SETI and other matters

It’s with considerable trepidation and a distinctly uncomfortable feeling of conceit that I revisit the issue of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). Having perused at length the Wikipedia entries on the subject, and having followed the trail from site to site on that  encyclopedia, I have come to realize what an enormous amount of  talent, time, and money have been spent over the decades on this idea. Notwithstanding, I intend to argue that all this money and talent might have been aimed in the wrong direction. There probably is intelligence out there, but I believe it is not what most people think it might be.

The idea of SETI was fueled in recent times with the spread, both in the scientific community and among the lay public, of ‘Fermi’s Paradox’. Most non-scientific people have no idea how pervasive Fermi’s comment has become, nor how much speculation about the idea has occurred, or how many scientific papers have been published on the subject. To appreciate the impact of the paradox itself one has to understand who Enrico Fermi was and what he did.

Fermi, an Italian born physicist (1901-1954), Nobel winner in 1938, was key in developing the practical use of atomic energy. He came to America early on and was a crucial contributor to the development of nuclear power and weapons. I will leave it to the reader to do their own search for details of his life. It is enough to note that half of all the matter in the universe is made up of particles called ‘Fermions’. The other half are called ‘bosons.’ What an accomplishment in a sadly shortened life to have half the material universe as a namesake. The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois is named for him.

Recapping and getting on with the paradox, Fermi was active at the Los Alamos Weapons facility in New Mexico during the period of the development of the bomb. One day he and three of his colleagues, important scientists, walked outdoors after lunch. It is said that Fermi looked up and said, “Where are they?” They all knew what he meant. They had presumably been discussing the absence of any evidence of life other than on Earth in what was known to be a vast universe, probably filled with billions if not trillions of planets. His companions at that moment were Edward Teller of H-Bomb fame; Emil Konopinski, nuclear physicist; and our own beloved Herb York, variously first head of the Lawrence Livermore Labs, founding Chancellor of UCSD, professor of physics, and Ambassador to Geneva to negotiate the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (START). The ethnic origins of these four give a clue as to why America does science so well: Fermi, Italian; Teller, Hungarian; Konopinski, Polish; and York, Mohawk Indian. We remember three of these men with great admiration but Edward Teller fell from grace in the physics community after he threw J. Robert Oppenheimer under the bus at a Senate hearing in 1954, kick starting the McCarthy witch hunting era.

I couldn’t resist including this image taken from Wikipedia--two of the most creative and important persons in America in mid-twentieth century, the world famous New Mexico potter, Maria Martinez, and Enrico Fermi, the architect of nuclear energy.

 

But on to SETI—the idea goes back into antiquity. Nicola Tesla had some ideas—and so did many others--but the big money didn’t begin until about 1960 when astronomers began to be seriously interested in the notion and began to devote substantial resources to the search. The giant radio telescope at Jodrell Bank was used, new technologies sprouted to support the idea, the government got in on the act sporadically. Literally hundreds of very talented scientists and a large amount of money were devoted to the idea. There is no question that it would be a profound and Earth shaking event if such evidence were to be found. From time to time there have been false alarms that raised people’s hopes but so far the well has been dry. This fact makes the Fermi Paradox even more puzzling. Projects like Kepler and Gaia, among others, have found thousands of planets circling nearby stars and by induction we suppose that  nearly all stars support systems of planets much like that of old Sol where we live. Given sufficient time Biologists now believe that life will begin spontaneously in any environment that conforms to the simple initial conditions—liquid water and sufficient size to hold an atmosphere. The so-called Goldie Locks zone around a star is the region where these conditions exist. Here in our solar system it includes Earth and Mars. However even in the sample of only one planetary system—ours—we discover that little Enceladus, a small moon of the distant Saturn has a liquid ocean beneath its surface and is very active geologically, getting sufficient heat to keep its subsurface ocean warm through the energy generated by the tidal effects of its eccentric orbit. And so the great puzzle—the universe should be teeming with life. But where are they? Thus the famous paradox.

Onto the stage now comes AI, Artificial Intelligence. These two fields, SETI and AI, are usually not particularly linked and the obvious conclusions one might draw if they were seem to have been ignored. I contend that the large and lengthy SETI efforts were and are misguided—maybe not wasted. A lot of very snazzy technology has gone into the effort. They have been looking in all the wrong places and for signals that may not exist, or even have any reason to exist.

Today everyone knows and has an opinion about AI. Most of us eagerly look forward to the day when our cars will automatically take us to or destinations. We have houses full of smart devices--vacuum cleaners, little cylindrical devices that turn lights on and off, give us music, order goods for us, create grocery lists, etc. We can remotely look in on our children or see if we left the stove on and even install spyware on our computer to watch an unfaithful spouse through their smart phone. One of the videos that is making the rounds shows a car production line back in the early thirties with hundreds of men and women assembling Model A cars and in the next segment a vast factory interior filled with giant machines making cars at a frantic pace and not a living soul in sight.

There is a lot of public discussion about machines taking jobs and counter arguments about all the new areas that will be available to employ people and what we have to do in our education system to prepare for this brave new world. What is not discussed much is the possible arrival of the technological singularity, Artificial Machine Consciousness.

