When discussing the Fermi Paradox one of the major themes within it is the idea of a great
filter, or something that prevents life from becoming a spacefaring civilization spanning
the galaxy.
Some kind of stumbling block that no one makes it past.
There are many potential great filters, some in the past, some in the future and it remains
uncertain if we, or anyone else made it past them or will get past them other than by sheer
luck.
But in our case, we already flirt with eventual extinction with our activities on this planet.
While nature has a few ways to cause our extinction, there actually aren’t that many that we
currently are aware of.
Asteroids and comets, the brightening sun, being located too close to a gamma ray burst,
and a few others but the list is rather short.
But as to causing our own extinction, there are some that are known and some that are
unknown.
The known ones are in actual fact well known, nuclear war and so on have that potential,
though not necessarily.
It’s ambiguous, we may be able to survive our challenges.
But it’s the ones that lay in our future and may be totally unforeseen that are particularly
scary.
It’s no secret that we often have to blindly learn a lesson before we know something is
bad for us.
This extends throughout human history, someone always has to be first.
Sure, the first person to try a cucumber found deliciousness, but the first person that died
from ingesting atropa belladonna discovered a deadly poison, yet that would someday become
the medication atropine which oddly is used to counteract some types of poisoning.
None of that could have been predicted by the original discoverers of the plant.
That type of thing still happens.
No one thought fossil fuels would cause atmospheric problems when we started using them.
Same with air conditioners, freon and ozone holes.
So it seems likely that some of the technologies we are pursuing today may have ends that are
completely unforeseen.
No technology we are currently pursuing seems more likely to have such pitfalls as artificial
intelligence and machine learning.
These are not a big deal right now and are proving quite useful, but there may come a
time where they become increasingly capable and complex leading to general artificial
intelligence, which is in essence machine intelligent life.
These are all scenarios we are all well versed in, both from science fiction and indeed science
and engineering.
We know that AI could be potentially dangerous, many stories have been written and many scenarios
envisioned including my own book Supermind.
It could be our apocalypse, or our greatest achievement.
But in any case, it will change our paradigms in how we view existence and life.
We’ve done this before with nuclear energy, the internet and so on.
Speculation is good here, because that's how we know to prepare for the risks should we
get close to making them reality.
But there are also events, sometimes called black swan events, where something comes along
that wasn’t predicted by the futurists, or anyone for that matter, and perhaps no
one quite realized how culturally relevant they would be to the world at large.
The cell phone is an example of this.
I remember when they didn’t exist, and the very first incarnations of them were huge
bulky packs you kept in your car in the 1980’s if you could justify the cost and the pitfalls
of using them.
Then we got flip phones, which were sort of a realization of Captain Kirk’s communicator.
But that was still a recognizable phone.
Oddly, the one thing I did not see William Shatner do when he went to space recently
on a blue origins launch was open up a flip phone and dial home.
At least though in the very short time he had in space, there is something oddly satisfying
to a lifelong star trek fan such as myself to think that William Shatner currently holds
the record for the oldest person ever to go to space.
But look at where cellphones went from after the flip phones.
They’re better than Star Trek’s communicators or tricorders.
They became full on computers and data access terminals far and beyond the flip phone era.
For many of us, cellphones are our computers and access to the internet.
And while that was all predicted to various degrees, it’s hard to have predicted how
integrated they would become to our lives.
Even me, at 46 years old.
While I often yell at my cellphone to get off my lawn when a message comes through,
I invariably read the message.
I am addicted to my phone, as most of us are.
It is a prosthetic brain.
But therein is the spooky question.
Can a technology come along, perhaps intended for another purpose entirely, that changes
everything?
The answer is yes, even today.
You can think about things like direct brain to computer interfaces above and beyond something
like virtual reality, but that’s seeing the flip phone without predicting the smart
phone.
How that actually manifests as a technology remains to be seen, but it does get into some
hypothetically spooky regions.
A direct brain to computer interface would have immense utility in things like dealing
with medical problems and disabilities.
From a medical perspective, it’s well known that this could be of great benefit.
But as with anything, technologies can grow beyond their original intent and find uses
in other areas, including entertainment.
So a brain to computer interface might be an attractive option to some to get the very
most realistic gaming experience they can , even to the point of consciously living
within the experience and shutting out the real world as is practical.
Don’t let yourself get eaten by a real bear while happily communing with nature in your
virtual reality.
