Well, maybe. Remember Templeton winner Martin Rees?
Proponent of multiverses and “our universe as possible simulation” wins this year’s Templeton Prize
So vast are the expanses of space and time that fall within an astronomer’s gaze that people in my profession are mindful not only of our moment in history, but also of our place in the wider cosmos. We wonder whether there is intelligent life elsewhere; some of us even search for it. People will not be the culmination of evolution. We are near the dawn of a post-human future that could be just as prolonged as the billions of years of Darwinian selection that preceded humanity’s emergence.
The far future will bear traces of humanity, just as our own age retains influences of ancient civilisations. Humans and all they have thought might be a transient precursor to the deeper cogitations of another culture — one dominated by machines, extending deep into the future and spreading far beyond earth.
Not everyone considers this an uplifting scenario. There are those who fear that artificial intelligence will supplant us, taking our jobs and living beyond the writ of human laws. Others regard such scenarios as too futuristic to be worth fretting over. But the disagreements are about the rate of travel, not the direction. More.
Actually, feted science profs were predicting this enlightenment a century ago. Then, of course, the Nazis, the Stalinists, the Maoists, and others intervened. The jackboot ensured that hundreds of millions of people had a post-human future—as fertilizer. Their defeat was a starting pont for a livable future for any other humans, and it was slow and difficult.
But there’s another problem too: High science cultures can die out. Consider the antikythera, a computing machine from two millennia ago, Archimedes’ 3rd century BC combinatorics, or Eratosthenes doing a rough accuracy of the circumference of Earth in also in the 3rd century BC.
So there was a high science culture back then and it died out. I’ve never heard a convincing explanation. True, after the fall of Rome some centuries later, war, terror and depredation made most research impossible in many parts of Europe until about 1200 AD.
And granted, critical events were happening elsewhere, like the development of printing and explosives in China, consciousness research in India, and computation in the Americas.
But the fact remains that high science cultures can just die out. That’s one reason for not taking the fretting about a post-human culture too seriously. I’d worry more about a sub-human one.
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