If and when our civilization expires, we may not even agree on the cause of death. Autopsies of empires are often inconclusive.
Sixty years ago, a German historian Alexander Demandt collected 210 different theories for the fall of the Roman Empire, including attacks by nomads, food poisoning, decline of Aenean character, vanity, mercantilism, a steepening class-divide, ecological degradation, and even the notion that civilizations just get tuckered out after a while.
Some were opposites, like too much Christian piety vs. too little. Or too much tolerance of internal deviance vs. the lack of it. Other reasons may have added together, piling like fatal straws on a camel’s back.
Now it’s your turn! Unlike those elitist compilers over at the Pandora Foundation, our open-source doomsday system invites you, the public, to participate in evaluating how it’s all going to end. (...)
The Great Filter
Way back, about a century ago, physicist Enrico Fermi and his colleagues, taking a lunchbreak from the Manhattan Project, found themselves discussing life in the cosmos. Some younger scientists claimed that amid trillions of stars there should be countless living worlds inhabited by intelligent races, far older than ours. How interesting the future might be with others to talk to!
Fermi listened patiently, then asked: “So? Shouldn’t we have heard their messages by now? Seen their great works? Or stumbled on residue of past visits? These wondrous others ... where are they?”
His question has been called the Great Silence, the SETI Dilemma or Fermi Paradox. And as enthusiasts keep scanning the sky, the galaxy’s eerie hush grows more alarming.
Astronomers now use planet-hunting telescopes to estimate how many stars have companion worlds with molten water, and how often that leads to life. Others cogently guess what fraction of those Life Worlds develop technological beings. And what portion of those will either travel or transmit messages. Most conclude -- we shouldn’t be alone. Yet, silence reigns.
Eventually it sank in -- this wasn’t just theoretical. Something must be suppressing the outcome. Some “filter” may winnow the number of sapient races, low enough to explain our apparent isolation. Our loneliness.
Over 10 dozen pat “explanations for the Fermi Paradox” have been offered. Some claim that our lush planet is unique. (And, so far, nothing like Earth has been found, though life certainly exists out there.) Or that most eco-worlds suffer more lethal accidents -- like the one that killed the dinosaurs -- than Earth has.
Might intelligence be a fluke? Evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr said -- “Nothing demonstrates the improbability of high intelligence better than the 50 billion earthly species that failed to achieve it.” Or else, Earth may have some unique trait, rare elsewhere, that helped humans move from mere intelligence to brilliance at technology.
Sound gloomy? These are the optimistic explanations! They suggest the “great filter” -- whatever’s kept the numbers down -- lies behind us. Not ahead.
But what if life-bearing planets turn out to be common and intelligence arises frequently? Then the filter lies ahead. Perhaps some mistake that all sapient races make. Or several. A minefield of potential ways to fail. Each time we face some worrisome step along our road, from avoiding nuclear war to becoming skilled planetary-managers, to genetic engineering, artificial intelligence and so on, we must ask: "Is this it? The Big Blunder? The trap underlying Fermi’s question?”
That’s the context of our story. The specter at our banquet, slinking between reflection and foresight, as we turn now to examine a long list of threats to our existence.
Those we can see. (...)
The Enemy Of Wisdom
Suppose we manage to avoid the worst calamities. The world wreckers, extinction-makers and civilization destroyers. And let’s say no black holes gobble the Earth. No big wars pound us back to the dark ages. Eco-collapse is averted and the economic system is kept alive.
Let’s further imagine that we’re not alone in achieving this miraculous endurance. That many other intelligent life forms also manage to escape the worst pitfalls and survive their awkward adolescence. Well, there are still plenty of ways that some promising sapient species might rise up, looking skyward with high hopes, and yet -- even so -- fail to achieve its potential. What traps might await us because we are smart?
Take one of the earliest and greatest human innovations -- specialization. Even way back when we lived in caves and huts, there was division of effort. Top hunters hunted, expert gatherers gathered, and skilled technicians spent long hours by the riverbank fashioning intricate baskets and stone blades. When farming created a surplus that could be stored, markets arose, along with kings and priests, who allocated extra food to subsidize carpenters and masons, scribes and calendar-keeping astronomers. Of course, the priests and kings kept the best share. Isn’t administration also a specialty? And so, soon a few dominated the many, across 99% of history.
