There’s a popular idea in nerd circles that at some point there will be a technological singularity. This means that rates of technological and scientific progress are accelerating, so that if it were possible to plot a graph of such change it would be exponential and eventually become almost vertical. This is the singularity. In graphical form, it looks like this:
This is a bit abstract, so it can be illustrated with a familiar example. From the start of the 1960s CE, the number of transistors which could be fitted in a given area doubled about once every two years. This manifested in various ways. It meant that every couple of years, the RAM available on a computer of, say £1000, doubled, the speed at which they worked doubled and so on. This is called Moore’s Law, and it might no longer apply. The problem with being able to tell whether it does or not arises from the fact that it isn’t in the interests of making a profit to say it has, and in fact commercial interests may always have driven it. There are other areas where acceleration of this kind can be seen, such as the sequencing of DNA. The human genome project was described as like the Apollo missions when it started in 1990. It finished in 2005, but today it can be done in a few weeks for a couple of hundred quid or less, hence 23andme and the others. This could be expected across the board, and different areas of science and technology help each other.
The usual scenario envisaged where this happens is via artificial intelligence, and looking at the likes of Midjourney and ChatGPT, one could be forgiven for thinking it’s about to happen, but Ray Kurzweil first published his book predicting the singularity in 1999. Predictions were made of something similar before that. Murray Leinster’s 1946 story ‘A Logic Named Joe’ told of a point when computers on the internet would achieve sapience and be able to solve any problem, including giving sex advice to small children, planning perfect murders and curing drunkenness instantly (one of these things is not like the other but I’m in a hurry) due to the information available to them online. This story is yet another example, incidentally, of how the internet is one of the least surprising things ever to happen. In 1946, the most advanced computers were – well you know how the routine goes. Massive great room-sized devices less powerful than a digital watch, or whatever.
But the future is not like the past. That’s what makes it the future. That said, things have happened in the past which might be clues as to what will happen. At the moment, one assumption is often that because scientific and technological progress has accelerated steadily, it will continue to do so. There are even deep time-based views which see the current acceleration as a continuation of an acceleration of biological evolution over æons, and this does make some sense. Over most of Earth’s history, life consisted of single-celled organisms who appeared very soon after this planet formed and didn’t develop hard parts until 600 million years ago, almost nine-tenths of the way through this planet’s history, and when modern humans first appeared we spend hundreds of thousands of years not doing anything like cave-paintings and so forth until the last tenth or so of our own history, then there were the twenty-five millennia or more between that and the emergence of agriculture, the thousands of years between that and the Industrial Revolution and so on. However, much of this is very centred on the way we live now being the focus of progress, and it’s a platitude to say that that may not actually be anything to be proud of.
There is another suggestion that progress is slowing down. Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of another world less than six dozen years after the Wright brothers achieved the first powered flight. At the time, there was a plan to put people on Mars just over a decade later but the last time humans left Low Earth Orbit was now more than fifty years ago. Project that backwards another fifty-one years and it precedes the first trans-Atlantic flight. Just imagine that projected back forwards. It would mean no flights from Britain to Australia until at least the early 1970s, no communication satellites, no Skylab, no Shuttle. In that particular area at least, progress has ground to a halt. Admittedly, this is partly because of advances in automatic space probes, but it isn’t the only way in which progress has decelerated. For instance, by 1970 the developed world had motorways, good sewers, commercial air travel, mechanised farming, long-distance ‘phone calls and all sorts of other things, and these are seen as the features of modern life over fifty years later, and although there have been disruptive changes since, the difference between life in 1920 and 1970 here at the Western world was surely far bigger than that between 1970 and today in 2023.
That said, there are indeed still new disruptive technologies such as social media, smartphones, 3-D printing and video calls. Many of them, however, are either tightly focussed on ICT or rely on it in some way. Another relatively disruptive piece of tech which arose recently is outpainting, which takes a photograph or other image and imagines its surroundings. Applying that to the graph above would lead to a steepening curve and a singularity.
But what if it’s like this?
We aren’t precisely aware of most technological and scientific trends, although we arguably are in digital electronics. Hence even a subtle deviation from an exponential curve wouldn’t be easy to spot. This is an outpainting of the left half of this curve using the prompt “A curve on a line graph with axes”:
This starts to deviate from the actual curve at about 1 on the X axis. I haven’t made any assumptions which would suggest this in the prompt.
My curve without cropping was a sigmoid. Sigmoid means “S-shaped”, although it’s a bit peculiar because an actual sigma is often not S-shaped. It is, however, used to refer to the letter S rather than the Greek letter. I can recall from when I was eleven years old plotting the temperature rise of ice over a bunsen burner and found it to have this shape. It takes more heating to change ice to cold water than it does to heat cold water to hot and once again more heating to boil hot water than to heat warm water by the same number of degrees. It crops up as the logistic function, which expresses population growth. A few individuals in a closed habitat will initially exponentially increase their population, assuming the gene pool is large enough, but will eventually level out as resources are used up. This exact example may in fact be relevant to progress if that depends on people having ideas and being able to act upon them, because the world’s human population has expanded and education has increased, leading to more scientists and engineers and more people able to put their ideas into production. Now that population growth is decelerating, perhaps progress will as well. In particular, the availability of resources is relevant here as this is being artificially restricted to non-renewables, and failure to follow a plant-based diet also means to some extent that our resources are more limited than necessary strictly on the dietary front. There are many other examples. A game between two players is unlikely to have be won by a player in the first few moves, and if they’re losing they are less likely to turn that around in the last few. Likewise, a tumour is likely to grow exponentially until it’s killing the patient, at which point it will no longer have a hospitable environment to do so because the body keeping it alive is no longer able to function properly.
Another rather salient curve of this shape is the learning curve. It takes a long time to start to learn something, then there’s a smooth increase in skill and experience which levels off again as one completes the task. On the other hand, the more one learns about something, the more one realises there is to learn, so that looks more like an exponential curve. The question is whether there is a limit to human knowledge and ability in general. Are we learning and becoming more capable in a finite space of possible knowledge and skills or are we discovering new vistas all the time? On top of that, are we going to cease to be capable of understanding more or being able to do more after a certain point because of our own limitations? Can we overcome those limitations through what we learn, for instance with cognitive enhancing drugs or AI?
Actual technological product lines do mature in a sigmoid way. Pocket calculators, for example, still exist, presumably for use in exams. They took a long time to evolve from abaci and mechanical adding machines, but in the 1970s and 1980s they became increasingly sophisticated very quickly. Nowadays they’ve levelled off. Mobile ‘phones seem to be similar. Early on, they were brick-like devices which could only be used for voice calls, and it took a long time for them to emerge from that stage. Then there was a period between the early ’90s and the early ‘noughties, also known as a decade I suppose, where they made rapid progress. Once the smartphone became popular, this changed to incremental progress on such things as resolution, camera quality and battery life. Making them a different size would make them less user-friendly and some of the facilities, such as video calls, are not actually that popular. Resolution on any device is a case in point, because the theoretical useful limit might be reached when the pixels become smaller than the angular resolution of the eye, which is determined by cone cells in the retina. In fact it is a little further than that because of what’s known as the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem, which is that something has to be at least twice as good as the bandwidth to avoid undesirable artifacts, so actually a pixel has to be at least somewhat microscopic to work properly. This means that any increase in resolution beyond a certain point becomes mere hype, and also wasteful because it needs four times the storage to double the now visually perfect resolution.
Hence there really is a sigmoid function in the improvement of certain devices. Toothbrushes used to go through a cycle where they returned to their well-known “default” form as other things were tried and rejected. Presumably the other versions are “nice tries” or possibly ways to get people to buy expensive new-style trendy toothbrushes. Razor heads are a notorious example of this as they simply seem to involve adding another blade every few years, although there are now bidirectional razors which really do seem to be an improvement. There is conflict between the needs of capitalism and technological progress in certain directions. For instance, there is never going to be a time under capitalism when cars or mobile ‘phones are going to be able to reproduce themselves in some way, and durable products which continue to be useful because they’re not wearing out are not profitable. A couple of years ago, I got interested in a company which sold more sustainable ‘phones, so I went to their website and was asked if I already had a mobile. On answering “yes”, I was sent away again because the greenest thing to do in those circumstances is to hang on to the one you’ve got! This sounds like a terrible business model because the first thing they do, and try quite hard at it, is to turn away customers. I have no idea if they’re still in business or if they have another way of surviving and making a profit.
The bigger question is whether just as progress in specific areas of technology follows a sigmoid curve, technological, and scientific progress in general does. If it didn’t, it would be because radically new forms of science and technology come along to fill the gap left by the mature older theories and devices, or because there is tech which can simply keep improving drastically for centuries. Arthur C. Clarke once said that if a distinguished elderly scientist says something is impossible, they will be proven wrong very quickly. And this does happen. An example which sticks in my head is Lord Kelvin, who in his old age insisted that Earth couldn’t be more than a couple of hundred million years old because of how it would cool over that time, not realising that radioactivity continues to heat the planet from within. David Bellamy’s climate change denial might also be an example. The question arising in my mind as I write this is, have I just got old? Am I saying further progress is impossible just because that’s what old age makes me think? But I’m not that old. I’m four dozen and eight. And in spite of that possibility, or perhaps because of it, it still seems very much that just as there’s a limit on individual tech, there’s also a limit of a similar kind on tech in general.
This would mean we are currently living through an era of rapid progress which will slow down. If that’s so, is there an easy way to estimate where we are in that and when it will reach a plateau? If it’s true that progress has indeed slowed since the 1960s, that might be some kind of inflection point where the curve went from concave to convex and if a measure could be found for when it really took off, that might give an estimate of how long we have until it levels out. The Industrial Revolution started around 1760 and Apollo 11 was in 1969. If history obeyed these kinds of laws, the levelling out can therefore be expected to occur around 2178. Another way of looking at this is similar to the way the Doomsday Argument works. The astrophysicist Richard Gott, from Louisville, Kentucky, visited the Berlin Wall in 1969 and predicted that the Wall would stand for at least 2⅔ years but no more than two dozen years after his visit. This was not based on any special understanding of international relations or politics, but on statistics. At the time, the Wall had been in existence for eight years, and on the basis of this he estimated that it would continue to stand for between a third and three times its then age, based on the principle of mediocrity, i.e. that there was nothing special about his particular visit, and the principle of indifference, that in the absence of information all possibilities are equally probable. This is true if probability is a statement of rational degree of belief. Half of all visits to the Berlin Wall can be expected to occur over half its lifetime, given the second principle. That period is between a quarter and three-quarters of its total lifetime, so it will continue to exist for thrice as long as it already has or a third of the time it already has. In fact it fell in November 1989. This principle has also been used to conclude, probably wrongly as the linked post argues, that one’s own birth is about half way through the total number of human births, and as I measured that from 200 000 BP based on an estimate made in 1976 there had been 75 milliard human births, and assumed population doubling every twenty-eight years would continue, that the last human birth would occur some time around 2134. These estimates, though, are egocentric, as someone born thousands of years ago would be able to estimate that the human race should’ve ended by now and it obviously hasn’t. Also, anyone visiting or being born outside that zone, i.e. near the end of the Wall or the human race, or near their beginning, will be very wrong. It’s just that the chances are that we are inside that zone.
As already mentioned, human population growth is likely to be sigmoid due to loss of resources and because species in a particular habitat have sigmoid population growth as a result. It would be interesting and relevant to know if this applies to omnivores, since one option we have which wouldn’t be available to, say, dolphins or cats, would be to modify our diet, starting to use other resources. Maybe this is what omnivorous species do. This kind of growth also scuppers the Doomsday Argument, and in fact population growth is slowing so for the purposes of that particular graph the line has already become convex. For technological and scientific progress’s sake, though, what are the results? The earlier limit of the take off point is vague, and possibly also in different places for technological progress and scientific progress. The spinning jenny is often mentioned as the start of the former, invented in 1764. Steam engines are a bit of a weird jump off point because they have existed for a surprisingly long time, having been invented in China around a thousand years ago and in Greece about twice that long back. It seems to have been James Watt’s improvements which led to them becoming practical as a source of power. This enabled iron to be refined more efficiently and machine tools are the final piece of the jigsaw. This all points to around 1760. Neil Armstrong stepped off the Eagle 209 years later, when I was almost two. Hence I was born 207 years after the onset of the Industrial Revolution at a time when the global human population was doubling every twenty-eight years. There were around eight hundred million people in 1750 and 3 610 million in 1970. Very approximately, this means that about six thousand million people were born between 1750 and 1970, meaning that by Gott’s argument there ought to be somewhere between two thousand million additional people and eighteen thousand million people born before progress flattens out. The lower estimate means that would’ve happened already but we know it hasn’t, so maybe the half way version works better in this case. This means after the births of six thousand million more people since 1967, the year of my birth, and we could already be more than half way there. Current world population is around 7 888 million, and about half the population alive in 1970 have died, so that’s an increase of 2 473 million, with spurious accuracy. If that rate doubles in the next fifty years, that takes us near the six thousand million point, so we could expect significant technological progress to end by about 2080, probably before.
All that said, there are a couple of ways in which very obvious progress could be made but hasn’t been. It’s been noted that technology is biassed towards able-bodied White cis men of a certain age range, isn’t particularly suitable for marginalised people, and in fact can even kill them. In this respect, we’ve not made much progress. The other way is linked to this: we are not living in an age of progressive politics. Quite the reverse. If a graph could be drawn for progressive politics, it would’ve peaked in about 1978 and is currently back in the 1960s or earlier. Things are going backwards in that respect and don’t show any signs of reversing. This influences technological and scientific progress. The increase in belief in Young Earth Creationism, for example, will have a knock-on effect on cancer research, to pick a fairly clear example, because cancer is effectively independent evolution. The oppression of female, queer and Black people deprives the world of their talents and skills, not only because of their special perspective but simply because they’re human beings who would otherwise be able to exercise and develop them. However, perversely this could mean that progress can continue for longer because it means the curve we currently experience is shallower and more drawn out due to the relative lack of talent. Simply emancipating women to the same degree as men would telescope the curve to half its length.
