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Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Rare...or frequent but not long-lived?

Richard Dawkins, in the penultimate chapter of his 1996 book, Climbing Mount Improbable, addresses the general question about how and to what extent life may have arisen in the universe.
...[O]ur island planet in the universe has never, so far as we know from properly authenticated accounts, been visited. More significantly, for the last few decades we have been equipped to detect radio communications from far away. There are about a million stars within the radius that radio waves could reach in a thousand years. A thousand years is a short time by the standards of stars and geology. If technological civilizations are common, some of them will have been pumping out radio waves for thousands of years longer than we have. Shouldn't we have heard some whisper of their existence by now? This is not an argument against life of any kind existing elsewhere in the universe. But it is an argument against intelligent, technically sophisticated life being spaced densely enough to be within easy radio range of other islands of life. If life when it starts has anything other than a low probability of giving rise to intelligent life, we might take this as evidence that life itself is rare. An alternative conclusion to this chain of reasoning is the bleak proposal that intelligent life may arise quite frequently, but typically only a short time elapses between the invention of radio and technological self-destruction. [emphasis mine; p. 284]
Why necessarily technological self-destruction? Technology provides only the means, but not the motive. To me, the most striking thing about our technological age is that technology coexists with a prevalent tide of religiosity. There are a few minds who contributed to the pivotal discoveries and inventions that led to present-day technology, but there are so many more minds still stuck in animism and tribal animosity. If a nuclear device were detonated anytime soon, the chances are that it would be set off by religious zealots.

The "rise of intelligent life" is more the rise of the potential for intelligent behavior than of its actual realization in significant numbers of "intelligent beings." The sad reality of pervasive unintelligent behavior is well illustrated by the 2008 political season in America.

4 comments:

  1. Does man exist for God; or does God exist for man. Is knowledge the means to an end or just the road to the end. Ignorance is bliss, so they say and I think Palin proves the point. ed

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  2. You miss a couple of points in your argument.

    First, religion has existed for far longer than technology, so actually it is a sudden tide of technology "co-existing" with religion, not the other way around.

    Second, historically, religions have been places where natural philosophy (ie science) was developed and nurtured, up until the 18th Century anti-religion reframe called the Enlightenment, when the term "the Dark Ages" was coined. Yes, religions had an effect on which sciences were practiced and studied, but so does the current science/political environment.

    Third, the greatest murders in the twentieth century were driven by non-religious or anti-religious ideologies (communism, national socialism/Naziism etc) and secular cultural and racial animousity. Jews have been targetted *for* their religion, but if you want mass murder *by* a religion, you have to go back to the effects of Martin Luther in the sixteenth century.

    Atheism, not so much.

    Fourth, there is at present only one major Earth religion that commonly uses violence in promoting itself. You know which one it is. So damning all religions based upon the current state of that one is not rational or fair.

    ASIDE: Often, I find people making some kind of "all religions are evil" statement are really just making an in-group/out-group sorting label. It's a convenient way to avoid having to spend any rational thought on the tenets of any particular religion, since you can label them all as "bad". When you get to know people personally who are religious, you can decide, "Oh, but these are *good* ni--, um, worshipers" YMMV.

    Finally, a weakness of Dawkins' argument is that the shortness of cycle where intelligent societies spew massive quantities of radio waves may be a function of the fact that *something better and less wasteful* is possible, and intelligent societies typically find it in 1-2 centuries after they find radio.

    The physical evidence for my hypothesis would be indistinguishable from "they blew themselves up", since they would merely stop the quasar-like broadcasting, and begin doing something that would only be detectable under some new science.

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  3. I see now that my reference to a "tide of religiosity" is a poor use of metaphor, since a tide by definition ebbs and flows, and you are quite right (as I too know of course) that religion has been "flowing" for a good long while.

    Nevertheless, religion still coexists with technology, rather than fades away (as it should if intelligence and rationality, rather than superstition, dominated human behavior).

    That religious institutions protected learning is to their credit, to the extent that they were not at the same time suppressing certain discoveries as proscribed by holy writ. But you're right: that was history. Science no longer needs such protection. The protection it may need now is from religion. For example, from creationists who want to legislate that their faith-based view be taught in schools as an alternative to evolution.

    Some thinkers (such as Bertrand Russell) have argued cogently that the twentieth century ideologies you mention were themselves religious. One of the early essays in Russell's collection, Why I Am Not a Christian, collected by Paul Edwards, addresses this.

    I don't "damn" all religion based on the current behavior of certain Islamists. I am critical of all religions for a number of other reasons as well, most of which reasons I've alluded to unsystematically from time to time in this blog.

    I agree that many religious people are okay. I certainly can't criticize their religion based on their behavior. However, as Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins (among others) point out, religious beliefs in themselves do not merit being regarded as above criticism. Even behaviorally inoffensive religious tenets can and should be criticized for being implausible and/or unnecessary.

    VERY GOOD POINT about technologies better than radio....I take it that you're suggesting that we here on earth haven't yet found any of them (but might in a few more years or decades)?

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