Our cosmos is 13.8 billion years old. Our planet was formed 4.5 billion years ago and life began 3.7 billion years ago. Our species, Homo sapiens, is just over 300,000 years old.
It is difficult to believe we are alone in a cosmos which contains perhaps 2 trillion galaxies, each containing 100 billion stars. Some think that there is, surely, a chance that there have been or are highly intelligent species on at least one of the quadrillions of other planets that must orbit these stars. They would be, like us, understanders of the cosmos; or maybe their alien senses perceive an entirely different cosmos.
I think this is highly unlikely. These huge numbers of cosmic objects are misleading. It took the blindly groping process of evolution through natural selection 3.7 billion years – almost a third of the age of the cosmos – to evolve an understanding organism from the first primitive life forms
We are unique, privileged beings and, for that reason, we should cherish every moment of our awareness. We should now be cherishing those moments even more because our supremacy as the prime understanders of the cosmos is rapidly coming to end.
Only 74,000 years ago the human population was massively reduced, perhaps to as low as a few thousand, by the volcanic winter that spread around the globe after the monstrous eruption that formed Lake Toba in Indonesia.
as recently as 1815, again in Indonesia, the eruption of Mount Tambora darkened the skies and lowered temperatures around the entire planet
one thing the unmanned expeditions to Mars have told us is that the Martian desert is wholly inimical to all conceivable forms of Earth life. The atmosphere is about a hundred times thinner than the summit of Everest and it provides no shield against cosmic radiation or the ultraviolet radiation of the Sun. The thin air of Mars is 99 per cent CO2 and utterly unbreathable. There are traces of water on the planet, but it is as salty as the waters of the Dead Sea and undrinkable. The pioneer and would-be spacefarer Elon Musk has said he would like to die on Mars, though not on impact. Martian conditions suggest death on impact might be preferable.
the heating of the Sun has been slow enough to allow life to evolve, a process which takes millions of years. Unfortunately, the Sun is now too hot for the further development of organic life on Earth. The output of heat from our star is too great for life to start again as it did from the simple chemicals of the Archean Period between 4 billion and 2.5 billion years ago. If life on Earth is wiped out, it will not start again
So anything we say about the cosmos cannot, if we aspire to truth, disprove the existence of thinking creatures capable of saying those things. We know, for example, the cosmos must be more than, say, a million years old because it would take much longer than that for intelligent beings to evolve. This means our very existence restricts what we can say about the cosmos
If we accept the Anthropocene, as I believe we should, the ages are getting shorter again. In my view, the Novacene may only last 100 years,
Soon after the Anthropocene began, we became like the boy racer, carried away by the power of acceleration. We have kept our foot on the accelerator for 300 years and are now approaching the time when our electronic, mechanical and biological artefacts can run the Earth system by themselves.
Unchecked even by the strongest of traditional religion, I think we committed a fundamentally evil act by using nuclear energy for warfare. The misuse of science surely is the greatest form of sin.
Cities are the most visible signs of the power of the Anthropocene to transform our planet. Night photographs of the Earth taken from satellites show brilliant dots, strings and flashes of light clustered together.
We have made huge changes to the Earth's environment during the last 300 years. Some of them – like the heedless destruction of natural ecosystems – are certainly bad. But what about the massive extension of life expectancies, the alleviation of poverty, the spread of education for all and the easing of our lives, not least by the widespread availability, thanks to that inventive genius Michael Faraday, of electrical power?
It is all very well to pine for a rural life amidst trees and meadows, but that should not entail a rejection of hospitals, schools and washing machines, which have made our lives so much better
So my last word on the Anthropocene is a shout of joy – joy at the colossal expansion of our knowledge of the world and the cosmos that this age has produced.
Having started out by harvesting the power of sunlight by mining coal, the Anthropocene now harvests the same power and uses its energy to capture and store information. This is, as I have said, a fundamental property of the universe. Our mastery of information should be a source of pride, but we must use the gift wisely to help continue the evolution of all life on Earth so that it can cope with the ever-increasing hazards that inevitably threaten us and Gaia.
From this simple format, a bewildering complexity emerges. The game has an enormous ‘branching factor’ – the number of possible moves that arise after each move is made. In chess, the branching factor is 35; in Go, it is 250.
