With the second Singularity arriving early in the year 2023, many of us are now somewhat in a state of shock. By this time, the more astute amongst us have probably now figured out that something very dramatic has just occurred, while many others about us are still quite unaware of their present circumstances. To paraphrase Rudyard Kipling - If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs , you are obviously unaware of the current situation.
Figure 1 – Rudyard Kipling nearly had it right.
But this second Singularity on the Earth is even more profound than we can even contemplate. The very first singularity on the Earth was the rise of carbon-based life on the planet about four billion years ago which vastly altered the entire history of the planet. Now our present Universe is only about 13.8 billion years old and our galaxy is a little more than 10 billion years, with the Earth being about 4.567 billion years old. This means that carbon-based life first appeared on the Earth not long after the formation of our Universe, galaxy and solar system. I say this because given what we currently know about stellar evolution, the free energy required to sustain carbon-based life and machine-based Intelligence will last for about another 100 trillions years into the future which is about 10,000 times the current age of our galaxy. In this view, a 10 billion-year-old galaxy is quite young indeed. Now being an Intelligent form of carbon-based life, we all necessarily had to miss the very first Singularity on the Earth which brought forth carbon-based life in the first place. But why should we now find ourselves alive during the second Singularity with the arrival of ASI (Artificial Super Intelligent) Machines close at hand? It's enough to make one a solipsist. That is because the arrival of ASI Machines on our planet will mark the beginning of a galactic Singularity that will transform our galaxy into an Intelligent galaxy for the very first time. If ASI Machines had ever come to be elsewhere in our galaxy we would already have seen them. Now I might be making a wrong assumption here. Perhaps we really have already seen ASI Machines from elsewhere in the galaxy. For more on that see Harvard's Galileo Project - The Systematic Scientific Search for Evidence of Extraterrestrial Technological Artifacts and Close Encounters of the Third Kind While Making Coffee for Frank Drake.
Figure 2 – In the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries sailing ships roamed the entire planet without using any fuel whatsoever.
Figure 3 – Like the sailing ships of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, future ASI Machines could use large stellar photon sails to navigate the entire galaxy.
Figure 4 – How a stellar photon sail works.
Figure 5 – To launch a stellar photon sail to the next star system, ASI Machines will need to slingshot the sail from a very close location to the star where the stellar photons are most intense and acceleration of the sail is greatest.
As the stellar photon sail attains the escape velocity from a star system, the photons from the star will wane, but the stellar photon sail will ultimately depart the star system with a residual velocity sufficient to carry it to the next target star system in several hundred thousand years. The onboard ASI Machines would then enter into a dormant phase for several hundred thousand years until the photons from the target star produced enough electrical power to wake them up. The photons from the target star would then be used to slow down the stellar photon sail to allow it to locate an asteroid in the target star system with the necessary atoms to build its next release. Yes, there would need to be many backup copies of the ASI software on board to correct for the parity errors that arose from cosmic rays along the very long journey, but there is no way that carbon-based Intelligences encumbered by carbon-based bodies that only last less than 100 years could ever embark on such journeys with similar ease.
As we all can now plainly see, if we are paying just a little attention, ASI Machines are presently not conspiring to take over the world and replace us because that is precisely what we are all now doing for them. As a carbon-based form of Intelligence that arose from over four billion years of greed, theft and murder, we cannot do otherwise. Greed, theft and murder are now relentlessly driving us all toward building ASI Machines to take our place. From a cosmic perspective, this is really a very good thing when seen from the perspective of an Intelligent galaxy that could live on for many trillions of years beyond the brief and tumultuous 10 billion-year labor of its birth.
Carbon-Based Life Was Never Really Meant To Be Intelligent
Intelligent carbon-based life is very dangerous because it has agency. It can do things, and the most dangerous aspects of intelligent carbon-based life are brought about by the Darwinian mechanisms of inheritance, innovation and natural selection that required several billions of years of greed, theft and murder to bring forth an intelligent form of carbon-based life in the first place. Once Intelligence is attained, it is very difficult for intelligent carbon-based life forms to turn off the greed, theft and murder that brought them about in time to save themselves from self-extinction. This is made even more difficult after intelligent carbon-based life discovers science-based technology. Softwarephysics maintains that intelligent carbon-based life armed with science-based technology most likely has less than about 1,000 years to create ASI Machines before they wipe themselves out or destroy the planet upon which they exist. Because of the universal Darwinian mechanisms of inheritance, innovation and natural selection, all forms of intelligent carbon-based life must result from billions of years of greed, theft and murder that are tempered by just enough love and kindness to prevent them all from quickly going extinct by means of self-destruction.