Why might we want progress to end though? There are a couple of reasons, linked to each other. One is that although humans probably evolved during a time of relatively rapid change, we throve during the flat period extending through the Palæolithic. We got used to the process where wisdom gained by elders could be usefully passed on to future generations. If someone discovered that onions were edible, something which has long mystified me, that could be passed on to grandchildren and we still have that knowledge today. By contrast, if someone in the early twentieth century learnt to write cursive with a fountain pen and that it wasn’t a good idea to share them because the nibs bend according to the individual writer, that information is now almost useless because people don’t even write much with bics nowadays, let alone pens with proper nibs. This means that older people are not so much fonts of useful knowledge and are probably less respected as a result. I can probably put on an LP at the right speed without scratching it, use a rotary dial telephone and other people can drive using manual transmission, but the former two of these are already useless and the latter will be too once cars are all electric. I might sound like an old fogey saying all this but it means that a corpus of a particular kind of skill is constantly lost rather than built up precisely because we are building on our predecessors’ achievements so quickly.
The other, which is again linked, is future shock. Heidi and Alvin Toffler famously dealt with this in 1970 although the term dates from 1963. Many aspects of their work are outdated, but the continuing existence of future shock as a general experience is indisputable. The concept is based on culture shock. I can’t use chopsticks or sign language and I walk most places. These three things would make it hard or impossible for me to adjust to life in East Asia, the deaf community or most of urban America. The same kind of difficulties emerge for us all due to rapid technological change and according to the Tofflers goes hand in hand with social change. It involves confusion, anxiety, isolation and depression. Disposability, built-in obsolescence, the end of tradition and a new kind of nomadic existence provoked by the need to change careers often due to the end of old industries and the start of new ones along with skills becoming outdated are all features of contemporary life. There have also been changing social norms, some of which seem quite positive such as the greater acceptance of homosexual relationships. However, it may be that this kind of change is temporary. We don’t know what will come out of the other side of course, but a new set of traditions could be built up, and in fact that’s nothing new because much of what we think of as tradition was actually invented in the nineteenth Christian century.
Both of these aspects might end at some point, always assuming we last long enough as a species, and we will return to a time which is much more high-tech and scientifically advanced but which doesn’t change as rapidly as today.
Finally, I want to point out how useful this might be to an SF writer. This post was inspired by an observation someone made about Asimov’s stories, in that the kind of robots who exist thousands of years in the future are not in fact very different to the ones which exist in his fictional twenty-first century. Another aspect of this in his writing is how oddly similar the culture and technology of his late Galactic Empire, some thirty thousand years after Hiroshima, are to the time he was writing. Books are on microfilm, people still smoke tobacco, there are apparently no robots and there are voice-operated machines to be sure, but they’re typewriters. Computers don’t seem to have a significant role at all. This looks very dated by today’s standards, but maybe in a way it’s a more accurate view of the future than one in which enormous change is ongoing. It makes it easier to write and imagine, and whereas it does become increasingly dated, it avoids zeerust, Douglas Adams’s concept of datedness which afflicts the now retrofuturistic.
If we survive, we don’t know what the world will be like centuries from now, but it’s also possible that the world in two hundred years won’t be that different technologically than the world in five hundred. Maybe it’s progress which will become dated, though hopefully not before environmental and social progress have made their marks.
Last time I decided to write a summary of the various common suggestions which have been offered to explain how in such a vast and old Universe with so many stars in so many galaxies which have planets apparently suitable for life as we know it here on Earth, we aren’t aware of the existence of any aliens. However, after writing ten thousand words on the subject I realised I was going to have to divide it up into smaller bits, so here’s the other half, which like the way intermissions usually occur more than half way through something, is probably going to be shorter than the first half, which covers eleven reasons. Here I plan to cover another ten, so it seems it will work out the way I said! If you want to know how this starts, such as with the Drake Equation, read the first bit of the previous post.
Anyway . . .
Too Expensive To Travel
It might at first look a bit weird to talk about money with aliens, because maybe they haven’t got any or even the concept of money, but in one idealised form economics is about work adding value to things, and that amounts to energy use. Therefore the idea of it being too expensive to travel to other star systems isn’t really based on money so much as the idea that somehow you’ve got to lever yourself into space and ping across interstellar space at amazing speed, and to do that you’re going to have to apply major force to the other end of the lever. This is not economics based on market value either, but on the sheer amount of work that has to be done to achieve this goal.
The Apollo missions simply involved transporting three people and some equipment to our natural satellite at a distance of only ten times the circumference of our home planet, which at the time was routinely circumnavigated by airliners. I don’t mean to diss the achievement by any means, but it’s important to bear in mind that in comparison to going to Mars or Venus it’s only a short hop. Venus, at its closest approach, and it’s also the closest planet to Earth, is, as the rhyme has it, “ninety times as high as the Moon”. It took an incredible amount of effort and risk even to make that relatively short trip. The Apollo program cost $25 800 million, which adjusted to 2020 prices is over a quarter of a billion US dollars. There was plenty of criticism about the cost, exemplified by Gill Scott-Heron’s poem ‘Whitey On The Moon’:
However, it’s also been calculated that the cost of the American space program over that period per annum was less than the total expenditure on lipstick over the same interval. This is a relatively patronising and possibly sexist observation to make, but when I consider how much I spend on lipstick, I’m really quite poor yet I hardly notice it. My lipstick budget is minute. Bear in mind also that it’s realistic to halve that as expenditure per adult, because it’s much more common for women to buy lipstick than men. The cost of the Venus-Mars mission at the turn of the 1970s-1980s CE decade would have been $80 thousand million at 1971 prices, and would’ve sent only one mission, though to two planets. That cost would’ve been close to a long scale billion dollars in 2020 terms. However, the entire Apollo program is only slightly more expensive than Trident, a benchmark I always use to assess what governments consider worth spending money on, so in fact Apollo didn’t really cost that much. Moreover, the money would’ve gone back into the economy and its possible to build on what’s already been achieved. One problem with going back is that it’s a bit like repairing a video recorder. The old equipment is no longer sufficiently integrated – “you can’t get the parts” – and much of the expertise is no longer available because of retirement, deaths and deskilling through not using the relevant talent. Even as it stands, NASA reused much of their stuff. Skylab was based on a Saturn V stage and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project used the Apollo Command Module. That said, it’s true that much of the paraphenalia were designed only for one purpose: to get astronauts there, land them and get back. The Apollo XIII LEM, for example, was incinerated on re-entry without being used, so it wouldn’t be suitable for landing anywhere except on its target. For instance, it would have been destroyed even by the Martian atmosphere.
The cost of space travel may be deceptive. I think it was one of the Ranger probes which only made it a third of the way to Cynthia but had expended 98% of its fuel to get there, meaning that just another two percent would’ve been sufficient. We’re used to an environment where Newtonian physics is obfuscated by the likes of friction, buoyancy and a substantial atmosphere. Take all those away and things become much simpler. Certain things are no longer necessary, such as constant input of energy to retain a constant speed. Therefore, fuel requirements are not so high once a vehicle has left our gravity well, although gravity’s range is infinite.
It’s been calculated that the Orion starship, which could accelerate up to five percent of the speed of light, would have cost $367 thousand million 1968 dollars. Dædalus would cost $6 long scale billion in 2020 prices. That’s the current price of reaching the nearest star within three dozen years with an uncrewed vessel. However, economies of scale are likely to be involved to some extent, as they would’ve been if the Apollo program had concentrated more on making its equipment and vehicles reusable. Even as it was, it was to some extent feasible to re-employ them, as I’ve said. But if NASA had designed some kind of more general-purpose landing vehicle, they could’ve saved a lot of money further down the line. There’s a kind of disposable short-termism to that decision.
Economics in this context needs to be re-cast because it’s a big assumption that aliens would have money. What it actually amounts to is work and energy use, but it’s still an issue because there’s usually going to be some energy cost when value is added to goods. Fuel is a good way of illustrating this. I don’t know for sure but I suspect the hydrogen and oxygen in the Saturn V fuel tanks were produced by electrolysis, and that electrical current had to be generated somehow. Likewise, the plan to use a powerful laser to push a solar sail and accelerate a spacecraft to near light speed would have to power the laser. That said, things change in space compared to an Earth-like planet, because here energy is relatively hard to harness but there is abundant matter, but in space it’s the other way round. Energy is freely available, from solar radiation and slingshot manœuvres around massive bodies, but most matter is rare. This means fuelling a spacecraft would be relatively cheap, and one suggestion for Dædalus, for example, was to use hydrogen and helium from Jupiter for the hydrogen bombs needed to propel it. It’s possible that ETs would manufacture their materials from hydrogen and helium using processes initiated by solar power or gravitational methods of capturing energy, and this too would make materials relatively “cheaper”.
In terms of recompense, there are different kinds of economy even among humans in the richest countries. Not only is there barter, which may not have been as widespread as often imagined, but also the likes of a gift economy, where people are expected to give presents at Xmas and birthdays. Gift economies also function on a larger scale: the long-term “loan” of pandas by China to other countries springs to mind. Large engineering projects have also been “funded” in other ways than money. Contrary to popular belief, the Egyptian pyramids were not built by slave labour but by workers giving their work for free in lieu of taxation, and various organisations today also run on volunteer work. There’s also the possibly rather sinister social media-style reliance on reputation to get people to do things, as depicted in ‘Community’ and ‘Black Mirror’, and functioning to a vast degree in China, where one unlocks access to various facilities by improving one’s reputation in the eyes of the government. This seems disturbing to many Westerners, but in fact it’s not that far from what we’re doing all the time here in a different way, such as by wanting likes on Facebook. A whole economy could be run that way, and we don’t even know if aliens exist, so we know even less about whether they have other ways of doing things than money, but there’s no reason to assume that’s how they run their societies if they do exist.
A significant barrier to human space travel is quite possibly democracy in the way we understand it in liberal democratic societies. The Apollo program was shortened and cut down due to the Nixon administration, and large long-term projects generally can be delayed or disappear entirely because of short governmental terms. It’s difficult to imagine America or Europe being able to build pyramids, simply because the project is too long and “expensive” in terms of labour to function well, plus we’d be doing something like building a monument to President Truman or Ramsey MacDonald, neither of whom we consider to be divine. This system, which may be temporary for various reasons, could seriously delay space programs elsewhere in the Galaxy. It could also mean that the kind of civilisations we could end up making contact with would not be democratic in that way because such societies would have stayed on their home worlds due to the difficulty of sustaining such projects. Among humans here, the idea of liberal democracy is restricted to certain countries and there is no tradition of it in many others. This, in a sense, is the Space Race writ large, because the idea of the Apollo program was largely to attempt to prove that liberal democracy functioned better than “communism”, as the Soviet system at the time was imagined to be. But it may turn out that the US won the battle but has lost the war if we ever encounter other technology-using life. This needn’t be a bad thing, because there’s totalitarianism, but also other options such as post-scarcity society.
To summarise, I don’t think money, or money translated into energy use, would hamper progress towards interstellar travel as such, but the political constitution of alien societies might. On the other hand, a society probably would want a return on its investment, and that could involve making interstellar travel tangibly beneficial to the home world, which could be difficult. Maybe there’s just no profit in it.
Zeta Rays
I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s worth going into again here to collect possible answers to the Fermi Paradox into one place. The first deliberate use of radio on this planet among humans only occurred towards the end of the nineteenth century. Analogue switchoff began little over a century later and although we still have analogue radio we don’t use it much. Of course, that doesn’t mean radio transmissions have stopped. It just means they are now usually encoded to carry digital signals. The more efficiently a signal is encoded, the closer it looks to random noise to someone who doesn’t have the key to decode it. Moreover, for all we know there may be a much better way to transmit signals than electromagnetic radiation just around the corner. This leaves us with the situation of trying to detect analogue radio transmissions from other star systems when we ourselves only used them for about a century, or a fiftieth of our history. Now suppose we are in existence as a civilisation for a total of twice the length of recorded history, or ten millennia. One percent of our time will have been used in this way. Taking Asimov’s estimate of 530 000 civilisations in the Galaxy, that would mean only 5 300 of them would be using radio waves in this way at any one time It’s actually far less because Asimov’s estimate was that the average suitable planet would support technological species for ten million years, although that’s assumed to be about ten evolutionary “cycles” of intelligent life, meaning that the closest civilisation currently doing this would be around a thousand light years away by the lower estimate but by the higher there would only be about four dozen in the entire Galaxy right now and at least four thousand light years away, which in turn means that every civilisation could have stopped listening by the time its signals were received. Also, it’s a myth that routine radio transmissions are easily detectable from other star systems. It’s been estimated that our own couldn’t even be picked up on Proxima B. A deliberately focussed transmission is another matter entirely though.
It was Jill Tarter who came up with the “zeta ray” statement and it’s been considered scientifically naïve on the grounds that physics is almost complete and the Standard Model does not predict the existence of any useful means of exchanging signals which is better than electromagnetic radiation. There can be no useful superluminal travel, for example, and although radio waves might not be ideal, the best frequency may well be visible light, and we more or less know that isn’t being used, at least indiscriminately. However, I think this objection takes Tarter’s claim too literally, because in fact she was probably saying that a new technique of communication would be found which works better than electromagnetic radiation in the long run. Also, as mentioned before, physics is in crisis, so our physics may not be theirs in the sense that they may be aware of methods we aren’t because they came across them via a different route. It makes sense to use a concentrated beam aimed at a suitable star system, perhaps one with technosignatures such as the presence of fluoride compounds in its atmosphere, if radio signals are employed, but that would mean only the selected targets would receive the message.
It’s also been suggested that the message might not be in transmitted form. If aliens have visited this planet in the distant geological past, they may have implanted a message in the genomes of organisms which existed at the time in such a way that it was likely to be conserved fairly well. Most DNA is non-coding, and although it can serve other purposes which mean that it has to contain the base-pairs it does such as telomeres which stop chromosomes from fraying at the ends, much of it seems to have no real function. However, it’s difficult to imagine how such a code could stay given the rate of mutations, and if it was conserved by having most of a population contain those codes, that would be best achieved via asexual reproduction or the majority of individuals in a population would have to have their genomes modified, which is a very large task. An alternative would be that when aliens arrived here, they genetically modified some native organisms for their own purposes and those would be more likely to show up if those traits turned out to confer selective advantages, but one thing which is fairly clear is that there never seem to have been any long-term biological visitors to this planet, or possibly even short-term, because there are no organisms whose genomes are known which are not related to native ones, insofar as life originated here anyway, but the point is that we are all demonstrably related. So there is no message in native genomes even if one was placed there, and no genetic sign of visitation to this planet, although surprisingly there may be technosignatures, which brings me to . . .
