget (2010) Chapter 10

“If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.” C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952)

“The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it. … For it all depends on how we look at things, and not on how they are in themselves.” Carl Gustav Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933) Translated by W. S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes

Indifference of the Universe

“The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent to the concerns of such puny creatures as we.” Carl Sagan, Cosmos (1980)

“Heaven and earth do not act from (the impulse of) any wish to be benevolent.”

天地不仁 Laozi, Dao De Jing, Chapter 5, The use of emptiness; 老子, 道德經

“The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can’t believe the whole universe exists for our benefit. That would be like saying that you would disappear if I closed my eyes.” Stephen Hawking, From an interview with Ken Campbell on Reality on the Rocks: Beyond Our Ken (1995)

Importance of meaning in life

“The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death — however mutable man may be able to make them — our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”

“The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning.” Stanley Kubrick, Interviewed in Playboy magazine, September (1968)

“THERE is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest - whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories - comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer. …

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If I ask myself how to judge that this question is more urgent than that, I reply that, one judges by the actions it entails. I have never seen anyone die for the ontological argument. Galileo who held a scientific truth of great importance abjured it with the greatest ease as soon as it endangered his life. In a certain sense, he did right. That truth was not worth the stake. Whether the earth or the sun revolves around the other is a matter of profound indifference. To tell the truth, it is a futile question. On the other hand, I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living(what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.” Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Translated by JUSTIN O’BRIEN

“Meaning consists in attachment to something bigger than you are.”

“The larger the thing to which you can credibly attach yourself, the more meaning your life has. I believe that we are moral animals, that we are biologically demanding of meaning.” Martin E. P. Seligman, Afterword: Breaking the 65 Percent Barrier, in A Life Worth Living: Contributions to Positive Psychology, Edited by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Isabella Selega Csikszentmihalyi (2006)

“Gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.” Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942), Translated by Stuart Gilbert

“As far as can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.”

“It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.” Carl Gustav Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962)

“All ultimate reasons are in terms of aim at value. A dead nature aims at nothing. It is the essence of life that it exists for its own sake, as the intrinsic reaping of value.” Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (1938) 1.14 Limits of space and time

Buddha’s 14 unanswerable questions

Gautama Buddha has remained silent on two cosmological questions. These are questions about ‘temporal and spatial finiteness or infiniteness’ of the Universe. (These correspond to eight in the ‘fourteen unanswerable questions’. They are eight because, for example, for the time we have the following four possibilities: ‘is the world eternal?’, ‘or not?’, ‘or both?’, and ‘or neither’.) Buddha has undeclared on these questions, as being metaphysical speculations irrelevant to attain the liberation and to reach nirvana, and he has discouraged his disciples from wasting time and energy on those points. JH, Modern Cosmology: Assumptions and Limits, KIAS Newsletter (2011); arXiv:1206.6297

“In the search for truth there are certain questions that are not important. Of what material is the universe constructed? Is the universe eternal? Are there limits or not to the universe? … If a man were to postpone his search and practice for

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Enlightenment until such questions were solved, he would die before he found the path.” Andy Zupko, Treasury of Spiritual Wisdom: A Collection of 10,000 Inspirational Quotations (1996)

“So, Malunkyaputta, remember what is undisclosed by me as undisclosed, and what is disclosed by me as disclosed. And what is undisclosed by me? ‘The cosmos is eternal,’ is undisclosed by me. ‘The cosmos is not eternal,’ is undisclosed by me. ‘The cosmos is finite’ … ‘The cosmos is infinite’ … And why are they undisclosed by me? Because they are not connected with the goal, are not fundamental to the holy life. They do not lead to disenchantment, dispassion, cessation, calming, direct knowledge, self-awakening, Unbinding. That’s why they are undisclosed by me.” Parable of the poisoned arrow, Majjhima Nikaya, the Sutta Pitaka, Pāli Canon

Opinion of Socrates

“Many of today’s problems awaiting solution are more sophisticated versions of puzzles discussed by the philosophers and mathematical astronomers of ancient Greece over two thousand years ago. They too worried about the limits of time and space, the elements that make up the whole, how (or if) the universe began, and whether cosmic events are random or meaningful, chaotic or maintained by balance and order.

Socrates didn’t spend his time discussing the nature of everything as most others did, wondering about what the experts call the kosmos and the reasons for all the things in the sky necessarily coming about as they do; on the contrary he pointed out the foolishness of those who were concerned with such matters.” M. R. Wright, Cosmology in Antiquity (1995)

“He did not even discuss that topic so favoured by other talkers, “the Nature of the Universe”: and avoided speculation on the so-called “Cosmos” of the Professors, how it works, and on the laws that govern the phenomena of the heavens: indeed he would argue that to trouble one’s mind with such problems is sheer folly. In the first place, he would inquire, did these thinkers suppose that their knowledge of human affairs was so complete that they must seek these new fields for the exercise of their brains or that it was their duty to neglect human affairs and consider only things divine? Moreover, he marvelled at their blindness in not seeing that man cannot solve these riddles since even the most conceited talkers on these problems did not agree in their theories, but behaved to one another like madmen. As some madmen have no fear of danger and others are afraid where there is nothing to be afraid of, as some will do or say anything in a crowd with no sense of shame, while others shrink even from going abroad among men, some respect neither temple nor altar nor any other sacred thing, others worship stocks and stones and beasts, so is it, he held, with those who worry with “Universal Nature.”” Xenophon, MEMORABILIA, I. i. 11-14, Translated by O. J. Todd

Clear answer from modern cosmology

Einstein’s answer

“We philosophize on … whether it … extends infinitely, or has a finite size. Heine has provided the answer in a poem: “And a fool waits for an answer.” So let us be satisfied and not expect an answer.” Einstein, Letter to Willem de Sitter, before 12 March 1917, in Einstein, A. and Stachel, J., Collected papers, Vol. 08 Correspondence, 1914-1918 (1998)

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What is understanding?

“True wisdom lies in knowing the limits of wisdom.” Socrates, Apology; Translation by Benjamin Jowett: So I left him, saying to myself, as I went away: Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is,—for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows; I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of him. Translation in wikiquote [Socrates]: When I left him, I reasoned thus with myself: I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know.

“Yu, shall I teach you what knowledge is? To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.”

由！誨女知之乎？知之為知之, 不知為不知, 是知也. Confucius, The Analects, Wei Zheng; 孔子, 論語, 為政

“To know and yet (think) we do not know is the highest (attainment); not to know (and yet think) we do know is a disease.”

知不知, 上; 不知知, 病. Laozi, Dao De Jing, Chapter 71, The Disease of Knowing; 老子, 道德經, 知病

Maintained mystery of the Universe

“The charm and importance of a study of the heavens was matched only by the uncertainty of the knowledge produced.” Aristotle, Translated by Roger French in M. R. Wright, Cosmology in Antiquity (1995)

“There is a widespread conviction that the new teachings of astronomy and physical science are destined to produce an immense change on our outlook on the universe as a whole, and on our views as to the significance of human life. The question at issue is ultimately one for philosophic discussions, but before the philosophers have a right to speak, science ought first to be asked to tell all she can as to ascertained facts and provisional hypotheses. Then, and then only, may discussion legitimately pass into the realms of philosophy.” James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe (1932)

“[C]osmology itself, like all arts and sciences, is a construct of human intelligence, subject to social and linguistic conditioning and dubious means of communication.” M. R. Wright, Cosmology in Antiquity (1995)

Great achievement of modern science

“The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, Seek simplicity but distrust it.” Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (1919)

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, 1094b.24; This translation is a bit different from the original. Translation by David Ross: It is the mark of an educated man to 23

look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs. Translation by H. Rackham: It is the mark of an educated mind to expect that amount of exactness in each kind which the nature of the particular subject admits. It is equally unreasonable to accept merely probable conclusions from a mathematician and to demand strict demonstration from an orator.

