The Giant Oops

The Giant Oops
Peter Shikli
29 Sept 2006

In 2007, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) now under construction near Geneva, Switzerland will begin operating. Pummeling atomic nuclei with more energy than ever before, it is expected to produce tiny black holes, the same thing that swallows galaxies without even a peep of light. Peter Weiss points out in his Scientific News article that this is not as dangerous as it sounds, and there are great scientific advances likely. The LHC physicists are closer to the facts than we outsiders, and there is no need to seek doomsday guidance from the supermarket tabloids.

But there is a big-picture question in all this. Consider the moment of truth of the Manhattan Project. Those physicists knew atomic nuclei decay naturally all around us, but they also knew they were going to go past a boundary. At least one physicist thought "lighting the atmosphere on fire" was worth mentioning. In the end, the button was pushed, surely with some tiny feeling of, "Oh, what the hell."

To understand why the button was pushed, we have to first consider why we are alone as a civilization pushing such buttons. Planet finder Geoff Marcy estimates the 200 billion stars of our Milky Way contain at least 10 billion Earth-like planets. Given that our 5 billion-year-old Earth was born 8 billion years after the Big Bang, the odds are good that an Earth-like planet produced a civilization earlier than ours, unless life is unique to Earth for some unknown reason. So why has SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) and other well-funded efforts found no sign of them?

In 1961, Dr. Frank Drake came up with what has become famous as the Drake Equation to estimate the number of technological civilizations that might exist in our galaxy:: N = R_* × f_p × n_e × f_l × f_i × f_c × L
where N is the number of civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy whose radio emissions are detectable.

Drake multiplies together the rate of formation of suitable stars (R_*) times the fraction of those stars with planets f_p, on down to the fraction of planets where technology develops (f_c). These fractions are each less than 1, so the idea is that multiplying them all together produces a tiny number that will be multiplied by the giant number R to produce some reasonable estimate of N. Some of these ratios are becoming better known with the discovery of over 200 extrasolar planets as of this writing. Some of Drake's ratios remain mysterious and shrouded in religious debate, such as the fraction of suitable planets where life develops (f_l).

At the end, Drake multiplies all those ratios by the average lifetime of communicating civilizations (L), the length of time such hypothetical civilizations release detectable signals into space. One assumption is that such civilizations may have formed earlier than ours, possibly during the 13 billion years before we arrived, hence have advanced much further than us -- if they are still around. Another assumption is that such intelligent civilizations have a beginning and an end, with the time in between rather short compared to the age of the universe.

Science fiction is full of speculation about that end. Wars, among ourselves or with aliens, disease, self-inflicted environmental destruction, meteor strikes, and so on. Common to all those scenarios are survivors, people or other living creatures who would rebuild some ongoing civilization, even if we had to go back to cockroaches to take another stab at evolution.

A different possibility is that the laws of physics have built into them some technological advance, like splitting the atom or producing a black hole, that comes with a giant oops that has no survivors.

So much of the world seems to have a purpose, including our roles in it. When people ask me if I believe in "intelligent design", I always respond with an enthusiastic "Yes, including how intelligent evolution is". From that first spark of the Big Bang, the physical laws were in place so eventually, somewhere, we would arrive. God may have left to chance which of the 10 billion planets would be our home, as much as he left to chance which founding atoms would become our bodies. But he fielded a world that would eventually, somewhere produce intelligent life that understood the difference between good and evil. That seems to be the part not left to chance -- to have been inevitable by all the physical laws guiding us. Whether those intelligent creatures have two eyes or four, God may not have been interested, leaving the details to evolution's numbers game.

The goal was the reason for creation, to produce intelligent life that understood the difference between good and evil, and then to see what they did about it. In my writing about God's Lab Rats, I speculate how this could be part of an unfathomably deep search for meaning on God's part -- a never-ending process rather than a destination.

But we living creatures have a destination and are not just recycling, not just doing the same thing repeatedly. Physical matter recycles. Rain goes back to the ocean and turns back into rain. Stars explode, and the resulting gas coalesces into stars. But life doesn't go backwards any more than mammals will evolve back to reptiles or Italians will revert to Romans. We are all headed toward a destination, even if we don't know what that is, factual knowledge of that destination also kept from us by intelligent design. I speculated how humanity may continue to evolve in Internet, Evolution, and God into a form of being more connected to God, more God-like than where we stand today. Now the question is, "What happens after all that?"

Assuming we arrive at our destination, as connected to God as humans can get, and having explored all the meaning we could, then what? As a civilization, we expand and explore by nature, where looking for other civilizations is as innate as looking for food. Perhaps having reached our goal, we can help others do so? But more likely, we would just gum up the other experiments, the other searches for meaning.