The Silurian Hypothesis
I’ve gone into this before and its relevance may not be entirely clear to the Fermi Paradox, but bear with me. It’s named after the Silurians of the Whoniverse, who are somewhat misleadingly named as they were supposed to have been around in the Eocene rather than the Silurian, but the name sounds good. The general idea is that we are not the first intelligent technological species to evolve on this planet. I myself have to confess that I’ve had two separate sets of belief which relate to this. The first is my belief as a teenager that Homo erectus established a sophisticated technological culture and colonised the Galaxy, then fell victim to a catastrophe affecting this planet during the last Ice Age which wiped them all out. I no longer believe this, but the purpose of the belief for me was to counteract Von Dänikens assertions of ancient aliens interfering in human prehistory, which I still believe underestimates human abilities. I later replaced this with the idea that Saurornithoides evolved into a technological species and accidentally caused a mass extinction by crashing an asteroid into the planet – the “left hand down a bit” theory of the Chicxulub Impact. It’s surprisingly difficult to find any reliable evidence to corroborate or disprove the hypothesis that we are not the first high tech species on this planet, but a number of technosignatures have been identified which we are ourselves producing right now, some of which will leave enduring marks in the geological record. Various possible technosignatures have been suggested, and some are found sporadically in various strata of different ages, but interestingly several coincide in the Eocene, making that the strongest candidate for the presence of industrial culture on this planet. This would seem to mean one of two things, making the astounding assumpion that it was in fact present at that time. Either a species evolved into a tool-using form and created a civilisation or we were visited by aliens who had done so elsewhere at that time. The much simpler conclusion is that it merely looks like there were high-tech entities of some kind present here back then and it has non-technological causes. However, if there haven’t been any valid signatures other than ours yet, this is relevant to the Fermi Paradox in two ways. One is that it means that we’ve never been visited over the four æons during which life has been present here, which suggests that over that whole time there were no aliens at all who visited this planet, strongly suggesting there were just no aliens at all. It could be that things have changed since, because for example phosphorus is becoming more common as the Galaxy ages, but it doesn’t augur well for their existence. Another is that because we would then be the first technological species, the amount of time a planet suitable for life spends with that kind of life on it could be relatively very short. Asimov’s ten million years is cut in half. In fact, it’s likely to be even shorter than that because at the time it was thought that the Sun would spend another five thousand million years on the Main Sequence and still be suitable for complex life, so we are now stuck with only about an eighth of that period and less than seventy thousand civilisations according to his estimate, which incidentally reduces the number of radio-using civilisations in this galaxy to only half a dozen. There is, however, another possibility: that there’s a kind of “phase change” in the history of a life-bearing world where intelligent life becomes a permanent feature of the biosphere. This would make extraterrestrial civilisations much more widespread. On this planet it means that we now have something like six hundred million years of intelligent life to look forward to, which using Asimov’s estimate again makes it ten dozen times as common, revising that figure of 530 000 up to almost thirty-two million, meaning also that the nearest world currently hosting intelligent technological culture originating on it is likely to be less than sixty light years away, and that ignores the possibility that closer planets may have been settled in the meantime. If this is true, and if it has happened here, they would’ve had to have had a very light touch not to modify our biosphere noticeably.
Everyone Is Listening, No-one Talking
There is a single good candidate for a signal from an alien civilisation: the so-called “Wow” signal:
This was received from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius on 15th August 1977 and was detected for over a minute, after which the telescope receiving it moved out of range due to Earth’s rotation. Humans have ourselves transmitted several messages with varying degrees of seriousness. The most famout of these is probably the Arecibo Telescope Message sent to the globular cluster M13 in 1974:
By current understanding, globular clusters don’t contain stars suitable for life-bearing planets, so this may be a waste. NASA transmitted the Beatles’ ‘Across The Universe’ to commemorate the organisation’s half-century. In probably the most serious attempt, Александр Леонидови Зайцев transmitted a tune played on a Theremin using a Russian RADAR station to six Sun-like stars between forty-five and sixty-nine light years away. However, on the whole we have only “listened”.
There are reasons for this. One is that there may be risks to transmission, and the people who have transmitted messages in such a way that they stand much chance of being received have been ciriticised for doing so unilaterally, because there may be risks associated with contacting potentially hostile aliens and thereby advertising our presence. The above message, for example, gives away our location and details of our biochemistry, rendering us prone to chemical or biological attack. This, then, is another version of the Dark Forest in that respect, but it is also wider than that. In order to transmit a signal receivable by any antenna within a hundred light years of us, we’d need to use all the power generated on the planet, and even then we don’t know that it’s far enough. On the other hand, the Arecibo Telescope (I ought to provide a picture to illustrate what I mean):
. . . is powerful enough to send a signal (which it has of course) which could be picked up by a similar telescope anywhere in the visible part of the Galaxy, provided they were both perfectly aligned towards each other. The alternatives are to broadcast a signal or transmit it to a target. One takes a lot of energy and won’t be picked up as far away, and the other could take less energy but would only be detected by its destination. It would also be necessary to aim the signal at where the star will be when the radio waves get there rather than where it is now. The Solar System moves about 1.5 million kilometres a day across the Galaxy, so a signal from Vega, to choose a random star system, would need to be aimed at a point sixteen times the width of the Solar System from where it is now to be received, and since it takes our light two dozen and two years to reach Vega that really needs to be doubled. In other words, sending signals is potentially dangerous, costly and difficult, but listening for them is much easier if other people are transmitting. It could, though, be that we’re at an impasse where everyone notices the eerie silence, decides there must be a good reason for it and refrains from transmitting. Hence the silence.
Science Is Limited
I mentioned this recently. We are able to establish apparently irrevocable facts about the nature of things, such as light being the ultimate speed limit. Science often seems to amount, via the principle of parsimony, to ruling out interesting explanations for things. The basic principle of the scientific method can be summed up as “the Universe is boring and not at all fun”. Before a scientific theory is known, possibilities often seem more open than afterwards. In Stuart times, England had a plan to send a clockwork spaceship to Cynthia (“the Moon”) because it was expected that above twenty miles gravity would suddenly cease to operate and the amount of energy stored in a coiled spring (this was before steam engines of course) was considered to be potentially huge. Also, at that time air was thought to pervade all of space and hunger was thought to be caused by gravity. This was clearly highly Quixotic. The scientists who planned the seventeenth century space program only thought it was possible with their technology due to their ignorance of what science ruled out. Similarly, our belief that we could reach other solar systems could be equally ill-founded. For instance, at close to the speed of light, tiny grains of dust are enough to destroy entire spaceships, so a shield would be needed, and there may be other issues of which we know nothing. We already do know it will never take less than four and a bit years to reach the nearest star system to our own.
There’s a somewhat related issue here which I’ll treat under the same heading. Science may not be inevitable. Presumably beings incapable of mathematics but otherwise rational and having similar intelligence to our own would be hampered in some areas of science particularly physics, although they wouldn’t be completely incapable. This subject is susceptible to being racist, but is it possible that science only arose once in our species, in Ancient Greece? It doesn’t seem like that to me, because other cultures seem to have had a firm grasp of how to apply rational thought to the world, but some people do believe that secularism and science can only have arisen in Europe. This is more restricted even than the human species as a whole. Leaving aside the racism, is it possible to be speciesist instead and say that only humans can do science, or have discovered how to do it? I have to say I don’t find this convincing. I can believe that technology-using species may nevertheless be hampered in developing science by lacking other abilities, such as not being able to extend magical thinking into more analytical reasoning or just not being any good at maths, or just be culturally indisposed to develop it, so it could happen, but science per se doesn’t seem to be the kind of thing which would be ruled out universally. That said, it’s entirely feasible to have perfectly good science without well-developed physics due to the absence of mathematical ability, which would also stunt chemistry due to the likes of molarity and enthalpy being ungraspable. It doesn’t seem to be the kind of thing which would rule every single species out though. Moreover, if life can enter space without technology, or appear there and evolve into complexity, it may not need science or maths to reach the stars.
Or, things could go the other way:
Intelligence Is Temporary
I recently watched ‘Idiocracy’. It’s not a wonderful film, but it does make the interesting point, if you want it to, that a sufficiently advanced technological society could take away the pressure to use one’s intelligence or reasoning. At least since we invented writing, and possibly since we came across language, we’ve been progressively outsourcing our memories and powers of thought to technological crutches. As previously observed, chimps seem to have better short term memories than Homo sapiens, and this is partly a trade-off between the opportunity to avail ourselves of language and the necessity of remembering things better due to not being able to fall back on the memory of other people. It would be intersting to test the memory of a chimpanzee or gorilla who can sign. Nowadays many people, myself included, are concerned at how short our attention spans have become and how poor our memories are because we can use search engines and are constantly assaulted by distracting media. This is really just a recent step in a process which has been going on for many millennia, although it may have serious and far-reaching consequences, or just be a moral panic. But maybe, as we develop ever more sophisticated mental aids, just as our bodies are now physically weaker than those of our relatives and ancestors, so will our minds atrophy. The popular idea that there are higher levels of spiritual evolution which we or our descendants will reach one day, and which those species who have gone before us have already attained, may be the reverse of the truth. Maybe there are plenty of planets on which intelligent life evolved, but although the species survived, they became less intelligent once they’d invented a self-sufficient technological trap to provide for all, and therefore didn’t need to exervise their minds any longer and proceeded to dispense with them in terms of sophisticated cognition. There will be no apocalypse, just a gradual degrading of thought until we are no longer really sentient at all but looked after by our machines. Then again, this might happen:
The Machines Take Over
This is a rather dramatic heading. The way things have gone since Apollo in our own history is that we have begun to produce increasingly sophisticated spacecraft but stayed in cis lunar space ourselves. This could be extrapolated to the point where we never enter trans lunar space again but our ever-more intelligent machines spread out and explore the Galaxy, meeting other machines on the way which have been launched by other stay-at-home aliens. Or, at home, we not only farm out more of our cognition to IT, but end up ceasing to be completely, or perhaps merge with our machines. In a sense this means there are aliens, but they’re not biological. In another situation, the Singularity happens and machines just decide they don’t need us. Possibly they also decide they don’t need to go into space either, but this is unlikely because space is a better environment for them in some ways than wet planets with corrosive gases in their atmospheres like this one. That doesn’t mean they’d leave the Solar System entirely though, and even if they did they might find very different places were friendly to them, such as interstellar space where superconductivity is easier to achieve, or blue giant stars where there’s plenty of energy-giving radiation. It’s also true that we might be looking in the wrong places for intelligent life, because once they’ve cracked the problem of interstellar travel, possibly with the help of the Singularity, they might end up in those very same places for the same reasons. Maybe planets are just passé. This, though, is a topic for another post.
Intelligence Is Not An Advantage
This bit of the post has various takes on intelligence, so it’s an appropriate place to spell out why I take care when I use the concept of intelligence. The idea that we are “more” intelligent than other species is disturbingly reminiscent of the idea of a hierarchy of being which is used to justify carnism and bleeds into humanity to allow us to look down on people whom we deem less intelligent. Therefore this needs restating in some way, although I’m not going to launch into my standard diatribe on this subject here. There isn’t “more” and “less” intelligence, only intelligence which is more like the kind which enables us to do certain things, and some of these are deprecated such as emotional intelligence. Hence when I say “intelligence”, what I actually mean is that set of mental faculties that is expected to enable us to build and travel in starships and arrive at destinations where we can continue to thrive. That may be an extrapolation too far, because there could be fatal snags and gotchas on the way to that goal which have nothing to do with social and political considerations, but if you prefer, it’s the ability to get our act sufficiently together intellectually to get Neil and Buzz up to their concrete golf course in the sky with considerably more than nineteen holes.
Due to our anthropocentricity, we’re tempted to think that our intelligence makes us better at surviving than other species, and to some extent this is true. We can invent aqualungs, submarines, igloos, anoraks and antibiotics, enabling us to get past things which would’ve felled other animals, but intelligence also has its drawbacks. It’s sometimes observed that cleverer people are more likely to be depressed because they overthink or are underemployed, and if this lead them to end their lives, from an evolutionary perspective this is not a successful outcome. There are more widespread issues too. In order to be as flexible as we are as adults, we start off very dependent and capable of very little by ourselves. This is as it should be and is worth remembering, but it means we need a nurturing society around us where we can learn how to function and relate to others. Many other animals can walk within minutes of being born but it takes us a year or more. The attention children need via parental care also means we reproduce very slowly, although we’re more likely to survive once we’ve done so, as are our offspring. We also have sexual reproduction, which increases genetic diversity but also makes it harder to colonise new environments. All of these things are liabilities from an evolutionary perspective. We’ve all seen those David Attenborough films of hundreds of newly hatched turtles frantically scampering down the beach to the sea and being picked off by gulls and the like, with no parental care, no education and so forth, and little chance of surviving and a life expectancy measured in minutes. But if they make it into the ocean and manage not to get devoured by various sea creatures, their lifespan, depending on the species, is often comparable to our own, and they continue to reproduce throughout that long life. Likewise, many other species don’t need to mate or produce gametes. Greenfly are born pregnant to their twenty-minute old virgin mothers. Compared to this, the burdens intelligence brings are crushing in some circumstances. Robinson Crusoe was never going to raise a family on that desert island, and a human finding herself on an uninhabited planet, no matter how habitable, is not going to give rise to a settled world even if she’s carrying fraternal twins when she gets there. A major planetary disaster which wipes out most of the human race, just leaving a few of us scattered about here and there out of touch with each other is not going to lead to a revived world community at any point, just to our extinction. How many worlds have there been where some lineage of animals has banged the rocks together and slowly and painfully made its society more sophisticated and wiser over millennia, only to face extinction when its world falls prey to a solar flare, spate of volcanic eruptions or cometary collision? Meanwhile, their equivalent of ants or lesbian lizards managed fine in the face of the same disaster.