“Fifty years ago Kurt Gödel … proved that the world of pure mathematics is inexhaustible. No finite set of axioms and rules of inference can ever encompass the whole of mathematics. Given any finite set of axioms, we can find meaningful mathematical questions which the axioms leave unanswered. This discovery of Gödel came at first as an unwelcome shock to many mathematicians. It destroyed once and for all the hope that they could solve the problem of deciding by a systematic procedure the truth or falsehood of any mathematical statement. After the initial shock was over, the mathematicians realized that Godel’s theorem, in denying them the possibility of a universal algorithm to settle all questions, gave them instead a guarantee that mathematics can never die. No matter how. far mathematics progresses and no matter how many problems are solved, there will always be, thanks to Godel, fresh questions to ask and fresh ideas to discover.” Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions (1988)

“The essence of mathematics lies precisely in its freedom.” Georg Cantor, Foundations of a general theory of manifolds: a mathematico- philosophical investigation into the theory of the infinite (1883) printed in From Kant to Hilbert: A Source Book in the Foundations of Mathematics, Volume II (2007) by W. Ewald

“In mathematics the art of asking questions is more valuable than solving problems.” Georg Cantor, Doctoral thesis (1867)

The Universe and life

“The universe was brought into being in a less than fully formed state, but was gifted with the capacity to transform itself from unformed matter into a truly marvelous array of structure and life forms.” Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430), Quoted in Kenneth R. Lang Parting the Cosmic Veil (2006), Translated by Howard J. van Till

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2. Astrobiology: Close Encounter with our Future 2.1 Where are we going?

Deus Ex Machina

“The survival of man depends on the early construction of an ultraintelligent machine. … Later machines will all be designed by ultraintelligent machines, and who am I to guess what principles they will devise? But probably Man will construct the deus ex machina in his own image. … Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.”

“provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.” Irving John Good, Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine (1965)

Why the future doesn’t need us

“Our most powerful 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech - are threatening to make humans an endangered species. … we have yet to come to terms with the fact that the most compelling 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology - pose a different threat than the technologies that have come before. Specifically, robots, engineered organisms, and nanobots share a dangerous amplifying factor: They can self- replicate. …, and quickly get out of control.” Bill Joy, Why the future doesn’t need us (2000)

“Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks. Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.” Stephen Hawking, Stuart Russell, Max Tegmark, and Frank Wilczek, in The Independent, May 20 (2014)

Possibility of posthuman future

Can we control the situation

Difference between science and technology

“A scientist studies what is, whereas an engineer creates what never was.” Theodore Von Kármán, quoted in National Research Council (U.S.), Theoretical Foundations for Decision Making in Engineering Design (2001)

“The use of a technology can enrich the human psyche, enlarge the human spirit, intensify its interior life.” Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (1982)

Ignorance of ignorance

“[S]cience, after all, is only an expression for our ignorance of our own ignorance.” Samuel Butler, The Note-Books, CHAPTER XXI. Rebelliousness

“Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.” Alfred North Whitehead

“Beware of his false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.” George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903) 25

“Madness, … according to him, was the opposite of Wisdom. Nevertheless he did not identify Ignorance with Madness; but not to know yourself, and to assume and think that you know what you do not, he put next to Madness.” Xenophon, MEMORABILIA, III. ix. 6, Translated by O. J. Todd

“Those who are ignorant of what they ought to know deserve to learn from those who know it.” Xenophon, MEMORABILIA, I. ii. 50., Translated by O. J. Todd

Hidden countermeasure of science

Ignorance of science, rise of machines, fall of human

“Why may not there arise some new phase of mind which shall be as different from all present known phases, as the mind of animals is from that of vegetables? … There is no security against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness, in the fact of machines possessing little consciousness now.

I would repeat that I fear none of the existing machines; what I fear is the extraordinary rapidity with which they are becoming something very different to what they are at present. No class of beings have in any time past made so rapid a movement forward. Should not that movement be jealously watched, and checked while we can still check it?

How many men at this hour are living in a state of bondage to the machines? How many spend their whole lives, from the cradle to the grave, in tending them by night and day? Is it not plain that the machines are gaining ground upon us, when we reflect on the increasing number of those who are bound down to them as slaves, and of those who devote their whole souls to the advancement of the mechanical kingdom?

Are we not ourselves creating our successors in the supremacy of the earth? … After all then it comes to this, that the difference between the life of a man and that of a machine is one rather of degree than of kind. … How then can it be objected against the future vitality of the machines that they are, in their present infancy, at the beck and call of beings who are themselves incapable of originating mechanical energy? … It is the machines which act upon man and make him man, as much as man who has acted upon and made the machines.

We must choose … or seeing ourselves gradually superseded by our own creatures, till we rank no higher in comparison with them, than the beasts of the field with ourselves.” Samuel Butler, Erewhon, or Over the Range (1872)

“Who will be man’s successor? To which the answer is: We are ourselves creating our own successor. Man will become to the machine what the horse and the dog are to the man; the conclusion being that machines are, or are becoming, animate.” Samuel Butler, On 13th June, 1863, the Press printed a letter by Butler signed “Cellarius” and headed “Darwin among the Machines,”

“The machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them.” Samuel Butler, Darwin Among the Machines” originally appeared in the Christ Church PRESS, New Zealand 13 June, (1863)

The danger of ignoring limits

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“We should start from the point of view that it is best to make the assumption that we know less than we think we do about reality. … probably there’s a lot more to reality than we think.” Jaron Zepel Lanier, Interview

Role of the science

Cosmic situation showing the future of technological civilization 2.2 Life and the universe

Are we alone?

“Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor any one in society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe.” Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (1955)

Great expectation

“To consider the Earth the only populated world in infinite space is as absurd as to assert that on an entire field sown with millet, only one grain will grow.” Metrodorus of Chios (4thcentury BC); F. M. Cornford, Innumerable Worlds in Pre– Socratic Philosophy, The Classical Quarterly, 28, 1 (1934): It would be strange if a single ear of corn grew in a large plain or there were only one world in the infinite.

“Do there exist many worlds, or is there but a single world? This is one of the most noble and exalted questions in the study of Nature.” Saint Albertus Magnus (1206-1280)

“Heaven and earth are large, yet in the whole of space they are but as a small grain of rice. … It is as if the whole of empty space were a tree, and heaven and Earth were one of its fruits. Empty space is like a kingdom, and heaven and Earth no more than a single individual person in that kingdom. Upon one tree there are many fruits, and in one kingdom many people. How unreasonable it would be to suppose that, besides the heaven and earth which we can see, there are no other heavens and no other earths!” Teng Mu 滕牧 (13thcentury), Translated by Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 3 (1959) Chapter 20

“If it were possible to settle by any sort of experience whether there are inhabitants of at least some of the planets that we see, I might well bet everything I have on it. Hence I say that it is not merely an opinion but a strong belief (on the correctness of which I would wager many advantages in life) that there are also inhabitants of other worlds.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1787), Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood

Disappointment and re-emerging expectations

“The biggest breakthrough in the next 50 years will be the discovery of extraterrestrial life. We have been searching for it for 50 years and found nothing. That proves life is rarer than we hoped, but does not prove that the universe is lifeless. We are only now developing the tools to make our searches efficient and far-reaching, as optical and radio detection and data processing move forward.” Freeman Dyson, Forecasts the future, at NewScientist.com (15 November 2006)

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

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Popularized by Carl Sagan, see [wiki: Sagan standard] Marcello Truzzi, On the Extraordinary: An Attempt at Clarification, Zetetic Scholar, 1, 11 (1978): An extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof.

“If this discovery is confirmed it will surely be one of the most stunning insights into our universe that science has ever uncovered.” President Bill Clinton, August 7 (1996)

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Martin Rees, in Project Cyclops: A Design Study of a System for Detecting Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life (1971)

Field lacking its subject matter

“There is even increasing recognition of a new science, sometimes called exobiology - a curious development in view of the fact that this ‘science’ has yet to demonstrate that its subject matter exists!”

