My father was telling me tonight about an article he read in one of his tech magazines (I think it was the MIT Tech Review). He was walking around looking for the magazine while he was explaining, but couldn't remember the author's name, just that he was a philosophy professor at Oxford--at which point I interrupted, "Nick Bostrom?" And it was.
Bostrom's an interesting guy who I've been following for a few years. His area of interest and expertise definitely lies in the futurist/transhuman domain, but he's one of those few that also enjoys a position of respect in the scholarly world. Wikipedia offers its typical terse summary of information about him, including his interesting three postulates which suggest we're living in a simulation. I offer a link to his seminal paper on what he terms existential risks--that is, risks which threaten human extinction (or worse (yes, there is worse)).
But to return to the original point, in the article which my father never did end up finding, Bostrom's unique position on SETI is that he hopes fervently that it will fail (bear in mind that this is me quoting my father quoting an article he read a while ago, and thus I am liberally assigning views to Bostrom that seem likely, so take it with a grain of salt). He would be perfectly content if the SETI initiative utterly fails to show any evidence of life, sentient or otherwise, and while he's at it, also hopes that future expeditions to Mars reveal no evidence of present or past microbial organisms.
Why such a seemingly Scrooge-ish outlook? It is his extrapolation of the Fermi Paradox, the well known problem of: if there's intelligent life out there, where are they? Many scientists believe that the universe should be teeming with life, but we've yet to hear a peep or see the slightest bit of evidence for it, and not for lack of trying. Frank Drake (who, my father mentioned, he once ended up giving a ride to, back to the airport from a conference at Arecibo, and is apparently a nice and interesting guy) concocted an equation to estimate the number of alien civilizations we should have in our local neighborhood, and while assigning values to the variables is hugely a matter of guesswork, reasonable assumptions tend to favor life aside from our own.
Given that this is not the case (as best we can tell), it would appear that at some point between non-life and advanced interstellar civilization, there must be at least one Great Filter, some enabling step in development that is extraordinarily unlikely, or some disabling event that is extraordinarily likely. To be more specific, it may reasonably be the case that the very first link in the chain, the apocryphal lightning bolt in the primordial ooze that generates a self-replicating molecule, is astronomically unlikely, and the only reason it seems otherwise is due to the Anthropic Principle. Similarly, it could be another step along the evolutionary ladder: progression to eukaryotic life, or to multi-cellular organisms, or something further up the chain, closer to the development of sentience.
This is Bostrom's hope. It may mean we are alone in the universe and destined to remain that way, but he finds it better than the alternative: that the Great Filter is something in our future. Any evidence of externally-generated life that we come across (apart from very rudimentary development somewhere like Mars, which would leave the matter open for debate) would strongly suggest that the Great Filter is something that is yet to come. Perhaps every race that is able to bring itself to our level of technology inevitably self-annihilates with nuclear weapons, or nanotechnology run amok, or the equivalent of the Large Hadron Collider spawning black holes or triggering vacuum phase shifts, or creating AI which eventually comes to dominate the race itself; there are any number of horror scenarios in which we fail to achieve our potential (again, read Bostrom's paper on existential risks for a thorough overview), and finding evidence of extraterrestrial life a posteriori increases the risk of these scenarios by many orders of magnitude.
Of course, there are some more benign possibilities. We've been assuming that the deafening silence in the galaxy is a sign of nothingness, which in turn rests on the assumption that the natural impulse for a species would be to explore or expand, but this may be an unwarranted anthropomorphic viewpoint. It is certainly possible that all sufficiently advanced races instead tend to close in on themselves, be it through plugging into a worldwide paradise virtual reality, creating their own private universe and hopping in, or any number of quieter alternatives.
Bottom line: while Bostrom's outlook is not without merit, there are so many assumptions involved that I remain unconvinced, and for the time being, I will continue to hope my SETI@home starts cheerfully chirping away one of these days.
Update:
I just found the actual article, and upon review, am pleased to see that I don't seem to have grossly mispresented his position.