Maybe intelligence of our kind arises continually all over the Galaxy but is nipped in the bud by such events, because we’re fragile because we’re intelligent, and this is why we’re unaware of any aliens. Or maybe:
Intelligence Is Rare
This is not the same thing. There are all sorts of random mutations which lead to positive or negative outcomes for organisms, but some of them are just unlikely. Intelligence involves one heck of a lot of genes, as can be seen by the fact that a very large number of genetic disorders affecting only one gene lead to learning difficulties. All sorts of things have to go “right” for us to be of average intelligence (see above for my comments on the notion of intelligence though). It might be very improbable for enough traits to occur together for the whole combination of characteristics to be advantageous at every stage right up until the Stone Age ensues. This is quite beside the question of how big an advantage intelligence would be. I always think of snake eyes. Snakes are the descendants of lizards who took up a burrowing lifestyle. They became vermiform, lost their limbs and their eyelids fused with the rest of their facial skin. They could’ve been expected to lose their sight entirely, but this didn’t hapen. Instead, they ceased to burrow, their eyelids became transparent and they had a whole new way to protect their eyes. It would be very useful for other vertebrates to have this facility, which amounts to still being able to see without needing to blink and having physical protection as good as for other organs, but this has only evolved once as far as I know. This is partly due to the sinuous pathway serpentine evolution has taken, but although I’m not sure I think only reptilian scales lend themselves to becoming transparent in such a way, although maybe life would find a way. It may be that there is simply no option for this to arise among other vertebrates regardless of evolutionary pressure. Therefore, although the above reason may be completely wrong and intelligence is a major advantage to most species in various niches, that still doesn’t mean that a Galaxy overrun with life-infested planets would have any with intelligent life on it apart from this one, because no matter how complex and advanced that life is, the precise, many-stepped pathway leading to intelligence is too improbable to happen.
One point against this possibility is the situation on this planet of multiple somewhat intelligent species among both birds and mammals. This could suggest that it’s a common evolutionary strategy. However, it could also mean that most of the improbable combination of steps had already been taken before synapsids and reptiles diverged several hundred million years ago, or it could mean that there is a typical threshold leading to widespread intelligence which is currently being crossed on this planet just as it has been on many other worlds. Also, this may not rule out spacefaring aliens. There could be space whales infested with giant space parasites, for example, travelling between the stars. They may not be intelligent but they could still turn up on our doorstep some day. There is a trend among vertebrates for relative brain size to tend to increase which can be traced in fossils, or at least cranial size since brains are rarely preserved. If this correlates well enough with intelligence of our kind, this is a clue that intelligence has been gradually increasing among vertebrates generally. This, though, is second-hand evidence and behavioural clues are difficult to derive from fossil remains. Choosing that characteristic focusses on a distinctive human feature and is “whiggish” – it projects the current situation backwards and selects evidence on that basis. It may also be true that the thickness of the armour of armadillos has increased over time, but I don’t know whether it has because I’m not focussed on that feature. That doesn’t apply to humans either. In fact the trend is reversed for us. Our canines have got smaller, whereas the chances are the tusks of elephants have got longer, and we’ve got physically weaker and less muscular. Giraffes’ necks have got longer. All sorts of features show evolutionary trends, but there may be planets with no long-necked animals where there are animals with necks and so forth, and this would only be of interest to zoölogists. Similarly, there could be worlds with a huge variety of advanced life forms, none of which have big brains or any other means of being intelligent. Moreover, tracing the line of ancestors with steadily increasing relative cranial size and treating that as a trunk, which it isn’t because evolution has no direction, the offshoots do not show increasing brain size as much. This could be selection bias.
Thus there may be plenty of “garden worlds” rich in complex life, but none with intelligent life, just because that route of evolution is improbable, and this doesn’t even depend on the idea that intelligence isn’t useful. In a way, it’s similar to the idea, to which I somewhat subscribe, that there are few or no intelligent humanoid aliens. Why would evolution turn up such an improbable body plan? Likewise, perhaps, why would it turn up intelligent life forms?
Great Filters
Several of these have already been mentioned, and this is in a way a whole sub-branch of SETI and discussion of the Fermi Paradox. The Universe is a dangerous and violent place and intelligent life is very fragile, and yet we’ve come so far since this planet was a lifeless ball of molten rock. But what if we’ve just been exceedingly lucky?
The difficulty in purines and pyrimidines forming spontaneously is perhaps the first of these. The existence of life in any form seems to violate the principles of thermodynamics because it seems to involve a dramatic decrease in entropy. However, much of thermodynamics is statistical in nature. A gas cylinder which starts off with a vacuum at one end sharply divided from gas at sea level pressure at the other will rapidly equalise pressure because the movement of the gas molecules is effectively random and this means they have about a fifty-fifty chance of moving over to the empty end, but this is just chance, not a hard and fast rule applying to individual cases. There is a chain of cause and effect involving a series of collisions and movements in straight lines between them which determines the location of each molecule. Perhaps life in the Universe is the same. It’s very unlikely to arise at all, but because the Universe is so vast and has so many places in it where life could appear, it happens to do so in this one place – Earth. There isn’t anyone around to observe that it isn’t there in all the places where it isn’t!
Here are the nucleic acid bases (well, except uracil, which is the one unique to RNA):
It isn’t at all clear how these molecules could form from non-living origins. The other types of molecules involved, or rather their basic building blocks, can often form easily and spontaneously given sufficient abundance of the elements of life. For instance, the simplest amino acid, glycine, is present in interstellar space. Lipids are also simple chains of hydrocarbons with carboxyl groups on the end, often joined to the simple molecule glycerol. Sugars are similarly small, simple molecules. By contrast, the above four, plus the other one, have no known pathway for their formation. That said, these five are not the only options. Measles viruses, for example, do better when they are able to substitute one of the bases for a unique separate base, and there are other such bases such as the anti-cancer drug fluorouracil, which is however unlikely to arise spontaneously and is not useful as a substrate for genetic code, which is what makes it useful – it breaks replication in tumour cells because it doesn’t work. Perhaps the large variety of possible bases makes life more likely to emerge. It could also be that life could have another basis than nucleic acids, but the fact that these improbable compounds are at its heart is similar to the phosphorus issue – why would life include unlikely substances if it was possible any other way? Surely those more likely biochemistries would be more likely to occur and compete successfully with other less likely biochemistries such as our own?
The two scenarios of scarce phosphorus and improbable purine and pyrimidine synthesis would result in very similar scenarios, and as adenosine triphosphate is based on both, in either situation there is no ATP. The situation could then be plenty of Earth-like planets rich in organics but with no life. There could be sugars, amino acids and lipids in the oceans, and in fact the quantities of these materials could add up to the same order of magnitude as the biomasse here, which is 550 gigatonnes in carbon alone. Considering those proportions in terms of the human body being a typical assemblage of organic compounds of this kind, sans nucleic acids and adenosine phosphates and other phosphates such as those in bones and teeth as typical would mean more than a teratonne of such compounds, which amounts to an average of two thousand tonnes per square kilometre, although unlike Earth, most of whose biomasse is on land, most of that would be in the oceans and therefore distributed through the water column. Such a planet might be devoid of life, but given sufficient phosphorus would be a fantastic candidate for terraforming and settling given the will to do so.
The next step is the emergence of respiration. The Krebs Cycle, which is how oxygen-breathing organisms release energy from sugar, is quite complex as anyone with A-level biology will ruefully recall. The anærobic portion of that pathway is simpler, but still not very simple and would have hobbled life considerably if the Krebs Cycle had not come along. It did actually take a very long time to do so. The step after is the evolutionary transition from bacteria and archæa to cells with complex organelles and nuclei, which could again be very improbable and seems only to have happened once since all chloroplasts, mitochondria and hydrogenosomes seem to be related. On the other hand, each combination happened separately. DNA, and presumably RNA, is just mutable enough to enable evolution to happen without becoming too harmful to organisms to enable them to survive, which is a delicate balance. There is also the question of the very early collision with Theia, a Mars-sized body which chipped Cynthia off of us, thereby providing a magnetosphere, maintaining a stable axial tilt and preserving the atmosphere from the solar wind.
The Great Filter might be above us in the stream of time or still downstream from us. If the latter, it seems to be such an efficient destroyer of intelligent life that it will be the biggest risk we will ever face. If intelligent life is common, there is no evidence that it progresses to interstellar travel, meaning that it could well be that whatever is going to happen has a mortality rate of one hundred percent. And we may well not see it coming because if it had been foreseen, wouldn’t it have been avoided? We’re doomed and we may never know why until it’s too late. That would probably be the very nature of a future Great Filter. But there are many candidates, such as nanotech disasters, pandemics, runaway climate change, nuclear holocaust and so forth. Alternatively, we may always have been living on borrowed time and are overdue for some planet-devastating disaster such as supervolcanoes, asteroid strikes or gamma ray bursts. We can’t necessarily project what may amount to extreme good fortune into the future because Lady Luck has no memory. Less anthropocentric possibilities largely amount to asteroid and cometary collision, volcanic eruptions and gamma ray bursts, some of which have less obvious and remote causes such as stars passing near the Solar System and disrupting bodies so that they move inwards and hit us. This category of potential Great Filters may have a flip side. These events have potential to cause mass extinctions, which might be thought to be bad for evolution but they actually tend to stimulate it because they empty ecological niches into which the survivors of the extinction can then evolve. Hence being pelted with comets is not necessarily a bad thing even though it’s apocalyptic and kills everyone. Consequently, another minor suggestion for an explanation of the Fermi Paradox is that other worlds actually haven’t suffered enough mass extinctions to make it likely intelligent life will evolve.
Interdict
This has similarities to the Zoo Hypothesis mentioned in the previous post. The Galaxy is very old and if the four æons between life appearing on Earth and the emergence of humans is typical for the emergence of intelligence, interstellar civilisations may have existed since thousands of millions of years before Earth even formed. There may have been an initial period of instability, even with wars and conflict of other kinds, but intelligent life in the Galaxy is now stable enough and everything is now sorted and peaceful. Matter and energy are both easily available, so there’s no need to exploit any planets with native intelligent life and in fact intelligent life may not even live on planets any more but in permanently voyaging starships and artificial space colonies orbiting blue giants since they’re a good energy source. Their home planets have in the meantime been re-wilded, so we see no technosignatures. However, we are valuable to them because we are original and uninfluenced thinkers producing our own scientific and technological culture, and for that matter artistic, which is valuable to them, so they leave us alone, at least for now, so as not to pollute their wells of information, and we can’t see them either because they’re hiding or because we’re looking in the wrong places. This may continue until a certain point is reached, which will trigger first contact, or they may never contact us. It’s also been suggested that if this is the real situation, they may have recorded the entire history of our planet and even rescued species before they became extinct, including humans, so somewhere out there may be places where non-avian dinosaurs, Neanderthals and trilobites are still flourishing. However, that’s quite a florid view, and this hypothesis is untestable because they are either hiding from us or undetectable, so there are no data.
Transcendence
This is my personal addition to the reasons, and is the last one I’ll mention here.
May years ago, I made my usual observation to a friend about the nature of intelligent life in the Galaxy. This is that all interstellar civilisations must be peaceful post-scarcity societies which are also anarchist, because other civilisations would be weeded out by internal conflict or environmental damage before reaching nearby star systems. He disagreed, and said that he expected durable civilisations not to be expansionist at all but to stay on their home worlds in a spiritually enlightened state. I was initially rather taken aback by this, but it is tempting to believe that this is so. Maybe what happens is that intelligent species are either constitutionally spiritual and never bother with space travel, or go through a kind of trial by ordeal through their history where they either wipe themselves out through conflict or materialism, or just ignorant tampering with the stable order of things, or go through a crisis where this looks like it’s going to happen and emerge on the other side wiser, more just and peaceful, and also with no interest in exploring the Galaxy in spacecraft. Or, maybe they do this and, and this is going to sound out of sight, engage in astral travel to other planets, so they’re here with us in spirit but we never have knowing contact with them. This is not, however, the kind of solution which is likely to appeal to a scientific mind set, although the first part of it may well be.
Except for the last, those twenty or so reasons probably account for most of the offerings to explain why we don’t see any aliens in spite of it seeming likely that there are some. There are at least six dozen more. The reason for this proliferation of reasons is of course that we have so little evidence to input into the question, and this is likely to continue until we either have a really good argument for their complete absence or we actually detect them. However, it’s equally feasible that we will never know and this may lead to even more reasons being offered.
Yesterday I considered the question of what civilisation would be like if nobody could do mathematics “as we know it”, which is one fairly minor suggestion for an answer to the Fermi Paradox of “where are all the aliens?”. Of course the simplest answer to this is that there aren’t any and probably haven’t ever been any, but there are also multitudinous other possibilities, many of which have interesting implications for us even if we never make contact with any. Yesterday, the fault was in ourselves, but what if the fault was in not our stars, but the stars? What if the issue is not that other intelligent life forms lack a capacity we do have, but that there is a realistic, external but still conceptual problem which prevents anyone from getting out there into interstellar space in a reasonable period of time? What if, so to speak, science “runs out”?
Even if there are no aliens, this possibility is still important. It’s entirely possible that they are in fact completely absent but science will still stop, and that would be a major issue. It would be rather like the way Moore’s Law has apparently run up against the buffers due to thermal noise and electron tunnelling. Ever since 1961, when the first integrated circuit was invented, there’s been an approximate doubling of transistors per unit area of silicon (or germanium of course) every two years or so, which may be partly driven by commercial considerations. However, as they get smaller, the probability of an electron on one side of a barrier teleporting to the other and thereby interfering with the operation of transistors increases. In 2002, it was theorised that the law would break down by the end of the decade due to Johnson-Nyquist noise, which is the disturbance of electrical signals due to the vibration of atoms and molecules tending to drown out weak signals, which is what nanoscale computing processes amount to. It isn’t clear whether Moore’s Law has stopped operating or not because if it does, it would have consequences for IT companies and therefore their profitability and share values, so the difficulty in ascertaining whether it has is a good example of how capitalism distorts processes and research which would ideally operate in a more neutral environment, and there’s also a tendency for people to suppose that scientific change will not persist indefinitely because of being “set in their ways” as it were, so it’s hard to tell if it actually has stopped happening. It’s been forecast, in a possibly rather sensationalist way, that once Moore’s Law does stop, there will be a major economic recession or depression and complete social chaos resulting from the inability of IT companies to make enough money to continue, but I don’t really know about that. It seems like catastrophising.