“Let us face the fact that this is a gamble at the most adverse odds in history. Then if we want to go on gambling, we will at least recognize that what we are doing resembles a wild spree more than a sober scientific program.” George Gaylord Simpson, The Nonprevalence of Hominoids, Science, 143, 769 (1964)

Chance and necessity

“Man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance.”

“The universe was not pregnant with life nor the biosphere with man.” Jacques Monod (1910-1976) Chance and Necessity (1971)

“We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction.” Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) Full House (1996)

“The universe is pregnant with life… Life is a cosmic imperative! Life is almost bound to arise… wherever physical conditions are similar (to Earth).”

“From the perspective of determinism and constrained contingency that pervades the history of life … life and mind emerge not as the results of freakish accidents, but as natural manifestations of matter, written into the fabric of the universe.”

“The universe is not the inert cosmos of the physicists, with a little life added for good measure. The universe is life, with the necessary infrastructure around; it consists foremost of trillions of biospheres generated and sustained by the rest of the universe.” Christian de Duve, Vital Dust (1995)

“Everything existing in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessity.” Democritus, quoted in Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology (1971), Translated by Austryn Wainhouse

“The fabric of this world is woven of necessity and chance; Man’s reason takes up its position between them and know how to control them, treating necessity as the basis of its existence, contriving to steer and direct chance to its own ends.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1796)

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“When facts are few, speculations are most likely to represent individual psychology.” Carl Gustav Jung

Waste of space

“A sad spectacle. If they are inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they not be inhabited, what a waste of space.” Thomas Carlyle, On other stars; quoted by Carl Sagan in Life Beyond Earth & the Mind of Man: A Symposium edited by Richard Berendzen (1972)

“If its like us then easy, less interesting. If its alien then hard, but interesting.” Christopher McKay, Scientific Perspective: the Search for Life in the Universe, A talk in Space Telescope Science Institute, May Symposium 2009

New interest

Discovery of exoplanets

“Our time will be remembered, because this was when we first set sail for other worlds.” Carl Sagan, (1987) 2.3 What is life

“Terrestrial life is but a particular instance of this cosmic evolution of matter.” Alexander Oparin, The Origin of Life on the Earth (1936), Translated by Ann Synge

Definition of life

I know it when I see it

“But I know it when I see it” Potter Stewart, an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Concurring, Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964)

“Nothing would be more tragic in the American exploration of space than to encounter alien life and fail to recognize it either because of the consequences of contamination or because of the lack of proper tools and scientific preparation.” The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems (2007)

Characteristics of Earth life

Unity of Earth life

Classification of life

Limits of life 2.4 Conditions for life on Earth

Essential elements of life

Possibility of outer space

Energy sources

Liquid water

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“No one really understands water.” Philip Ball, Water - an enduring mystery, Nature, 452, 20 (2008)

“If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.” Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey (1957)

Claim of arsenic bacteria

“The relative abundance of phosphorus in the human body is several orders of magnitude greater than in the Solar System, where it is only the seventeenth most common element. So, how did phosphorus concentrate on Earth, ultimately becoming part of us?” Sun Kwok, Research highlights journal club. An astronomer is bugged by the scarcity of one of life’s vital elements in space Nature, 439, 637 (2006)

Earth’s special conditions 2.5 Origin and evolution of life on Earth

Origin of life

“It seemed splendid to me to know the causes of each thing: what is that by virtue of which each thing is born, and that by virtue of which it is destroyed, and that by virtue of which it is.” Platon, Phaedo, 96a

“… there is every reason now to see in the origin of life not a “happy accident” but a completely regular phenomenon, an inherent component of the total evolutionary development of our planet. The search for life beyond Earth is thus only a part of the more general question which confronts science, of the origin of life in the universe.” Oparin, Alexander Ivanovich (1894–1980); In M Calvin and O.G. Gazenko (eds.) Theoretical and Experimental Prerequisites of Exobiology Foundations of Space Biology and Medicine, Volume I, Theoretical and Experimental Prerequisites of Exobiology, Chapter 7

“It has now become quite clear that the origin of life was ⋯ a necessary stage in the evolution of matter. The origin of life is an inalienable part of the general process of the development of the universe and, in particular, the development of the earth.” Oparin, Alexander Ivanovich; In R. Buvet and C. Ponnamperuma (eds.) Chemical Evolution and the Origin of Life (1971) Problem of the Origin of Life: Present State and Prospects

“Anyone who tells you that he or she knows how life started on the sere Earth some 3.45 billion years ago is a fool or a knave.” Stuart A. Kauffman, At Home in the Universe (1995)

“Who ever would have dreamed, when this earth was a mere molten mass, of any such forms of life as have appeared? The method of nature seems to be by the production of novelty - some totally unexpected turn of origination. By and by the earth cooled, and the seas appeared; aeons later, plant life and animals.” Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954)

Situation in the early Earth

Unsolved riddles

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Early life

Evolution of life 2.6 Search for life in the solar system

Biosignature

Mercury, Moon, Venus

Martian canals

“Not everybody can see these delicate features at first sight, even when pointed out to them; and to perceive their more minute details takes a trained as well as an acute eye, observing under the best conditions. … These are the Martian canals.” Percival Lowell, Mars and Its Canals (1906)

“The hypothesis of plant life … appears still the most satisfactory explanation of the various shades of dark markings and their complex seasonal and secular changes.” Gerard P. Kuiper, On the Martian surface features, PASP(Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific) 281 (1955)

Mars

“I remember being transfixed by the first lander image to show the horizon of Mars. This was not an alien world, I thought. I knew places like it in Colorado and Arizona and Nevada. There were rocks and sand drifts and a distant eminence, as natural and unselfconscious as any landscape on Earth. Mars was a place. I would, of course, have been surprised to see a grizzled prospector emerge from behind a dune leading his mule, but at the same time the idea seemed appropriate.” Carl Sagan, Cosmos (1980)

“As far as cultural shock is concerned, my impression is that the attention span of most people is quite brief; after a week or two of great excitement and over- saturation in the newspapers and on television, the public’s interest would drop off and the United Nations, or whatever world body we had then, would settle down to discussions with the aliens.” Stanley Kubrick, Interviewed in Playboy magazine, September (1968)

Terraforming

Giant planets

Europa

Lake Vostok

Tidal heat

Titan

Rare Earth hypothesis

Rare Titan hypothesis

“Scientists have discovered liquid (H2O) on another planet! however; it is extremely corrosive to organics and inorganics; solution concentrations will be so high as to be toxic; high temperatures imply life Rx on timescale of days; solid 31

phase floats, rendering the polar and winter regions uninhabitable and creating a climate feedback instability; its photolysis product, O2, poisons the atmosphere; … proving the suitability of our environment of liquid CH4 at normal temperatures and the intelligence of its design.” Christopher McKay, Scientific Perspective: the Search for Life in the Universe, A talk in Space Telescope Science Institute, May Symposium 2009

Enceladus

Other places 2.7 The great silence

Possibility of supercivilization

“In astrobiology, apply common sense, postulate the general, search for the obvious, and expect the unexpected.” Radu Popa, Between Necessity and Probability: Searching for the Definition and Origin of Life (2004)

A crystal ball telling the future

“If extraterrestrial intelligence is abundant, it will be our destiny to interact with that intelligence, whether for good or ill.” Steven J. Dick, Cosmic evoluton: History, culture, and human evolution, in Cosmos & Culture: Cultural evolution in a cosmic context, edited by Steven J. Dick and Mark L. Lupisella (2009)

“Few will deny the profound importance, practical and philosophical, which the detection of interstellar communications would have. We therefore feel that a discriminating search for signals deserves a considerable effort. The probability of success is difficult to estimate; but if we never search, the chance of success is zero.” G. Cocconi and P. Morrison, Search for interstellar communications, Nature 184, 102 (1959)

Great Stupidity

“The paradox is surely telling us that something is fundamentally wrong with our view of the universe, and our place in it.” Stephen Baxter, The Planetarium Hypothesis: A Resolution of the Fermi Paradox, JBIS (Journal of the British Interplanetary Society) 54, 201 (2001)

“The silence we have heard so far is not in any way significant. We still have not looked long enough or hard enough.” Frank Drake and Dava Sobel, Is Anyone Out There? The Scientific Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (1992)

Potential of the machine

The Great Filter 2.8 Arrival of the space age

Escape from a craddle

“Our planet is the cradle of mind, but one cannot live forever in a cradle.” Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a letter (1911)

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“Exploring the solar system and homesteading other worlds constitutes the beginning, much more than the end, of history.” Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)

“The unfolding of intelligence and complexity could still be near its cosmic beginnings.”