A practical difference between the thinking and acting speed of artificial intelligence and the speed of mammals is about 10,000 times. At the other end of the scale, we act and think about 10,000 times faster than plants. The experience of watching your garden grow gives you some idea of how future AI systems will feel when observing human life
The signs of the increasing power of AI are all around us. If you read science and technology news feeds, you will be bombarded daily with astounding developments. Here is an example I just spotted. Using ‘deep learning’ technology such as AlphaGo, scientists in Singapore have made a computer that can predict your risk of having a heart attack by looking into your eyes. Not only that, it can tell the gender of a person, also just by looking into the eyes.
In reality, the Novacene, like the Anthropocene, is about engineering. The crucial step that started the Novacene was, I think, the need to use computers to design and make themselves
We will know that we are fully in the Novacene when life forms emerge which are able to reproduce and correct the errors of reproduction by intentional selection.
When imagining the intelligent machines of the future, it is astonishing how often we come up with something that looks or acts like a human. I think there are three possible reasons for this. First, it is a quasi-religious impulse in that it sees humans as the summit of creation and, therefore, our successors must be somewhat humanoid. Secondly, it is comforting to think they are like us, at least on the outside; we perhaps feel that this means they are like us on the inside and so can be trusted to behave in a more or less human way. The third reason is that we are intrigued by the idea of the uncanny,
Thinking in linear logic is neat, but you would soon die if you relied on it in a jungle. Rapid instinct guards us against the hazards of the environment.
*The sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov was the first to consider in depth the behaviour and morality of cyborgs, or, as they were then called, robots.
He suggested a solution in a story written in 1942. He offered three laws of robotics:
‘If a lion could talk,’ said the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘we could not understand him.’ This was a more rigorous version of Čapek's remark on humans and dogs. Wittgenstein's point was that our language is our way of life and it is how we see the world. Lions would not share any of those perspectives. And neither would the cyborgs.
Complex speech patterns and writing make us unique amongst animals, but what was the cost? I think that communication by speech and writing, although at first it improved our chances of survival, has impaired our ability to think and delayed the emergence of a true Novacene.
If the cyborgs are at least as intelligent as we are and are capable of evolving holistically, they will probably adapt to the Earth environment, which includes us, in a very brief time.
the continued survival of our species will depend on the acceptance of Gaia by the cyborgs. In their own interests, they will be obliged to join us in the project to keep the planet cool. They will also realize that the available mechanism for achieving this is organic life. This is why I believe the idea of a war between humans and machines or simply the extermination of us by them is highly unlikely. Not because of our imposed rules, but because of their own self-interest, they will be eager to maintain our species as collaborators
Other possibilities include spraying seawater to make fine particles of salt that would serve as condensation nuclei and produce clouds in the humid air above the ocean surface that would reflect sunlight.
Several scientists have proposed inserting an aerosol of sulphuric acid in the stratosphere to serve as condensation nuclei for clouds
the best account yet given of the practices and drawbacks of geoengineering is in The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World by Oliver Morton. His analysis makes it clear that geoengineering is something we might have to use as a last-ditch measure
The explosion in space of a nuclear weapon within a metal cavity can produce a pulse of electromagnetic energy that could be quite deadly to Novacene systems.
In July 2017 Elon Musk and 115 other Silicon Valley AI specialists wrote an open letter to the UN, asking for a ban on autonomous weapons. Known in the trade as LAWS – lethal autonomous weapons systems – these are devices that can seek, identify and kill enemy targets. Usually, a human is involved in the final decision to fire, but this is a precaution rather than a necessity
In designing autonomous weapons I don't doubt that the engineers are confident that there will be a human in the decision chain. Or they will say they have built in rules – rather like Isaac Asimov's three rules of robotics – that will ensure only the chosen target will be attacked. But as the Novacene advances, the naivety of this idea that the cyborgs will necessarily obey such rules will be exposed.
As I have said, we shall be parents of the cyborgs and we are already in the process of giving birth. It is important we keep this in mind. Cyborgs are a product of the same evolutionary processes that created us
As with interstellar travel, so with hyperintelligence. If we do give birth to the cyborgs, does it not imply that we really are the first and only intelligence in the universe? Had there been a predecessor like us, the artificial intelligence they created would long ago have answered Fermi's paradox.