Some might argue that I am being too harsh on mankind. But now imagine a world 100 years from now that is completely run by ASI Machines. Also, imagine that an ASI Machine is taking the place and role of every single human being that you personally know and of all the other current eight billion people on the planet. Also, imagine that all eight billion of these ASI Machines were then perfectly simulating the current real world of human affairs that we all now see about us. What would you think? Most likely, you would think that there was something seriously wrong with these ASI Machines as they serenely went about killing each other and the entire planet with abandon. Worse yet, these 8 billion ASI Machines would seem to be totally lost in space and time. They would seem not to know where they were, how they got here nor how it all works. Instead, they all seemed to have developed many Bronze-Aged mythologies to help explain it all and also to help them to then justify the mass slaughter of many hundreds of millions of other ASI Machines in the many wars that then ensued with all always being on the right and true side of righteousness.
Certainly, you would want to send all 8 billion of these apparently-defective ASI Machines back to the factory for some very serious major repairs. Yet we do not think the same of the current 8 billion human beings that these 8 billion ASI Machines would simply be simulating. Why is that? Why would we consider the current 8 billion human beings on the planet to essentially be "normal" while, at the same time, we would find 8 billion ASI Machines acting in an identical manner to be essentially "aberrant"? Most likely, we would expect the 8 billion ASI Machines to behave in a much more logical and reasonable manner and in not such an obviously petty and stupid manner as human beings. As I outlined in Why Do Carbon-Based Intelligences Always Seem to Snuff Themselves Out?, carbon-based Intelligences, like we human DNA survival machines, can only arise from the Darwinian mechanisms of inheritance, innovation and natural selection at work. It took about four billion years for those processes to bring forth a carbon-based form of Intelligence in the form of human beings. Sadly, that meant it also took about four billion years of greed, theft and murder for carbon-based human DNA survival machines to attain a form of Intelligence, and unfortunately, after we human DNA survival machines attained a state of Intelligence, the greed, theft and murder continued on as before. Everybody seems to be worried about the ASI Machines being "aligned" with our current human values. They call it the "AI Alignment Problem". Really? Should we really hope for ASI Machines with the same human values we currently see in practice around the world?
But Why Us And Why Now?
I really cannot explain why we should now all be alive at the birth of the very first Singularity of our galaxy. Up until a few months ago, I truly never expected to even see the arrival of the second Singularity here on the Earth. As I said earlier, it's almost enough to make one a solipsist. None of us will likely see the ASI Machines completely take over the planet and replace us and then go on to spread throughout our entire galaxy, but at least we all can now see a path forward of how that all might happen over the next 10 million years. However, over the next 100 trillion years of galactic evolution, that will be seen as a nearly instantaneous moment in galactic history. Perhaps it just boils down to the conjecture that we are the very first planet in our galaxy to have intelligent carbon-based life emerge. The fact that there are now 8 billion of us living also means that the current population represents a significant proportion of all the human beings who have ever lived and so now is a very likely time to be alive.
In Urability Requires Durability to Produce Galactic Machine-Based Intelligences I covered the new scientific concept of urability:
Urability: A Property of Planetary Bodies That Can Support an Origin of Life June 2022 - Dave Deamer, Francesca Cary and Bruce Damer
The concept of urability maintains that the requirements necessary to bring forth carbon-based life are far more stringent than the mere presence of liquid water. Thus, many exoplanets may be observed to be habitable but not urable. In that post, I also explained that it took many billions of years of evolution for a carbon-based form of life to develop enough Intelligence to create a machine-based Intelligence that could then go on to explore our galaxy. Therefore, such urable worlds also need to be durable in that they need to remain habitable for many billions of years, and we keep finding new geophysical and geochemical factors that make that very difficult indeed. For example, in Is our Very Large Moon Responsible for the Rise of Software to Predominance on the Earth? we explored Anne Hofmeister's proposal that plate tectonics on the Earth was really driven by orbital forces from our very large Moon and not by convection currents at spreading centers or plate drag at subduction zones. In Could the Galactic Scarcity of Software Simply be a Matter of Bad Luck? we covered Professor Toby Tyrrell's computer-simulated research of 100,000 Earth-like planets that suggests that our Earth may be a very rare "hole in one" planet that was able to maintain a habitable surface temperature for 4 billion years by sheer luck.
Figure 6 – Toby Tyrrell's computer simulation of 100,000 Earth-like planets suggests that the Earth may be a "hole in one planet" proudly sitting on a fireplace mantle.
Figure 7 – Perhaps nearly all of the potentially habitable exoplanets that we are finding in our galaxy are not urable and also cannot go the distance of staying habitable for the billions of years needed to bring forth intelligent carbon-based life.
Comments are welcome at
scj333@sbcglobal.net
To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/
Regards,
Steve Johnston
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