Eventually though, skill and knowledge spread, increasing that precious surplus, letting more people read, write, invent ... which created more wealth, allowing more specialization and so on, until only a few remained on the land, and those farmers were mostly well-educated specialists, too.
In the West, one trend spanned the whole 20th Century: a steady professionalization of everything. By the end of the millennium, almost everything a husband and wife used to do for their family had been packaged as a product or service, provided by either the market or the state. And in return? A pilot had merely to pilot, and a firefighter just fought fires. The professor simply professed, and a dentist had only to dent. Benefits abounded. Productivity skyrocketed. Cheap goods flowed across the globe. Middle-class citizens ate strawberries in winter, flown in from the other hemisphere. Science burgeoned, as the amount that people knew expanded even faster than the pile of things they owned.
And that is where -- to some of us -- things started to look worrisome. (...)
You see, science kept making discoveries at an accelerating clip. Already, a researcher had to keep learning ever-increasing amounts in order to discover more. It seemed that just keeping up would force each of us to focus on ever-narrower fields of study, forsaking the forest in order to zero-in on tiny portions of a single tree. Eventually, new generations of students might spend half a lifetime learning enough to start a thesis. And even then, how to tell if someone else was duplicating your effort across the world or down the hall?
That prospect -- having to know more and more about less and less -- seemed daunting. Unavoidable. There seemed to be no way out ...
... until, almost overnight, we veered in a new direction! Our civ evaded that crisis with a technological side-step that seemed so obvious, so easy and graceful, that few even noticed or commented. There were so many exciting aspects to the Internet Age, after all. The old fear of narrow over-specialization suddenly seemed quaint, as biologists started collaborating with physicists and cross-disciplinary partnerships abounded. Instead of being vexed by overspecialized terminology, experts conversed excitedly, more so than ever!
Today, hardly anybody speaks of the danger that vexed us so. It’s been replaced by the opposite concern -- one that we’ll get to next time.
Only first consider this.
Sure, we may have escaped the specialization trap, for now, but will everyone else manage the same trick, out there across the stars? Our solution now seems obvious -- to surf the tsunami! To meet the flood of knowledge with eager, eclectic agility. Refusing to be constrained by official classifications, we let knowledge bounce and jostle into new forms, supplementing professional skill with tides of zealous amateurism.
But don’t take it for granted! The approach may not be repeated elsewhere. Not if it emerged out of some rare quality of our natures. Or pure luck.
Nor would it have been allowed in most human cultures! Which of our past military or commercial or hereditary empires would have unleashed something as powerful as the Internet, letting it spread -- unfettered and free -- to every tower and hovel? Or allow so many skilled tasks to be performed by the unlicensed?
One can imagine countless other species -- and our own fragile renaissance -- faltering back into the dour scenario that we students mulled on those gloomy nights. Slipping into an endless, grinding cycle where specialization -- once a friend -- becomes the worst enemy of wisdom.
The Opposite Extreme
We just talked about one more way that civilizations might fail to achieve their dreams -- not because of calamity, or war, or ecological collapse, but at the hands of something mundane, even banal. (...)
Much has been written about the problems that accompany Continuously Divided Attention. The loss of focus. A susceptibility for simplistic/viral notions. An anchorless tendency to drift or lose concentration. And these are just the mildest symptoms. At the extreme are dozens of newly named mental illnesses, like Noakes’s Syndrome and Leninger’s Disease, many of them blamed on the vast freedom we have won -- to skitter our minds hither and yon.
Have we evaded one dismal failure mode -- the trap of narrow overspecialization -- only to stumble into the opposite extreme? Shallow-mindedness? Pondering thoughts that span the farthest horizons, but only finger-deep?
Listen to those dour curmudgeons out there, decrying the faults of our current “Age of Amateurs.” They call for a restoration of expertise, for a return to credentialed knowledge-tending, for restoring order and disciplined focus to our professions and arts and academe. Is this just self-interested guild-tending, as some call it? Or are they prescribing another badly needed course correction to stave off disaster?
Will the new AI systems help us deal with this plague of shallowness ... or make it worse?
One thing is clear. It isn’t easy to be smart in this galaxy of ours. We keep barely evading a myriad pitfalls along our way to ... whatever we hope to become.
When you add it all up, there’s not much surprise that we seem so alone.