“[T]ravel beyond the solar system, through interstellar space, would, if it ever happened, be a posthuman challenge.” Martin Rees, Our Final Century (2003)

“Interstellar travel … is essentially not a problem in physics or engineering but a problem in biology.” Freeman J. Dyson, Letter to the editor, Scientific American, April 1964

“Mere distance is nothing; only the time that is needed to span it has any meaning.” Arthur C. Clarke The Promise of Space (1968)

Motives and degeneration of advance into space

“The International Space Station is not a step forward on the road to the High Frontier. It’s a big step backward, a setback that will take decades to overcome.” Freeman J. Dyson, Introduction to The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space by Gerard K. O’Neill (2000)

“[T]he International Space Station (ISS) will be the most expensive artefact ever constructed, but it is a “turkey” in the sky.” Martin Rees Our Final Century (2003)

The High Frontier

“Our ability to send people far into space, and there to maintain them in good health, reached its limits with the Apollo Project. The life support systems developed for that venture were capable of maintaining human life for two weeks, long enough only for a quick dash to the Moon, a few days of exploration, and a return. The Skylab Project of the early 1970’s extended the time limit for astronauts in space to three months, but in a location much closer to the Earth, in low orbit. The maintenance of life for a time of many months, as would be necessary for a voyage to the asteroids, presents no problems that are new in principle, but the detailed engineering of such systems has not been done.” Gerard K. O’Neill, The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space (1976)

“Mere possession of the technology for expansion is not enough. The motivation to expand must also be there.” Ben R. Finney, “Exponential Expansion: Galactic Destiny or Technological Hubris?” in Michael Papagiannis, editor, The Search for Extraterrestrial Life: Recent Developments, Dordrecht, Reidel, 1985

“Interstellar probes are appealing as long as someone else sends them, but not when we face the task ourselves.” Philip Morrison, John Billingham, and John Wolfe, editors, The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, NASA SP-419, 1977

“While the expense of human exploration cannot likely be justified on the basis of science alone, the committee emphasizes that careful attention to science opportunity is very much in the interest of a stable and sustainable lunar program.” National Research Council, The Scientific Context for Exploration of the Moon (2007) p.81 33

Viking life exploration

Technological leven required for interstellar travel

“If we ever encounter extraterrestrial intelligence, they’re likely to be machines, not creatures of flesh and blood.” Steven J. Dick, They Aren’t Who You Think, Mercury 32, 18 (2003)

Microbes’ advancement into space

“Our curiosity, our thirst to know, our enthusiasm to enter space and spread ourselves and our probes to other planets and beyond represents part of the cutting edge of life’s strategies for expansion that began in the microcosm some three- and-a-half billion years ago. We are but reflections of an ancient trend. ⋯ Because we have a monopoly within the animal kingdom on high technology, human beings seem the most likely candidate to expand life throughout the solar system, if not beyond. But it is not a foregone conclusion that human beings will be the ultimate agents of the microcosm’s expansion into space.” Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Microcosmos (1986) 2.9 Space exploration

What is intelligence?

“Instinct, intelligence and wisdom are inseparable; they are integrated, react and are blended in hybrid factors.” Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (1945)

“Intelligence is not something of an objective size and no linear measurement of it independent of a defined framework is possible. Without a certain context, without a frame of reference, intelligence is meaningless.” Joseph Weizenbaum, Islands in the Cyberstream: Seeking Havens of Reason in a Programmed Society (2006)

“If intelligence was such a good thing, and it was so obviously of Darwinian benefit, and it was an easy thing to achieve, I assume other lineages would have it, and they haven’t. And yet they’re doing very well.” Stephen Jay Gould, in Timothy Ferris, Life Beyond Earth (2001)

“If we insist in looking for life which is like our own, why do we looking for … INTELLIGENT LIFE?” Franco Giovannelli, Concluding address in The Bridge between the Big Bang and Biology: Stars, Planetary Systems, Atmospheres, Volcanoes: Their Link to Life, F. Giovannelli ed. (2001)

“The considerations of the intelligent always include both benefit and harm. As they consider benefit, their work can expand; as they consider harm, their troubles can be resolved.”

是故智者之慮, 必雜于利害, 雜于利而務可信也, 雜于害而患可解也. Sun Tzu, The Art of War; 孫子, 兵法

“Warfare is the Way of deception. … If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.”

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兵者, 詭道也. … 知彼知己 百戰不殆; 不知彼而知己, 一勝一負; 不知彼, 不知己, 每戰必殆 Sun Tzu, The Art of War; 孫子, 兵法

Great Intelligence

“I was reading about how countless species are being pushed toward extinction by man’s destruction of forests. Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.” Calvin, in Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson, November 08 (1989)

The earth, that is sufficient, I do not want the constellations any nearer, I know they are very well where they are, I know they suffice for those who belong to them. Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road

Communication

“We need not be afraid of interstellar contact, for unlike the primitive civilizations on Earth which came in contact with more advanced technological societies, we would not be forced to obey – we would only receive information.” Frank Drake, On Hands and Knees in Search of Elysium, Technology Review, 22, June (1976)

“I want to show that we need not be afraid of interstellar contact, for unlike the primitive civilizations on Earth that were overpowered by more advanced technological societies, we cannot be exploited or enslaved. … they are too far away to pose a threat.” Frank Drake and Dava Sobel, Is Anyone Out There? (1992)

“The radar and television announcement of an emerging technical society on Earth may induce a rapid response by nearby civilizations, newly motivated to reach our system directly.” William I. Newman and Carl Sagan, Galactic Civilizations: Population Dynamics and Interstellar Diffusion, ICARUS 46, 293 (1981)

“It is too late to be shy and hesitant. We have announced our presence to the cosmos. … Interstellar radio communication will not be a dialogue. It will be a monologue. The dumb guys hear from the smart guys.” Carl Sagan, The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective (1973)

“The means for contact with extraterrestrial intelligence are potentially within our hands.” Carl Sagan, editor, CETI: Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence (1973); cited in Michael A. G. Michaud, Contact with Alien Civilizations_ Our Hopes and Fears about Encountering Extraterrestrials (2007)

Worry

“By revealing our existence, we advertise Earth as a habitable planet. … We cannot assert that interstellar contact is totally devoid of risk. We can only offer the opinion that, in all probability, the benefits greatly outweigh the risks. … There is no limit to the kinds of threats one can imagine given treachery on their part and gullibility on ours. Appropriate security measures and a healthy degree of suspicion are the only weapons.”

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Project Cyclops: A Design Study of a System for Detecting Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life (1971)

“I can conceive of no nightmare so terrifying as establishing communication with a so-called superior (or, if you wish, advanced) technology in outer space.” George Wald, in Berendzen, Life Beyond Earth the Mind of Man (1973)

“The cardinal question of the actual outcome of the encounter of mankind with extraterrestrial civilization – whether it will be beneficial or harmful – has not been answered unanimously.” S. A. Kaplan, EXOSOCIOLOGY —. THE SEARCH FOR SIGNALS FROM EXTRATERRESTRIAL CIVILIZATIONS, in Extraterrestrial Civilizations: Problems of Interstellar Communication, edited by S. A. Kaplan (1969), Translated by the Israel Program for Scientific Translations

“We cannot see that our security is in any way jeopardized by the detection of signals radiated by other life. It is when we respond to such signals that we assume any risks that may exist. Before we make such a response or decide to radiate a long-range beacon, we feel the question of the potential risks should be debated and resolved at a national or international level.” Project Cyclops: A Design Study of a System for Detecting Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life (1971)

Extraordinary claim

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Popularized by Carl Sagan, see [wiki: Sagan standard] Marcello Truzzi, On the Extraordinary: An Attempt at Clarification, Zetetic Scholar, 1, 11 (1978): An extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof. 2.10 The close encounter

Close encounter

“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.”