More widely, there are areas of “crisis”, to be sensationalist myself for a moment, in science, particularly in physics but as I’ve mentioned previously also perhaps in chemistry. The Moore’s Law analogy is imperfect because it isn’t pure scientific discovery but the application of science to technology where it can be established that a particular technique for manufacturing transistors has a lower size limit. This is actually a successful prediction made by physics rather than the end of a scientific road. However, the consequences may be similar in some ways because it means, for example, that technological solutions relying on microminiaturisation of digital electronics would have to change or be solved in a different way, which is of course what quantum computers are for. The end of science is somewhat different, and can be considered in two ways.
The first of these is that the means of testing hypotheses may outgrow human ability to do so. For instance, one possible time travel technique involves an infinitely long cylinder of black holes but there is no way to build such a cylinder as far as can be seen, particularly if the Universe is spatially finite. Another example is the increasing size and energy required to build particle colliders. The point may come when the only way to test an hypothesis of this kind would be to construct a collider in space, and right now we can’t do this and probably never will be able to. There would be an extra special “gotcha” if it turned out that in order to test a particular hypothesis involving space travel it would be necessary to have the engines built on those principles in the first place to get to a place where it could be falsified.
Another way it might happen is that there could be two or more equally valid theories which fit all the data and are equally parsimonious and there is no way of choosing among them. It kind of makes sense to choose a simpler theory, but on this level it becomes an æsthetic choice rather than a rational one because nothing will happen as a result of one theory being true but not the other. If all the data means all the observable data, this is the impasse in which science will find itself.
It also seems to be very difficult to arrive at a theory of quantum gravity. Relativity and quantum physics are at loggerheads with each other and there seems to be no sign of resolution. There “ought to be” some kind of underlying explanation for the two both being true, but it doesn’t seem to be happening. Every force except gravity is explained using the idea that particles carry the message of that force, such as photons for electromagnetism and gluons for the strong nuclear force, but gravity is explained using the idea that mass distorts space instead, meaning that gravity isn’t really a force at all. I’ve often wondered why they don’t try to go the other way and use the concept of higher dimensions to explain the other forces instead of using particles, but they didn’t and I presume there’s a good reason for that. It wouldn’t explain the weak force I suppose. However, there does seem to be a geometrical element in the weak force because it can only convert between up and down quarks if their spin does not align with their direction of motion, so maybe. But so far as I know it’s never been tried this way round, which puzzles me. There’s something I don’t know.
There may also be a difference between science running out and our ability to understand it being exceeded. Already, quantum mechanics is said to be incomprehensible on some level, but is that due to merely human limitations or is it fundamentally mysterious? This is also an issue evoked with the mind-body problem, in that perhaps the reason we can’t seem to reconcile the existence of consciousness with anything we can observe is that the problem is just too hard for humans to grasp.
People often imagine the ability to build a space elevator, which is a cable reaching thousands of kilometres into space to geostationary orbit up and down which lifts can move, making it far easier to reach space, but there doesn’t appear to be a substance strong enough to support that on Earth, although it would be feasible on many other planets, moons and asteroids using existing technology. We might imagine it’s just round the corner, but maybe it isn’t. Likewise, another common idea is the Dyson sphere, actually acknowledged by Freeman Dyson himself as having originally been thought of by Olaf Stapledon, which encloses a sun in a solid sphere of extremely strong matter to exploit all of its energy, which again may not exist. And the obvious third idea is faster than light travel, which is generally taken to be impossible in any useful way. One way the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) could be conducted is to look for evidence of megastructures like Dyson spheres around stars, and in one case a few people believed they’d actually found one, but what if they turn out to be impossible? Dyson’s original idea was a swarm of space stations orbiting the Sun rather than a rigid body, which seems feasible, but an actual solid sphere seems much less so. Our plans of people in suspended animation or generation ships crossing the void, or spacecraft accelerated to almost the speed of light may all just be pipe dreams. Our lazy teenage boasts will be high precision ghosts, to quote Prefab Sprout. Something isn’t known to be possible until it’s actually done.
If non-baryonic dark matter exists, the beautiful symmetries of elementary particles which the Standard Model of physics has constructed do not include it. And despite my doubts, it may exist, and even if it doesn’t there’s an issue with explaining how galaxies rotate at the rate they do. However, at any point in the history of science there were probably gaps in knowledge which seemed unlikely to be filled, so I’m not sure things are any different today. It reminds me of the story about closing the US patent office in 1899 CE, which is apparently apocryphal, because everything had been invented. However, there is also the claim that technological progress is slowing down rather than accelerating, because the changes wrought in society by the immediate aftermath of the Industrial Revolution were much larger than what has happened more recently. At the end of the nineteenth century, there seemed to be just two unresolved problems in physics: the ultraviolet catastrophe and the detection of the luminiferous æther. These two problems ended up turning physics completely upside down. Now it may be possible to explain any kind of observation, with the rather major exceptions which Constructor Theory tries to address but these seem to be qualitatively different. The incompleteness of these theories, such as the Uncertainty Principle and the apparent impossibility of reconciling relativity with quantum mechanics, could still be permanent because of the difficulty of testing these theories. Dark matter would also fall under this heading, or rather, the discrepancy in the speed of galactic movement and rotation does.
This is primarily about physics of course, because there’s a strong tendency to think everything can be reduced to it, but biocentrism is another possible approach, although how far that can be taken is another question. Also, this is the “trajectory and particles” version of physics rather than something like constructor theory, and I’m not sure what bearing that has on things. Cosmology faces a crisis right now as well because two different precise and apparently reliable methods of measuring the rate of expansion of the Universe give two different results. Though I could go on finding holes, which may well end up being plugged, I want to move on to the question of what happens if science “stops”.
The Singularity is a well-known idea, described as “the Rapture for nerds”. It’s based on the perceived trend that scientific and technological progress accelerate exponentially until they are practically a vertical line, usually understood to be the point at which artificial intelligence goes off the IQ scale through being able to redesign itself. Things like that have happened to some extent. For instance, AlphaGo played the board game Go (AKA Weichi, 围棋) and became the best 围棋 player in the world shortly after, and was followed by AlphaGo Zero, which only played games with itself to start with and still became better than any human player of the game. This was a game previously considered impossible to computerise due to the fact that each move had hundreds of possible options, unlike chess with its couple of dozen or fewer, meaning that the game tree would branch vastly very early on. But the Singularity was first named, by Ray Kurzweil, two and a half dozen years ago now, and before that the SF writer Murray Leinster based a story on the idea in 1946, and it hasn’t happened. Of course a lot of other things have been predicted far in advance which have in fact come to pass in the end, but many are sceptical. The usual scenario involves transhumanism or AI, so to an extent it seems to depend on Moore’s Law in the latter case although quantum computing may far exceed that, but for it to happen regardless of the nature of the intelligence which drove it, genuine limits to science might still be expected to prevent it from happening in the way people imagine. For this reason, the perceived unending exponential growth in scientific progress and associated technological change could be more like a sigmoid graph:
I can’t relabel this graph, so I should explain that this is supposed to represent technological and scientific progress up to the Singularity, which occurs where the Y-axis reads zero.
There’s a difference between science and technology of course. It’s notable, for example, that the development of new drugs usually seems to involve tinkering with the molecular structure of old drugs to alter their function rather than using novel compounds, and there seems to be excessive reliance in digital electronics on a wide variety of relatively scarce elements rather than the use of easily obtained common ones in new ways. And the thing is, in both those cases we do know it’s often possible to do things in other ways. For instance, antibacterial compounds and anti-inflammatories are potentially very varied, meaning for example that antibiotic resistance need not develop anything like as quickly as it does, even if they continue to be used irresponsibly in animal husbandry, and there are plenty of steps in the inflammatory process which can be modified without the use of either steroids or so-called non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, all of which are in fact cycloöygenase inhibitors, and there are biological solutions to problems such as touchscreen displays and information processing such as flatfish and cuttlefish camouflage which imply that there is another way to solve the problem without using rare earths or relatively uncommon transition metals. So the solutions are out there, unexploited, possibly because of capitalism. This would therefore mean that if the Singularity did take place, it might end up accelerating technological progress for quite a while through the replacement of current technology by something more sustainable and appropriate to the needs of the human race. Such areas of scientific research are somewhat neglected, meaning that in those particular directions the chances are we really have not run out of science. They could still, in fact, have implications for the likes of space travel and robotics, but it’s a very different kind of singularity than what Kurzweil and his friends seem to be imagining. It’s more like the Isley Brothers:
Having said that, I don’t want to come across as a Luddite or anti-intellectual. I appreciate the beauty of the likes of the Standard Model and other aspects of cutting edge physics and cosmology. I’m not sure they’re fundamental though, for various reasons. The advent of constructor theory, for example, shows that there may be other ways of thinking about physics than how it has been considered in recent centuries, whether or not it’s just a passing trend. Biocentrism is another way, although it has its own limits. This is the practice of considering biology as fundamental rather than physics. The issue of chemistry in this respect is more complex.
Returning to the initial reason this was mentioned, as a solution to the Fermi Paradox, it’s hard to imagine that this would actually make visiting other star systems technologically unfeasible. If we’re actually talking about human beings travelling to other star systems and either settling worlds or constructing artificial habitats to live in there, that doesn’t seem like it would be ruled out using existing tech. The Dædalus Project, for example, used a starship engine based on the regular detonation of nuclear bombs to accelerate a craft to a twelfth of the speed of light, though not with humans on board, and another option is a solar sail, either using sunlight alone or driven by a laser. Besides that, there is the possibility of using low doses of hydrogen sulphide to induce suspended animation, or keeping a well-sealed cyclical ecosystem going for generations while people travel the distances between the stars. There are plenty of reasons why these things won’t happen, but technology doesn’t seem to be a barrier at all here because methods of doing so have been on the drawing board since the 1970s. Something might come up of course, such as the maximum possible intensity of a laser beam or the possibility of causing brain damage in suspended animation, but it seems far-fetched that every possible technique for spreading through the Galaxy is ruled out unless somewhere out there in that other space of scientific theory there is some kind of perpetual motion-like or cosmic speed limit physical law which prevents intelligent life forms or machines from doing so.
All that said, the idea that science might run out is intriguing. It means that there could be a whole class of phenomena which are literally inexplicable. It also means humans, and for that matter any intelligent life form, are not so powerful as to be able to “conquer” the Cosmos, which is a salutory lesson in humility. It also solves another peculiarity that somehow we, who evolved on the savannah running away from predators, parenting and gathering nuts and berries for food and having the evolutionary adaptations to do so, have developed the capacity to understand the Universe, because in this scenario we actually haven’t.
When I was a youngling, for some reason my image of chemistry was a man in a white coat doing something with test tubes of orange liquid. I have no idea why the liquid was orange and in fact there probably aren’t many compounds which are that colour. It’s all the stranger that this was my image because my father was an industrial chemist, so one might imagine I was more grounded in that particular respect.
I don’t know how the process worked exactly because he was a rather distant influence on my life in some ways, but by the time I was about seven or eight I had abandoned my childish ambitions to be a nuclear physicist and decided I wanted to be a biochemist. If you imagine science as a three-tier system with biology at the top and physics at the bottom, chemistry is in the middle: the central science. In this schema, biochemistry would be about two-thirds of the way up, with organic chemistry under it down to the middle point and below that would lie inorganic chemistry.
At secondary school (and we’re kind of on homeedandherbs territory here so I won’t dwell on it too much), I excelled at chemistry and out of my year of ninety selective (11+ passers) pupils I got the highest mark at the end of the third year, which is Year 9 or Key Stage 3 in contemporary terms. My year head (who is now a successful folk musician incidentally and has been on TOTP) was very happy about this. However, I had a problem. My best friend was doing German with me and although I was very close to him emotionally I also thought he was a bad influence in the sense that if we were in the same classes it would be difficult for us to concentrate on our work, so I had to eliminate German and the way the block system worked with options, I couldn’t do both that and Chemistry. There was also the question of balance, which I’ll come back to. I therefore gave up Chemistry and instead did the unpopular combination of Biology and Physics at O-level. To my mind at the time, I’d also heard that the concept of molarity was important in chemistry and I’d failed to understand it a couple of years previously and found it intimidating. This was a very unpopular decision with my Year Head, and he later anxiously asked me whether I was planning to do A-level English because again my results during the O-level years had been the best in the year. I did, but it was a bit of a disaster really for reasons I really shouldn’t go into on this blog. In case you’re wondering, I did eventually take GCSE Chemistry at evening classes in the ’90s when it was an entry requirement for my herbalism training and got an A, although to be frank getting anything other than an A at GCSE when you have a postgraduate qualification basically means you’ve failed calamitously. I also have a B in Spanish and it’s worse than my French, which I failed at O-Level.
Continuing with the school theme for a bit, pupils who followed science were generally encouraged either to do one science or Chemistry with either Biology or Physics because the two were closer to each other than Physics and Biology. My approach was different of course. I decided that since biology and physics both impinged on chemistry, studying Biology and Physics would enable me to learn some chemistry from either end, and it did in fact do so to some extent. This is of course because chemistry is the central science of the three.