Nick Bostrom (May/June 2008). "Where Are They? Why I hope the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing" (PDF). MIT Technology Review.
Bostrom's an interesting guy who I've been following for a few years. His area of interest and expertise definitely lies in the futurist/transhuman domain, but he's one of those few that also enjoys a position of respect in the scholarly world. Wikipedia offers its typical terse summary of information about him, including his interesting three postulates which suggest we're living in a simulation. I offer a link to his seminal paper on what he terms existential risks--that is, risks which threaten human extinction (or worse (yes, there is worse)).
But to return to the original point, in the article which my father never did end up finding, Bostrom's unique position on SETI is that he hopes fervently that it will fail (bear in mind that this is me quoting my father quoting an article he read a while ago, and thus I am liberally assigning views to Bostrom that seem likely, so take it with a grain of salt). He would be perfectly content if the SETI initiative utterly fails to show any evidence of life, sentient or otherwise, and while he's at it, also hopes that future expeditions to Mars reveal no evidence of present or past microbial organisms.
Why such a seemingly Scrooge-ish outlook? It is his extrapolation of the Fermi Paradox, the well known problem of: if there's intelligent life out there, where are they? Many scientists believe that the universe should be teeming with life, but we've yet to hear a peep or see the slightest bit of evidence for it, and not for lack of trying. Frank Drake (who, my father mentioned, he once ended up giving a ride to, back to the airport from a conference at Arecibo, and is apparently a nice and interesting guy) concocted an equation to estimate the number of alien civilizations we should have in our local neighborhood, and while assigning values to the variables is hugely a matter of guesswork, reasonable assumptions tend to favor life aside from our own.
Given that this is not the case (as best we can tell), it would appear that at some point between non-life and advanced interstellar civilization, there must be at least one Great Filter, some enabling step in development that is extraordinarily unlikely, or some disabling event that is extraordinarily likely. To be more specific, it may reasonably be the case that the very first link in the chain, the apocryphal lightning bolt in the primordial ooze that generates a self-replicating molecule, is astronomically unlikely, and the only reason it seems otherwise is due to the Anthropic Principle. Similarly, it could be another step along the evolutionary ladder: progression to eukaryotic life, or to multi-cellular organisms, or something further up the chain, closer to the development of sentience.
This is Bostrom's hope. It may mean we are alone in the universe and destined to remain that way, but he finds it better than the alternative: that the Great Filter is something in our future. Any evidence of externally-generated life that we come across (apart from very rudimentary development somewhere like Mars, which would leave the matter open for debate) would strongly suggest that the Great Filter is something that is yet to come. Perhaps every race that is able to bring itself to our level of technology inevitably self-annihilates with nuclear weapons, or nanotechnology run amok, or the equivalent of the Large Hadron Collider spawning black holes or triggering vacuum phase shifts, or creating AI which eventually comes to dominate the race itself; there are any number of horror scenarios in which we fail to achieve our potential (again, read Bostrom's paper on existential risks for a thorough overview), and finding evidence of extraterrestrial life a posteriori increases the risk of these scenarios by many orders of magnitude.
Of course, there are some more benign possibilities. We've been assuming that the deafening silence in the galaxy is a sign of nothingness, which in turn rests on the assumption that the natural impulse for a species would be to explore or expand, but this may be an unwarranted anthropomorphic viewpoint. It is certainly possible that all sufficiently advanced races instead tend to close in on themselves, be it through plugging into a worldwide paradise virtual reality, creating their own private universe and hopping in, or any number of quieter alternatives.
Bottom line: while Bostrom's outlook is not without merit, there are so many assumptions involved that I remain unconvinced, and for the time being, I will continue to hope my SETI@home starts cheerfully chirping away one of these days.
Update:
I just found the actual article, and upon review, am pleased to see that I don't seem to have grossly mispresented his position.
Nick Bostrom (May/June 2008). "Where Are They? Why I hope the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing" (PDF). MIT Technology Review.
