|
Looking
forward to billions of years makes us long for a path of
knowledge. Unfortunately, science is the path of ignorance. It is
the art of asking simple questions. So simple that they can be
answered, and that nature repeats the same answers whenever we
ask. Most scientists adhere to the superstition that, eventually,
all questions can be reduced to such simple ones.
The
world around us started investigating itself less than a million
years ago. Apart from problems with daily bread and daily
violence, the questions asked have been the same through the
ages: Whence do we come? Where do we go? And why?
Science
has just reached the level of the first aspect of this trinity of
questions: The world’s origin.
As long as the social
environment did not change significantly during the life of one
generation, the ideas of a static God and a stationary world were
natural. Hence, when physical science appeared, its task was
considered to be the search for unchangeable laws. Like all good
conservatives, many physicists clung to the eternal
unchangeability not only of laws, but also of the state of the
world. Even Einstein initially thought, and always felt, in
favour of a static universe. If taken consequently, this concept
implies thermodynamic equilibrium. Man would have to be a
statistical fluctuation.
Today we know that our world –
that is all we can see or experience – is not in
equilibrium, but has been evolving from extreme simplicity to
greater and greater complexity. It seems that there was the birth
of man, the birth of life, of the stars, of matter, of space and
time. Scientists of all disciplines are revealing the drives
behind this procreative power of the universe. Cosmologists are
already asking questions about its very beginning. For instance,
one can inquire whether basic physical laws allow a derivation of
the present state of the universe from an initial state of
maximal simplicity – maximal in some sense of extreme order
or disorder. We may instead find that our initial conditions are
not distinguished in such a way but are rather accidental.
Then we may go in for statistics about worlds with various
initial conditions, embedded (physically or mathematically) in
some meta-world which lies beyond our direct perceptivity.
Conservatives may even please their minds’ longing for
steadiness by considering the meta-world to be in equilibrium,
thus making our own world a fluctuation phenomenon. But however
unlikely it may appear from such a point of view, within our
world evolution to more and more complexity must have been
inevitable.
It seems possible now, and even likely, that
science will answer the question of whence we come: Out of simple
symmetry, or chaos, or nothingness. All we need may be some
mathematical building instructions (the basic physical laws,
still largely hidden), and an initial state of sufficient impetus
to cause the expansion in space and time, thus preventing
equilibrium. It may not be fully proven yet, but assumed as a
reasonable working hypothesis, that these two provisions entail,
for purely statistical reasons, the formation of increasingly
complicated structures and, hence, the whole subsequent
evolution.
Let us quickly go through history. Make the age
of the world 12 billion years (it may in fact be a bit older) and
squeeze those into 12 months. Let it be New Year’s Eve
today.
Remember: On last New Year’s Eve the whole
world which we see now was extremely near us, perhaps in one
point with us, totally structureless, at least orderless, but
endowed with the impetus to expand against gravity and with the
rules of how to build structures. In a minute fraction of the
first second of the first of January, elementary particles are
created in this primeval medium. Matter appears in the form of
Hydrogen and Helium. It becomes dominant after a while (on
January first or second), for expansion thins radiation faster
than matter. When the radiation is cool enough to decouple from
Hydrogen, matter can follow its tendency to escape from the
expansion and form lumps. But instead of fully submitting to
gravity and collapsing into Black Holes, it has to assemble in
very long-lived structures, with gravity balanced by rotation or
various kinds of pressure.
Before the end of January the
galaxies and the first generations of stars have formed. From now
on stars brew the heavier chemical elements. Dying stars enrich
the interstellar gas with such material. Laws of nuclear physics
let Carbon become especially abundant, laws of atomic and
molecular physics enforce the formation of organic molecules on
the surfaces of dust grains in the gas surrounding stars. (During
the past few years, radio astronomers have detected more and more
complicated organic molecules in such conditions.)
