Broca's Brain - Carl Sagan [137]
We appear to be on the verge of developing a wide variety of intelligent machines capable of performing tasks too dangerous, too expensive, too onerous or too boring for human beings. The development of such machines is, in my mind, one of the few legitimate “spinoffs” of the space program. The efficient exploitation of energy in agriculture—upon which our survival as a species depends—may even be contingent on the development of such machines. The main obstacle seems to be a very human problem, the quiet feeling that comes stealthily and unbidden, and argues that there is something threatening or “inhuman” about machines performing certain tasks as well as or better than human beings; or a sense of loathing for creatures made of silicon and germanium rather than proteins and nucleic acids. But in many respects our survival as a species depends on our transcending such primitive chauvinisms. In part, our adjustment to intelligent machines is a matter of acclimatization. There are already cardiac pacemakers that can sense the beat of the human heart; only when there is the slightest hint of fibrillation does the pacemaker stimulate the heart. This is a mild but very useful sort of machine intelligence. I cannot imagine the wearer of this device resenting its intelligence. I think in a relatively short period of time there will be a very similar sort of acceptance for much more intelligent and sophisticated machines. There is nothing inhuman about an intelligent machine; it is indeed an expression of those superb intellectual capabilities that only human beings, of all the creatures on our planet, now possess.
CHAPTER 21
THE PAST AND
FUTURE OF AMERICAN
ASTRONOMY
What has been done is little—scarcely a beginning; yet it is much in comparison with the total blank of a century past. And our knowledge will, we are easily persuaded, appear in turn the merest ignorance to those who come after us. Yet it is not to be despised, since by it we reach up groping to touch the hem of the garment of the Most High.
AGNES M. CLERKE,
A Popular History of Astronomy
(London, Adam and Charles Black, 1893)
THE WORLD has changed since 1899, but there are few fields which have changed more—in the development of fundamental insights and in the discovery of new phenomena—than astronomy. Here are a few titles of recent papers published in the scientific magazines The Astrophysical Journal and Icarus: “G240-72: A New Magnetic White Dwarf with Unusual Polarization,” “Relativistic Stellar Stability: Preferred Frame Effects,” “Detection of Interstellar Methylamine,” “A New List of 52 Degenerate Stars,” “The Age of Alpha Centauri,” “Do OB Runaways Have Collapsed Companions?,” “Finite Nuclear-size Effects on Neutrino-pair Bremsstrahlung in Neutron Stars,” “Gravitational Radiation from Stellar Collapse,” “A Search for a Cosmological Component of the Soft X-ray Background in the Direction of M31,” “The Photochemistry of Hydrocarbons in the Atmosphere of Titan,” “The Content of Uranium, Thorium and Potassium in the Rocks of Venus as Measured by Venera 8,” “HCN Radio Emission from Comet Kohoutek,” “A Radar Brightness and Altitude Image of a Portion of Venus” and “A Mariner 9 Photographic Atlas of the Moons of Mars.” Our astronomical ancestors would have extracted a glimmer of meaning from these titles, but I think their principal reaction would have been one of incredulity.
WHEN I WAS ASKED to chair the 75th Anniversary Committee of the American Astronomical Society in 1974, I thought it would provide a pleasant opportunity to acquaint myself with the state of our subject at the end of the past century. I was interested to see where we had been, where we are today, and if possible, something of where we may be going. In 1897 the Yerkes Observatory, then the largest telescope in the world, was given a formal dedication, and a scientific meeting of astronomers and astrophysicists was held in connection