The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [98]
Observation III. Science and technology have changed our world more in the past century than it changed in the previous hundred centuries—it took ten thousand years to get from the cart to the airplane, but only sixty-six years to get from powered flight to a lunar landing. Moore’s law of computer power doubling every eighteen months continues unabated and is now down to about a year. Computer scientists calculate that there have been thirty-two doublings since World War II, and that as early as 2030 we may encounter the singularity—the point at which total computational power will rise to levels that are so far beyond anything we can imagine that they will appear nearly infinite and thus, relatively speaking, be indistinguishable from omniscience. When this happens the world will change more in a decade than it did in the previous thousand decades.19
Deduction II. Extrapolate these trend lines out tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years—mere eye blinks on an evolutionary time scale—and we arrive at a realistic estimate of how far advanced an ETI will be. Consider something as relatively simple as DNA. We can already engineer genes after only fifty years of genetic science. An ETI that was fifty thousand years ahead of us would surely be able to construct entire genomes, cells, multicellular life, and complex ecosystems. (At the time of this writing the geneticist J. Craig Venter produced the first artificial genome and constructed synthetic bacteria that were chemically controlled by the artificial genome.20) The design of life is, after all, just a technical problem in molecular manipulation. To our not-so-distant descendants, or to an ETI we might encounter, the ability to create life will be simply a matter of technological skill.
Deduction III. If today we can engineer genes, clone mammals, and manipulate stem cells with science and technologies developed in only the past half century, think of what an ETI could do with fifty thousand years of equivalent powers of progress in science and technology. For an ETI who is a million years more advanced than we are, engineering the creation of planets and stars may be entirely possible.21 And if universes are created out of collapsing black holes—which some cosmologists think is probable—it is not inconceivable that a sufficiently advanced ETI could even create a universe by triggering the collapse of a star into a black hole.22
What would we call an intelligent being capable of engineering life, planets, stars, and even universes? If we knew the underlying science and technology used to do the engineering, we would call it an extraterrestrial intelligence; if we did not know the underlying science and technology, we would call it God.
Einstein’s God
Inevitably in discussions about science and God, the matter of Albert Einstein’s religious beliefs arises, with theists and New Age spiritualists of various stripes clamoring to claim the great physicist as one of their own. With careful quote mining one can find support for Einstein as a believer of some sort. To wit: “God is cunning but He is not malicious,” “God does not play dice,” and “I want to know how God created the world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details.” In the final weeks of his life, when Einstein learned of the death of his old physicist friend Michele Besso, he wrote the Besso family: “He has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubborn illusion.”
What did Einstein mean by “God” playing