By the
middle of August, our sun and its planetary system are formed in
a contracting cloud of gas and dust. It takes less than a day for
the sun to achieve approximately its present properties and
supply its planets with a more or less steady stream of
high-temperature radiation. The formation of an atmosphere and
oceans on the earth leads to an ideal environment for the kind of
chemical evolution which radio astronomers find in irradiated
circumstellar clouds. The earth’s atmosphere does not yet
contain free Oxygen, and thus ultraviolet light can reach its
surface. Laws of statistics favour the formation of complexity in
a system receiving high-temperature radiation and re-radiating
the energy at low temperature.
Is it only due to my
ignorance that I wonder whether auto-catalysis is already
effective even at this level of pre-biological evolution? Does
the rate of formation of some molecule in a mixture containing
its constituents, and given luminous or chemical energy, grow
with the concentration of this molecule? It may be a matter of
taste to decide when to call the earth’s surface alive. The
main condition for the genesis of life seems to be that it
doesn’t exist yet: it would consume the primeval soup of
organic molecules.
By the middle of September the oldest
rocks on the earth’s present surface have formed. From the
beginning of October we have the first news about organisms:
fossils of algae. The first vertebrate fossils date from December
16. On December 19 plants conquer the continents, and the fish
form jaw-bones. On the 20th of December the land is covered with
woods, and the atmosphere becomes rich in Oxygen. (Strong
ultraviolet light is no longer desirable. More complexity is
allowed with softer radiation!) On the 22nd and 23rd, when our
coal-beds are formed, amphibious quadrupeds originate from
lung-fish and conquer the damp lands. From these, reptiles are
born and settle on dry land on December 24th. Warm blood is
invented on the 25th. Late in the evening there are the first
mammals, living a paltry existence beside the dinosaurs during
the next two days. In recesses, hidden from the mighty,
intelligence prepares. On the 27th birds form out of reptiles. On
the 28th and 29th mammals and birds take over the power from the
dragons. During the night before the 30th, the (still continuing)
formation of the Alps and other young mountain ranges begins.
Up
to now, essentially all biological information is fixed in
molecules of nucleic acid. On the 30th of December, storage in
large protein structures – the brains – begins to
supplement this genetic fixation: Learning becomes important.
Soul and mind start evolving. In the night before December 31st
the human twig shoots off the branch which led to the present
primates. Now, we have one day left to develop ourselves. With
about twenty generations per second this seems easy. But
documentation is poor. Only from about ten in the evening we have
the relics of Olduvai gorge. Five minutes before midnight the
Neanderthal people thrive, with brains about as big as ours. Two
minutes before twelve, we sit around the fire, shouting and
whining and rhythmically clapping our hands, paint deer and bison
on thewall of our caves, start asking our three questions, and
put weapons or honey and grain into our fathers’ tombs.
History has been handed down for fifteen seconds in China and
Egypt. Five seconds before twelve, Jesus Christ is born. One
second before twelve, the Christians start the extermination of
the American civilizations. How many living species do we now
exterminate every day? – Gong! – Here we are in the
new year. What will it bring?
In cosmology, there is one
question about the future which can be answered by extrapolation
from the past: Will the universe expand forever, or will it
re-contract? The answer is simple: “In my beginning is my
end”. Like a missile that is shot from the earth’s
surface into space, it will go off toinfinity or fall back,
depending on its initial velocity. So, if the initial impetus was
sufficient, universal expansion could never be stopped but only
slowed down by gravity. If it was insufficient, however, gravity
would win and reverse expansion into contraction some time in the
far future. Our entire visible world would then return to an
extremely dense state, perhaps to one singular point. Then, “time
must have a stop”.
Present theories say that a world
which is finite in time, also has a limited space, whereas the
ever-expanding world has infinite space. To decide which kind of
world we live in, we need to make more observations; but if the
law of gravity is that of Newton and Einstein, and if there is
not much more invisible than visible matter around us,
observations favour the everexpanding model. However, should the
world eventually re-contract, it would first continue to expand
for at least as long as it did so far, and the subsequent
contraction phase would last exactly as long as the expansion.
