One Cannot Live in the Cradle Forever by Robert de Neufville

Robert,

I found your essay exceptionally well aimed and argued and right on topic. A great pleasure to read, thank you. I feel a top score coming on! Your message is loud clear and true; "Adapt or Perish" and "Our existence is more tenuous than we generally realize." I also somehow feel this is the precurser essay to my own essay which continues the theme with new fundamental results showing a firm direction to go and methodological description.

However I agree you're right that; "Overcoming the technical challenges may be easy in comparison to using our collective power as a species wisely." and in far more ways than one. I'd also extend that to easy; "...in comparison to implementation in the face of old belief led science". For me scientific discovery implies 'change'. For many it seems the opposite is true!

I agree it's a fair view to say; "I don't think we understand the risks well enough yet to honestly say exactly what we need to do." I propose first resolving the great fundamental anomalies, then improved understanding will identify the greatest risks. Also our ability to avoid catastrophes will improve. Without that focus we may be consigned to being a momentary speck in the history of the universe.

Great job, well done. I hope you enjoy mine. The derivation uses quite simple 3D geometry and logic. QM becomes intuitive and understandable, even by young students (see the reproduced 'classroom experiment' in the end notes).

Best of luck in the competition.

Peter

Robert

I thought your well written essay framed the issue facing humanity in very clear terms. I do believe we are on the same page and thank you for your comments on my essay. If you have not already done so, I suggest you also read the essay by Walter Putnam which adds yet another dimension to the discussion. I also, think Marc Séguin's idea of the need to become future-literate fits in quite well.

I really agree with what you wrote:

"But the greatest challenges may be political. Overcoming the technical challenges may be easy in comparison to using our collective power as a species wisely. If humanity were a single person with all the knowledge and abilities of the entire human race, avoiding nuclear war, and environmental catastrophe would be relatively easy."

If we can't rid ourselves of nuclear weapons - the biggest environmental and existential threat to our future - how can we manage the more complicated issues?

Below are a few quotes that I find relevant to you essay:

Robert A. Heinlein:

We have two situations, mutually exclusive: Mankind surviving, and mankind extinct. With respect to morality, the second situation is a null class. An extinct breed has no behavior, moral or otherwise.

Arthur C. Clarke:

There is no way back into the past; the choice, as Wells once said, is the universe-or nothing. Though men and civilizations may yearn for rest, for the dream of the lotus-eaters, that is a desire that merges imperceptibly into death. The challenge of the great spaces between the worlds is a stupendous one; but if we fail to meet it, the story of our race will be drawing to its close.

Carl Sagan:

Since, in the long run, every planetary civilization will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring--not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive... If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds.

Good luck in the competition. You deserve to do well.

Regards

Arthur

Thank you, Robert, for your own thoughtful essay. You are absolutely right that there must be a political will to create institutional change in order that humans work together for the common good. We have that now in many different forms, but it seems scattered in many different directions as well. Maybe we are closer than we think to a consensus on what steps to take. Groups large and small are just like individuals in many ways: You can know what is the right thing to do, or at least what you should not do, and yet still do the opposite. But just as individuals mature and learn over the years to follow the conscience, maybe humanity is reaching the point where the collective conscience will prevail over base instinct. Best of luck in the contest.

I liked your essaay, but it sure seems to me to be much easier to solve those problems on Earth and avoid catastrophe, than to move people to another planet in the galaxy. I think that colonizing the galaxy has to be justified by some other reason than avoiding nuclear winter or runaway global warming.

Dear Robert,

A well written and interesting essay on the subject of existential risk and why we should care. Although I only touched on the topic of artificial intelligence in any depth, I enjoyed the broader scope of your essay. It is true that new technologies you mention hold great promise and peril and will most likely either end up being a solution to our problems or making them much worse depending on how they are used. AI in particular is difficult as it will literally have a mind of it's own. I agree too that become a space-fairing species is the only long term solution to our survival, hopefully SpaceX and similar organizations can help accelerate that development to the point where space travel becomes profitable, economical and sustainable (rather than mostly government funded).

