Humanity Needs an Insurance Policy

The Lifeboat Foundation is an organization which seeks to raise awareness about the potential threats humanity as a whole faces, whether from external threats such as X-Ray bursts, nearby supernovas, or cataclysmic meteor impacts, or from internal threats such as global nuclear war, a malicious organization or individual intentionally releasing a biological engineered virus, or even accidentally releasing a self replicating nanotechnology which could devour all life on earth. The simple fact is that for intelligent sentient life to survive, humanity must spread out among the stars. This is something recognized by many prominent members of the scientific community, including most recently Stephen Hawking, who said, warning of earth destroying disasters, that humans must spread out into space. In the long term the Lifeboat Foundation would like to actually see self-sustaining space stations created and built, with humanity spreading among our solar system and eventually to neighboring solar systems.

I am an adamant supporter of the Lifeboat Foundation's goals for three major reasons: The Drake Equation, the Fermi Paradox, and The Law of Accelerating Returns. The combination of these three principles illustrates something terribly jarring; that life throughout the universe almost always destroys itself through technology.

Now, I am not a luddite and I love technology and all the great things it has brought, and I hope to see the day when technology has conquered aging, all disease, and death in general. But I do not embrace the idea that many strong proponents of technology do; an absolute blind faith in everything turning out perfectly well. I hope it does, and I think that it will, but I also think I will get to work safely everyday yet still wear my seat belt. I do not plan on coming down with a life threatening illness but I have insurance anyway. In our daily lives we take steps to mitigate and humanity as a whole needs to do the same thing, we need an insurance policy. That is what the Lifeboat Foundation seeks to create.

The Drake Equation is a popular one in astrophysicists communities. It is essentially a simple, but long, equation intended to determine how common life is in the universe. It goes like this, you start with the number of stars in our galaxy, which is estimated to be about 400 billion. Multiple that by percentage of stars which form stable planets, and that by the time stable planets are conducive to life forming on them, times the actual likelihood of life forming, times the average time life survives on a planet, times the chance it becomes technologically advanced, etc. Now it's obvious from this question that besides the very first number; the number of stars, none of these numbers are actually known. But even if you put very small numbers into this equation, say one in ten thousand for each one, since you start out with four hundred billion stars, you still end up with thousands of space fairing civilizations of intelligent life. Even if they spread very slowly so much time would have elapsed (billions of years) that they should be virtually everywhere we look. And this leads to the second principle, The Fermi Paradox.

Enrico Fermi, a Nobel prize winning physicist, looked at this equation and said "so where are they?" No one had a good answer. Essentially the Fermi Paradox is stating that even assuming very conservative numbers for all of those variables, the universe should still be teaming with life, yet we seem to be all alone. Why is that? Well, there are only three logical possibilities. The first is that we are the first, or of part of the first generation, of life to arise in the universe. This could be caused by conditions we are not yet familiar with which require certain cycles to pass (just as heavy planets couldn't form until the first few generations of stars were born and died) to make solar systems, galaxies, or the universe conducive to life. The second is that they are all around us, just in forms we can not detect. The third possibility is that life is common and does grow, but something always happens that prevents them from spreading out. Of these three scenarios, only one logically requires any action on our part; the third. That is, if there is something that tends to wipe a technological species out just before it starts to spread among the stars, we better damn well identify it, and if we can not do that, at least have secondary and tertiary plans to compensate for it.

Thus we are brought to author and inventor Ray Kurzweil's "Law of Accelerating Returns" in which he argues that growth of information, ideas, and technology increase exponentially, leading eventually to such a profoundly rapid change of technological progress as to create a hitherto un imaginable altering of human life as we know it. Imagine, by comparison, that the atom was discovered, X-Rays, Nuclear power, Radio, Lasers, the Internal Combustion Engines were perfected, and the computer revolution all were discovered within the course of a few months. And then imagine the same thing happening in the next few weeks. And then in the next few hours, then days, then minutes. You get the idea.

Kurzweil's recognition of the rapid growth of technology, something his essay goes through leaps and bounds to empirically demonstrate, leads into a corollary principle, that of the Doomsday Curve. This curve, demonstrated graphically in the provided links, essentially draws the logical conclusion of such a rapid technological growth. That is, the more technology that is available to one person, the easier it is for them to kill larger and larger numbers of people. In the middle ages it would take half of humanity all of their effort to wipe out the other half, being limited to hand to hand combat. With the advent of chemical explosives and machine guns, perhaps a third to a quarter of the world could get away with killing all the rest of the people. Keep in mind that the invading Japanese army slaughtered more than the numbers of the victims of both atomic bombs combined in the Chinese nationalist capital of Nan King in a just a few weeks and mostly by hand. With nuclear explosives, perhaps one tenth or one twentieth would be all that is needed, something that has prompted the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to move the hands of their 'doomsday' clock two minutes closer to midnight as we now enter the age of nuclear proliferation into totalitarian governments.

With the advent of the internet and its subsequent rapid information dissemination, and the mass production of complex technology, small groups of people may be able to biological engineer viruses directed to take out entire races of people, and a few hundred people could kill hundreds of millions. We could argue about the numbers, but the pattern remains. In the future, with things like nanotechnology on the horizon, this could become more and more of a threat, a future where eventually one person could, even accidentally, wipe out the entire human race, or even potentially all life on earth. With the growth of anti-technology terrorists like Ted Kaczynski and anti-human organizations like the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, is it really that difficult to imagine a well motivated and intelligent person seeking to rid the earth of the human population, which they perceive as a scourge and un-natural, through something like engineering an air borne HIV virus?

With that, perhaps we indeed have the jarring answer to the Fermi Paradox. Despite all the hundreds of billions of stars and likely thousands of technologically advanced civilizations, none of them survive, or so few survive that it is a rare event to come across even one.

Now, I don't want to be a dystopian alarmist, this is just one answer to the Fermi Paradox, personally I suspect we might very well be the first, or part of the first generation, of technologically advanced civilizations to arise. A very fascinating and exciting prospect! But it's easy to fool ourselves into thinking the most promising explanation is the right one, and truth be told, I have no clue, nor does anyone for that matter. But we do know that technological growth, even if eventually limited, is rapid and very powerful. We do know there are no other intelligent species yet discovered. We do know all ready the dangers that can come from technological growth. We do know that we are talking about the continuation of the human race, indeed the only intelligent race yet known to exist in the universe, and as such we *must* act to rationally secure our place in the future, and sign up for an insurance policy for humanity. Support the Lifeboat Foundation.