Can it be a reasonable question what our far future would be in
either of these models of the universe?
Looking forward to
billions of years, we may find our curiosity withered. It does
not seem possible to find our ends in our origin. The origin was
too simple. What matters, is the front of evolution, here and
now.
In our neighbourhood, the time-scale of evolution has
become shorter and shorter: Billions of years were needed for
physical, chemical and biological selection, until that beautiful
organism, the system of life, covered our planet. But a few
million years were enough to create man, the latest organ or
blossom of that organism. And man realizes that he is not just
another animal: Post-biological evolution has set in with him. In
addition to genetically fixed behaviour, traditions are built up
and inherited through education. Biological mutation and
selection lose their governing influence. Revolutionary thinking
and inventive planning are the mutative forces which change
tradition. With its new organ, life changes its environment much
faster and more radically than before. Technology incorporates
more and more matter into the process of life. New and extremely
complicated structures develop, such as libraries, or the art of
the fugue. Such structures are not in themselves reproductive,
but self-reproduction and, hence, personal death have gained a
new quality: Whereas the essence of a plant or an insect lies in
its genes, and is reproducible, the essence of man is not. In
spite of communication, a great man, or a loved one, seems to
take much more with him than he leaves. Even with libraries and
other means of tradition, human death appears as an irretrievable
loss. We would like so much to have another world for our
souls.
Can we renounce that wish, and learn to love
ourselves and each other as mortal parts of something unknown
beyond us, evolving from us? Can’t we die in peace, even if
we have no biological offspring, and if we can scarcely discover
traces of our own soul and mind in the world? Our traces must
be there and must help shape the world, contributing a tiny
bit to the evolution of God, even after we have disappeared as
physical and biological entities. The laws of physics and biology
are no longer dominating the fight at the front of evolution.
This front has moved from the level of physics through chemistry
and biology to technology and noology. Further we can’t
see. But is there any reason to think that we are the end?
Yes
there is.
Like at the last turn of a millennium, but now
with far more justification, we may fear that the world’s
end is near. We talked about noology and hushed up the fact that
technology has rudely pushed aside soul and mind. Within a
few generations, science and technology have become rampant like
a malignant tumor. Evolution rages towards a singular point in
the history of the earth, a crisis which has never before
occurred: Its time-scale is becoming as short as the life-span of
the individuals at its front. But for our genetically and
traditionally fixed abilities of adaptation, acquired in the
course of several hundred thousand generations, will be
inadequate or even fatal if we change our world significantly
during our life-time.
It is not at all clear whether such
a critical point can be overcome. As our line of life approaches
it, complicated feed-back mechanisms seem to force it nearer and
nearer, more and more rapidly. With an approximately exponential
expansion of population and technology, every finite space will
be exhausted very soon. On the other hand, as we hit the walls
(or rather our neighbours), socio-economic pressure grows and
accelerates technological development even further. Therefore,
the psychological and sociological strain connected with the
precipitation in time, must coincide with the strains due to lack
of space and resources.
Do we have time to find economic,
social and spiritual frames in which mankind can survive? And are
we even searching in the right direction?
We certainly
cannot learn from the past, for evolution was then subcritical.
Extrapolation across a singular point is impossible. Therefore,
blind trust in a laissez-faire ideology would be foolish. The
once useful principles of evolution, our instincts and
traditions, together with a degenerating technology, can now lead
us only into turmoil and chaos, where we will dissipate all
recent achievements of evolution, perhaps destroy terrestrial
life itself, and leave scorched earth.
Clearly, something
new must happen. Evolution must circumvent the critical point by
opening another path, bringing in some new laws of interaction. A
new level must be climbed. But it is no longer “nature”
that is responsible for evolution. It is us. We are the
front of evolution. We have to do it. And what are we
doing?
