- About the Author
- Review by Sameer Rahim (U.K. Telegraph)
- Excerpt: Chapter 1; Is Anybody Out There? (NYTimes)
- Audio: Paul Davies & John Lennox on Unbelievable radio show; "Are We Alone in the Universe?"
- "Aliens? Be not afraid" by Joseph Wood (The Catholic Thing)
- "Alien Ideas Christianity and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life" by Benjamin D. Wiker (Catholic Education Resource Center)
- Wiki SETI page. - The Drake Equation.
- The Fermi Paradox. -The Great Filter.
"We are so wedded to the human concept of a machine as, for example, chunks of metal with buttons and knobs, or as information being processed (as in software), that we find it hard to conceptualize technology involving levels of manipulation above these. What do I mean by this? A conventional machine such as a car moves matter around in an organized way. Information technology on the other hand moves information around in an organized way. For example, Photoshop on my computer can rotate an image. When that happens, matter moves too, namely electrons in the computer's circuitry, but we wouldn't recognize the technology in action by observing the electrons - we see it via the complete image.
One way to think about information is as a 'higher level' concept than matter. The higher level builds on, but transcends the lower level. Thus software - an abstract concept - invariably requires physical hardware to support it: swirling bits of information inside a computer, or sense data in the brain, need switches or neurons. Now, I ask, are these two conceptual levels - matter and information - all there is? Five hundred years ago the very concept of a device manipulating information or software, would have been incomprehensible. Might there be a still higher level, as yet outside all human experience, that organizes information in the same way that information processing organizes electrons? If so, this 'third level' would never be manifest through observations made at the informational level, but that doesn't mean that it is non-existent, and we need to be open to the possibility that alien technology may operate at the third level, or maybe the fourth, fifth...levels.
To think creatively on this topic, we must even be wary of notions like 'control' and 'manipulation' and 'design' , for these are also human categories that may turn out to be short- lived. The arbitrary separation of objects into 'natural' and 'artificial' is something that we take for granted, but as I shall argue in the next chapter, it is a purely cultural distinction. Technology is, in the broadest sense, mind or intelligence or purpose blending with nature. Importantly, technological devices do not subjugate nature; the devices still obey the laws of physics. Technology harnesses the laws; it does not override them. So to say that a radio or a laser or an obelisk on the Moon is 'unnatural' doesn't mean it isn't part of nature. The best way I can think to express it is to say that technology is nature-plus. (Art is also nature-plus.) The value that is added by technology is a very specific amalgam of constraint and liberation, most obviously associated with purposeful goals. A washing machine can't bake bread, but it can do what unmodified nature can't, namely, wash, rinse, and spin-dry clothes, which is what it is designed to do. A computer can't fly, but it can prove the four-colour theorem, which is not on Mother Nature's agenda, anywhere, as far as I know. However - and this is the key point I want to make - technology of that sort - our sort - may be only one way that nature becomes nature-plus. And we may utterly fail to recognize or appreciate the significance of a more sophisticated form of nature-plus, even if it were staring us in the face." (p.144)
IS SCIENCE INEVITABLE?
Suppose we grant that high intelligence is in fact common in the universe. The next question of interest to SETI researchers is what proportion of those intelligent species proceeds to discover science, invent high technology, and engage in long-range communication. It is certainly fashionable, partly for reasons of political correctness, to assert that, here on Earth, any human society would be bound to discover science and technology in the fullness of time. To say otherwise seems to be implying the superiority of European civilization, where science as we know it began, and this is regarded by some people as racist and chauvinistic. Personally, I have always been skeptical of the claim that 'science is inevitable'. The problem is that science works so well, and is so much a part of everyday life, that people tend to take it for granted. The scientific method, taught (mostly badly) to every school student, comes across as a thoroughly obvious procedure: experiment, observation, theory - what could be a more natural way to find out how the world works?
The 'obvious' view to science is seen to rest on flimsy foundations when placed in an historical context, however. Science proper emerged in Renaissance Europe under the twin influences of Greek philosophy and monotheistic religion. The Greek philosophers taught that humans could come to understand the world by the exercise of reason, which achieved its most disciplined form in the rules of logic and the mathematical theorems that followed therefrom. They asserted that the world wasn't arbitrary or absurd, but rational and intelligible, even if confusing and complicated.However, Greek philosophy never spawned what today we would understand by the scientific method, in which nature is 'interrogated' via experiment and observation, because of the Greek philosophers' touching belief that the answers could be deduced by pure reason alone. The Greeks' remarkable advances in reason and mathematics were nurtured for centuries during the European dark ages by Islamic scholars, without whom it is very doubtful that science and mathematics would have taken root in European culture in medieval times. An echo of the Islamic phase survives in modern terms like algebra and algorithm, and in the names of familiar stars such as Sirius and Betelgeuse. In spite of the importance of the Islamic phase in the lead-up to science, for some reason (possibly political or social) Arab scholars did not go on to formulate mathematical laws of motion or carry out laboratory experiments in the modern sense of the term.
Meanwhile, monotheism increasingly shaped the Western world view during the formative stages of science. Judaism represented a decisive break with almost all contemporary cultures by positing an unfolding cosmic narrative based on linear time. According to the Judaic account, the universe was created by God at a definite moment in the past, and developed in a unidirectional series (creation, fall, trials and tribulations, Armageddon, salvation, judgment, redemption...). In other words, Judaism has a cosmic story to tell, of a divine plan revealed through historical sequence. This was in sharp contrast to the prevailing view that the world ids cyclic: the rotation of good times and bad times, the rise and fall of civilizations, the revolving wheel of fortune. Even today, the unidirectional linear-time world view of Western civilization rests uneasily with other cultural motifs, such as the dreaming of the Australian Aborigines or the cyclicity of Hindu and Buddhist cosmologies.
