Something I always get a kick out of is that we, as technological humans, don't build things to last forever. I'm not talking about self-destructing junk like iPhones, but things like bridges, which are generally designed to last a mere three decades, according to the Michigan Department of Transportation. Meanwhile, the average new retail store—a Gap or whatever—is designed to last just 20 years. You can assume most everything around you built within the last 50 years has a very short lifespan. That Gap will either be something new, or gone, very, very soon.
Advertisement
Maybe that's less interesting to you. Hard to say. But it does bring up a more interesting question: if we could, technologically speaking, make things to last, say, 500 years, would we? And why not? Obviously we don't have a great track record of leaving things in good shape for our offspring but, at the same time, corporations or governments don't have lifespans like human bodies do. Well, sometimes governments are built to expire, but if we're talking about, like, the U.S. Constitution or English monarchy, then, no, those are indeterminate by design. They should then care (such that an organization can "care") about an indeterminate future, right? (I realize this is a super-light touch for super-deep political theory, but pretend with me for a few minutes.)So, do we also assume that humans are indeterminate? If you follow much singularity-speak, that probably even seems like a stupid question. Of course we're forever, as post-human digital beings. You can pursue the simple, factual arguments against that notion elsewhere but, even given some sort of transhuman existence, there is still some variety of limiting physical reality, some finiteness suggesting an end.
The Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank inspired the first proposals to search for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. Credit: Anthony Holloway, University of Manchester
This all brings us to an unlikely research organization exploring this question of finiteness (do we last?): SETI UK. This just-launched operation, the British analog of the United States' beleagured search for extra terrestrial intelligence, is properly known as UKSRN and consists of a variety of different search tools from 11 different institutions across the U.K. Basically, we're hunting for radio signals originating from alien intelligence within the universe's massive, unceasing flood of radio noise.This brings us to the work of Dr. Anders Sandberg, of Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, and back to my original question. Dr. Sandberg is investigating the question of how far away in space and time another civilization could start and still have a chance of interacting with Earth.
Advertisement
“If this were a very limited range, the Fermi question, ‘Where are they?,’ would be easy to answer: they couldn’t have got here yet. However, we show in our paper that, beyond a certain technological level, civilizations can spread not just across their own galaxy but across enormous intergalactic distances. This is mostly limited by how fast their devices are and the expansion of the universe. There are millions or billions of galaxies from which a civilization could have reached us, if it were established early,” Sandberg says in a press release.His answer isn't hopeful: "If life or intelligence is rare, it must be millions or billions of times rarer; if advanced societies wipe themselves out, or decide to not go exploring, they need to converge to this outcome with extremely high probability, since it only takes one that escapes this fate to fill the universe.”That is, if there are a large number of advanced civilizations in the universe, then advanced civilizations are doomed to be small and short. If there were not a limiting factor to advanced civilizations, at least one of those civilizations would have spread out forever and it would already be on top of us. But we're still searching.Which brings us to yet another researcher, Dr. Austin Gerig, senior research fellow in Complex Networks at the University of Oxford. In a way, he finishes the thought: "We know that (1) we exist and that (2) our birth number within our civilization is approximately 70 billion (i.e., approximately 70 billion people were born before us). From such little information, we can reasonably, and perhaps surprisingly, conclude that (1) many other civilizations exist and that (2) most of these civilizations are small, i.e., most will die out before producing trillions of people.”This is all what's known as the “universal doomsday argument.” The argument is just what it sounds. Just like a human body (or hard-drive) is destined to fail eventually through a variety of different forces, so too is a civilization. “If most civilizations are small, then our own civilization is likely to be small, i.e., it is likely to die out within the next few centuries," says Gerig. "Our research indicates this is the case, but that our estimates of survival are greater than previously thought using a more traditional form of the doomsday argument.”So that's it, sort of. It's an interesting angle to the question of why we search. We search because we want proof that humans have a future, that we don't vaporize ourselves with nukes or boil ourselves in our own oceans. It's not hope for company, but hope for our own company.Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.
ORIGINAL REPORTING ON EVERYTHING THAT MATTERS IN YOUR INBOX.
By signing up, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy & to receive electronic communications from Vice Media Group, which may include marketing promotions, advertisements and sponsored content.