The corona virus saga - chapter 53

Is the current viral pandemic a rehearsal for our own cosmic mortality?

In 1998, Robin Hanson, now an economics professor at George Mason University, posed a vexing question: If the universe is such a garden of possibility, as astrobiologists and cosmologists proclaim, why amid billions of worlds and after billions of years is there no evidence of anybody out there to greet us?

As the great physicist Enrico Fermi once asked, “Where is everybody?”

"We’re all right here Enrico," said Dr Boor and the others at the quantum theory conference.  Enrico had been drinking again, and they were all very concerned about him.

"No, no, no," said Enrico. "Where’s everyone else."

Maybe the Great Filter got them, Dr. Hanson proposed. The Great Filter is a civilization-scale event or circumstance that would prevent a species from colonizing space or ever meeting other species, perhaps of even continuing to exist.

The filter might start out as planetary heartburn. Or planetary shivers could cause global cold and heat waves.

Or an asteroid that came barreling in and took out pretty much everything. Unleashing a Godzilla (copyright by the Toho Corporation) like creature from the bottom of the ocean that eats mankind for dinner.

Or idiots in the military decide to blow up a few satellites, and then a Kessler Syndrome comes into effect as the space debris multiplies and multiplies until it blankets the earth and we are stuck on this small green and blue ball forever, unable to leave, or even send anything up into space.

Stuck on this ball of dirt. If only we had taken better care of it. Can Amazon deliver us a new one?

And don’t forget outside interferers. There seem to be an awful lot of them these days. Almost as if 5G technology had disrupted the fabric of space and time. Leaving open cracks for all sorts of dubious interstellar agencies to sneak in. Things you didn’t want in your neighborhood.

And even though we did live in the middle of nowhere, cosmically speaking, we did have neighbors. Noisy neighs at that. Always snooping around, seeing what we were up to.  

And they didn’t like the look of things. Cracks in the fabric of space and time in their neighborhood. No sir. Time to set up a neighborhood watch. Get some rat traps. Catch us some rats. Catch em and flush em. Clean this situation up.

Martin Rees, a.k.a. Lord Rees of Ludlow, a cosmologist at Cambridge University and co-founder of the Center for the Study of Existential Risk, detailed some of the ways we might die in his book “Our Final Hour: A Scientist’s Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind’s Future In This Century — On Earth and Beyond.”

He fears that we must prevent the spread of dangerous knowledge. Dangerous knowledge that will lead to our destruction. 

Like consider cleaning up viral pandemics, and in doing so thereby instigating mavericks inspired by Alaska governors and tv westerns to pony up their game and take on the viral pandemic trade themselves, home brew style.  Build their own from scratch.  Make em better and better.  Startup a hobby.  In the basement.  Or the spare bedroom.

Dirty war. Take everybody out. Clean up the situation. Wipe it clean. Start a new. Fresh. A new day for all.  That's the end game. Of their little weekend hobby activities.  In that spare room.  In the basement, like in every B movie you have ever seen with this particular plot line.

Part of the message of Professor Rees’s book, and others like it, is that we have grown too big and interconnected for our own good, too smart for our own pants. As a result, we are pushing on the most ominous term in the famous Drake Equation, developed by the American astronomer Frank Drake, which is used to estimate the number of technological civilizations in the galaxy: the average lifetime of a technological society.

How long can trained monkeys dance before they get tired and sit down, or even worse make a mistake, like drive a car through a wall that just happens to be the wall between civilization and anarchy?  Or even worse, the quantum stuff that literally holds everything together, that keeps it all from just drifting off into eternity, or even worse, blink out of existence.

How long before they build a better mouse trap. One that catches them in it. And then they’re stuck.  In their own mousetrap.  How embarrassing.

Some went looking for a cosmic joy buzzer, a magic button or incantation that would bring some friendly interstellar overlords to come and help us out. Clean up the situation.

Others wondered if that was a good idea, got nightmares, and then strode forth with great vigor to hide any such messaging devices from all of mankind.

Some wondered if we were missing the point, that all of this press a button stuff was super old school, and interstellar folks worked more like FutureBook did. Through some kind of quantum interference or entanglement. And if you just spoke up and asked them what to do, they would tell you right away. Like all friendly folk do.  Because they were always listening.  All the time. Everywhere.

Others thought this through, and then really got upset. They constructed hats out of tin foil and lived inside of copper shielded faraday cages.  Always making sure they stayed grounded if they ever went out. And of course they wore a mask when they did.  And when they came back, and they always did, they washed their hands, for a very, very, very long time.

Dr. Rees, in a more recent note, pointed out that thinking about the long-term future has evolved since 1961 when Dr. Drake first presented his equation. Among other things, artificial intelligence, just a gleam in a few dreamers’ eyes back then, has become a big deal. Deep-learning networks are becoming embedded in science, politics and society, to what end, we have only begun to debate. They are the future.

If we find that interstellar joy buzzer and give it a firm grip, deep learning neural networks are the ones who will answer. If they care to.

Build the deep learning networks, and maybe they will tell us what to do that will save us. They will help us get the cargo. The cargo we all so desperately need. We just gotta have it.