Looking at the activities of mankind, the physicist
Max Born said at the end of his life: “Nature’s
attempt to produce a thinking creature has failed”. In the
years since, we haven’t improved much. There may be some
progress in behaviour, but it is usually followed by a quick
set-back, and such progress is definitely much slower than in
technology. As was always our usage, everybody wants to be at the
top and wants to see others at the bottom. It is progress that
this division is no longer inheritable. So, it has to be created
anew for each generation, and this produces more strain than the
old inequality. Children are bent and crippled in school to make
a good bottom. Talents and qualifications are mainly used to gain
privileges. The idea that they should only bring more
responsibilities is not seriously considered in our part of the
world.
Another example of progress: Slavery. Formerly all
people were needed because there could never be too many slaves.
Then, slaves were replaced by machines because these could still
be owned as private property. For a while this will work quite
well: Production of nonsense and waste feeds more and more people
who are needed to ask for the nonsense and remove the waste. But
suddenly some resources are exhausted or choked up by waste, or
people can’t consume all the absurdities, or the owners may
simply have enough – and people find themselves unemployed.
Students leave school or university and find that they are not
needed, while at the same time most true tasks remain
untouched.
One way out is war, isn’t it? People are
needed in wars, and after wars. In fact, within the rich part of
the world, war without killing would be sufficient. Only the
destruction of things is needed to create new jobs.
Killing could be replaced by sex and football.
Still more
hopeless, of course, is the situation in the so-called
underdeveloped countries, where we first robbed the people of
their hats and then left them alone in the sun.
But what’s
new with all this grousing of bad-tempered old men? Indeed,
nothing new, except the nearness of the singular point.
Our
planet is full, and technological growth changes it faster than
man and the biosphere can adapt. If we compare the recent
man-built structures with the biological and cultural wealth they
replace, it seems (even if we were to forget about war) that our
main activity is destruction. Within the present tenth of a
second in our compressed history we are scattering to the winds
all of the oil which the sun has helped us to compose during the
last ten days, and we are blighting our source and our children
with radio-active and chemical waste. In a Darwinian sense,
technological civilization seems to have been superior. It has
won. But what happens after the best has won and has closed the
system? Does evolution simply come to an end if diversity has
been destroyed and cannot be re-created by expansion?
Is
this the hour of the conservative utopian? Can we reduce the
speed of evolution by suppression? Is this, at last, the
opportunity to establish the static, perfectly organized state?
No! Confinement goes with rigidity. An ordered death is no better
than the chaotic one which we hope to avoid. And, anyhow, a
static solution would certainly be unstable and would quickly be
driven towards the critical point again.
So, what we have
to find seems to be a self-organization of mankind that provides
for a steady non-catastrophic evolution under the conditions of
restricted population and consumption. A main prerequisite will
be that expansion takes place on a new level with far more
diversity than economic, technological and military competition
can offer. Then, the speed of evolution may become sub-critical
without repression. Let us assume we succeed. Then, what will
follow?
Within my limited view from the path of ignorance,
two tracks show dimly far beyond the blurring abyss of the
impending crisis. One leads inwards, one outwards: The
development of our mental abilities, and the conquering of
habitable planets.
There are hints that our present
consciousness is but a poor prelude of things to come. Not only
great artists or intellectuals make me feel that way, but also
the intriguing evidence of extrasensory perception, telepathic
communication between minds, or even the direct influence of mind
on matter. Especially in those cases where only one mind
is involved one can perhaps ask questions simple enough to expect
nature to answer in a simple way. But so far this has not been
done in a convincing manner. We are still totally ignorant.