“The Great Disillusionment” Herbert George Wells. The War of the Worlds (1897)

Communication possibility

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“How do you expect to communicate with the ocean, when you can’t even understand one another?” Stanislaw Lem, Solaris (1961), Translated from the French by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox (1970)

“I only wanted to create a vision of a human encounter with something that certainly exists, in a mighty manner perhaps, but cannot be reduced to human concepts, images, of ideas.” Stanislaw Lem, in Boston Globe, Ideals, December 15, 2004

“If a lion could talk, we wouldn’t be able to understand it.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy of Psychology a A Fragment, 327, Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte

Close encounters in history

“Thus ended the battle of Omdurman-the most signal triumph ever gained by the arms of science over barbarians. Within the space of five hours, the strongest and best-armed savage army yet arrayed against a modern European Power had been destroyed and dispersed, with hardly any difficulty, comparatively small risk and insignificant loss to the victors.”

“This kind of war was full of fascinating thrills. It was not like the Great War. Nobody expected to be killed. … To the great mass of those who took part in the little wars of Britain in those vanished light-hearted days, this was only a sporting element in a splendid game.” Winston Churchill, cited in Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate All the Brutes: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide (1997)

“The violent clash of Europeans and Aztecs is as close as mankind has ever come to an encounter with an alien world. Two advanced societies, each dominant in its own universe and ignorant of the other, were utterly changed the moment they collided. From that instant, both sides knew that only one of their worlds would survive.” Anthony De Palma, Here: A Biography of the New American Continent (2001)

“Think again of those astronomers who beamed radio signals into Space from Arecibo, describing Earth’s location and its inhabitants. In its suicidal folly that act rivaled the folly of the last Inca emperor, Atahualpa, who described to his gold-crazy Spanish captors the wealth of his capital and provided them with guides for the journey. If there really are any radio civilizations within listening distance of us, then for heaven’s sake let’s turn off our own transmitters and try to escape detection, or we are doomed.

Fortunately for us, the silence from Outer Space is deafening.” Jared Diamond, The rise and fall of the third chimpanzee. (1991)

“The study of UFOs is a necessity for the sake of world security in the event we have to prepare for the worst in the Space Age, irrespective of whether we become Columbus or the Indians.” Letter from Air Commodore J. Salutun, published in UFO News, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1974; in Timothy Good, Need to Know: UFOs, the Military, and Intelligence (2007)

Peaceful encounter

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“We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we would not want to meet.” Jonathan Leake, Stephen Hawking: ET Exists, Times of London, April 25, 2010

Back into silence

“It is difficult to construct a plausible scenario whereby an intelligent species develops and retains for centuries an interest in the interstellar communication together with the technology to engage in it, and yet does not begin interstellar travel.” John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1986)

What are we looking for in outer space?

“There may be thoughts, intentions and cruel hopes in my mind of which I know nothing. … Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.”

“We don’t want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. For us, such and such a planet is as arid as the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin. … We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors.” Stanislaw Lem, Solaris (1961), Translation from the French by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox (1970)

“Space flights are merely an escape, a fleeing away from oneself, because it is easier to go to Mars or to the moon than it is to penetrate one’s own being.” Carl Gustav Jung, in Serrano Miguel, C. G. Jung and Hermann Hesse: A Record of two Friendships (1966)

“The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, [to which] our species could migrate.” Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot (1997)

“I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.” Carl Sagan, Cosmos (1980)

“You vision becomes clear when you look inside your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.” Carl Gustav Jung

“The advance of scientific knowledge does not seem to make either our universe or our inner life in it any less mysterious. … The conclusion forced upon me in the course of a life devoted to natural science is that the universe as it is assumed to be in physical science is only an idealized world, while the real universe is the spiritual universe in which spiritual values count for everything.” J. B. S. Haldane The Sciences and Philosophy: Gifford Lectures (1929) 2.11 Course of the future technology

Creations of future technology

“Expect the best, plan for the worst, and prepared to be surprised.” Attributed to Denis Waitley

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Controllability

“The human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. ⋯ At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.” Theodore Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future (the Unabomber Manifesto) (1995)

“Men have become the tools of their tools.” Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

“The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year … Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain.” Gordon Moore, Cramming more components onto integrated circuits, Electronics Magazine 38 (April 19, 1965)

“It can’t continue forever. The nature of exponentials is that you push them out and eventually disaster happens.” Gordon Moore, Interviewed in Manek Dubash, Moore’s Law is dead, says Gordon Moore, Techworld (April 2005)

“Since the technology is going to grow exponentially, ultimately the non- biological portion will dominate.” Ray Kurzweil, Interviewed in Radical Evolution by Joel Garreau (2005)

“Our sciences and technologies … run far out ahead of many citizens’ capacity to adapt to their enticements.” Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus To Pornography (1996)

Potential of humal fall

“In the computer-human loop, the human is the more flexible portion. So whenever you change a piece of computer technology, the changes are that the human users will actually be changing more than the technology itself changed.” Jaron Lanier, Interviewed in Radical Evolution by Joel Garreau (2005)

“The Most Important Thing About a Technology Is How It Changes People.”

“It is impossible to work with information technology without also engaging in social engineering.”

“I fear that we are beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us, and I worry about a leaching of empathy and humanity in that process.”

“If we can’t reformulate digital ideals before our appointment with destiny, we will have failed to bring about a better world. Instead we will usher in a dark age in which everything human is devalued.” Jaron Lanier, You are Not a Gadget (2010) Chapter 2

Deep Blue

“As Deep Blue goes deeper and deeper, it displays elements of strategic understanding. Somewhere out there, mere tactics are translating into strategy.

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This is the closest thing I’ve seen to computer intelligence. It’s a weird form of intelligence, the beginning of intelligence. But you can feel it. You can smell it.” Frederic Friedel, assistant to Gary Kasparov, Quoted in Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999)

Watson

AlphaGo

Thinking machine

“Turing is suggesting that it is only a matter of complexity, and that above a certain level of complexity a qualitative difference appears, so that “super-critical” machines will be quite unlike the simple ones hitherto envisaged.” John Randolph Lukas Minds, Machines and Gödel, published in Philosophy, XXXVI, 112 (1961), http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jrlucas/Godel/mmg.html

Understanding and control

“You insist that there is something a machine cannot do. If you tell me precisely what it is that a machine cannot do, then I can always make a machine which will do just that!” John von Neumann, Quoted in E. T. Jaynes, Probability Theory: The logic of science (2003)

“Bureaucratic administration means fundamentally domination through knowledge.” Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology; English translation in (1968) Chapter Ill. The Types of Legitimate Domination 2.12 Close encounter with the future

Imminent catastrophe

“For this reasons, it is reasonable to expect human brain capacity, at least in terms of hardware computational capacity, for one thousand dollars by around 2020.”

“I set the date for the Singularity – representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability – as 2045. The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today.” Ray Kurzweil, The singularity is near (2005)

“We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow, biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation.” Carl Sagan, The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective (1973)

“Superhuman robots are widely predicted for mid-century.” Martin Rees, Our Final Century (2003)

Understandability

Interviewer: Do you believe that Hal has genuine emotions?

Dave: Oh, yes. Well, he acts like he has genuine emotions. Uh, of course, he’s programmed that way to make it easier for us to talk to him. But as to whether or not he has real feelings is something I don’t think anyone can truthfully answer.

