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Self-Designed Evolution
A lecture given by Stephen Hawking and reprinted in Scientific American has been gathering a lot of attention recently in cyberspace.
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Posted by veronica on 07/10 at 06:41 AM
Do you think Hawking reads the IEET site? (grin) Just a few comments on some of his statements:
"I think any visits by aliens, would be much more obvious, and probably also, much more unpleasant."
Why more unpleasant? I assume that Hawking proposes that in the future, WE will act like friendly and productive aliens to another planet. ((Hmm, then again, maybe he doesn't. After all, he writes, "the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. Talk about creating life in our own image.")) Also, why would the visit be much more obvious? Were we to visit another intelligent planet, wouldn't we want to go in cautiously and hidden, for our safety? (That was /not/ my making a case for believing in UFO visits to earth.)
"We are used to thinking of intelligent life, as an inevitable consequence of evolution. But the Anthropic Principle should warn us to be wary of such arguments. It is more likely that evolution is a random process, with intelligence as only one of a large number of possible outcomes."
I don't understand the words "more likely." Evolution is either a random process or there's some guidance behind it. But that latter view is teleological. It's a decision. Some decisions are simply not subject to probability.
"It is difficult to imagine that one could build a living system, out of just hydrogen and helium, and anyway the early universe was still far too hot for atoms to combine into molecules. "
It's even more difficult to imagine that a living system of just hydrogen and helium could build /itself/. And yet, here we are.
"There used to be a project called SETI, the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. It involved scanning the radio frequencies, to see if we could pick up signals from alien civilisations. I thought this project was worth supporting, though it was cancelled due to a lack of funds."
SETI is still around; it's just funded by private sources now. Frankly, I'm glad. I prefer my tax dollars to support a science that /has/ a subject.
Posted by Athena Andreadis on 07/10 at 11:23 AM
Veronica, what Hawking says is nothing new and he didn't have to read IEET posts to get a clue. Biologists have been saying similar things for a long time (and I'm one of them). Hawking always gets an audience because he's famous. Some of it is the usual voyeurism but the rest is justified -- he wrote a general science best seller that deserved its status and he's a very good physicist who made several interesting predictions regarding the basics of the universe.
Evolution is random, but outcomes that make a change more optimal in a particular environment are likely to persist and propagate. Nothing's teleological about that -- or monolithic, for that matter. When circumstances change, so does the fitness of a particular "decision".
As for SETI, there are plenty of things that your tax money is paying for that are literally millions of times more expensive and have no purpose but destruction. SETI tax money corresponded to a few cents per year per person. Space exploration is not a luxury, it's a necessity for our long-term survival and well being -- far more so than developing immersive VR. And finding a second life genesis will be the greatest paradigm shift we will ever encounter.
Posted by veronica on 07/10 at 01:58 PM
"Veronica, what Hawking says is nothing new and he didn't have to read IEET posts to get a clue."
Oh, all I meant was "d'ya think Hawking will read my comments below?" Jokingly, of course.
Concerning tax money and SETI: Thank you for listing /other/ things I'd rather not waste my money on, too.
I don't mind giving my money for space exploration. But SETI's search for ET life is different, and is /not/ "necessary for our long-term survival and well being."
"And finding a second life genesis will be the greatest paradigm shift we will ever encounter. "
I truly don't think it will. I think most people will think, "how the heck does the existence of life over 100 light-years away affect ME?"
Posted by Athena Andreadis on 07/10 at 05:01 PM
"I truly don't think it will. I think most people will think, "how the heck does the existence of life over 100 light-years away affect ME?""
Are you serious? Finding life elsewhere will affect us more than the Copernican revolution did, from religion to science.
Posted by veronica on 07/11 at 11:46 PM
"Are you serious?" -- Yes.
"Finding life elsewhere will affect us more than the Copernican revolution did, from religion to science. "
Religious folks will -- and in many cases already have -- incorporated the possibility of the existence of life elsewhere. You know very well that their theology is flexible enough to handle such things.
Now we must be on the same page here: I mentioned finding evidence of life over 100 light-years away; I was not talking about actually having a live conversation with any of them. That might be a different case with regards to both science and religion.
Posted by Athena Andreadis on 07/12 at 11:27 AM
If we find life elsewhere, it will help us figure out 1) how it originated and 2) which characteristics of life are parochial versus universal. We will be able to address religious claims of uniqueness, of sudden appearance and of the universality of several articles of faith across religious traditions (if the life is sufficiently complex). And we will be able to do so based on evidence, rather than philosophical arguments.
Posted by Sam Blackburn, Graduate Assistant to Prof. Hawking on 07/13 at 07:48 AM
Hi all,
This "recent announcement" seems to have ended up in the news, so I just wanted to clarify a basic point: Hawking wrote the lecture in about 1999! The text is still available on his website, but he hasn't given it as a talk recently.
I'll update the website to give dates for each lecture.
Thanks and regards,
Sam.
Posted by Mike Treder on 07/13 at 08:10 AM
Sam, thanks for this clarification!
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