Accelerating Future

In my last post, Mitchell Porter (whose mailing list postings I’ve been reading for nearly a decade), argues that my vision for a Neo-Carboniferous world is “deliberately low-key”, and he paraphrases it as, “Hey, greens! You shouldn’t fear us robot-swarm, mind-uploading, planet dismantling transhumanists! Look at this vision of a leafy green Carboniferous world that we’ve conjured up for you!” Then he remarks, “It says nothing about, say, how we meet the WMD-fabber-on-every-desktop problem without outright relinquishment, nor does it really tackle the problem of whether having as many trees and human beings as possible truly seems like a good thing, when you have truly godlike power and insight”.

Mitchell’s comment, and Sebastian Hagen’s before his, are on the mark. By transhumanist standards, the vision I present is boring and conservative. My point is to attempt to flesh out the wide range of possibilities inherent when intelligence commands self-replicating machinery. For myself, I’d appreciate a Neo-Carboniferous Earth just as easily as if it were a computer simulation on a matchbox-sized nanotechnological computer, as if it actually existed in the “real world”, but that’s just my preference. Matter is probably more usefully spent on implementing conscious beings living worthwhile lives, rather than as filler molecules of lignin doing little more than serving as an elaborate decoration for the consumption of qualiabearing beings.

As for the challenge of a WMD-fabber on every desktop, I’ve argued for the solution before, and it’s still the same — we require a benevolent singleton. A top-level decision making entity that can act with extreme speed and reliability to put down threats before they emerge. Naturally, the unimaginative might directly associate such an agency with communist dictators, but what I am talking about is as different from a communist dictator as an animal is from a prion. With immense power must come immense responsibility and intelligence, far more than can be held in the three pound lump of flesh we call the human brain. The inherent hazard of stating this is exposing myself to ridicule by those who immediately associate recognition of human limitations as misanthropy, which it is not. Such logic is like saying that those who criticize elements of America’s foreign policy are innately anti-American.

What is remarkable are those that seem to argue, like Ray Kurzweil, the Foresight Institute, and the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, that humanity is inherently capable of managing universal self-replicating constructors without a near-certain likelihood of disaster. Currently Mumbai is under attack by unidentified terrorists — they are sacrificing their lives to kill, what, 125 people? I can envision a scenario in 2020 or 2025 that is far more destructive and results in the deaths of not hundreds, but millions or even billions of people. There are toxins with an LD50 of one nanogram per kilogram of body weight. A casualty count exceeding World War II could theoretically be achieved with just a single kilogram of toxin and several tonnes of delivery mechanisms. We know that complex robotics can exist on the microscopic scale — microwhip scorpions, parasitic wasps, fairyflies and the like — merely copying these designs without any intelligent thought will become possible when we can scan and construct on the atomic level. Enclosing every human being in an active membrane may be the only imaginable solution to this challenge. Offense will be easier than defense, as offense needs only to succeed once, even after a million failures.

Instead of just saying, “we’re screwed”, the clear course of action seems to be to contribute to the construction of a benevolent singleton. Given current resources, this should be possible in a few decades or less. Those who think that things will fall into place with the current political and economic order are simply fooling themselves, and putting their lives at risk.

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Part of the rationale for being a “transhumanist”, or, more broadly, having grandiose dreams for humanity’s future, is the extremely simple and mundane observation that the available matter and free energy in our general vicinity is far larger than what we have utilized of it thus far. The incoming solar energy is about a million times greater than global energy consumption, and the available hydrothermal energy to be extracted from the energy gradient between the mantle and the upper crust is many times that. These energy sources far exceed that available from all fossil fuels, uranium, and thorium combined. In the long run (less than a century?), solar and hydrothermal will become our primary energy sources, simply because nothing else will be able to meet our exponentially growing demand.

The biosphere contains just two trillion tonnes of carbon, but the oceans contain about 36 trillion tonnes of carbon (mostly as bicarbonate ion), and several trillion tonnes of additional carbon exist as fossil matter, including the leftovers from the catastrophic Azolla event 49 million years ago. Retrieving oceanic carbon and reintroducing it to the organic biosphere could allow us to reestablish beautiful forests over much of the surface of the planet. Historically, tropical forests extended to within 40 degrees of the equator, subtropical forests to 60, and other forests to the poles. Palm trees and turtles thrived at the North Pole. Our current ice, grass, and desert-covered Earth is a geophysical abnormality caused by an Ice Age that began 23 million years ago when Antarctica split from South America, permitting the creation of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and leading to an “Icebox Earth” with glaciated poles. We have had greener ages, and we can bring them back with technology, particularly organic and inorganic self-replicating agents.

Though most environmentalists center their efforts around preserving currently existing biodiversity, forward-looking environmentalists should look towards not just preserving the already existing biodiversity, by setting environmental conditions conducive to the development of millions of new species and a planet covered in luxuriant foliage. By using vertical farming, which will be demonstrated as proof-of-concept within years, and closed-cycle manufacturing, we can minimize our footprint and sustain upwards of 100 billion people with negligible environmental impact. The current impression that the planet is overpopulated is a selection effect resulting from people living in crowded cities, concentrated by technological and economic necessity. Decentralized manufacturing and high-resolution virtual communication will allow a more evenly distributed populace.

Some, like environmentalist Bill McKibben — have said “Enough”, enough technology, enough life, enough progress. Unsurprisingly, I disagree. Looking back from the perspective of a world more than 20 times lusher and Nature-filled than today, with more than 20 times more people distributed evenly across huge tracts of land now practically empty, it will be hard to say, “we should have stopped when we were just at 5% of this potential”. There have been other times in history with just 5% of the biomass and life of today — immediately after major mass extinctions. If today’s world is “enough”, then why stop there? Why not revert back to a world with even less biodiversity and biomass? It would be a surprising coincidence if the current biomass is just right, rather than too little or too much. Those arguing otherwise are just products of their environment — the glacier, desert, and steppe-covered poverty of the Late Cenozoic.

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