The concept of linear time, and a universe created by a rational being and ordered according to a set of immutable laws, was adopted by both Christianity and Islam, and was the dominant influence in Europe at the time of Galileo. The early scientists, who were deeply religious, regarded their work as uncovering God's plan for the universe, as revealed through hidden mathematical relationships. What we now call the laws of physics they saw as thoughts in the mind of God. Without belief is a single omnipotent rational lawgiver, it is unlikely that anyone would have assumed that nature is intelligible in a systematic quantifiable way, mirrored by eternal mathematical forms. The scientific method itself verged on being an occult practice at the time of Newton, and was conducted after the fashion of a secret society. Writing coded symbols on pieces of paper and subjecting matter to 'unnatural' experimentation in the sanctum of special laboratories is an arcane procedure by any standards. So science, though considered natural enough today, was little different from magic when it was first established.
Suppose an asteroid had hit Paris in 1300 and destroyed European culture. Would science ever have emerged on earth? I have never heard a convincing argument that it would. It is often remarked that in medieval times the Chinese were technologically far more advanced than the Europeans, which is true. So why did the Chinese not go on to become true scientists? Part of the reason is that the traditional Chinese culture was not steeped in the monotheistic notion of a transcendent lawmaker. Outside the monotheistic world, nature was perceived as ruled by the complex interplay of competing influences in the form of gods, agents, and concealed mystical tendencies. In medieval China, no clear distinction was drawn between moral laws and laws of nature. Human affairs were inextricably bound up with the cosmos, forming an indivisible unity. for the pagans of Europe and the Near east, who were in competition with Christianity and Islam at their formative stages, knowledge of the cosmos is to be gained through 'gnosis', a mystical communion with the creator, rather than through rational inquiry. Could gnosis eventually lead to science? I don't think so. Unless you expect there to be an intelligible order hidden in the process of nature - fixed and analyzable by mathematics - there would be no motivation to embark on the scientific enterprise in the first place.
Here we reach a key subtlety about the scientific method, which is the role that theory plays in physics. The power of theoretical physics stems from the recognition that there are deep interconnecting principles in nature. When Newton saw the falling apple, he didn't just see an apple fall; he perceived a set of equations linking the motion of the apple to the motion of the Moon. 'Theoretical physics' does not mean 'having conjectures about physics'. It means establishing an elaborate interlocking system of specific mathematical equations to capture aspects of physical reality that on casual inspection we would never guess are related, and then modeling those relationships quantitatively. No other science possesses this underpinning. There is no 'theoretical biology', let alone 'theoretical sociology' or 'theoretical psychology', in the physics sense of the word theory. There are ideas, conjectures, simple mathematical models, organizing principles, paradigms and so forth, but no true law-like mathematical theory (at least, not yet). The spectacular success of physical science derives from the fertile interplay of theory and experiment. Without minds prepared by the cultural antecedents of Greek philosophy and monotheism (or something similar) - and in particular the abstract notion of a system of hidden mathematical laws - science as we know it may never have emerged.
It is sometimes claimed that, even without a belief in a pervasive immutable law-like order in nature, any sufficiently long-lived society would stumble upon science eventually, simply from trial and error. After all, the Chinese discovered the compass without a clue about how the Earth's internal dynamo generates a magnetic field or how that field interacts with electrons in the compass. Perhaps, then, the use of increasingly sophisticated tools would sooner or later lead to nuclear power and spacecraft and radio communication. For technology, it is enough to know that, without knowing how. Well, obviously it's possible in principle to discover, step by step, that certain causes produce certain effects. The true power of science, however, is that it leads us to design novel contraptions based on understanding the principles governing them. With trial and error, one can perfect existing tools and devices, but without a sound theoretical basis, there is no reason to even go looking for most of the things that now dominate modern science. Why would one expect there to exist neutrinos or gravitational waves, for example, which almost all pass right through the Earth without having any measurable effect at all? Why look for dark matter or dark energy, which astronomers deduce from very careful observations using satellites and large telescopes, but which make sense only when suitably interpreted through layer upon layer of mathematical theory? Why build a particle accelerator unless you have had reason to suspect that hitherto unknown and invisible particles like W and Z had a good chance of being there? Of course, there is a finite probability that a race of sentient beings without science may, by pure accident fueled by curiosity, put together a radio telescope or a particle accelerator without the slightest idea of what they were doing or what the outcome would be , and have no actual understanding of what they found when they found it. Possible, yes, but the scenario is so ridiculous it cannot be taken seriously. It's as silly as saying that someone with no musical ability will one day accidentally write a symphony.
I concede there may be some deep, as yet undiscovered, principle of social organization that says, roughly speaking, given a race of curious beings (and curiosity is certainly a biological trait), then over time science is inevitable. It might be the case that human history has been channeled down the path of enlightenment and discovery by the unseen hand of such unknown laws of complexity and organization. ...On the face of it, however, there seem to have been many contingent features - political, religious, economic, and social - that went into the development of the modern scientific method. It could be that history is simply a series of random and unforeseeable accidents, one of them being the felicitous conjunction of Greek philosophy and monotheism in medieval Europe. If we do discover an alien civilization that found science, it would be strong evidence that there are indeed universal laws of social and intellectual organization, just as there are universal laws of physics. But without good reason to believe in such laws, the fashionable claim that 'science is inevitable' strikes me as totally without foundation. (p.72-76)
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