Imagine the Jetsons from 2300 coming to the rescue of the Romans. In short order, so much poverty, disease, and suffering would be cured. But so would the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery. Would we be better off without those 2300 years of our history? Even with the best of intentions, could the Romans have been converted into the Jetsons in a year or two of the finest computer based training? Or are all the steps and missteps of the evolution of our civilization and ourselves as spiritual beings part of the plan?

If the plan is for us to search for our own meaning, without short cuts and without anyone handing us the answers, then the plan would not call for such intervention. That means we either evolve into creatures who understand that and choose to grow quiet, to silence our radio transmitters, and become flies on the wall. Or the system has built into it our exit strategy. The fail-safe method is to conclude the experiment with the latter.

With lab rats, the end of the experiment is to take the rats away. Maybe back to their exercise wheels, but just as likely to the dissection table. But we don't let them hang out in the maze with the cheese eaten, and we don't let them wander over to other rats in other ongoing experiments.

Is taking us out at the end cruel? A not-so-funny joke on God's part? As individuals, we come into this world knowing what Jim Morrison said, "No one gets out alive", so closing the experiment doesn't change that by much. Perhaps a few years off the last lives, but compared to the many lives cut short by accidents and childhood diseases, it wouldn't be out of character for the world. At least it would be quick. As far as ending humanity, the premise is that the end of the experiment would be timed to coincide with humanity's arrival at our potential. That's just restating my dad's last words, "I did what I came for."

So if we follow the logic that this is all part of the great plan, operated by the laws of science from the spark of the Great Bang onward, the plan and its laws of science probably include that exit. Built right in but unknown to us, just as the little bang of the Manhattan Project was built into the Big Bang.

Our exit wouldn't be a time bomb, like the sun blowing up at a certain point in its life cycle. That could happen before or after humanity reaches its destination. Better is something coupled to humanity having reached its destination. Few triggers for that kind of annihilation would work better than some law of physics that says, "By the time man has learned to do X, he has probably accomplished all he is destined to." So when man learns to do X, doing it comes with a surprise.

This surprise should come before humans master interstellar travel, before we discover other civilizations and pollute their experiments. Splitting the atom was well before interstellar travel, so having that trigger our exit would have been a safe bet to keep us out of mischief. Moving the trigger to the LHC creating black holes would have increased the risk, but we'll still be a long way from interstellar travel in 2007. We know little about dark matter and dark energy, and perhaps an experiment related to that would turn us into the dark stuff left from so many other civilizations reaching their destinations. It could be related to the type of rocket engines (ion, plasma, etc.) that scientists speculate may be needed for interstellar travel, but that would be cutting it close.

We can start looking for the trigger in order to avoid it. Scientists can analyze and do their best to predict what may be dangerous and what may not, but so much of scientific achievement is punctuated by a final leap into the unknown. If we had decided to avoid splitting the atom because we believed the worry that it would light the atmosphere on fire, we would be sitting here today wondering what it would be like. Fifty years later, we would know a lot more about splitting the atom. We would have more analysis to show it would be OK to try. "The odds of the world surviving are 99.999%," someone would calculate. But knowledge of that last 0.001% would come only after pushing the button. If we lived in a world where every 2-bit despot or fanatic was getting his hands on the forbidden instructions to build the bomb, how long would it be before one of them said, "Oh, what the hell."? Perhaps God's plan is that we do survive every scientific leap, except the last one.

Trying to prevent the giant oops may be nothing more than a rear guard action, like the lab rat coming up with dodges to avoid the dissection table at the end of his experiment. Simply a matter of time, but not outcome.

And what an unobtrusive exit from the standpoint of the other experiments. A scientist a few dozen light years away notices a little unexplained poof next to our sun. His galaxy is full of unexplained little poofs. And if our giant oops calls for taking the sun with us, astronomers see stars blow up every day.

Add to that how short the span of our civilization is, a few thousand years compared to the billions of years of Earth's life. Assuming other civilizations share this meteoric rise from animals to annihilation, each of us would be short blinks on the timetable of the cosmos, particularly if we only count the few centuries between the invention of radios and our demise with the possibility of interstellar travel. The odds of one experiment seeing radio waves from another experiment would depend on their comparatively short life spans intersecting.

The bible, written by folks without much scientific training, say the world will be destroyed by God in some fiery cataclysmic flash, not unlike a nuclear physics experiment going terribly wrong. Interestingly, that may be planned for when we have achieved our purpose to become as much like God as we can become, hence we fulfill the prophesy in a rather spooky turn of the tables.

Perhaps God has more than just a plan. He also has a sense of humor.

More ramblings like this: www.shikli.com/blog

Peter Shikli is CEO of Bizware Online Applications. You can view his bio and contact him at pshikli@bizware.com.