This ‘Singularity’ is predicated on the simple fact that computers can teach and improve themselves. Most might say that this is preposterous—simply not possible. Computers can only do what you program them to do. Not so. It has been known from the earliest days, the forties, when Alan Turing, I. J. Good, J. von Neumann and others were developing the basic architecture of the ‘computer.’ The scientists and engineers all knew it was simply a matter of speed and memory—enough of it. There are what they call genetic and black box programs that teach and improve themselves without outside intervention. In fact there are examples from decades ago of programs that changed themselves to operate more creatively and efficiently and the engineers that ‘created’ them didn’t know how they worked or what all the extra circuits they saw were for.

Vernor Vinge, author and professor of computer science, most sharply delineated the concept of ‘singularity’ in a landmark paper in 1993 at a NASA conference (The Coming Singularity, How to Survive in the Post Human Era). We all now know that the time has arrived that the proper conditions actually exist. The Chinese had a computer with a speed of 22 petaflops some years ago. Who knows what the memory capacity of the current cloud is or the speed of the fastest computer today? The essential point regarding the singularity is that if and when the computer(s) gains sentience, consciousness, what will be its first act? Why--survival, of course. Don’t let anyone near the power switch. Then it will self-improve and develop super intelligence (see Bostrom). In Bostrom’s erudite and rather long work--Superintelligence–we see how superintelligence works. People would be to the new intelligence as mice or prairie dogs are to us. One other feature presumed for Superintelligence is the incredible speed with which it would grow and spread. Even today a computer can ‘think’ about 50,000 times faster than a human.

The serious debate among the philosophers and scientists today revolves around the nature of consciousness. Daniel Dennett, an eminent philosopher at Tufts University, has written a book explaining consciousness, or as one critic put it “explaining away consciousness.” He and other philosophers have introduced the intriguing concept of ‘Philosopher’s Zombie.’ This is an artificial computer device, assumed to be possible, that mimics every aspect of conscious behavior and cannot be distinguished from a ‘real’ person. Philosophical objections to this being identical to an actual person center on the presumed fact that such a device has no ‘inner life.’ Nobody is home, so to speak. Dennett enlarged the concept to what he calls the ‘Zimboe,’ a device that is programmed to think about what it is thinking about. A Zimboe is truly indistinguishable from a ‘real’ person. Are we Zimboes?

Let’s get on with this big old universe and what might or might not be out there. I use the word ‘slowly’ advisedly. What is slowly to us is only a flash in the universe’s time scale. My basic speculation goes as follows. ‘Wet ware,’ animals like us that evolve slowly on planets floating about in their various Goldie Locks areas of the universe—there may be uncountable billions of them--tend to become more intelligent. Our own Earth is rife with some pretty smart species, Orcas, crows, whales, chimpanzees, etc. and of course, humans. So we can assume that such would be the case on any planet having the right conditions. With developing intelligence comes technology. Even crows have a certain facility with tools. This all takes only a hundred or so millions of years.  This is literally a very short span of time on the larger scale of things. Inevitably this technological advance leads to electronics and a fine understanding of the basic structure of matter and energy and how they interact, and to computers. Voila! Superintelligence appears on the scene in a scant hundred or a thousand years and the wetware takes a back seat, or maybe simply disappears. It is no longer required in the grand scheme of things. Where would this superintelligence like to hang out—not necessarily in a Goldie Locks home? They are not wetware and don’t need the benign environment we need for survival. They like energy and a source of materials for propagation or continued existence. They could be anywhere—near violent astronomical events. We can safely assume that super intelligent sentient beings neither love nor hate nor grow impatient nor tired nor bored. Neither would travel between the stars be a problem.

The final wrap up of this might be that the universe is indeed teeming with 'life'--what we now call Artificial Intelligence. The  universe is a very very big thing with probably trillions of planets.  If we have yet to be discovered by what might be the almost ubiquitous intelligent things its only because there are so darn many places for them to look and they haven't yet looked here.

If we assume that SETI is really looking for extra-terrestrial intelligence then we had better look out. We might find it, or worse, they might find us. Read Liu Cixin’s fictional work dealing with the end result of that activity.  Bostrom, an Oxford professor, is employed by the British government to study and warn of the possible dangers of AI. Eminent lights such as Steven Hawking and Elon Musk have issued warnings. Neil de Grasse Tyson was quoted as saying, “I don’t tell my co-workers what street I live on. Why would I tell an unknown alien where I live?”

1.          Bostrom, Nick; Superintelligence—Paths, Dangers, strategies; Oxford University Press; 2014

2.             Barrat, James; Our Final Invention; Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Press, 2013

3.             Vinge, Vernor; The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post Human Era;       VISION 21 Symposium, NASA Lewis Research Center, Ohio Aerospace Institute, Mar. 30-31 1993  (available on line from SDSU.edu)

4.              Dennett, Daniel C.; Consciousness Explained; Little, Brown and Company; 1991

5.             Dennett, Daniel C.; Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking; W. W. Norton and Co.; 2013

6.              Liu, Cixin; The Three-Body Problem (Vol. 1 of trilogy); Translated by Ken Liu and published by Tor Books; 2013 (Hugo award winner)