This leads to scenarios that I honestly don’t think the average person is going to go for.
We live in a world of hacking and cyber security and putting the brain in that direct loop
opens up beyond orwellian scenarios of changing people’s thoughts, hacking their minds,
and altering their perceptions and how they think.
Losing control of brain to computer interfaces is probably even worse than the idea of losing
control of a generalized AI and I don’t really think people would take that step en
masse.
Some will for sure, there’s always someone that will climb mount everest and then go
to mars, and someone that will get wild cosmetic implants and body mods, and so on.
But most don’t.
But at the same time, we’re not that far along.
Even a cellphone, if you were to go back a century and a half and hand a cellphone to
Herman Melville, he might not understand how it works, but he could read the words on the
screen.
If he can’t tell you what it is, he could tell you what it is not, and might say that
cellphone is not a whale.
But all of these layers of technology that we’re adding to society take us further
from nature.
What do you feel when your electricity or internet gets interrupted?
Frustrated is the usual answer.
Did you feel the same when you were a kid?
I didn't, we didn’t have the internet, and if the electric went down we lit candles.
Deprive me of the internet today however, or electricity as sometimes happens, and my
modern self is instantly bored and lost.
And therein is the problem with advancing technology.
The further you move forward, the less of a connection you have with how things were
in the past.
Comparatively few in the developed world still know how to practice subsistence agriculture,
knowledge that was once crucial to humanity.
This disappears more and more as we industrialize agriculture.
But if that fails, could that be a great filter?
Is the loss of knowledge on how to survive under the natural conditions of your planet
a game changer?
It may well be, even to the point of extinction.
Now push all of this forward, if we significantly continue to alter the planet to suit our needs,
as in full on continued terraforming, does that open up a civilization to even more risks
of extinction?
Take Mars, we would need to do a great many things to make it habitable for humans.
All of those things would be artificial, and thus if any link in the chain fails then the
natural harshness of Mars comes back in full force.
Are the pitfalls of advanced technology themselves a great filter?
Or how about isolation after a massive disaster like an impact event.
What effects does that have?
Say the asteroid hits, most people are wiped out, but the core groups of humans have no
way to contact each other.
In the past, there were things like HAM radio, where coordination could be done long distance.
But that’s disappearing, and we increasingly just talk to each other using the internet,
which isn’t likely to survive such a calamity.
Could small groups of isolated humans be driven to extinction by that isolation?
That may well be the case.
But there’s also even spookier unknowns.
We don’t have a complete understanding of physics.
We know parts of the puzzle very well, but there remains areas where there are unknowns.
For example how many dimensions does the universe have?
We have no idea, and some theories such as the variants of string theory suggest ten
dimensions of space and one dimension of time.
Without knowing anything about these dimensions, it’s difficult say what, if anything, we
could use them for.
There may even be unknown physics that to probe you could inadvertently tap into some
property of nature that is utterly deadly to your planet.
In fact, there is one such fate that’s even worse that may be possible.
It’s the idea of the universe itself tunnelling to a lower energy state, if it’s not already
there.
If you could somehow set that off, you could inadvertently end the universe and all civilizations
within it.
Clearly if this were possible it hasn’t happened yet or we wouldn’t be here, but
image the civilization at ground zero setting off the reaction that then propagates at the
speed of light and no one sees it coming until it arrives, and the very matter you’re made
out of dissolves and the laws of physics as we know them are replaced with altered laws
that may not even allow matter to exist.
Who knows what other extinction level pitfalls await us in the areas of science we do not
yet know.
Call it, the universal trap.
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently addressing the conspiracy
theories that I am either an artificial intelligence and ANNA is real, or the other that I am an
alien and just simply forgot.
It can’t be both, but I will say that I exist, but only because the Event Horizon
opposum is staring at me keeping my quantum wave function collapsed and it’s very tiresome,
and on that note, there’s a link below to a blast from the past where my wavefunction
was similarly collapsed by Fraser Cain in a debate about the Fermi Paradox a few years
back.
You may have heard the debate on Event Horizon or Fraser’s podcast, but what you might
not know is that there is a video version of it over on skylias’ channel.
Link below and be sure to check out my books at your favorite online book retailer and
subscribe to my channels for regular, in-depth explorations into the interesting, weird and
unknown aspects of this amazing universe in which we live.