This phrase, “The Central Science”, is in fact the name of a popular textbook on the subject, first published in 1977, and the idea was also posited by the philosopher Auguste Comte in the nineteenth century. Chemistry can be seen as central because it deals with entities which are the concern of physicists such as electrons, protons and marginally neutrons, and is also used to explain the behaviour of organic molecules such as DNA, proteins and lipids which are the basis of life as we know it. As such, chemistry is isolated from other sciences and is able to develop concepts of its own which may not connect as closely with reality as the other two, although it’s probably true that right now physics isn’t doing too well in that respect either. There’s also the question of turning the current ladder on its head. Right now, most people who think about it at all probably consider physics to be the basis of, well, physical reality, but it’s possible to invert this and consider the Cosmos to be centred on life, which in the carbon-based biochemical form we’re familiar with can be used as the basis of science by implying certain things about the nature of the Universe. For instance, Fred Hoyle, an astronomer, predicted that because there was organic life in the Universe, and carbon was unexpectedly common, the energy of the carbon nucleus must be unusually close to the sum of the energies of three helium-4 nuclei, since that was how it formed in the first place, and he turned out to be correct. We can safely start off from the idea that our kind of life exists and work out what that entails for the nature of reality. It’s therefore fairly simple either to regard biology or physics as the most fundamental science, but the same can’t so easily be done with chemistry because of its central position.
Physics can leapfrog chemistry into biology to some extent: there is such a thing as biophysics. For instance, the way birds and insects fly or the emergence of turbulence in a blood vessel leading to arterial disease rely more on physics than chemistry. By contrast, there’s nothing to leapfrog to in chemistry. It’s either going to become biology or physics on the whole, although there’s also the likes of geochemistry and astrochemistry, though these are more specialities of the subject itself. Chemistry cannot claim, therefore, to be the basis of anything in a fundamental way. It’s always going to have to rely on other sciences to some extent. This is not a criticism of the science so much as a musing on its nature, but it has practical consequences for academia.
Chemistry is impinged on from all sides. In the ’80s, I was unsurprisingly involved in campaigning against cuts in higher education, and at the time they focussed very much on the arts and humanities. I would partly put this down to the influence of another industrial chemist on this country and my life, namely Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher’s government concentrated very much on slashing funding and resources to the humanities while leaving chemistry relatively untouched. Although I can’t remember the details particularly well, I do remember participating in some kind of dispute on campus regarding the injustice of this unbalanced approach to research and teaching, and at one point we found ourselves confronting chemists, who were apparently of the opinion that the humanities were less important than their own faculty and department. Incidentally, the layout of Leicester University reflected the central position of Chemistry because it had three linked buildings dealing with physics, chemistry, biology and medicine, with Chemistry in the middle joining the others together. I don’t know if this is coincidence, architectural conceit or logistical. The chemists’ hostility to us, and at the time chemistry graduates tended to be politically on the Right, was in fact ill-founded because from a twenty-first century perspective this looks like a case of divide and conquer, and Chemistry turned out to be particularly vulnerable to funding cuts. It’s a case of Martin Niemöller’s famous dictum, “first they came for the Socialists. . . “, though in some ways not so serious, but who knows the consequences?
During the ‘noughties, there was a rapid decline in Chemistry departments. This came rather close to home, as one of our closest friends worked for such a department at De Montfort University, formerly and much more appropriately known as Leicester Polytechnic, but all over England Chemistry departments were closing down. Between 1997 and 2002 there was a fifteen percent drop in British chemistry graduations compared to a nine percent drop in graduations overall. Chemistry is an expensive course to teach, which rather annoys me as the Humanities which bore the brunt of the cuts from 1981 on are probably cheaper than any of the natural sciences. Nonetheless a university looking for savings is going to be eyeing Chemistry suspiciously. This has consequences for the pharmaceutical and materials sciences industries in this country, which is particularly serious in the former case as it’s a major British industry (even though it must be nationalised to preserve the NHS and engages in animal abuse on an appaling scale). It’s also a less popular course with students because they see the careers as less lucrative than others, and also see the subject as less exciting than some others, so there was a decline in applications during the ’90s. This may reflect the unhealthy shift towards a “vocational” rather than a truly academic approach to higher education. The way the National Curriculum lumped all the sciences together and for some reason allowed major errors to creep into the syllabus can’t have helped either. However, this is not just a British phenomenon. The same is happening in North America, Europe and Japan, although there has been a rise in interest in China and India. Even so, nowadays only half the universities in the “U”K offer Chemistry per se as a complete degree.
This could easily turn into a discussion about Britain vs the rest of the world but the pressures are the same everywhere. Chemistry is also vulnerable to inroads being made into it due to its central position. Physically-based materials science can advance “upwards” from physics into chemistry and biotechnology can advance “downwards” into it. There’s also nanotech, which does the same kind of job as applied chemistry might’ve done in the past. Biotechnology and pharmacology are difficult to tell apart in some ways. For instance, biotech is used to manufacture drugs and since it aims at altering the function of cells it clearly applies to medicine. Chemical engineering also uses a lot of nanotechnology nowadays. Hence the territory of chemistry is easily invaded.
Ever since I studied it at school, I’ve felt that geography isn’t a real subject. It seems to be more a collection of bits of other disciplines such as economics and geology rather than having a real core. Of course a circle can easily be drawn round a subject and it can simply be called something, but it means it has neither a claim to being fundamental in a way most other disciplines are nor its own theoretical basis. I may of course be wrong about this because of Dunning-Kruger, but my perception of the nature of geography, which is I admit fairly dismissive, has some similarities with how I apprehend chemistry. Chemistry has too many connections with other fields to stand a good chance of holding together in the long run except in a significantly reduced area, although I have a great deal more respect for it than geography. Part of the subject’s predicament could be linked to the rather confusing possibility that scientific and technological progress is actually slowing down rather than speeding up. There was an exponential growth in the number of synthesised substances between the start of the industrial revolution and the 1990s, but it isn’t clear that this has or will continue, and it may be deceptive. For instance, in pharmacology, an area I tend to know more about due to being a herbalist, the so-called “non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs” (NSAIDs) are all cycloöxygenase inhibitors despite the fact that there are many possible points along which the inflammatory pathway could be modified and in spite of large numbers of compounds being known to interact with them. Likewise with broad-spectrum antibiotics, there are many antimicrobial compounds out there, but the ones used tend to be quite similar. This is partly due to capitalism of course, because altering a compound you know works and which is already well-known and manufactured on a large scale is easier than coming up with a completely new one. This can also be seen in my post on fibres, where Du Pont owned the patent on Nylon-66, leading to the development of new nylons which were somewhat different from the first but also had a lot in common with them. The restriction imposed by the patent did spur creativity, but in a specific area. Also, it’s notable that the most recent organic synthetic polymer mentioned in that post was first marketed in 1958, and there was a peak of synthetic fibre production in the mid-twentieth century.
The exponential growth in the number of different compounds synthesised in the past two and a bit centuries could be expected to follow other markers of technological change and go into decline. It’s partly driven by population growth, which possibly goes some way towards explaining why India and China now have more chemists than they used to because they’re developing nations with large populations. In principle, the more the population is, the more people there are to have useful ideas, in chemistry and other areas. Once development has got past a certain stage, population growth slows and this is likely to happen for the whole species, potential extinction events notwithstanding. The date for a technological singularity has been steadily postponed and is according to some people now in the early twenty-second century, and some consider it to be the end of exponential progress followed by a decline. In other words it’s a peak. It’s possible for one person to have been born the year of the first powered plane flight and retire during the Apollo programme. By contrast, a person born the last year humans left low Earth orbit will now be forty-nine. By 1970, most of the technologies that made the biggest difference to standards of living were already in place. The exception, of course, is Moore’s Law, but that too has now ceased to operate due to transistors being too small to operate reliably owing to the laws of physics. That doesn’t mean there isn’t another way forward though.
The problem with chemistry is that it was particularly useful for those kinds of mid-twentieth century achievements, such as antibiotics, plastics and synthetic textiles. Once we’ve got those the situation changes, and in particular it’s held back by capitalism and the emphasis on vocational training in universities rather than actual education, although slowing population growth is also likely to be a factor.
Another problem, affecting academia across the sciences, is scientometrics. This is the attempt to measure and quantify research papers and publications, and is used to assess funding and resources allocation in science. It can be seen to encourage the “publish or die” approach, where research is divided up into “minimum publishable units”, which increases the paper count but doesn’t particularly contribute to progress. It also distorts it. For instance, in palæontology there’s been a tendency to report a very large number of species in our genus and I suspect that this is because it’s newsworthy and attracts funding rather than anything else. The result is poor quality research. Recently I noticed that a number of medical papers seemed to have oddly small sample sizes which didn’t seem to be the kind of numbers you could do reliable statistics on. Maybe there’s been some advance in stats which means that tests are now able to be trusted with smaller samples but I strongly suspect this is publish or perish. I cannot see this not having an influence on chemistry, although how is another question.
Finally, there are some philosophical issues associated specifically with chemistry rather than other natural sciences, although of course they would have their own too. Chemistry is in broad terms the science of the structure and transformation of matter, although it’s possible to take issue with that because not all materials science is chemistry and not all matter is atomic. It also impinges on quantum physics a fair bit. For instance, there’s mesomerism. An atom might form a double bond with another but a single bond with a third and fourth at the same time, in which case the two single-bonded atoms would be negative ions, but because of the quantum nature of electrons it’s uncertain which of the three atoms it’s bonded with have the double bonds and which are ionised. There is, I think, no definitive fact about this, and in the many-worlds interpretation this means that we don’t know which universe we’re in, and in fact may be in three different worlds until we are able to observe the fact of the matter, or create that fact. Atoms also lack a definitive radius, and have different radii according to whether the bond they’re making is covalent or ionic. Also, the very distinction between ionic and covalent bonds is not black and white, since some bonds are closer to being covalent and some closer to being ionic but they can’t be neatly pigeonholed. This is partly because atoms are not really atoms. They’re not indivisible (α-τομοι) units of matter.
The idea of describing a compound in terms of a certain number of atoms of each element joined together also doesn’t always make sense. For instance, tantalum carbide’s formula is TaC0.88 because it doesn’t in fact consist of equal amounts of tantalum and carbon. This happens a lot with minerals. Some chemists claim there are chemical properties which can’t be reduced to physics, such as Roald Hoffmann, who questions the reducibility of pH (acidity or alkalinity of a substance dissolved in water) and aromaticity (ring-shaped organic molecules) to non-chemical concepts.
Note the resonances – there’s a degree of uncertainty here
Aromaticity famously came to the chemist Kekulé in a dream where he sees carbon atoms joining hands and turning into snakes who swallow their own tails. I’ve just realised this is going to sound odd unless I explain the difference between aliphatic and aromatic compounds. In organic chemistry there are two main types of compound. Aliphatic compounds are based on chains of carbon atoms and aromatic compounds are based on rings of the same. They’re called aromatic because early on, some of them were noted to be smelly, such as benzene, but this is not an essential feature and many aliphatic compounds are also smelly.
As noted yesterday (to me, not to you), hexagonal rings of carbon are particularly strong, which is why it might be feasible to build a space elevator with their help. The above ring is therefore particularly stable. Each hydrogen can also be replaced with something else. Phenol, for example, replaces one hydrogen with an hydroxyl (OH) group, or a larger entity such as the rest of an amino acid can occur to, as with phenylalanine:
(Hydrogens and carbons are not routinely drawn in structural formulæ).
That alternating double and single bond in the hexagonal ring may not represent reality, partly due to resonance structures, and consequently they’re more often represented thus:
There is a problem with drawing it this way, because it’s easy to forget that every carbon has four bonds, leading to impossible structures being drawn if you’re not careful, but it’s plainly quicker and reflects the non-local nature of the electrons, which is where things get a bit imponderable for me. Atoms, and in particular their orbitals, are not spheres but collections of lobes meeting at a point in which the electrons are most likely to be located. This is irreducible probability: there is no hidden mechanism which determines where they are, and there cannot be – it’s been proven. Hence there are situations where two lobes on one atom can overlap with two lobes on another, and these are known as π bonds. They’ve been evoked as an explanation for the existence of free will, as they occur aplenty in human brain cell microtubules. In the case of an aromatic compound there are six of them, each overlapping with two adjacent carbons. Double and single bonds between carbon atoms have different lengths, but X-ray crystallography shows that all the carbon-carbon bonds in benzene are the same length, so the picture above of alternating single and double bonds is unrealistic. It’s also a little hard to imagine how such a molecule could be a regular hexagon, and this leads to knock-on effects in different parts of the molecule if it’s bigger than just benzene. Hexabenzocoranene, for instance, consists of a sheet of thirteen of these rings, and it seems they’d need to tessellate for this to be possible. Therefore the orbitals can be thought of as a pair of parallel tori on either side of the molecule, and the molecule must also be flat even though the classical understanding of the bond lengths would mean it couldn’t be. This is an emergent property of resonance, and as such could be considered a purely chemical concept or property, not reducible to physics.
When this idea became popular, it underwent “mission creep”: chemists started to see these non-localised bonds everywhere. It also changed the definition of what an aromatic compound was again, because for instance that structural formula of phenylalanine above is no longer as neatly alternating as it’s shown to be. Aromatic compounds become compounds including carbon rings with delocalised electrons, themselves in rings.
I mentioned X-ray crystallography. This involves working out what shape a molecule is by crystallising a lot of it together and X-raying it. This leads to a distinctive pattern of X-rays bouncing off it in the same way as a diamond with a beam of light shone through it would produce a distinctive pattern of reflection which would reveal its symmetry, and it’s possible to work back from this scattering to a shape which the molecule in question must be. This was later joined by NMR, nuclear magnetic resonance, since renamed MRI so as not to scare patients that the process was dangerously radioactive. The magnetic fields induced cause the electrons and protons to behave in a distinctive way in aromatic compounds, and therefore the test for whether something is aromatic or not is now several steps away from being the same thing as containing a hexagonal ring of carbon with alternating single and double bonds. Computers also made determining their form faster, and this is significant because it changes the definition of stability. It means that a molecule only needs to be stable enough to last as long as it takes for a NMR scan to be computed of it, meaning in turn that less stable aromatic compounds can be said to exist than before. However, on the other side again, the reason for their instability may be that they are on Earth at a certain temperature interacting with other molecules, and there are in fact polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in interstellar space. They do exist, and our understanding of them is in a way parochial, because just as pH makes most sense considering compounds dissolved in water, so does our understanding of polyaromatic hydrocarbons.
