Not only is much of that information represented in purely symbolic forms—alphabets, languages, binary codes—it is also represented in each brick, alloy, machine, and structure we build from the materials around us. Even the symbolic stuff is instantiated in some material form or the other, whether as ink on pages or electrical charges in nanoscale pieces of silicon.
In fact, it may have always been an integral, and essential, part of our existence since our species of hominins became more and more distinct some , years ago. This idea, which I also pursue in my upcoming book, The Ascent of Information , leads to a number of quite startling and provocative proposals.
That might not sound too bad—except the growth trend of our digitized informational world is such that it requires approximately 40 percent more power every year. Even allowing for improvements in computational efficiency and power generation, this points to a world in some 20 years where all of the energy we currently generate in electricity will be consumed by digital electronics alone.
We still print onto paper, and the energy cost of a single page is the equivalent of burning five grams of high-quality coal. Digital devices, from microprocessors to hard drives, are also extraordinarily demanding in terms of their production, owing to the deep repurposing of matter that is required. We literally fight against the second law of thermodynamics to forge these exquisitely ordered, restricted, low-entropy structures out of raw materials that are decidedly high-entropy in their messy natural states.
It is hard to see where this informational tsunami slows or ends. Our dataome looks like a distinct, although entirely symbiotic even endosymbiotic , phenomenon. But symbiosis implies that all parties have their own interests to consider as well. It has probably not escaped your attention that the kind of intelligent transmission of experience from one generation to the next—together with the ability to know when to use that information—is not unlike what we see in human society in the cultural transmission of ideas from generation to generation.
Cultural transmission of experiences is a process with spookily Lamarckian characteristics. We do indeed inherit a tendency to certain cultural ideas from our parents and from society, but we can mold them to our best advantage, alter them, or even discard them. You might be brought up by parents who are wonderful musicians, but you decide that you never even want to touch a kazoo. Cultural ideas that are used are reinforced, those that are neglected waste away.
It is precisely this ability to improve and to prune ideas that has caused human civilization to advance at such breakneck speed. And if this kind of cultural transmission does occur on another planet, you can be sure that evolution will be swift and effective—just as ours continues to be. Let us do a brief thought experiment. Imagine that you are a member of a highly advanced alien civilization, intent on spreading your legacy throughout the galaxy.
But instead of dropping off a biological molecule, you might be such an advanced alien that you seed this planet with intelligent artificial creatures, specially designed robots that have the capacity to bypass natural selection. They are programmed to have the foresight that nature is lacking. Their robotic gazelle descendants would know that longer legs are better and would re-engineer their own design to give them longer legs.
Similarly, robotic lions would reprogram their own software to enable them to sneak up on prey more stealthily. What would be the end result of such a scenario? Would there still be predators and prey? Or would these creatures be improving themselves so rapidly that soon the robot gazelles are building spaceships to escape the robot lions and the robot lions are building supercomputers to design weapons of mass robot-gazelle destruction?
This ridiculous scenario is not nearly as trivial as it seems, because the idea touches on some of the most fundamental mechanisms and constraints on evolution. Can intelligence, and the ability to bypass natural selection, also bypass the limits that the natural world imposes?
On the face of it, many of the familiar characteristics of animals and plants that we see around us would simply disappear if the organisms in an ecosystem were all super artificial intelligences.
Oxford professor Nick Bostrom, for instance, suggests that a community of artificial intelligences will be sharing information in such an effective and rigid way that many aspects of animal behavior would be unnecessary.
Artificial organisms could achieve the same result simply by sending an email. And if the system is well designed, checks will ensure that the email is a form of honest signalling. No fake Tinder profiles allowed. How likely is it that this universe of interconnected computers would be doing nothing but communicating, reproducing, and carrying out their singular goal?
Possibly not very. If such an alien world of artificially intelligent organisms really exists, there are some things it cannot avoid—no matter how intelligent or how well designed. Taken together, this work suggests that our reactions to a future confirmed discovery of microbial extraterrestrial life are likely to be fairly positive.
How will we react to the discovery of alien life? Depictions of contact with extraterrestrial life in fiction for over a century have highlighted potential downsides of alien contact, from H.
Other experts, including scientists such as Christof Koch, Guy Consolmagno, and Aaron Gronstal, have suggested that the discovery of extraterrestrial microbial life will have little in the way of societal or psychological impact Gronstal, ; Levine, To date, though, the only empirical work of which we are aware that assessed potential psychological reactions to extraterrestrial life has done so by positing hypothetical contact with an intelligent extraterrestrial species Vakoch and Lee, Thus, although the question of how we will react to extraterrestrial microbial life has spawned much speculation, it has sparked scant empirical work, and none that we are aware of which addressed reactions to actual announcements of such a discovery.
