They are laughing at a recent cartoon in The New Yorker, which provides an unlikely explanation for the disappearance of a large number of public trash cans in new york. This cartoon depicts "little green men" (with an antenna and an innocent smile) stealing trash cans and diligently unloading them from flying saucers.
When the nuclear scientists sat down for lunch, in the dining room of a big wooden house, one of them turned to a more important issue, really. "So, where did everyone go?" He asked. They all know that he is sincerely talking about alien creatures.
This question was put forward by Enrico Fermi and is now called Fermi Paradox, which has a creepy meaning.
Stealing flying saucers, however, humans have not found any evidence of intelligent activities in stars. There is no feat of "space engineering", no visible superstructure, no space empire, and even no radio transmission. Some people think that the strange silence from the sky is likely to tell us some ominous information about the future process of our own civilization.
This fear is increasing. Last year, Adam Frank, an astrophysicist, pleaded with a Google audience to say that in this cosmological background, we can see climate change-and the geological age of the new baptism of the human world. Anthropocene refers to the impact of human energy-intensive activities on the earth. Can't we see the evidence of galactic civilization flying in space, because none of them can go that far, because of resource depletion and subsequent climate collapse? If so, why should it be different? A few months after Frank's speech, the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on global warming caused a sensation in June 20 18+00. If it is not decarbonized, it indicates a bleak future. In May this year, amid the sound of "extinction rebellion", a new climate report raised the stakes and warned that "human life on earth may be extinct."
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At the same time, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) released a press release about an asteroid that will hit New York State within one month. Of course, this is a rehearsal: part of a "stress test" designed to simulate the response to this disaster. Obviously, NASA is quite worried about the prospect of this disaster, and this simulation is very expensive.
Elon Musk, a space technology expert, also conveyed his concerns about artificial intelligence to tens of millions of YouTube viewers. He and others worry that the ability of artificial intelligence system to rewrite itself and improve itself may lead to a sudden out-of-control process, or an "intelligent explosion", which will make us far behind-artificial super intelligence can destroy us unintentionally or even intentionally. 20 15
Musk donated it to the Oxford Institute of Future Anthropology, led by trans-humanist Nick Bohstrom. Bostrom College is located at the spire of a medieval university. It carefully studies the long-term fate of human beings and the dangers we face, a real cosmic scale, and tests the risks of climate, asteroids and artificial intelligence. It also investigated less publicized issues. Physical experiments that destroy the universe, gamma-ray bursts, nanotechnology that devours planets, and exploding supernovae all attract its attention.
So people seem to pay more and more attention to the signs of human extinction. As an international society, we are more and more familiar with the increasingly severe future. There is something in the air.
But this trend does not actually rule out the post-atomic era: our growing concern about extinction has a history. For some time, we have been increasingly worried about our future. My doctoral research tells how this story began. No one has told this story yet, but I think it is an important story for us now.
I want to know how current projects, such as the Institute for the Future of Humanity, have become a branch and continuation of an ongoing "Enlightenment" project, which was originally set up for ourselves more than two centuries ago. Reviewing how we cared about our future in the first place helps to reiterate why we should continue to care about today.
Extinction, 200 years ago 18 16, there are some things in the air. This is a 100 megaton sulfate aerosol layer. Around the earth, it is made up of materials thrown into the stratosphere when Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted the year before. This is one of the biggest volcanic eruptions since Holocene civilization.
Tamborra crater. (NASA) almost blocked the sun, and Tamborra's radiation caused a chain reaction around the world: harvest collapse, mass famine, cholera outbreak and geopolitical instability. It also triggered the first popular novel about human extinction. These are from a writers' troupe, including Byron, mary shelley and percy shelley.
The crew were on holiday in Switzerland, when a huge thunderstorm caused by climate change in Tamborra trapped them in their villa. Here, they discussed the long-term prospects of mankind.
Read more: Why volcanoes, Frankenstein, and 18 16 Summer and Anthropocene?
Obviously inspired by these conversations and the hellish weather of 18 16, Byron immediately set about writing a poem entitled Darkness. It imagines what will happen if our sun dies:
I had a dream. This is not all a dream. The brilliant sun went out, the stars wandered in the eternal space, there was no light and no road, and the cold earth was in the air without the moon.
Blindness and darkness wavered in the book, which described in detail the subsequent sterilization process of our biosphere and caused a sensation. Nearly 150 years later, under the background of escalating tensions in the Cold War, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists once again called for Byron's poems to illustrate the seriousness of nuclear winter. Two years later,
Mary shelley's Frankenstein (probably the first book on synthetic biology) mentioned that the monster born in this laboratory may surpass and destroy Homo sapiens, a competitive species. By 1826, Mary continued to publish The Last Man. This is the first novel about human extinction, which describes the hands of epidemic pathogens.
Boris Karlov plays the Frankenstein monster in 1935 (Universal Studios/Wikileaks). Besides these mystery novels, other writers and thinkers have also discussed these threats. 18 1 1 year, samuel taylor coleridge had a daydream in his personal notebook, dreaming that our planet was "burnt by a close-range comet and still moving forward-there were fewer people in the city and fewer people in the river, five miles deep." 1798, mary shelley's father and political thinker william godwin questioned whether our species would "last forever?" Just a few years ago, Kant pessimistically declared that global peace can only be achieved in the vast cemetery of Hume. Soon, he will worry that the descendants of mankind will become smarter and push us aside.