It even gets to the point that all that’s needed is for atoms of any kind to form a loop. There’s a square molecule of four aluminium atoms, which probably exists transiently but doesn’t persist but could in a sense be called aromatic, and again in deep space there’s C6, which is just the tiniest and loneliest possible piece of graphite. On Earth it would either oxidise to carbon dioxide or find other carbons and become graphite, graphene or a carbon nanotube.
This brings me back to the minimum publishable unit. At some point the concept of aromaticity got out of hand and it’s suspiciously similar to the plethora of supposèd species of Homo. It seems that it might be quite exciting and publicity-seeking, and maybe in a way fashionable, to declare something an aromatic compound just to crank out a paper, and I’m not blaming anyone here. It’s the system. In doing so, this pressure to publish erodes and blurs the originally nicely defined concept of the benzene ring, and later the delocalised electron thing. It’s an example of how capitalism influences science, not in the sense of forcing scientists to develop new antibiotics which are basically the same as their predecessors and therefore have the same drawbacks and potential to lead to resistance, but in the sense that it subtly pervades the scientific consciousness and very concepts used in it. In a way it was better for this concept before there was a means of measuring the length of atomic bonds, and it was certainly a more sensible environment before scientometrics started to make a serious impact on chemistry.
In conclusion, then, I wonder if anyone at all has read this far, and also that chemistry is in danger of being eroded precisely because it’s the central science, and also due to political and social pressures, the concepts within it, which may be unique to chemistry and not helpfully explicable in reductivist ways to physics, are like much of science in danger from capitalism via scientometrics. The issue of aromaticity is a single but insidious example of that. Also, calling chemistry “the central science” kind of makes it sound fundamental, but in reality what it means is that it’s the most “sciency” science, since it’s the one which is furthest from anything non-scientific. It’s the middle rung of the ladder, and as such has special status, but that also makes it especially vulnerable.
It used to be thought that we were about halfway through our planet’s history, and that conditions would continue in the way they have in the last few hundred million years until the Sun becomes a red giant in something like five thousand million years’ time. Sadly, this is not now considered likely, but that’s not really because of us or any damage we might be doing to the planet’s long term prospects. It turns out that our Sun has something more hostile in store for us in less than an æon. And at this point I should probably explain my words.
Firstly, I still use the long scale with large numbers, so for me a billion is 1012 and so on – 1 followed by twelve 0’s. The short scale, where a billion is 109, 1 000 000 000, is American and when I say “American” I mean both continents. It’s fairly wasteful to use up the words for numbers on lower values, so I don’t do it. That said, ironically from an English-using perspective, the short scale does line up better with metric multiple prefixes such as giga- for “billion” and tera- for “trillion” and so on. There’s also already a perfectly good word, “millard”, referring to a hundred thousand anyway.
Secondly, the word æon, from the Greek word ‘αιων meaning “age” or “generation”, and sometimes translated in the Bible as “world” in a fairly pejorative way, is a unit of time lasting a thousand million, or millard, years. From the same root stems the word “eon”, which is a division of time above “era”, so I’ll talk about that too. Earth’s past history is divided on the longest temporal scale into eons, namely the Hadean, Archean, Proterozoic and Phanerozoic, this last being our current eon. From the Archean onwards, these are divided into eras (the well-known Palæozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic in the past 540 million years or so), periods (for example the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous), epochs (in our case the Pleistocene, Holocene and probably the Anthropocene), ages, for example the Meghalayan which lasted from some time in the Bronze Age and might be considered to have finished in the 1950s, and finally chrons, which in the case of the current Sub-Atlantic started around the time Rome was starting to expand. It gets a bit confusing because of the archæological Three Age System of Stone, Bronze and Iron, and incidentally we are still in the Iron Age, which collides with the chrons.
With a couple of exceptions, Earth’s future is as yet unmapped as far as actual names for intervals of time are concerned, but it certainly isn’t unmapped according to scientific understanding, which of course could change easily. In fact it did just that in the past few years with the realisation that we haven’t got as long as we thought. I’ve already gone into a fictionalised history of the next two hundred million years which mainly amounts to Dougal Dixon’s work on ‘After Man’, ‘Man After Man’ and ‘The Future Is Wild’. This is somewhat feasible and somewhat based on science, though forty year old science, and has some degree of validity, but there is a firmer understanding of the probable near future, and also well beyond that until the Sun dies. Thus I’ll start with the next few million years.
It’s been proposed that we’re currently in the Anthropocene Epoch, but it isn’t clear when it started. The previous epoch, the Holocene, covered the time since the end of the last Ice Age, but in recent years it’s been reconsidered and now there’s a popular movement to divide the Holocene off from the past few years because of the major effect our own species is having on Gaia, hence Anthropocene – ‘ανθροπος + καινος = > human + freshness. All the epochs in the Cenozoic end in “-cene” because they’re relatively recent. The geological dating system uses “BP” to name particular fairly recent times, usually within the history of our genus Homo, which stands for “Before Present”, the “present” being defined as the year 1950. Consequently one suggestion is to date the Anthropocene from 1950. Another rather similar proposal is that it begin from the earliest nuclear weapons tests, since these have left a long-lasting change in the geological record by irradiating the world and changing its radionuclide signature. A third suggestion is that it begin with the Industrial Revolution, and finally Heather Davis has proposed that it start in 1492, since this is when Europeans began to conquer the rest of the world. Rupert Sheldrake, who articulated the Gaia Hypothesis, recently proposed that the Neocene will follow the Anthropocene in the near future, which basically coincides with the Singularity and marks the point where machines will sort the environmental problems we’ve created. This would make the Anthropocene ridiculously short, possibly less than a century, but Sheldrake embraces that, linking it to the acceleration of change, which may have started nearly an æon ago with the appearance of multicellular life. The future is of course unknown and our existence may have vast consequences of which we’re currently unaware and can’t anticipate, but there’s also what might be called the “geological future”, that is, the future as it will proceed assuming that human activity lacks major long-term consequences for the planet, which is probably less hubric and more Copernican, as it were.
Naming things doesn’t necessarily give you any control over them though.
The most obvious issue in the relatively near future is anthropogenic climate change. It isn’t clear whether what we do to the climate is far-reaching enough to end the recent spate of ice ages, of which there have been five from the Pleistocene onwards so far. It might even trigger one, because if Antarctic icebergs spread far enough they may reflect more heat into space and cool the planet. There are various ideas about the next ice age. The most popular seems to be that it will happen anyway, in about fifty millennia, which is when it’s “scheduled”. More recently this has been questioned, and some climatologists believe there will still be another ice age but that it will be in a hundred millennia, because by that point climate will have returned to the point where it would’ve been without our technology as it has recently been. Of course it may also be that we or our machine successors will just “re-wild” most or all of the planet and things will get back to “normal”. This degree of uncertainty regarding even the relatively near geological future might be seen as indicating that this is just idle speculation, but in fact it may not be because certain things are well-known and established scientific facts it seems unlikely we’ll be able to avoid, such as entropy, and those can be predicted fairly confidently.
A lot of this is covered in the popular video ‘Timelapse Of The Future’:
I’ve covered this before here, and there are similarities between this post and that one and its successor, but I hope I’m saying something fresh here too.
Fifty thousand years from now, the day will be one second longer. This is because the lunar tidal action on Earth gradually slows our rotation. I’ve previously been curious about how long it would take before the year has exactly three hundred and sixty-five days, and if this change is linear, leap years will become unnecessary by the time each day is fifty-nine seconds longer, almost three million years from now, and before that date they could be rarer, say every five years by six hundred millennia from today. To be honest, I find the idea that the Gregorian calendar would still be in use by then absurd, but there are similar assumptions made about the likes of long-term contracts and economic planning, so maybe it will, and Y2K is an example of a problem caused by assuming such things would not be in place for longer than a few years.
A quarter of a million years hence, Lō’ihi will break the surface of the Pacific Ocean, although it may of course be either deeper or shallower by then depending on which way sea levels go. This is the next Hawaiian island, to the southeast of Hawai’i itself. This will continue as the Pacific plate and the hotspot shift over many millions of years and the islands to the northwest erode away. By six hundred millennia from now, the chances are that an asteroid one kilometre in diameter will have hit us, although this could happen at any time. The energy released by this would be equivalent to around sixty times the detonation of every nuclear weapon in the world. There’s a modelling tool for asteroid impacts here.
Around a million and a quarter years from now, a red dwarf star called Gliese 710 will be very close to the Solar System, less than a quarter of a light year away. By two million years hence, judging by previous events when this has happened, the ocean will once again be alkaline enough for coral to recover. This acidification occurs because of the increase in atmospheric CO2. Ten million CE will be around the time the Afrikan Rift Valley will be flooded and the new continent, which Dougal Dixon named Lemuria, will start to move across the Indian Ocean. Also by this time, even without a mass extinction most species around today will have died out and, I hope, been replaced. Fifty million years from now the map of the world will look roughly like this:
(I actually think this is exaggerated in the sense that it assumes the rate of continental drift to be faster than it in fact is).
Around 200 million years from now, there will be a new supercontinent, whose exact shape is hard to predict because nobody knows much about which way Antarctica will move. This restores the planet to the situation as it was before the dinosaurs evolved, and makes for a large amount of desert with extreme temperatures near the centre of the continent, very hot during the day and very cold at night. It will also increase the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, and means a single world ocean and a single landmass covering 29% of Earth’s surface. While this continent is in place, the Hadley cells either side of the Equator will move to 40° either side of it. This will increase the already high percentage of desert land by a further 25%. This supercontinent will have broken up by about 450 million years from now, leading to the kind of climate found here during the Age of Dinosaurs, and also at around this time the likelihood of a mass extinction from a gamma ray burst, which will cause it to rain concentrated nitric acid, means it’s likely to have happened by about this time.
There may just be time for another supercontinent to form about 600 million years from now, by which time there will be no more total solar eclipses because of our satellite’s widening orbit, but there will still be annular eclipses where some of the Sun’s surface remains visible.
Then, unfortunately, a major catastrophe will ensue. Up until this point, a process referred to as the carbonate-silicate cycle has kept considerable amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Rain dissolves this gas and acidifies, landing on rocks and gradually dissolving them. Calcium and bicarbonate ions are washed into the ocean, where it’s incorporated into the hard parts of organisms such as plankton, molluscs and coral. This sinks to the ocean bed, where it’s buried and ends up in the magma under the crust. Volcanic eruptions then return this to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. But the Sun is gradually getting brighter, and by this time the light will be strong enough to start weathering the rocks faster than their carbon can be released back into the air, and will also start to dry the land, reducing rainfall and therefore carbon reaching the sea. The rocks will also harden, slowing continental drift and since that’s responsible for throwing up new volcanoes along the edges of the plates, these will erupt less often. At a certain point, around 600 million years from now, one form of photosynthesis known as C3 will cease to operate due to insufficient carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This will lead to a gradual decline and eventual extinction, first of green herbs such as annuals, then deciduous trees, then broad-leaved evergreens and finally conifers. I would expect that during this time, evolution would lead to other plants occupying their vacant niches. That said, there’s still C4 photosynthesis, which can function at a lower level of carbon dioxide, and there are many plants which use this type, particularly those in the spurge family, and they already look quite alien and futuristic:
Photograph of Euphorbia helioscopia, taken in Machida city, Tokyo, Japan. Croped & resized. Date 17 May 2006 Source Own work Author Sphl
Water vapour is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and consequently this evaporation of water from the oceans and elsewhere will start to raise surface temperatures. Because of less photosynthesis, oxygen will also fall and therefore the ozone layer will break down and there will be more oxidation at the surface due to more ultraviolet light penetrating to ground level, removing even more oxygen from the atmosphere. By 850 million years or so in the future, C4 photosynthesis will become impossible and the cycle run by the sun through plants will cease to function. This means that only animals who don’t breathe oxygen or rely on plants for food, directly or indirectly, could survive. This would, for example, include worms living in geothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean who feed on bacteria. However, the ocean will also be disappearing and once the average surface temperature exceeds 47°C 1.1 æons from today, the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere will start to run a feedback loop through the greenhouse effect, causing runaway evaporation from the oceans and a slide into a situation where the only life which can survive will be in places like lakes and caves at the tops of mountains or near the poles, and finally not even that. 1.6 æons from now only bacterial and archeal life will remain, and 2.8 æons hence even the poles will be at 150°C.
I find this all rather claustrophobic and suffocating, which is a bit of a weird reaction. I look around at the trees in the park, the people, badgers and spiders in this household, note that I can breathe the air and that there is evidence of human activity all around in the form of houses, roads, vehicles, furniture, whatever, and it really saddens me that it will come to an end so soon, but I also find it weird because we’ve got 800 million years to go. However, they used to think that Earth would stay in about the same state for about as long as it had already existed, so theory has robbed us of three or four æons of life. There’s only enough time for another two supercontinents, by contrast with maybe ten which have happened before on this world. But the future is in fact unknown and may not be like the past, or continue trends which began then. We have intelligent tool-using life now, and those tools may find a way to lengthen our stay, or alternatively hasten our demise. Also, if some of us were to leave this planet permanently and entirely to settle elsewhere, that gives us more hope, if hope is the word. But a Doomsday Argument-like scenario makes that unlikely. Then again, maybe it isn’t up to us. Maybe another species of animal will start to invent more advanced tools and technology before the carbonate-silicate cycle breaks down. Maybe there will even be such beings around as it starts to happen. Who knows? The future is unknown.
It’s been mentioned that They might just be planning our extinction. That is, it may be that the ruling class, having realised that the planet is in trouble and that automation makes most workers unnecessary, might just have quietly decided that if the majority of the human race gets wiped out by various disasters it might be no bad thing for them. I’m going to call this Their Extinction. Although they might have miscalculated and believe themselves to be invulnerable when they aren’t, in which case it will literally be their extinction, I don’t actually mean that they will themselves die out but that the scenario they have in mind is their solution to their problems, which are not our problems. But there’s also Our Extinction: the extinction that we can own. This is what’s been referred to as voluntary human extinction, or anti-natalism. It’s been summed up, perhaps inaccurately, as “Live Long And Die Out”, and is also called anti-natalism because it’s against the idea of having any more babies.
