I was never a Carl Sagan fan club member. Reading Wikipedia, he was a dope-head and so last century in his thinking. Apparently his fatal disease can stem from smoking so that was unfortunate.
Intelligence as a fatal trait is also dopey. Here's why.
The Cosmos, Life the Universe and Everything, is made up of the four forces of the apocalypse = the strong, weak, electromagnetic and gravity, acting on the four nucleotides of DNA = adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and thymine (T). The DNA was filtered through reality for a billion years, during which time the selection processes made more and more swishy DNA that could do all sorts of chemical and whatnot tricks such as odour detection [dogs], sound reflection navigation [bats], magnetic field navigation etc = a truly splendid array of amazing skills. But there's one special one = consciousness, thinking, sentience, pondering, evaluating, remembering and stuff. There is DNA memory such as animals have, that needs no education but gives an instinctive reaction to all sorts of things such as a praying mantis catching a fly. Neuron memory and cognitive process is something else. Humans have heaps of it. Killer whales, chimps and whatnot have a good lot too.
Reality is a complex system derived from a really simple Lego approach of those 4 wave function generating 'forces' combined with and acting on the four DNA components which produce the consciousness of the quantum physicists who give us the Schroedinger equation to ponder along with Goedel and the rest.
There is a plain and obvious trend over the process of increasing intelligence. I'll get teleological now and assert that It's purposeful in a billiard ball, no-free-will, God does not play dice, trend to whatever It is from wherever it was.
We could also adopt the latest fashion of Avatar theory and living the simulation.
But sticking with the organic molecules for a minute. There's no reason I can think of that intelligence etc is self-limiting. I've always thought a great deal more of the stuff would suit me just fine - orders of magnitude more would be fine. Failing that, at least having Google clipped on would be handy, telling me what to do 99% of the time and preferably 99.999% of the time. It seems a big waste of effort to have intelligence self-destruct when it gets good enough. I say go for full scale deflection.
Regarding the two possible self-destruct mechanisms I can think of, viruses and nuclear war, nuclear war can't do it because there are only about 10,000 bombs which if they all were let off in a clever way would leave 90% of earth untouched, and all of the oceans. The Preppers would scoff at the problem and even enjoy being vindicated at last. Of course there would be quite a change in human life, but I guess that within 100 years things would have bounced back phenomenally. There would be maybe 1% of people left, or even 10%. That's heaps of people to breed from and restart. They'd have the pick of places to live! 1% of 7 billion = 70 million - a good breeding programme available.
Viruses at best kill 70% of people who are infected. Plus famine fatalities would ramp that up. There would still be 20% of people left from the best virus attack organized by Fauci and WEF, or Made in China, Fort Detrick, Ukraine etc.
There's no stopping us, we're on our way. Relentless, inevitable, merciless. We don't know where we're going but we're on our way. A full scale nuclear war would be just a speed bump, hardly visible in the graph of humanity over millennia. A bit like 1987 seemed bad at the time but the Dow graph barely shows it. 1929 was a bit of a ding. 2023 might be a doozy. Or 2029. Never a dull moment in the human zoo.
Mqurice |