One
may ask how much space and energy, and how many individuals would
be needed for further mental evolution. It seems that the earth
with its share of solar energy and the present population should
by far be sufficient. This might represent an almost infinite
spiritual space, and enough land to live on as gardeners of the
world. We could easily fulfill all our needs by harvesting solar
energy with some kind of biological engineering. Then, why don’t
we jump over to that path right now? The problem is that man is
still more of a hunter than a gardener. And he loves huge
dangerous machines which make him proud of his power over his
progenitor, nature. The dinosaurs with their towers of protein
had to vanish, and we are proud of our infinitely simpler
concrete towers. Who is proud of his cancer because of its
growth? Science and technology have brought us to the critical
point too early. We may see the other much more attractive path
of evolution very near, but it seems that we can’t reach
it. We don’t strive to be; we strive to have. We want
economic, not spiritual growth.
Then, why not try space
travel, where the luxuriant growth of science and technology must
be useful? Many could be employed, and all could suffer at least
as hard as in war, if we were to prepare for the colonization of
our galaxy. Adam was not bored, and our galaxy with its hundred
billion stars would offer space to keep Adam’s task for
another million years – that is for about the first hour of
the new year in our compressed history. Be fruitful, and
multiply, and replenish the world, and subdue it. Space ships
like Noah’s ark would have to travel for perhaps a few
centuries to find a habitable planet. Within another thousand
years or so, a new home could be sufficiently populated to start
one or a few similar expeditions from there. In this way, mankind
could trickle throughout our galaxy and populate all favourable
stars within less time than it took to develop man from apes.
This provokes wild speculations: Are we the only living
society in our galaxy? If not, why did others not come here? Or
did they, and leave us uninfluenced, because they have more
reverence for life than we have? Or did they interfere very
cautiously? If nobody ever came here, does that show that
intelligent life is always a very short-lived phenomenon? That
perhaps it can nowhere evolve beyond our type of critical point?
Or does intra-galactic communication set in before space travel,
and one realizes that the bodies don’t have to expand
further in space, because the spread of information is more
appropriate for the development of a new superstructure: galactic
culture?
Clearly, both space travel and interstellar
communication take too long to help us out of our present crisis.
This path may be reachable from some safe plateau later on. Now,
it is the impending, not the distant future which we have to
shape. The abyss has to be crossed first. Therefore, our
prospects are gloomy. Even where we seem to have a free vote we
will continue to bungle from election to election. choosing
mostly ambitious and irresponsible leaders who have to think in
terms of four years, and the few people who dare ask radical
questions will be ridiculed or pushed out of their jobs or into
jail. Not only in totalitarian societies do we admire central
power more than diversity. We even establish new bureaucracies in
order to organize our march into the singular point more
efficiently. And if we cry for jobs we mean productivity, not
creativity. We don’t want further evolution. We want the
nice old economic growth. We are preparing for collective
suicide.
If we fail, it will start again or be tried
elsewhere. If we have been alone in our galaxy, it happens in
others. We can’t see that far, and it isn’t our task.
Still, it would be encouraging, or comforting, to find from
cosmological observations that our universe is of the open type,
offering infinite space and time. Then, physical laws would allow
for an unbounded evolution. And since this type of world would
never reach an equilibrium, the drive behind evolution –
the drive towards more complexity – would last for ever. As
the stars burn out, and one day no new ones are born any longer,
as matter and radiation are thinned out more and more, it would
certainly become increasingly difficult to live. But it wouldn’t
be us who would have to do so. Not even science fiction reaches
that far. We cannot envisage the essence of structures which will
be at the front of evolution after us. We don’t know
ourselves yet. How could we be so arrogant as to ask for the
world’s end? The world is open and undetermined. It has to
be shaped by man. “Werelt” means “man’s
age”. We have to find a way.
A clear mind of
our century (my namesake) said: “There is a goal but no
way; what we call way is hesitation”. Yes, with all
despondency we should know what we have to do now in order to
fulfill our liability for evolution. But if we look out to the
coming billions of years, hoping to find support from answers to
the where and why, we must turn the aphorism round: There is a
way, but no goal; what we call goal is a fancy of our impatience.
|
|