Hi Robert,

Thanks for your interesting essay. I especially appreciated your acknowledgment of human existence as only a tiny portion of Earth's history.

I found that your recommendations for improved decision-making, governance, and making plans for hazard avoidance resonated with my essay on computationally intelligent personal dialogic agents. I developed a prototype of this kind of dialogic web system as part of a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation that investigated ways to develop interaction skills. I see the development of a dialogic web as a clear path toward your recommendations.

I'd appreciate a rating, if you can do that, since I am a bit short on ratings. Also, if you know of some one that would be interested in collaborating with me on the further development of the dialogic web, I'd appreciate it if you would pass along my contact info. My gmail username is my first name, then a period, then my last name.

Thanks,

Ray Luechtefeld, PhD

Dear Robert de Neufville,

You begin "Life is a marvel of thermodynamics." And also "humanity must not squander the temporary miracle of its existence." And "we have to make sure that we survive" and "merely surviving... may seem an unambitious goal. We have to be free."

These are themes I base my essay on, with the same caveat that you note; Edmund Burke's observation "idealist schemes are never as well thought out as we imagine." And "decision makers almost invariably end up serving their own interests."

In another comment you said "we should steer so as to maximize our chances for survival, rather than construct some imagined utopia." Yes indeed!

As you focus on catastrophes, they maintain larger mind share for you than for me. That is the reason I'm happy to see your sober understanding of governments and utopias.

I hope you find time to read my essay and comment on.

Good luck in the contest.

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Hello Robert,

I liked your essay. Two things: I completely concur with one of your opening statements - "First and most of all we have to make sure that we survive," and that is the whole premise of my essay. We will not solve all the worlds/species problems as we have been working on our problems for tens of thousands of years and our headway is questionable. Though through continued work we may be able to make things better for the majority in the long run.

Second: This later statement "In a sense, the future is a collective action problem" is only relevant in how well we can collectively, and at what level, accomplish anything. Sometimes humans need to be lead by the hand or guided even if they don't know why.

Good luck,

Don Barker

Dear Robert,

I appreciated the expertise and data about catastrophic events of the past, and the relatively wide spectrum of topics that you cover in the limited space of the essay.

I am curious about the estimate by physicist Richard Gott. Do you know whether this a purely abstract argument (reasoning in `geometric` terms of where a point might be on a segment, given that the segment be finite, etc.), or one more concrete and subtle, based on specific (historical) data?

You wrote:

`If we are really special it is also good news for us, because it means that the most stringent filtering steps - and therefore the greatest dangers - are already behind us.`

This triggers the discussion about the fact that we may be special/non-special. You seem to prefer the Copernican, NON-special option, but you also seem to argue about the opposite. I am definitely for the NON-special option, for the following reason.

We could only be special if we assumed that there is a threshold after which extinction becomes much more unlikely, but I do not see why this should be the case. Consider a remote village in which you find an unusual number of ultra centenary people. This does not guarantee to these very old people the chance to have more years left to live than the average person from a `normal` village. And if this example is not convincing, I would just say, more generally, that we cannot anticipate the nature and frequency of (natural or auto-induced) causes for the extinction of humanity that will occur in the future.

Best regards

Tommaso

Dear Robert,

You are correct, "Be Prepared" is a good policy. But focusing on catastrophe can bring you down. I hope you have other ways to counteract this.

Thanks for reading and commenting on my essay. While we agree on key points, you note that using statistical mechanics to model the behavior of a complex human system is problematic.

Yes, it is problematic, but that doesn't imply that there no insights to be gained. 10^10 humans is a statistically significant number, and for many purposes can be considered random.

Decades ago I realized/discovered that to accomplish my immediate goal [say to design, debug, document, produce, and market a new product] required a certain amount of time and a certain amount of effort, and there were no shortcuts. In other words, the fact that I was doing uniquely human and creative behavior did not cancel the fact that conservation of energy, momentum and general laws of physics could be bypassed. We live in a physical universe governed by physical laws, of which thermodynamics are some of the most significant. I think the approach I've taken is not entirely inappropriate although it is problematic.

Thanks again for your feedback, and your participation in this contest. Good luck.

My best regards,

Edwin Eugene Klingman