From: UFO UpDates - Toronto <ufoupdates@virtuallystrange.net>
Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2001 02:44:58 -0500
Fwd Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2001 02:44:58 -0500
Subject: Shermer's Last Law

http://www.sciam.com/2002/0102issue/0102skeptic.html


Shermer's Last Law

Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is
indistinguishable from God

By Michael Shermer

...........

As scientist extraordinaire and author of an empire of
science-fiction books, Arthur C. Clarke is one of the
farthest-seeing visionaries of our time. His pithy quotations
tug harder than those of most futurists on our collective
psyches for their insights into humanity and our unique place in
the cosmos. And none do so more than his famous Third Law: "Any
sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from
magic."

This observation stimulated me to think about the impact the
discovery of an extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) would have
on science and religion. 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 says, 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. Because we are far from possessing these traits,
how can we possibly distinguish a God who has them absolutely
from an ETI who merely has them copiously relative to us? We
can't. But if God were only relatively more knowing and powerful
than we are, then by definition the deity would be an ETI!

Consider that biological evolution operates at a snail's pace
compared with technological evolution (the former is Darwinian
and requires generations of differential reproductive success;
the latter is Lamarckian and can be accomplished within a single
generation). Then, too, the cosmos is very big and very empty.
Voyager 1, our most distant spacecraft, hurtling along at more
than 38,000 miles per hour, will not reach the distance of even
our sun's nearest neighbor, the Alpha Centauri system (which it
is not headed toward), for more than 75,000 years.

Ergo, the probability that an ETI only slightly more advanced
than we are will make contact is virtually nil. If we ever do
find an ETI, it will be as though a million-year-old Homo
erectus were dropped into the 21st century, given a computer and
cell phone and instructed to communicate with us. The ETI would
be to us as we would be to this early hominid--godlike.

Because of science and technology, our world has changed more in
the past century than in the previous 100 centuries. It took
10,000 years to get from the dawn of civilization to the
airplane but just 66 years to get from powered flight to a lunar
landing.

Moore's Law of computer power doubling every 18 months or so is
now approaching a year. Ray Kurzweil, in his book The Age of
Spiritual Machines, calculates that there have been 32 doublings
since World War II and that the singularity point--the point at
which total computational power will rise to levels so far
beyond anything that we can imagine that it will appear nearly
infinite and thus be indistinguishable from omniscience--may be
upon us as early as 2050.

When that happens, the decade that follows will put the 100,000
years before it to shame. Extrapolate out about a million years
(just a blink on an evolutionary timescale and therefore a
realistic estimate of how far advanced ETIs will be), and we get
a gut-wrenching, mind-warping feel for how godlike these
creatures would seem. In Clarke's 1953 novel, called Childhood's
End, humanity reaches something like a singularity and must then
make the transition to a higher state of consciousness. One
character early in the story 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 relation between the two
will be profoundly affected by contact with an ETI. To find out
how, we must follow 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." Ad astra!



The Author

Michael Shermer is founding publisher of Skeptic magazine
(www.skeptic.com) and author of The Borderlands of
Science.


...............

UFO UpDates thanks The Anomalist for the lead

http://www.anomalist.com/