It is impossible to distinguish between a sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence and a deity
The article appeared in issue 1 (October 2002) of the journal World of Science and Technology - Scientific American, published by Ort. Presented on the Science website courtesy of the journal editors.
As an outstanding scientist and the author of an empire of science fiction books, Arthur C. Clark is one of the most far-reaching visionaries of our time, his insightful quotes leave a greater impression on our collective psyche than those of most futurists, due to their insights into humanity and our unique place in the universe, and none of them leaves a greater impression than his famous third law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is no different from an act of magic."
Comment W made me think about the effect that the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) can have on science and religion, for W purpose, I would like to humbly offer Shermer's last law (I do not believe in naming laws after my name, and as the good book says, the last shall be the first and the first will be the last): "Any extraterrestrial intelligence, which is advanced enough, cannot be separated from the divine."
God is portrayed as omniscient and omnipotent in most Western religions. Since we are far from owning these qualities, how can we distinguish between the divine, who is endowed with these qualities, and an ETI who is only endowed with them in abundance, compared to us? we will not be able to.
But if God were to surpass us even relatively in knowledge and power, oh by definition the deity would be ET1!. Consider that biological development works at a snail's pace compared to technological development. (The first is Darwinian and requires generations of differential replicating success. The last is Marcian, and can be realized within one generation in your heart). The world is very big and very empty.
And Voyager, the farthest spacecraft from the Sun, moving powerfully at a rate of 60,000-n kilometers per hour, will not reach the distance of the Sun's closest neighbor in its heart, the Alpha Centauri system (to which it is not aimed), in more than 75.000 of it.
Thus the likelihood that ETI is only slightly more creamed than our cast iron is almost nil. If we ever manage to locate ETI, it would be like Desma to a million-year-old homo erectus thrown into the twenty-first century, given a computer and a cell phone, with instructions to contact us.
The ETI will be to us as we will be to his early hominid (member of the Hades family) - like God.
Due to evil and technology, our world has changed more in the last century than in the hundred centuries that preceded it.
Ten thousand years passed from the cradle of civilization to the airplane, but only 66 years separated the motorized flight and landing on the moon. Moore's law in the midst of computer power that doubles every 18 months is now approaching a year, Ray Kurzweil, in his book "The Machine Age, Spirituality", makes the calculation that since World War II, there were 32 such duplications, and that the extraordinary point - the point where the power of computing which will rise to levels that are so far beyond anything we can imagine for ourselves, until they are almost infinite, therefore it will be impossible to distinguish between them and omniscience - it will be realized already in 2050.
When that happens, the decade that follows will put the 100,000 years that preceded it into mockery and scorn, well over a million years (just the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms, and thus a realistic estimate of ETI's rate of progress),
And we get a sense of how similar to God these creatures will be, in Clarke's 1953 novel, Childhood's End, humanity reaches such a stage as we have described, and must move to a higher state of awareness. One character
The one that appears at the beginning of the story asserts that "Science can destroy religion both by ignoring it and by refuting its main points. As far as I know, no one has proven the non-existence of Zeus or Thor, but they have less
Believe today."
Although science is far from destroying religion, Shermer's last law predicts that the relationship between the two will be significantly affected by contact with ET1. To entertain the nature of the relationship, we must follow Clark's second law: "The only way to find out the limits of the possible is to venture a little beyond these limits, towards the impossible. Successfully!
* Michael Shermer is the publisher of the magazine "Skeptic" (www.skeptic.com) and the author of the book "In Darwin's Shadow".