Sixty years ago, a German historian Alexander Demandt collected 210 different theories for the fall of the Roman Empire, including attacks by nomads, food poisoning, decline of Aenean character, vanity, mercantilism, a steepening class-divide, ecological degradation, and even the notion that civilizations just get tuckered out after a while.
Some were opposites, like too much Christian piety vs. too little. Or too much tolerance of internal deviance vs. the lack of it. Other reasons may have added together, piling like fatal straws on a camel’s back.
Now it’s your turn! Unlike those elitist compilers over at the Pandora Foundation, our open-source doomsday system invites you, the public, to participate in evaluating how it’s all going to end. (...)
The Great Filter
Way back, about a century ago, physicist Enrico Fermi and his colleagues, taking a lunchbreak from the Manhattan Project, found themselves discussing life in the cosmos. Some younger scientists claimed that amid trillions of stars there should be countless living worlds inhabited by intelligent races, far older than ours. How interesting the future might be with others to talk to!
Fermi listened patiently, then asked: “So? Shouldn’t we have heard their messages by now? Seen their great works? Or stumbled on residue of past visits? These wondrous others ... where are they?”
His question has been called the Great Silence, the SETI Dilemma or Fermi Paradox. And as enthusiasts keep scanning the sky, the galaxy’s eerie hush grows more alarming.
Astronomers now use planet-hunting telescopes to estimate how many stars have companion worlds with molten water, and how often that leads to life. Others cogently guess what fraction of those Life Worlds develop technological beings. And what portion of those will either travel or transmit messages. Most conclude -- we shouldn’t be alone. Yet, silence reigns.Eventually it sank in -- this wasn’t just theoretical. Something must be suppressing the outcome. Some “filter” may winnow the number of sapient races, low enough to explain our apparent isolation. Our loneliness.
Over 10 dozen pat “explanations for the Fermi Paradox” have been offered. Some claim that our lush planet is unique. (And, so far, nothing like Earth has been found, though life certainly exists out there.) Or that most eco-worlds suffer more lethal accidents -- like the one that killed the dinosaurs -- than Earth has.
Might intelligence be a fluke? Evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr said -- “Nothing demonstrates the improbability of high intelligence better than the 50 billion earthly species that failed to achieve it.” Or else, Earth may have some unique trait, rare elsewhere, that helped humans move from mere intelligence to brilliance at technology.
Sound gloomy? These are the optimistic explanations! They suggest the “great filter” -- whatever’s kept the numbers down -- lies behind us. Not ahead.
But what if life-bearing planets turn out to be common and intelligence arises frequently? Then the filter lies ahead. Perhaps some mistake that all sapient races make. Or several. A minefield of potential ways to fail. Each time we face some worrisome step along our road, from avoiding nuclear war to becoming skilled planetary-managers, to genetic engineering, artificial intelligence and so on, we must ask: "Is this it? The Big Blunder? The trap underlying Fermi’s question?”
That’s the context of our story. The specter at our banquet, slinking between reflection and foresight, as we turn now to examine a long list of threats to our existence.
Those we can see. (...)
The Enemy Of Wisdom
Suppose we manage to avoid the worst calamities. The world wreckers, extinction-makers and civilization destroyers. And let’s say no black holes gobble the Earth. No big wars pound us back to the dark ages. Eco-collapse is averted and the economic system is kept alive.
Let’s further imagine that we’re not alone in achieving this miraculous endurance. That many other intelligent life forms also manage to escape the worst pitfalls and survive their awkward adolescence. Well, there are still plenty of ways that some promising sapient species might rise up, looking skyward with high hopes, and yet -- even so -- fail to achieve its potential. What traps might await us because we are smart?
Take one of the earliest and greatest human innovations -- specialization. Even way back when we lived in caves and huts, there was division of effort. Top hunters hunted, expert gatherers gathered, and skilled technicians spent long hours by the riverbank fashioning intricate baskets and stone blades. When farming created a surplus that could be stored, markets arose, along with kings and priests, who allocated extra food to subsidize carpenters and masons, scribes and calendar-keeping astronomers. Of course, the priests and kings kept the best share. Isn’t administration also a specialty? And so, soon a few dominated the many, across 99% of history.
Eventually though, skill and knowledge spread, increasing that precious surplus, letting more people read, write, invent ... which created more wealth, allowing more specialization and so on, until only a few remained on the land, and those farmers were mostly well-educated specialists, too.