In the present series of studies, we sought to provide an initial, yet systematic, test of psychological reactions to the discovery of extraterrestrial life. In these studies, we focused on reactions to extraterrestrial microbial life, as opposed to intelligent life, as the Drake Equation 1 , suggests it is far more probable that we discover evidence of this type of life, considering direct exploration of our solar system has so far ruled out the possibility that we share it with intelligent extraterrestrial beings.
Potential remains for the discovery of microbial life in our solar system, which is why extraterrestrial microbes are the focus of our study. In the present set of studies we focused on affective reactions positive vs.
To do so, we primarily conducted quantitative analyses of natural language use in response to such discoveries, a method that has been used to assess affective states, drives, personality, and mental health in a large body of prior research for a review, see Pennebaker et al.
We generated predictions for Studies 1 and 2 based on the results of this pilot study, and proceeded to assess affective and risk vs. In a pilot study, we sought to provide an initial assessment of past societal responses to announcements of the discovery of extraterrestrial life, or discoveries that might suggest this possibility.
Analysis of language in news coverage and other cultural products has been used in a number of previous studies to assess affective states, values, and attitudes at the cultural level e. We analyzed the language used in past news articles about discoveries of evidence for extraterrestrial life to examine whether such events are portrayed in a generally positive or negative light. Fifteen news articles providing contemporaneous media coverage of three of the above events suggesting evidence for extraterrestrial life were selected from various publications, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Time Magazine, and Science Magazine.
We thus used news coverage from the first two sources that appeared to be of high journalistic quality. Words were categorized according to the default LIWC dictionary. LIWC calculates the percentages of words in a text which reflect various psychological states, feelings, or parts of speech. Thus values reported throughout this manuscript are based on percentages.
This practice is standard in other articles reporting LIWC results i. System of Earth-like Planets and affect positive vs. However, there was a significant interaction between event and reward vs. As it is most likely that we will first discover extraterrestrial life in the form of microbes, in a separate set of analyses, we focused on coverage of the seven articles from about the evidence of life from a Martian meteorite.
Differences in the percentage of words reflecting positive vs. Results of the Pilot Study suggest that reactions to past announcements of extraterrestrial life discovery or evidence that suggests such life may exist are largely positive, indicating greater positive vs.
To the extent that media coverage reflects the broader cultural mood, these findings suggest that society is likely to react in a positive fashion if we were to discover extraterrestrial life in the future. In our two main studies, we sought to test whether individual reactions might also show this pattern in response to the discovery of extraterrestrial microbial life.
Given that it is more likely we will discover evidence of microbial extraterrestrial life than intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations, in Studies 1 and 2 we assessed reactions to the discovery of extraterrestrial microbes.
To do so, we asked participants to imagine a scenario in which such an announcement was made and to describe how they would react in a free response format. Participants were thus asked to describe how humanity would react to the same announcement. We did not make predictions regarding potential interactions between condition own reaction vs. Mean age was The most frequent level of education was 4-year college degree Participants also rated their political orientation on a 7-point Likert scale, with Inclusion criteria for each analysis are as follows.
Participants who provided a random sequence of characters, or failed to respond, to an open response question were excluded from the corresponding text analysis. Those who fully completed the Likert-scale measurements of reactions were included in the analyses even if they did not provide responses to the open format questions. Two participants were excluded from both text analyses own reactions vs.
For each prompt, there was a participant who responded to only one of the prompts. After providing informed consent, participants were asked to imagine that scientists had just announced the discovery of microbial life outside of Earth. They were then asked to think about how they would react to such an announcement, and describe their reactions in an open response format. Participants were also asked to describe how humanity would react to the same kind of announcement.
These two tasks own reaction vs. Please provide as much detail as you can and please try to write at least a few sentences describing what YOUR thoughts, feelings, and responses would be. Study 1 was approved by the institutional review board at Arizona State University. A significant interaction was also found with reward vs. These results indicate that the mean differences between the proportions of words reflecting positive vs. We did not find particularly strong or consistent correlations between our dependent variables and our individual difference and demographic measures.
Given the large number of variables measured, we report here only correlations with an absolute value of 0.
Full correlation matrices, including correlations among dependent variables can be found at osf. Our results were largely consistent with the pattern observed in the Pilot Study. People believe that they will react positively to the discovery of extraterrestrial microbial life and that humanity as a whole will do the same. We simply do not know whether other chemicals can build replicating molecules like DNA. The authors sidestep all of this and zero in on the rise of complexity and cooperation as the thing to look for.
They write:. In particular, the evolution of complex life on the Earth appears to have depended upon a small number of what have been termed major evolutionary transitions in individuality.
In each transition, a group of individuals that could previously replicate independently cooperate to form a new, more complex life form or higher level organism. That includes us. We are collectives of cells all working together.
0コメント