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On HAL 9000, in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Existential risk

“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” Roy Amara, known as Amara’s law in PC Magazine Encyclopedia, https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia

“Associated with every step along the road to superintelligence are enormous economic payoffs.” Nick Bostrom, How Long Before Superintelligence? (1997) https://www.nickbostrom.com/superintelligence.html

“It would be good news if we find Mars to be completely sterile. Dead rocks and lifeless sands would lift my spirits.” Nick Bostrom, Where Are They?: Why I Hope The Search For Extraterrestrial Life Finds Nothing (2008)

Catastrophe

“The new species, or “posthuman”, will likely view the old “normal” humans as inferior, even savages, and fit for slavery or slaughter. The normals, on the other hand, may see the posthumans as a threat and if they can, may engage in a preemptive strike by killing the posthumans before they themselves are killed or enslaved by them. It is ultimately this predictable potential for genocide that makes species-altering experiments potential weapons of mass destruction, and makes the unaccountable genetic engineer a potential bioterrorist.” George Annas, Lori Andrews, Rosario Isasi Protecting the Endangered Human: Toward an International Treaty Prohibiting Cloning and Inheritable Alterations (2002)

Threat without bad intention

“Economic decisions generally discount into insignificance what may happen more than twenty years from now: commercial ventures are not worthwhile unless they pay off far sooner than that, especially when obsolescence is rapid. Government decisions are often as short-term as the next election.” Martin Rees, Our Final Century (2003)

“People in these corporations and establishments may well have the very best of intentions for economic progress or for national defense. Yet their organizations can be ruthless or destructive and, in effect, malevolent.” Jerome Ravetz, The No-Nonsense Guide to Science (2005)

“There are alarmingly many ways in which individuals will be able to trigger catastrophe.”

“Technical advances will in themselves render society more vulnerable to disruption.” Martin Rees, Our Final Century (2003)

“The major advances in civilization all but wreck the civilizations in which they occur.” Alfred North Whitehead, Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (1927) 2.13 The great illusion

Ultraintelligent machine

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“The survival of man depends on the early construction of an ultraintelligent machine. ⋯ Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an "intelligence explosion," and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make,” Irving John Good, Speculations concerning the first untraintelligent machine (1965)

“Such machines, properly ‘motivated’, could even make useful political and economic suggestions; and they would need to do so in order to compensate for the problems created by their own existence. There would be problems of over- population, owing to the elimination of disease, and of unemployment, owing to the efficiency of low-grade robots that the machines has designed.” Irving John Good, The scientist speculates: an anthology of partly-baked ideas (1962)

“When the first transhuman intelligence is created and launches itself into recursive self-improvement, a fundamental discontinuity is likely to occur, the likes of which I can’t even begin to predict.” Michael Anissimov, Quoted in Ray Kurzweil, The singularity is near (2005)

“Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended. Is such progress avoidable? If not to be avoided, can events be guided so that we may survive?” Vernor Vinge, The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post- Human Era (1993)

“The purest scary version is just if you had an arms race to get to The Singularity.” Vernor Vinge, Interviewed in Radical Evolution by Joel Garreau (2005)

Out of control

“The critical element of his [Vinge’s] Singularity scenario is that it is fundamentally out of control.” Joel Garreau, Radical Evolution (2005)

“It would be more safe if it took a long time to happen.” Vernor Vinge, Interviewed in Radical Evolution by Joel Garreau (2005)

“Given that superintelligence will one day be technologically feasible, will people choose to develop it? This question can pretty confidently be answered in affirmative. Associated with every step along the road to superintelligence are enormous economic payoffs.” Nick Bostrom, How Long Before Superintelligence? (1997) https://www.nickbostrom.com/superintelligence.html

“We are well on the way to becoming servants to computers and we don’t even notice. Slowly, we are becoming part of the machines.” Joseph Weizenbaum, Islands in the Cyberstream: Seeking Havens of Reason in a Programmed Society (2006)

Singularity

“The ever accelerating progress of technology … gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.”

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John von Neumann, Quoted in S. Ulam, Tribute to John von Neumann, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 64, 1 (1958)

Hopeful monster

“I used the term "hopeful monster" to express the idea that mutants producing monstrosities may have played a considerable role in macroevolution. A monstrosity appearing in a single genetic step might permit the occupation of a new environmental niche and thus produce a new type in one step.” Richard Goldschmidt, Natural basis of Evolution (1940)

Unpredictability

“History shows that the low-probability, high-impact scenarios are the ones that really shock.” Joel Garreau, Radical Evolution (2005)

“The value of technology forecasting lies not in its ability to accurately predict the future but rather in its potential to minimize surprises … and to prepare decision makers for the future.” National Research Council, Persistent Forecasting of Disruptive Technologies (2010) p.1, Report-2, p.vii

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions” A proverb

“The epochal advances are unpredictable; so are the potential trade-offs between benefits and hazards.”

“Human beings are able to engineer some modifications that nature cannot achieve.”

“Novel techniques and discoveries will generally have manifest short-term usefulness, as well as being steps towards Joy’s long-term nightmare.” Martin Rees, Our Final Century (2003)

Ignored prior warnings

“Postmortem analysis of disruptive events often reveals that all the information necessary to forecast a disruptive event was available but missed for a variety of reasons, including the following: • Not knowing enough to ask a question • Asking the right question at the wrong time • Assuming that future developments will resemble past developments • Assuming one’s beliefs are held by everyone • Fragmentation of the information • Information overload • Bias (institutional, communal, personal) • Lack of vision.” National Research Council, Persistent Forecasting of Disruptive Technologies (2010) p.109

“And in the mid twenty-first century came the great disillusionment.” Borrowing Herbert George Wells. The War of the Worlds (1897)

‘Nightmare from which you will never awake.’ James Joyce, Ulysses (1921)

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Posthuman

“If the technology of self-replicating machines were ever developed, a fast- spreading disaster could not be ruled out.”

“Twenty-first century may alter human beings themselves – not just how they live. A superintelligent machine could be the last invention humans ever make.” Martin Rees, Our Final Century (2003)

Deus ex machina

“[The paper] “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine” (1965) … began: “The survival of man depends on the early construction of an ultraintelligent machine.” Those were his [Good’s] words during the Cold War, and he now suspects that "survival" should be replaced by “extinction.” He thinks that, because of international competition, we cannot prevent the machine from taking over. He thinks we are lemmings. He said also that "probably Man will construct the deus ex machina in his own image.” Irving John Good (1998), Cited in Our Final Invention by James Barrat (2015)

Human as a transition

“Man is something that is to be surpassed. Man is a rope, stretched between animal and overman (Übermensch) - a rope over an abyss.” Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883) 2.14 The last man

Mind children

“Unleashed from the plodding pace of biological evolution, the children of our minds will be free to grow to confront immense and fundamental challenges in the larger universe. We humans will benefit for a time from their labors, bur sooner or later, like natural children, they will seek their own fortunes while we, their aged parents, silently fade away.

It is a world in which the human race has been swept away by the tide of cultural change, usurped by its own artificial progeny. … When that happens, our DNA will find itself out of a job, having lost the evolutionary race to a new kind of competition. …The uneasy truce between mind and body breaks down completely as life ends.” Hans Moravec, Mind children (1988)

“[T]he most likely and durable form of “life” may be machines whose creators had long ago been usurped or become extinct.” Martin Rees, Our Final Century (2003)

“[A] robotic existence would not be like a human one in any sense that we understand, … the robots would in no sense be our children, that on this path our humanity may well be lost.” Bill Joy, Why the future doesn’t need us (2000)

Pursuit of immortality

“Yes, indeed, I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl of Cumae hanging in a jar, and when the boys said to her, Sibyl, what do you want? she replied I want to die.” T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922) The epigraph

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“If the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies” Blaise Pascal, Pensées

Man and machine

“The argument is that I think the world is not binary, it is not just made out of zeros and ones. I do not believe that everything can be reduced to long madhouse chains of 0 and 1. I don’t think the world is like that.”

“The human cannot be represented by a finite number of bits, without missing something essential. What people forget is, to be human you have to be treated human by other humans. ⋯ The human does not end at the skin. He or she is unavoidably embedded in their environment. To be human, other humans have to recognize a human as human. I would say that it is impossible for us humans to treat a machine, no matter how human-like it is, like a little child.”

