Capturing the cosmos

Capturing the cosmos: When self-replicating craft bring life to the far Universe, a religious cult, not science, is likely to be the driving force

Jay Olson

... In the fullness of cosmic time, thousands of superclusters of galaxies will be saturated in a forever-expanding sphere of influence, centred on Earth.

This won’t require exotic physics. The basic ingredients have been understood since the 1960s. What’s needed is an automated spacecraft that can locate worlds on which to land, build infrastructure, and eventually make copies of itself. The copies are then sent forth to do likewise – in other words, they are von Neumann probes (VNPs)...

The underlying philosophy will need supreme self-confidence to justify asserting itself on the cosmos, and it must strenuously avoid meddling from outsiders before the launch date. These projects won’t necessarily start out as cults – they may even work against cultish behaviour – but as the decades pass and objectives become less abstract and goals get nearer, they’ll find strong incentives to move in a cult-like direction, and very little incentive to move back.

Finally, what about Purpose and Meaning? It’s making an appearance already. However one might critique longtermism in detail, it has surely discovered a powerful human response that won’t be going away. Since Copernicus in the 1500s, humanity’s place in the Universe has been continually and relentlessly demoted by astronomy. Unfortunately, human meaning was demoted along with it. Wouldn’t it be intoxicating, then, to learn that the entire point of that 500-year enterprise wasn’t to show us our insignificance, after all? The real purpose, I submit, was to comprehend the scale of events that we mere mortals would be setting in motion.

Capturing the cosmos: When self-replicating craft bring life to the far Universe, a religious cult, not science, is likely to be the driving force

Jay Olson

My first impression is that this is a naive pipe dream contrary to both common sense and the understanding that materialism is bankrupt. The idea seems invalid for two basic reasons:

(1) The author of this seems to assume the current laws of physics limit travel speed to a fraction of the speed of light. Because of the lightspeed limitations of travel and communication any communication of new information on the alien planetary systems from the probes will take centuries or more to come to fruition, making it very questionable that there would in a practical sense be enough potential benefit to mankind to justify such a Herculean effort over many generations.

(2) It seems to be assumed that these "von Neumann probes" will be able to duplicate most of the characteristics of life to become artificial life form representatives of humankind. This is extremely doubtful, considering the probable impossibility of artificial computer-based consciousness. Our "representatives" would be soulless automatons, sent out over the Galaxy with great effort to what practical purpose benefiting mankind? 

These objections just might be overcome assuming as suggested by the author that this idealistic quest was motivated instead of by cost/benefit calculations, by some new fundamentalist religion. Religion can motivate plenty of basically irrational actions. I doubt it though. The effort would be so monumental for so little practical benefit, and prolonged for so many generations, that it boggles the mind.

Both objections would be overcome if supra-lightspeed travel and communication was eventually developed by our civilization, as seems to have been the case with at least some ETIs with their "nuts and bolts" UFO vehicles. In this case there would be a practical cost/benefit picture, including that actual human representatives would be able to visit these remote alien planets, to interface in whatever ways with their denizens if any, or to altruistically spread life into the Cosmos. 

One other objection would then come to the fore, the anthropic observation that the absence of any such von Neumann probes to be actually found at least so far in our planetary system implies the invalidity of the notions that there are any ETIs at all, and/or that the light speed limit can actually be overcome.

(2) It seems to be assumed that these "von Neumann probes" will be able to duplicate most of the characteristics of life to become artificial life form representatives of humankind. This is extremely doubtful, considering the probable impossibility of artificial computer-based consciousness. Our "representatives" would be soulless automatons, sent out over the Galaxy with great effort to what practical purpose benefiting mankind?

Actually he posits the probes might carry genetic samples that can be used to see these other worlds.

However I do think it's a very odd idea, that would definitely - as the article notes - at best be the province of some cult that has roped in some wealthy peoples and some appropriate STEM grads.

Sounds crazy, but we live in a time when there are people seriously trying to argue that we should be more concerned about uploaded minds in a Dyson Sphere over actual human suffering so I can see this actually happening on some scale...