Why We Explore -14 Nations Launch New Space Era
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
These lines from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets poetically captures one of the most important reasons we explore space: to reveal humanity's place in nature.
The past century has seen a revolution than the idea that this entire universe is in a state of constant change, as planets, stars and galaxies are born and die, an idea known as cosmic evolution, which become part of our world view in the Space Age.
In an unprecedented move, 14 of the world's leading space agencies revealed last week their agreed vision for globally co-ordinated space exploration to the Moon, and beyond.
Welcoming the agreement, Great Britain's Science and Innovation Minister Malcolm Wicks said: "During this century we are sure to see some fantastic voyages of discovery as robots and humans venture further into our Solar System."
Steven Dick in his brilliant essay, Why We Explore, wrote: "Cosmic evolution has become the guiding principle for modern astronomy." For the past decade, NASA's Origins program has had cosmic evolution as its overarching epic story. When the program began in 1996, it was viewed as "Following the 15 billion year long chain of events from the birth of the universe at the Big Bang, through the formation of chemical elements, galaxies, stars, and planets, through the mixing of chemicals and energy that cradles life on Earth, to the earliest self-replicating organisms – and the profusion of life."
The NASA fleet of Great Observatories (Hubble, Compton, Chandra and Spitzer), along with European Space Agency observatories many other spacecraft, have provided an ever more robust view of cosmic evolution and the place of our pale blue dot and its inhabitants.
In his 1967 essays Beyond the Observatory, Harvard College Observatory Director Harlow Shapley wrote that "Nothing seems to be more important philosophically than the revelation that the evolutionary drive, which has in recent years swept over the whole field of biology, also includes in its sweep the evolution of galaxies and stars, and comets and atoms, and indeed all things material."
Cosmic evolution, Dick points out has been described by Sir Arthur Peacocke, a British biochemist as "Genesis for the Third Millennium." It may result in a profusion of life, either microbial or intelligent, throughout the universe. This outcome, the quest of astrobiology programs around the world, would constitute a biological universe.
A third possible outcome, rarely discussed, Dick concludes, "is a cosmos in which cultural evolution that may result in a 'postbiological universe,' in which human intelligence has been superseded by artificial intelligence. Carnegie Mellon AI pioneer Hans Moravec has postulated a postbiological Earth in the next few generations. Given the time scales of the universe, its seems much more likely to have already happened in outer space."
According to Moravec, by 2040 robots will become as smart as we are. And then they'll displace us as the dominant form of life on Earth. But he isn't worried - the robots will love us.
Posted by Casey Kazan
Thank you for your wonderful articles Casey. This particular post fits into the grand "Singularity" scheme of things rather nicely.... somewhat like 'Globalism'; an inevitability. The last paragraph though... do you call AI 'robots'? Seems like such a 1960's vision of the future. Given the past 35 years, and taking into account the exponential rate of mankind's advance into the 'future', what do you see for the year 2040?
I'm 46. I'm the eternal optimist, but too, the grand skeptic. I'm on the cusp of forever, thinking sometimes it's not such a great place to be. Better than the alternative and heavens hollow promise.
Regardless, here's a question for the ages:
Would you like to live forever?
Regards
Posted by: Dave K. Welch | June 04, 2007 at 08:47 PM