“We human understand each other because most of the conversations that we have, have a certain point or touch upon experiences that we share just because we are humans. ⋯ These highly advance robots have no background of human experience. Even if they move or act similarly to humans, they would have a completely different personal history as we humans. May be a robot or computer could pick apart simplified versions of our sentences but it could not interpret them correctly because it wouldn’t have our socialization or life experiences.

Another important point - after the missing common fundamental experiences - which I absolutely want to say in connection with the theme, “understanding,” is that most of the text processing that we do is within a very tightly defined context.” Joseph Weizenbaum, Islands in the Cyberstream: Seeking Havens of Reason in a Programmed Society (2006)

Human enhancement

“Will they decide that we humans are useless and stupid and take over the world from us? I have recently come to realize that this will never happen. Because there won’t be any us (people) for them (pure robots) to take over. … With all these trends we will become a merger between flesh and machines. … So we (the robot- people) will be a step ahead of them (the pure robot). Our machines will become much more like us, and we will become much more like our machines.” Rodney Brooks, Flesh and machines (2003)

“Before the next century is over, human beings will no longer be the most intelligent or capable type of entity on the planet. Actually, let me take that back. The truth of that last statement depends on how we define human.” Ray Kurzweil, The age of spiritual machines (1999)

Human speciation and aftermath

“There is a tendency in our planning to confuse the unfamiliar with the improbable.” Thomas C. Schelling, Introduction to Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (1962)

End of cultural evolution

“The first step towards democracy in the control of technology is to be freed of two illusions. The first [illusion] is that there is an inevitability about

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technological progress. ⋯ The second [illusion] is that ordinary people cannot influence the course of technological development.” Jerome Ravetz, The No-Nonsense Guide to Science (2005)

“We know that we humans cannot control earthquakes. Nor can we control tsunamis or other natural disasters. What we can control is our own technologies and we can say “No” to technologies that are catastrophically dangerous.” David Krieger, Mother Nature and Nuclear Power, Published on Tuesday, March 15, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

“I am sorry to say that there is too much point to the wisecrack that life is extinct on other planets because their scientists were more advanced than ours.” John F. Kennedy, An address by senator John F. Kennedy on the subject of disarmament in Washington, D. C., December 11 (1959), in the Appendix B of U.S. Security, Arms Control, and Disarmament 1960-1961 (1961)

Anthropocene

“Maybe the reason civilizations don’t get around to colonizing other planets is that there’s a narrow window when they have the tools, population and will to do so, and the window usually closes on them. … If it’s true that civilizations normally go extinct because they get stuck on their home planets, then the odds are against us.” John Tierney, A Survival Imperative for Space Colonization, The New York Times, July 17, (2007)

End of the World

“One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge. … As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end. If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, … then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.” Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (2002)

“We need more understanding of human nature, because the only real danger that exists is man himself. He is the great danger, and we are pitifully unaware of it. We know nothing of man, far too little. His psyche should be studied because we are the origin of all coming evil.” Carl Gustav Jung, Interview available in YouTube: We are the origins of all coming evil (Carl Jung) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rJaatCSCGw (2014.11.8); We are the evil interview with Carl Jung https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wop91_Gvwos (2008.3.30)

When I was young in school in Switzerland, about the time of the Boer War, We used to take it for known that the human race Would last the earth out, not dying till the planet died. I wrote a schoolboy poem About the last man walking in stoic dignity along the dead shore Of the last sea, alone, alone, alone, remembering all His racial past. But now I don’t think so. They’ll die faceless in flocks, And the earth flourish long after mankind is out. Robinson Jeffers, End Of The World 2.15 Eternal Silence

“The world began without man, and it will complete itself without him.”

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Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (1955)

Future

“The problem with the future is that it keeps becoming the present.” Calvin, in Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson, December 30, 1990

“You may not be interested in future, but future is interested in you.” Borrowing Leon Trotsky

“The best way to predict your future is to create it.” Attributed to Abraham Lincoln

“The future enters into us in order to transform itself in us long before it happens.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (1934), Letter Eight, 12 August (1904)

Eternal silence of infinite spaces

“When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me?

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.”

“Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this. All our dignity consists, then, in thought. By it we must elevate ourselves, and not by space and time which we cannot fill. Let us endeavour, then, to think well; this is the principle of morality.

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.” Blaise Pascal, Pensées

A view of the nature

“What do I know sympathetically, morally, of either of these worlds of life?” Ralph Waldo Emerson, History (1841)

Meaning of the silence

“Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.” R. Buckminster Fuller, Interview in Minneapolis Tribune, 30 April (1978)

“Sometimes I think we’re alone. Sometimes I think we’re not. In either case, the thought is staggering.” R. Buckminster Fuller

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인명색인 Index of Names 리베이로 M. R. Ribeiro 128 리스 Martin Rees 27, 115, 193, 262, 264, 303, 308, 309, 가로 Joel Garreau 312, 315 316, 318, 319, 323 가모브 George Gamow 85 리만 Bernhard Riemann 34 까뮈 Albert Camus 157, 158 리비트 Henrietta Leavitt 49 갈릴레오 Galileo Galilei 41, 42, 111, 133, 145, 157, 236 린데 Andrei Linde 89, 126, 131 골드슈미트 Richard Goldschmidt 314 링컨 Abraham Lincoln 334 공자孔子 37, 166 릴케 Rainer Maria Rilke 334 괴델 Kurt Gödel 168, 169 마굴리스 Lynn Margulis 269 괴테 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 149, 196 마그누스 Saint Albertus Magnus 191 구드 Irving John Good 175, 176, 259, 310, 311, 319 마이어스타인 F. Walter Meyerstein 125 구스 Alan Guth 103 마하 Ernst Mach 40, 43-45, 48, 98 굴드 Stephen Jay Gould 195, 272 말룽키아풋따 Malunkyaputta 161 궉 Sun Kwok 218 맥케이 Christopher McKay 197, 247 글라우콘 Glaucon 15 맥켈러 Andrew McKellar 76 노자老子 154, 166 멈포드 Lewis Mumford 152 뉴턴 Isaac Newton 32-36, 40, 41, 46, 47, 59, 60, 84, 93, 메트로도루스 Metrodorus of Chios 190 111, 112, 155, 181 멘델레프 Dmitri Mendeleev 200 니체 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche 321 모노 Jacques Monod 195 다가마 Vasco da Gama 285 모라벡 Hans Moravec 322, 323, 326 다윈 Charles Darwin 314 모리슨 P. Morrison 254 다이슨 Freeman Dyson 90, 169, 193, 262, 264, 269 모스테린 Jesús Mosterín 89 다이아몬드 Jared Diamond 283 뫼비우스 August Ferdinand Möbius 97 데모크리투스 Democritus 196 무어 Gordon Moore 292, 295, 296, 300, 303, 315 데우스 엑스 마키나 deus ex machina 175, 176, 319 밀러 Stanley Miller 229, 245, 249 데카르트 René Descartes 87, 137, 139 바렛 James Barrat 319 드 라파렌트 Valerie De Lapparent 73 바로우 John Barrow 88, 143, 286 드레이크 Frank Drake 256, 274 바이첸바움 Joseph Weizenbaum 153, 272, 313, 325 드윗 Bryce S. DeWitt 138, 139 박스터 Stephen Baxter 256 드지터 Willem de Sitter 24, 46, 49, 50, 166 박찬경 Chan-Gyung Park 118 드팔머 Anthony De Palma 283 버틀러 Samuel Butler 181, 185 디두브 Christian de Duve 195 베르그손 Henri Bergson 65 디즈니 M. J. Disney 127 베버 Max Weber 151, 301 딕 Steven J. Dick 254, 268, 319 베소 Michele Besso 44 딕스 Thomas Digges 69 베이트슨 Gregory Bateson 121 딥블루 Deep Blue 295, 296, 298 베이즈 Thomas Bayes 89 라베츠 Jerome Ravetz 308, 329 보스트롬 Nick Bostrom 306, 312 라이트 M. R. Wright 162, 167 보어 Niels Bohr 18 라이프니쯔 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 65 복스 George E. P. Box 21 란다우 Lev D. Landau 131 볼 Philip Ball 217 램 Stanisław Lem 280, 287 부뤼헬 Pieter Brueghel the Elder 322 러드니키 Konrad Rudnicki 20, 31, 145 부르노 Geordiano Bruno 68 레니어 Jaron Lanier 153, 186, 293, 294 붓다 Gautama Buddha 160-162, 164 레비-스트로스 Claude Lévi-Strauss 190, 333 브룩스 Rodney Brooks 326, 327 레싱 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing 134 브리송 Luc Brisson 125 로웰 Percival Lowell 236, 237 비트겐슈타인 Ludwig Wittgenstein 65, 280 루이스 C. S. Lewis 154 빈지 Vernor Vinge 311, 312 루카스 John Randolph Lukas 300 빌렌킨 Alexander Vilenkin 138 루크레티우스 Lucretius 58, 142 샤툭 Roger Shattuck 293 르메트르 Georges Lemaître 48, 49, 68, 237 성 알베르투스 마그누스 Saint Albertus Magnus 191 르베리에 Urbain Le Verrier 111, 112 세네카 Seneca 114

