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The future of life
SCIENTISTS and philosophers have tried time and again to answer questions regarding the meaning of life — why are we here? Astronomers study the life of stars and galaxies and try to understand the workings of the cosmos. Though religion answers quite a few of these questions, scientists want proof, something tangible they can base their theories on. How did life start? What is its purpose? Where are we going? What is to become of the universe?
Astronomers and researchers cannot give us definitive answers but they can give us context by taking into account the way things have been developing till now. Until recently, people believed that the universe had always been there. That we were just drifting into an endless river of stars and galaxies. Later, our telescopes became advanced, which helped us to understand the bigger picture. According to Edwin Hubble, the universe is expanding, thinning out and this expansion becoming swifter by the day. Thus, in all probability, if the universe is constantly expanding it must have had a beginning. So when and how will it meet its end?
As SETI astronomer, Dr Seth Shostak predicts in his work Life, the Universe and Everything, “Our sun, a relative newcomer to the Galaxy, will like your least favourite uncle, go funny as it ages. In another five billion years or so, it will swell up, swallow a few inner planets and boil away all that is interesting in our world.”
So what will to happen to mankind? Will it also dissipate like smoke in the blink of an eye? Dr Shostak and many researchers and futurists feel that there is a chance that our descendants might relocate to another neighbourhood, “bringing along photos and artifacts for future museum exhibits on ‘Earth; the Planet That Was’.” This is certainly possible as far as scientists and theorists are concerned. Even then, a hundred billion years later, the bright spiral arms of our galaxy will dim out, replaced by black holes and dead, neutron stars. This demise of stars will continue, erasing galaxies that will eventually evaporate and be consumed by the cold fog, which was once our universe.
Youngest on the block?
Since there are almost 200 billion stars in the Milky Way, it is quite possible that it is teeming with thousands of earth-like planets, harbouring, life in it’s dark corners. It goes without saying that if there is life, there could be intelligence as well. Could it also be possible that we are the newest arrivals in the galactic club of intelligent beings in the cosmos? Take our planet’s history, for instance. It has been 4.6 billion years since earth was formed. The history of evolution starts from bacteria, trilobites, dinosaurs and finally ending at humans.
Whereas, other living species survived thousands of years, mankind has only been technologically advancing for a century or so. How long do technologically advanced societies normally last? We really do not know, as we have not encountered any such societies other than ourselves. However, experts believe that in case folks at SETI do pick up a signal from anywhere else in the galaxy, it will be from a civilization which is technologically more advanced than us.
Mary Barsony, a research scientist at Space Science Institute, states, “These days, the stellar birth rate in the Milky Way is only about one solar mass per year. The galaxy’’ss not nearly as fertile as it once was. It seems that there was a real burst of star formation more than 10 billion years ago, though. Those early years were when the stellar population boomed.” This means that our sun is certainly a newcomer to the galaxy.
So are we the youngest ‘intelligent beings’ too? Since we do not know how long intelligent societies last, there are some assumptions in this regard. According to Dr Shostak, there are two possibilities: the first one being that “intelligence is such a useful attribute that technological societies really last a long time — billions of years. Heck, trilobites lasted a half billion years, and they weren’t even smart (by any reasonable standard). So maybe the thinking beings club is home to really, really old societies, and we’re like preschoolers surrounded by grad students.”
The other possibility, he notes, is that no intelligent society lasts a very long time, meaning that not only does the intelligence club relatively new members but it might also be a very small gruop. However, the fact remains that we are, in all probability the galaxy’s youngest arrivals.
Of brains, bots and bytes
In a world where technology is making leaps everyday in some field or the other, will human beings remain the same? In case we encounter aliens, will they be squishy and fleshy or actually intelligent? “The reasonable probability is that any extraterrestrial intelligence we will detect will be machine intelligence, not biological intelligence like us,” states Dr Shostak, who is also the author of Sharing the Universe: Perspectives on Extraterrestrial Life.
There are also experts who feel that biotechnology has great potential and that future humans will be machines and organisms put together. On the other hand there are those who do not agree with either of the above and feel that humans are the most intelligent type of life forms. Dr Shostak also adds that for humanity to survive, mankind will let loose mechanical ancestors to travel through space; something, other advanced societies might have already done millions of years ago.
With Artificial Intelligence, (AI), on the agenda, scientists like Marvin Minsky, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who is also researcher of intelligent machines, states that alien intelligence would also use the same basic language tools for communication or thought. And that it is most probable that intelligence emerges and progresses in the same way throughout the cosmos.
Speaking of AI, scientists feel that robots are a better choice than humans, to explore the universe, as they do not have the same hang-ups as humans. This means that a robot would not need a hot cup of steaming coffee after a 24-hour work schedule. Richard Doyle, leader of the Centre for Space Mission Software and Systems at the jet propulsion laboratory, the place where Nasa designs robotic probes, stated, “there’s an obvious advantage for safety to send vanguard machines first, to push the frontier, and allow humans to follow.” He is of the opinion that our probes will eventually have to think for themselves.
Our nearest neighbour, Alpha Centauri, is more than four light years away. Sending a spacecraft there would require the probe to have a decision-making power. “You can’t joystick it and we know so little beforehand that you can’t even know what the mission would be,” adds Doyle.
An intelligent machine would have the important advantage of repairing and even reproducing itself in order to create some sort of infrastructure for attaining success in far-off missions. Dr Shostak assumes that pattern recognition, reasoning and intuition with other attributes, which would be induced into appropriate hardware, would be the ideal space travellers. In fact, there might be many such machines zipping through space from other systems, communicating with each other.
All this will happen as their creators stay put on their own worlds, possibly clinging on to their own ecosystems. Randall Mills, a medical doctor trained at Harvard has teamed up with a neurology professor from John Hopkins along with a software company to work on an Artificial Intelligence concept, stated that the ideal thing would be for an “AI being” to only have certain experiences designed into its circuitry. “You set its parameters so that it knows no other realities than the task you’ve assigned it,” he said.
Dr Michio Kaku, theoretical physicist with the University of New York and one of the string field theorists, feels that advanced civilizations may have established the ability to travel through wormholes in the space-time dimension and thus may just go through “doorways” from one galaxy to another. He feels that genetic engineering and advances in biotechnology could make humans smarter and sturdier with a prolonged lifespan. His assumption for future humans is not completely based on machines, but on the concept of a stronger, genetically engineered biological species.
Could it be possible that some kind of extraterrestrial intelligent device is already spying on us without our knowledge? With the advancement of nanotechnology, we are also working on the ability to construct tiny intelligent, nanoprobes to do many things. Scientists predict that one day tiny nanoprobes will be injected into the bloodstream to detect and cure diseases including tumours and blocked arteries. One of the believers of tiny, artificially intelligent, nanoprobes prying into the affairs of the beings on this planet, is Allen Tough, professor emeritus of education at the University of Toronto.
So what will the future of life be on this planet? Will we disappear into the nothingness of space or turn into ‘cyborgs’ as some experts predict? Will the species roaming the cosmos sent from earth be anything like what we are today or just artificially intelligent machines? Whatever the outcome, humans do not have it in their nature to sit back, for we are an adventurous, curious and restless lot. Perhaps one day, science and age-old wisdom will define why we are here and where we are going or maybe alien intelligence will enlighten us.
The writer
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