In the West, one trend spanned the whole 20th Century: a steady professionalization of everything. By the end of the millennium, almost everything a husband and wife used to do for their family had been packaged as a product or service, provided by either the market or the state. And in return? A pilot had merely to pilot, and a firefighter just fought fires. The professor simply professed, and a dentist had only to dent. Benefits abounded. Productivity skyrocketed. Cheap goods flowed across the globe. Middle-class citizens ate strawberries in winter, flown in from the other hemisphere. Science burgeoned, as the amount that people knew expanded even faster than the pile of things they owned.
And that is where -- to some of us -- things started to look worrisome. (...)
You see, science kept making discoveries at an accelerating clip. Already, a researcher had to keep learning ever-increasing amounts in order to discover more. It seemed that just keeping up would force each of us to focus on ever-narrower fields of study, forsaking the forest in order to zero-in on tiny portions of a single tree. Eventually, new generations of students might spend half a lifetime learning enough to start a thesis. And even then, how to tell if someone else was duplicating your effort across the world or down the hall?
That prospect -- having to know more and more about less and less -- seemed daunting. Unavoidable. There seemed to be no way out ...
... until, almost overnight, we veered in a new direction! Our civ evaded that crisis with a technological side-step that seemed so obvious, so easy and graceful, that few even noticed or commented. There were so many exciting aspects to the Internet Age, after all. The old fear of narrow over-specialization suddenly seemed quaint, as biologists started collaborating with physicists and cross-disciplinary partnerships abounded. Instead of being vexed by overspecialized terminology, experts conversed excitedly, more so than ever!
Today, hardly anybody speaks of the danger that vexed us so. It’s been replaced by the opposite concern -- one that we’ll get to next time.
Only first consider this.
Sure, we may have escaped the specialization trap, for now, but will everyone else manage the same trick, out there across the stars? Our solution now seems obvious -- to surf the tsunami! To meet the flood of knowledge with eager, eclectic agility. Refusing to be constrained by official classifications, we let knowledge bounce and jostle into new forms, supplementing professional skill with tides of zealous amateurism.
But don’t take it for granted! The approach may not be repeated elsewhere. Not if it emerged out of some rare quality of our natures. Or pure luck.
Nor would it have been allowed in most human cultures! Which of our past military or commercial or hereditary empires would have unleashed something as powerful as the Internet, letting it spread -- unfettered and free -- to every tower and hovel? Or allow so many skilled tasks to be performed by the unlicensed?
One can imagine countless other species -- and our own fragile renaissance -- faltering back into the dour scenario that we students mulled on those gloomy nights. Slipping into an endless, grinding cycle where specialization -- once a friend -- becomes the worst enemy of wisdom.
The Opposite Extreme
We just talked about one more way that civilizations might fail to achieve their dreams -- not because of calamity, or war, or ecological collapse, but at the hands of something mundane, even banal. (...)
Much has been written about the problems that accompany Continuously Divided Attention. The loss of focus. A susceptibility for simplistic/viral notions. An anchorless tendency to drift or lose concentration. And these are just the mildest symptoms. At the extreme are dozens of newly named mental illnesses, like Noakes’s Syndrome and Leninger’s Disease, many of them blamed on the vast freedom we have won -- to skitter our minds hither and yon.
Have we evaded one dismal failure mode -- the trap of narrow overspecialization -- only to stumble into the opposite extreme? Shallow-mindedness? Pondering thoughts that span the farthest horizons, but only finger-deep?
Listen to those dour curmudgeons out there, decrying the faults of our current “Age of Amateurs.” They call for a restoration of expertise, for a return to credentialed knowledge-tending, for restoring order and disciplined focus to our professions and arts and academe. Is this just self-interested guild-tending, as some call it? Or are they prescribing another badly needed course correction to stave off disaster?
Will the new AI systems help us deal with this plague of shallowness ... or make it worse?
One thing is clear. It isn’t easy to be smart in this galaxy of ours. We keep barely evading a myriad pitfalls along our way to ... whatever we hope to become.
When you add it all up, there’s not much surprise that we seem so alone.
Image: Amazon
[ed. Geez... I just finished one of the most uplifting novels one could read in a quarantined pandemic and then started this one. Bad choice. If you're unfamiliar with the Lifeboat Foundation, check out this FAQ. Plus, can I say I detest all the damn ads on this site? (usually have Adblocker working, but can't read the article with it on - a good reason to avoid Salon in the future.)]