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세이건 Carl Sagan 90, 134, 149, 154, 156, 192, 199, 이세돌 Sedol Lee 298 238, 262, 275, 277, 288, 303 이카로스 Icarus 322 셀리그만 Martin E. P. Seligman 158 자로子路, 仲由, Zhong You 166 셸링 Thomas Schelling 328 정화鄭和, Zheng He 285 소로 Henry David Thoreau 14, 292 제우스 Zeus 325 소크라테스 Socrates 15, 37, 162, 163, 166, 182, 183 제임스 William James 110, 147 쇼 George Bernard Shaw 182 제퍼스 Robinson Jeffers 331 슈바르쯔쉴드 Karl Schwarzschild 44 조이 Bill Joy 176, 291, 316, 324 스타로빈스키 A. A. Starobinsky 149 지오바넬리 F. Giovannelli 272 스튜어트 Potter Stewart 202 진즈 James Jeans 167 슬라이퍼 Vesto Slipher 49, 53, 237 창 Ted Chiang 259 슬로언 Alfred P. Sloan 117 챔버레인 Thomas Chamberlain 129 시아마 Denis Sciama 115 처칠 Winston Churchill 282 심슨 George Gaylord Simpson 195 치올코프스키 Konstantin Tsiolkovsky 262 아니시모프 Michael Anissimov 311 카 B. J. Carr 109 아담스 Walter S. Adams 76 카스파로프 Garry Kasparov 295, 296 아도르노 Theodor W. Adorno 152 카우프만 Stuart A. Kauffman 222 아리스토텔레스 Aristotle 35, 41, 141, 167, 168 카이퍼 Gerard P. Kuiper 237 아마라 Roy Amara 305 카다쉐프 Nikolai Kardashev 253 아우구스티누스 Saint Augustine 142, 171 카시러 Ernst Cassirer 152 아이슬리 Loren Eiseley 217 카터 Brandon Carter 87 아인슈타인 Albert Einstein 17, 22-25, 28, 29, 32-40, 42- 카플란 S. A. Kaplan 276 52, 54, 59, 60, 69, 70, 80, 82, 84, 88, 93-95, 칵진스키 Theodore Kaczynski 291 98, 105, 111, 112, 120, 123, 134, 146, 147, 칸토르 Georg Cantor 169, 170 165 칸트 Immanuel Kant 14, 141, 191 아타왈파 Atahualpa 284 칼더 Alexander Calder 13, 14 안나스 George Annas 307 칼라일 Thomas Carlyle 149, 196 알파고 AlphaGo 298, 299 커즈와일 Ray Kurzweil 292, 302, 303, 312, 313, 326, 알퍼 Ralph A. Alpher 75, 85, 145 327 앤드류스 Lori Andrews 307 케네디 John F. Kennedy 267, 329 에딩턴 Arthur Stanley Eddington 49 케롤 Lewis Carroll 153 에머슨 Ralph Waldo Emerson 15, 54, 74, 78, 153, 338 케플러 Johannes Kepler 66, 88 에오스 Eos 325 켈빈 Calvin 273, 333 엘리스 George F. R. Ellis 26, 27, 55, 115, 118, 129, 130 코르테스 Hernán Cortés 281 엘리엇 T. S. Elliot 149, 324 코코니 G. Cocconi 254 오닐 Gerard K. O'Neill 264 코페르니쿠스 Nicolaus Copernicus 68, 123 오웰 George Orwell 303 콜럼버스 Christopher Columbus 282, 284, 330 오컴의 윌리엄 William of Occam 21 쿤 Thomas Kuhn 59, 61, 73, 108, 113 오파린 Alexander Oparin 201, 222, 229 큐브릭 Stanley Kubrick 156, 239, 281, 304, 311 올버스 Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers 66 크리거 David Krieger 329 옴 Ed Ohm 76 크세노폰 Xenophone 162, 182 옹 Walter J. Ong 180 클라크 Arthur C. Clarke 263 와인버그 Steven Weinberg 88, 151 클레인 Felix Klein 97 왈드 George Wald 90, 276 클린턴 Bill Clinton 193 왓슨 Watson 297, 298, 300, 303 메로도토스 Metrodorus of Chios 190 우즈 Carl Richard Woese 207 타르코프스키 Andrei Tarkovsky 280 유클리드 Euclid 82, 82, 93-97 탱무滕牧, Teng Mu 191 윌슨 Robert Wilson 61, 75, 76 토레티 Roberto Torretti 14 웨터슨 Bill Watterson 273 튜링 Alan Turing 299, 300 웰스 Herbert George Wells 279, 282, 317 트로츠키 Leon Trotsky 334 융 Carl Gustav Jung 154, 158, 196, 288, 331 티어니 John Tierney 330 이사시 Rosario Isasi 307 49

티플러 Frank Tipler 88, 286 티토누스 Tithonus 325 파스칼 Braise Pascal 136, 137, 139, 150, 325, 335 파스퇴르 Louis Pasteur 61 파이어아벤드 Paul Feyerabend 23 페르미 Enrico Fermi 255, 259 펜로즈 Roger Penrose 89 펜지아스 Arno Penzias 61, 75, 76 포바 Radu Popa 253 포우 Edgar Allan Poe 67, 68 포퍼 Karl Popper 20, 21, 27 폰 노이만 John von Neumann 19, 301, 313 폰 카르만 Theodore VonKármán 179 푸앵카레 Henri Poincaré 69 푸코 Michel Foucault 331 풀러 Buckminster Fuller 339 프로이트 Sigmund Freud 123 프리드만 Alexander Friedmann 45-49, 81, 83, 84, 99 프로스트 Robert Frost 148 프루스트 Marcel Proust 136 프톨레미 Claudius Ptolemaeus 111 플라톤 Plato 7, 15, 17, 122, 222 플랑크 Max Planck 34 피블스 P. J. E. Peebles 145 피사로 Francisco Pizarro 281 핀니 Ben Finney 265 하이네 Heinrich Heine 166 하이데거 Martin Heidegger 65 한슨 Robin Hanson 259, 306 할 9000HAL9000 304, 311 할데인 J. B. S. Haldane 149, 288, 289 해리슨 Edward Harrison 67, 68, 88 허만 Robert Herman 75, 85, 145 허쉘 William Herschel 111 허블 Edwin Hubble 26, 48,49, 53, 54, 56, 68, 237 호건 John Horgan 109, 131, 132 호킹 Stephen Hawking 19, 65, 115, 122, 131, 135-140, 146, 155, 177, 286 홉스 Hobbes 273, 333 화이트헤드 Alfred North Whitehead 14, 21, 61, 115, 129, 158, 168, 182, 222, 223, 272, 309 휘트만 Walt Whitman 274 휠러 John Archibald Wheeler 131, 138, 139 흄 David Hume 43 힉스Peter Higgs 39, 194

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