Clarke’s First Law: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that
something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that
something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
Clarke’s Second Law: “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible
is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”
Clarke’s Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic.”
This last observation stimulated me to think more on the relationship of
science and religion, particularly the impact the discovery of an
Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (ETI) would have on both traditions. To that
end I would like to immodestly propose Shermer’s Last Law (I don’t believe
in naming laws after oneself, so as the good book warns, the last shall be
first and the first shall be last): Any sufficiently advanced ETI is
indistinguishable from God.
God is typically described by Western religions as omniscient and omnipotent.
Since we are far from the mark on these traits, how could we possibly
distinguish a God who has them absolutely, from an ETI who has them in
relatively (to us) copious amounts? Thus, we would be unable to distinguish
between absolute and relative omniscience and omnipotence. But if God were
only relatively more knowing and powerful than us, then by definition it
would be an ETI! Consider two observations and one deduction:
1. Biological evolution operates at a snail’s pace compared to technological
evolution (the former is Darwinian and requires generations of differential
reproductive success, the latter is Lamarckian and can be implemented within
a single generation). 2. The cosmos is very big and space is very empty
(Voyager I, our most distant spacecraft hurtling along at over 38,000 mph,
will not reach the distance of even our sun’s nearest neighbor, the Alpha
Centauri system that it is not even headed toward, for over 75,000 years).
Ergo, the probability of an ETI who is only slightly more advanced than us
and also makes contact is virtually nil. If we ever do find ETI it will be as
if a million-year-old Homo erectus were dropped into the middle of
Manhattan, given a computer and cell phone and instructed to communicate with
us. ETI would be to us as we would be to this early hominid–godlike.
Science and technology have changed our world more in the past century than
it changed in the previous hundred centuries. It took 10,000 years to get
from the cart to the airplane, but only 66 years to get from powered flight
to a lunar landing. Moore’s Law of computer power doubling every eighteen
months continues unabated and is now down to about a year. Ray Kurzweil, in
The Age of Spiritual Machines, calculates that there have been thirty-two
doublings since World War II, and that the Singularity point may be upon us
as early as 2030. The Singularity (as in the center of a black hole where
matter is so dense that its gravity is infinite) is the point at which total
computational power will rise to levels that are so far beyond anything that
we can imagine that they will appear near infinite and thus, relatively
speaking, be indistinguishable from omniscience (note the suffix!).
When this happens the world will change more in a decade than it did in the
previous thousand decades. Extrapolate that out a hundred thousand years, or
a million years (an eye blink on an evolutionary time scale and thus a
realistic estimate of how far advanced ETI will be, unless we happen to be
the first space-faring species, which is unlikely), and we get a
gut-wrenching, mind-warping feel for just how godlike these creatures would
seem.
In Clarke’s 1953 novel Childhood’s End, humanity reaches something like a
Singularity ](with help from ETIs) and must make the transition to a higher
state of consciousness in order to grow out of childhood. One character early
in the novel opines that “Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well
as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware,
the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now.”
Although science has not even remotely destroyed religion, Shermer’s Last Law
predicts that the relationship between the two will be profoundly effected by
contact with ETI. To find out how we must follow Clarke’s Second Law,
venturing courageously past the limits of the possible and into the unknown.
Ad astra!
Dr. Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, the
Director of the Skeptics Society, a monthly columnist for Scientific
American, the host of the Skeptics Lecture Series at Caltech, and the co-host
and producer of the 13-hour Fox Family television series, Exploring the
Unknown. He is the author of In Darwin’s Shadow, about the life and science
of the co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace. He also
wrote The Borderlands of Science, about the fuzzy land between science and
pseudoscience, and Denying History, on Holocaust denial and other forms of
historical distortion. His book How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age
of Science, presents his theory on the origins of religion and why people
believe in God. He is also the author of Why People Believe Weird Things that
was widely and positively reviewed and was on the Los Angeles Times
bestseller list as well as the New Sciences science books bestseller list in
England. Dr. Shermer is also the author of Teach Your Child Science and
co-authored Teach Your Child Math and Mathemagics.
According to Stephen Jay Gould (from his Foreword to Why People Believe Weird
Things): “Michael Shermer, as head of one of America’s leading skeptic
organizations, and as a powerful activist and essayist in the service of this
operational form of reason, is an important figure in American public life.”
Dr. Shermer received his B.A. in psychology from Pepperdine University, M.A.
in experimental psychology from California State Univesity, Fullerton, and
his Ph.D. in the history of science from Claremont Graduate School. Since his
creation of the Skeptics Society, Skeptic magazine, and the Skeptics Lecture
Series at Caltech, he has appeared on such shows as 20/20, Dateline, Charlie
Rose, Tom Snyder, Donahue, Oprah, Sally, Lezza, Unsolved Mysteries, and other
shows as a skeptic of weird and extraordinary claims, as well as on
documentaries aired on A & E, Discovery, and The Learning Channel.