1754, the philosopher david hume declared that "human beings, like every animal and plant, will participate in" extinction. Godwin pointed out that "some of the most profound explorers" recently began to pay attention to "the extinction of our species". 18 16,
Against the background of the blazing sky in Tamborra, a newspaper article drew people's attention to this increasing noise. It lists many threats of extinction. From global cooling to ocean rising to planetary fire, it highlights the new concern of the scientific community about human extinction. The article points out in an understatement that "the possibility of such a disaster is increasing day by day." It said ruefully, "So, here, this is a very rational end of the world!" " "Before that, we thought the universe was busy.
So if people first began to worry about human extinction in the18th century, where was the previous concept? There is enough revelation in the bible to last until judgment day. But extinction has nothing to do with the end of the world These two views are completely different and even contradictory.
As a beginning, doomsday prophecy aims to reveal the ultimate moral significance of things. Its name is: revelation means revelation. In sharp contrast, extinction reveals nothing at all, because it indicates the end of meaning and morality itself-if there is no human being, there is no human meaning.
And this is an important reason for extinction. Judgment day makes us feel very comfortable, because we know that in the end, the universe is consistent with what we call "justice" and there is no real stake. On the other hand, extinction reminds us that everything we cherish is always in danger. In other words, everything is at stake.
Extinction was not discussed much before 1700, because there was a common background assumption before the Enlightenment that the essence of the universe was as full of moral values and values as possible. This in turn leads people to think that all other planets have the same "living and thinking creatures" as us.
Although it became a widely accepted fact after Copernicus and Kepler in16th century and17th century, the concept of pluralistic world can definitely be traced back to ancient times. From Epicurus to Nicholas in Cusa, they all suggested that they lived in a life form similar to ours. Moreover, in a universe with infinite humanoid creatures, such creatures and their values will never be completely extinct.
Thousands of stars move in the globular cluster Mesia 13. (NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Group (STSCI/AURA)) 65438+In the 1960s, Galileo confidently declared that a completely uninhabited or uninhabited world was "naturally impossible" because it was "morally unreasonable". Gottfried leibniz later declared that there can be nothing completely "leisure, barren or dead" in the universe. 1753, the pioneer scientist edmund halley (the famous comet was named after him) came to the conclusion that there must be people living inside our planet. This would be unfair. He believes that moral creatures will be "vacant" for any part of nature.
At about the same time, Harley provided the first theory about the "mass extinction event". He speculated that comets had destroyed the entire "world" species before. Nevertheless, he also insisted that after every previous disaster, "human civilization has reappeared reliably" and will reappear again. Only in this way can he say that such an event is morally justified.
Later, in the 65438+60s, the philosopher Denis Diderot was asked at a dinner party whether mankind would become extinct. He answered "yes", but immediately used "yes". Not long after, the Italian pessimist Giacomo Leopaldi foresaw the same situation. He said that under the sunlight, human beings will "die in the dark and freeze like ice crystals."
Galileo's inorganic world is now a creepy possibility. In the end, life becomes extremely subtle. Ironically, this appreciation comes not from the scouring of the sky, but from the exploration of the underground. Early geologists, in the late17th century, realized that the earth has its own history, and organic life is not always a part of it. Biology is not a permanent fixture on earth-why should it be somewhere else? Coupled with more and more scientific evidence that many species have been extinct before, with the arrival of the19th century, this has slowly changed our view on the orientation of life cosmology.
Seeing the death in the stars, people like Diderot looked up at the universe and saw a large number of humanoid Petri dishes in the 1950s from 65438 to 0754. The author says, for example, that from 65438 to 0854, thomas de Quincy stared at the Orion Nebula and reported that they only saw a huge inorganic "skull", which staggered and grinned.
Astronomer William Herschel realized as early as 18 14 that observing the Milky Way is a kind of "timer". Fermi will spell it. In the century after de Quincy, people have intuitively felt a basic concept: looking forward to the dead space, we may just be looking forward to our own future.
People are beginning to realize that the emergence of intelligent activities on earth should not be taken for granted. They began to realize that it was something different-something that stood out in the silence of the deep space. Only when we realize that what we think is valuable is not the baseline of cosmology can we understand that these values are not necessarily a part of nature. It is entirely our responsibility to realize this and realize them. This, in turn, leads us to the modern project of forecasting, preemption and strategy formulation. This is how we care about the future.
As soon as people began to discuss human extinction, possible preventive measures were put forward. Bostrom now calls it "macro strategy". However, as early as 65438+1920s, French diplomat Beno de Merlette (Beno? T de Maillet) put forward great geo-engineering achievements that can be used to buffer climate collapse. Since we began to think about this problem for a long time, the concept of human beings as a geological force has always existed-until recently, scientists accepted this concept and gave it a name: "Anthropocene".
Will technology save us? Soon, the author began to make high-tech advanced futures to protect the existing threats. Vladimir Odoevskii, an eccentric Russian futurist, wrote 19 in 1930s and 1940s. He imagined that humans could design the global climate and install giant machines to "repel" comets and other threats. However, Odoyevski is also keenly aware that self-responsibility will bring risks: the risk of failure. Therefore, he was also the first author to suggest that it is possible for human beings to destroy themselves with their own technology. Read more: betting on speculative geo-engineering may bring about an escalating "climate debt crisis"
However, this risk is not necessarily a desperate invitation. It still is. It can only show our understanding of the fact that since we realized that there were no human beings in the universe, we began to realize that the fate of human beings was in our hands. We may have been proved unfit for this task, but, just like now, we are not sure that human beings or things like us will inevitably reappear here or elsewhere. Since the end of 17, the understanding of this point has snowballed into a trend that we are constantly swept away by our deep concern for the future. Current startup