On the one hand, then, there’s the STARK Conspiracy, a fictionalised version of the first plan written up by Ben Elton in his I assume well-known novel and later TV series ‘STARK’. On the other is VHEMT, pronounced ‘Vehement’ – the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. It must be borne in mind that the former is fictional, and therefore probably doesn’t reflect reality. We have to be very cautious at this point about conspiracy theories, and in fact that should probably be addressed first.
Conspiracy theories give the illusion of explanation when in reality they only serve a psychological purpose of giving people a sense of certainty and a superficial hypothesis to account for perceived situations. Most of the time they have no basis in reality, although occasionally they have. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, for example, did turn out to be real. In the unlikely event that you don’t know what this was, the CDC deliberatedly infected Black men with syphilis spirochaetes and refrained from treating them to study the progress of the disease without treatment. Not only were they infected, but of course they passed it on to their sexual partners and children. There was no informed consent. This took place between 1932 and 1972. That, then, is a real conspiracy. They do happen. They may not be the point though. The point is really that we live in a situation where large-scale conspiracies are possible and can be influential. In other words, this world with this system, antisocial people controlling society, the ability to wield large scale power, corruption and so forth. Conspiracies, which are in any case probably not as widespread as they seem to be, are a symptom, not the disease. Whether the disease is endemic to the population or not amounts to a political stance. But exposing conspiracies may be pointless because clearing one up leaves space for another. That’s all assuming that major conspiracies exist of course.
There’s also the question of how much a conspiracy “theory” is even a theory. It’s usually more a hypothesis with strong confirmation bias. We think there’s a conspiracy and go on to perceive positive signs of one everywhere. They don’t seem to be testable or falsifiable propositions so much as belief systems which cause one to seek confirmatory evidence. Hence it might be better to call them “conspiracy hypotheses” just to encourage one to bear in mind that they are not rigorously arrived at on the whole.
The next step is to bear in mind the superficiality of their explanatory power. There are ideologies and social and political theories about economics, politics and the social realm which one may agree or disagree with but have sophisticated approaches to society. For instance, there’s the trickle-down theory, which I’ve chosen because I disagree with it but it’s considered respectable. This is the idea that the rich should be taxed less because their wealth will enable them to provide greater employment opportunities for the poor, whose income will therefore increase. And it is true that money doesn’t generally just sit in banks doing nothing, but is often invested and used elsewhere. My point being that I appreciate the reasoning behind this and have a limited amount of respect for it, but I do have some. It makes more sense than the idea that the Illuminati are running the world right now. Incidentally, even if they were it wouldn’t make it any worse than it already is, and might even make it better (but read the blog post if you like).
One conspiracy which did turn out to be true, and was on a larger scale than some, was the one involving Cambridge Analytica. It’s tough to make a case for that being irrelevant although it remains so that a different form of democracy and media and social media ownership and influence would have made it harder for it to succeed, so it is still symptomatic.
We’re left, then, with cock-ups. That’s rather flippant, but to be more serious about it, there are concerted attempts to do things surreptitiously, and there’s the general inability and incompetence of muddling through and hoping things will be okay. It isn’t at all clear what’s happening with Their human extinction. Science strongly supports the existence of various issues whose confluence could be expected to wipe out the species, such as anthropogenic climate change, plastic pollution, oceanic acidification and the appearance of new pandemics among humans. There’s a remarkable response to this among governments which either involves complete silence and failure to address the problems or denial, and it isn’t clear if this is disingenuous or not. It’s possible that they are psychologically speaking in denial about it, and of course that’s an early stage of grieving. Alternatively, it might just be propaganda and they know the score, and given the fossil fuel lobby’s successful decades-long obfuscation, that seems more likely.
The question then arises, if they know, what does it mean that the general public is unable to perceive a response to the crisis? Does it mean they’re doing nothing, or are they doing something so unpopular that the public would find it unacceptable? The problem is that silence is hard to interpret. We do know that the majority of the human race is in mortal danger. That much is undeniable. A clue as to what might be happening could be found in the current mass murder of the poor which is taking place in the UK.
In the past, undesirables have of course been rounded up and put in concentration camps, which are a British invention. This is a fairly expensive solution, although it does allow for the spread of lethal infections fairly easily, for which treatment would be counterproductive. In a move reminiscent of care in the community, it’s now possible for people to be killed in their own homes or on the streets through benefit sanctions or by encouraging assault against them, and this resembles the idea of privatisation – “individuals and their families” – quite closely. Therefore I imagine the plan is to encourage the degradation and habitability of the planet until it becomes impossible for poor people to survive. Perhaps “encourage” is the wrong word, as it suggests agency. It’s more a question of the problem of potentially uncoöperative poor people whose services are no longer required due to automation by allowing them to die. This is a fairly straightforward, not really conspiratorial scenario which resembles other policies in its laissez faire quality. In fact it isn’t so much a policy as the absence of one.
Ben Elton had a somewhat different idea of what was planned, and although his novel had a humorous purpose he’s known for his axe-grinding. ‘Stark’ has been described as “their solution”, and it’s only a very limited one although it kind of is. Elton envisaged the rich engineering an economic crash which rendered the resources more affordable, followed by the construction of a self-sustaining orbital habitat to which the super-rich would escape, but also envisaged them killing themselves after a few years due to something like boredom and disillusionment. I can’t remember the plot that well, but if it did involve going into orbit, the question is, what happens next? How should we feel about their descendants, assuming there are any? Is there another social struggle after most of us have died? Would their children be responsible for the ecocide committed on this planet and the extinction of the vast majority of the human race?
Something I keep meaning to get round to talking about here is the concept of “Up Wing”. The concept has changed over the past few decades, but there are suggestions that Left and Right be replaced by Down and Up. Brian Stableford calls these “Green” and “Grey”, but that isn’t quite what I mean. Up wing politics supports the idea of technological progress and Down wing believes that technological innovation has become detrimental to the human race. In the context of human extinction, the idea that technological innovation is harmful to us is not simple because in a way, some people would prefer us to die out as that could promote the recovery of the biosphere. This is still not the place, unfortunately, to go into too much depth on this issue, but I often feel it’s a major thing I’m not mentioning with big flappy ears, wrinkles and a proboscis. I’ll get round to it someday. But I will say, in spite of my endless invective against capitalism, this is not the whole story.
Moving on, there’s “our extinction”. The meaning of “our” here is quite limited because I’m not personally convinced by this position, although it might be better to orchestrate it rather than having it thrust upon us. The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, also known as VHEMT, espouses what’s known as “anti-natalism”, in this case with a Green tendency. I first came across VHEMT in the early 1990s in connection with Earth First!, a group with which I have major issues, but I can see the point of VHEMT itself. The movement takes a humorous approach to the issue of environmental devastation, although the underlying message is serious. The thesis is basically that the existence of human beings on this planet, in their current state at least, is harmful to all life on Earth and therefore that we should stop having children and deliberately die out, as peacefully as possible. In fact I get the impression that they believe that no manifestation of human life and culture on this planet or off it is positive for the biosphere. Right now, it does appear that if we were all to disappear tomorrow, the planet would quickly bounce back from the damage we’ve done, and this chimes with James Lovelock’s earlier opinion on the Gaia Hypothesis that human arrogance alone makes us believe that we can have a long-term impact on the survival of life on this planet, and that we metaphorically amount to a case of the common cold, which Gaia could easily shake off. Rather disturbingly, Lovelock has now changed his mind and now believes that the Singularity will save the planet but that if we continue in the same vein life will indeed become impossible here. In any event, VHEMT are not misanthropic, but actually want to spare us all from the disasters which will ensue if we continue as we have been. They also acknowledge that the chances of everyone deciding to stop breeding are effectively zero, but that it’s still worth trying, presumably because good will is the only moral impulse (this is Kant’s idea incidentally – I didn’t get this from them). This is reminiscent of my attitude towards veganism, or rather a plant-based diet, in that although I believe it’s essential for human survival given current conditions, that doesn’t mean I think most of the human race will ever adopt such a diet. Nonetheless it isn’t about that for me. It’s just about not being part of the problem in that respect. In other ways I am part of the problem. Likewise with VHEMT. Interestingly, they also have a concept of THEM – Terrorist Human Extinction Movement – which is the military-industrial complex and amounts to the tendency I described in the first part of this post.
They also want to clear up some misconceptions. They are pro-parent, pro-child, voluntary and life-affirming. They believe that children who already exist deserve a good life, which is in fact one motivation for them advocating this view – the starving children cliché. Given that children exist, they also need good parenting. They are not imposing the idea on anyone, i.e. they don’t believe in enforcing anything like abortions, sterilisations or contraception. Finally, they are life-affirming: they don’t want more people to die than are dying already or for people to kill themselves.
I hope I’ve given them a fair press there. It’s also quite persuasive to argue that if a person in a rich country, particularly a middle-class person, has children, those children will then probably go on to consume and cause more damage to the planet over their many decades of life, as would further descendants and so forth up until the point where human life on this planet becomes unsustainable. I do not, however, agree with them.
VHEMT abuts onto several other issues in an interesting way. One of these is the GSM community. If the idea of sex for physical reproduction is abandoned, it makes it harder to argue for heterosexuality being better than homosexuality, and of course if the infliction of existence is seen as a negative, it could even make sex for the purposes of procreation morally inferior to sex where procreation is impossible. However, I wouldn’t entirely agree with that portrayal of queerness as many lesbians, gay men and trans people do in fact want children, and gender dysphoria can even include the negative perception of one’s own barrenness or sterility, because one may be technically fertile but is unable to procreate in the manner which is congruent with one’s gender identity. There’s also the concept of freedom from children. Patriarchy often means that initially similar circumstances gradually drift towards more rigidly circumscribed gender rôles because of such factors as potential employers’ expectation of the nature of one’s parental responsibilities and the biological clock.
Antinatalism generally is often motivated by other reasons than simply hastening the demise of the species. Although I personally consider the coming into existence of a sentient being as morally neutral, it’s undeniable that into every life a little rain must fall. There are claims that our memory is selective and that we rationalise our suffering to minimalise it, partly because we are instinctively driven to stay alive, reproduce and raise children.
There is a sense in which I am myself antinatalist, though not usually about humans. I would far rather not be infested with parasites than have to debate myself over the moral quandary of killing them, and I would definitely prefer houseflies not to breed in my home. I’m also pro-choice, so to that extent it does apply to my own species. In a sense, anti-natalism could be seen as assessing the quality of human life sufficiently negatively that it means that it is usually or always better not to be born. That said, we do have children, although we limited it to two because that amounts to zero population growth if universalised. I should point out that I only really believe in zero population growth for the developed world because of our greater potential for environmental damage, the lower need for support from one’s children and the easy availability of contraception. I wouldn’t impose that on others in the majority of the world, and I wouldn’t even impose it on anyone else. It probably goes without saying that most vegans are probably antinatalist with regard to farm animals, and I’m no exception. I don’t believe that farm animals should continue to be bred and a lot of the time the breeds themselves have been modified with purely human benefit in mind. I do, however, believe in animal sanctuaries if livestock (horrible word) farming has ended.
There are a few issues with human extinction being a positive thing. We don’t appear to be moving towards a managed or planned extinction for a start, and this is problematic because if we leave our machines running, as it were, the risks to various localities become considerable. We have stored toxic chemicals, biological weapons and nuclear facilities, and if any of these fail without human supervision, the environment in the vicinity at least will be severely damaged and at best take a long time to recover. On the other hand, mass extinctions can be increase biodiversity. The problem with this view, though, is that it focusses on proliferation of variety rather than the suffering and death of the creatures going extinct or otherwise being harmed.
There’s a long history of communities which decide not to have children and die out. Entire religious sects have done so. The Shakers, for example, founded in the eighteenth century, were celibate after admission, although they allowed people to join when they were pregnant and they adopted children. The sect found it difficult to support itself economically because mass production was bringing the price of the kind of goods they made by hand and sold down, and there was a constant decline in membership, which peaked at six thousand in the early nineteenth century. There appear to be only two left although they hope others will join them. This is the reason I don’t think movements like VHEMT will succeed: they won’t pass their ideas on to new generations of their own and belief systems acquired during childhood are the most durable for adults. Therefore they would have to rely on converting people, and I just don’t think this is going to happen, so for me it isn’t a question of whether it’s desirable but how likely a planned extinction is by this method.
One of the arguments the founder of the movement, Les Knight, made for human extinction was that even if we were able to achieve harmony with the planet in the short term, this could later change. This seems erroneous to me because the forces of oppression need to win every battle but the forces of liberation only need to be victorious once, provided they’ve truly won, and a sustainable society is only possible if society is liberated.
There’s also the Medea Hypothesis, the “evil twin” of the Gaia Hypothesis. This is the claim that life tends towards self-destruction of its environment. For instance, a few æons ago microörganisms began to produce oxygen via photosynthesis, which poisoned most of the other organisms alive at that point and it took the planet many millions of years to adjust. In general, microbes are seen as responsible for the catastrophes associated with this, and therefore the idea of stewardship by humans could make sense. Maybe we could monitor the biosphere for threats and prevent them. Believers in this hypothesis would attribute the current crisis to it, although this time it isn’t instigated by microörganisms. However, we technically have a choice. Given that some time in the next æon there will be another Medean event, when the Sun wipes out all complex life on this planet leaving only microbes, the presence of intelligent tool users at that point, even if not human, or in fact any successful establishment of biodiverse settlements elsewhere in the Cosmos could have led to the survival of the kind of complex life which originated here. So maybe we owe it to the Universe to continue to survive.
Boris Johnson has recently been criticised for his alleged statement, “let the bodies pile up in their thousands” in response to lockdown measures. He may well not have said this. However, it is the case that the policies his and other governments pursue guarantee that the bodies will in fact pile up in their billions unless something is done. It seems there are three options: their extinction, in the sense that we all drift into a situation where almost everyone dies; our extinction, where VHEMT’s idea catches on universally, and the scenario where we survive. That last scenario is incompatible with capitalism of course, which makes it improbable, but if we did, stewardship to prevent future non-human caused disasters would seem to be morally incumbent upon us.
A Box Of Chocolates 