Science and Religion · 4:45am Jul 27th, 2013
This blog post is not about ponies, is rather long and talks about adult stuff like "religion"... Read at your own risk. Or just skip it, I won't be mad if you don't read it.
I've been asked more than once what I believe in. Which religion I follow and if none, why?
I answer that question with "I believe in something different than anyone else", in which science and religion, in my opinion, aren't too far from each other.
How can I believe in something nobody else - I have met one who think the same yet - believe in?
No, it's not about how scientist believe in some theory and some times build other theory on top of each other.
And it's not about how the universe was created, because frankly, I doubt anybody know for sure and I'm not sure it really matters. To me, it's an interesting research topic, but nothing else.
You should read about Fermi's Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
In short, scientists, while looking up there at the stars, are able to do some figure on how many stars there is, how many planets orbit them, and how many should be able to support life. From that, they found out that there should be billions of living planets and even if a small fraction of them had intelligent life, it would still means hundred of thousands of civilization. Considering our own sun is rather young compared to other, some of those civilization must be millions years older than our. Fermi's Paradox can be sum up to "Where's everybody?"
I answer the paradox with two points;
- We don't hear them because we are not advanced enough. We listen for radio waves and it's seriously a bad way to communicate, compared to quantum entanglement... or even thing we don't know! Who know on what the internet will run in a thousand years!
- They are here and always have been. They haven't directly contacted us because we aren't ready. They are waiting and watching.
To explain how I came to that conclusion, I will ask you - if someone is really reading this - to put yourself in the skin - if they have some - of a member of a space-faring civilization that is millions years ahead of us. Not Star Trek or Star Wars "pew pew pew" style space-war, but a civilization where corporal form and even death is a thing of the past. Where everybody communicate instantly and thing like racism, sexism, patriotism are simply non-existent.
What you do, as a member of that species - or many species - is travel galaxies in search for other civilization to join your intergalactic group, to enrich your knowledge and cultural creation. You find our planet - hundred thousand years ago - and found a species that show potential for intellect and social evolution. You want to help this species achieve greatness and you have all the time needed to do it, hundred of thousand or even millions of years if needed. Your goal is for this species to create a civilization and one day stand as one, welcoming and able to be integrated to a much bigger society. Right now, the best they managed is to paint their hands on some cave's walls. They kill each other, eat raw meat, there's an alpha male mating multiple female, and so on. The only communication is some random sounds that has no real meaning. Civilization? None, but they have shown that spark of potential. You want to help them become more.
What do you do?
Right now, they don't even have a conscience. They need the foundation of a civilization, and the first step for that is to give them... a carrot on a stick to force them to do things. This is where religion comes in. You cannot talk about complex concept to them, they don't even know what fire is. How do you force them to do something? Death is a notion they understand. One moment, you're alive, the next you are not. What happen to you after?
"You can continue to live after death if you do..."
What's surprising is how the "sacred" texts of religious book give very specific orders to people who had no idea why they would need to follow them. For a man that fight every day to survive, why should he not eat pork? Why should he cook his meat? Why should he not kill another alpha male? Why should he do his "business" outside the cave/village? And why should he sacrifice part of his food reserve if he "sinned"? He already have a hard time to survive! He can't afford to lose part of his food! But there's that thing... That reward he doesn't really understand, but it sounds great. It sounds better than what he lives daily.
Of course, today we know diseases are killed when we cook meat, that pork it's one of the animal with the most parasites and it requires long and high cooking temperature. Or that killing one another is counter-productive to our civilization, or that a city need to carry its waste outside the living zones. Today, it sounds obvious to us. But back dozen of thousands years ago, those notion were completely alien and nobody had the knowledge to implement them or understand them. They didn't make sense!
As time passed, some of those notion became anchored in our self, in our society. Some religious rules became mundane and people followed them without really thinking about it. Laws and rights have been based on those - on religion - even if today we now started to create laws and rights based on things beyond religion. At that point, a new "prophet" would show up to guide the population's evolution towards new goals and new rules. I love how the last "order" we got is "love each other" and we are yet to properly do it.
In other words, I believe most religions were created by aliens that wanted to give us a social evolution kick-start and a couple of push to guide us in the right direction. Crazy, right? And yet, it would explain lot of very strange writings in most of the sacred text. Notions that were far beyond their understanding back then. Things that today sound easy and just plain obvious. I see religious writings as historical proof that something - or someone - came here to guide our evolution. Not to save our soul, but to make us into a proper civilization.
What are they waiting for? It should be quite obvious. We can't realistically join an intergalactic civilization in our current state. I believe in thousands years from now, we won't have countries anymore. War will be a thing of the past. How can you do war if the whole world watch you in real time? Races will disappear as people of different color continue to mix. Even today, it's becoming rather hard to say if someone is black or white as there's so many shades in between. Immigration and globalization will only push us towards that faster.
Religions are slowly - but surely - phasing out as people for the first time in history really starts to think by themselves. They gave us the sociological evolutionary push we needed to come where we are now. Global communication offers an exchange and mixing of ideas unlike anything we had before. We can't even predict what the next generation will be like. The carrot is now becoming pointless as we are now looking beyond it.
What is interesting, for me, is to analyze why the carrot was placed there in the first place. Was there other ways to push a species towards building a civilization? I haven't found any that would work as well as religion would - or did.
Of course, at that point it's normal to wonder how many events were our own doing and which were helped in some way. For a species which goal is to nurture a whole civilization over hundred of thousand of years, death of a few millions is acceptable if it helps them take a step in the right direction. It's in our darkest moments that we are pushed towards the light.
What pissed me off greatly is that I will most likely not live long enough to see them contacting us once we are ready.
If you really read that whole thing, let me know what you think.
So... Stargate?
1239800 You mean the Gods exploiting us in Stargate? Not really. Imagine aliens playing the role because they need to, not because they want to, but because there is no better way to kick our lazy ass our of the caves. An evolution plan made for hundred of thousands years. Our evolution, planned ahead to give us the best chances.
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Well, not the evil ones, but like the Asgard that helped in ways.
I certainly agree with this thinking, by the way. It's easy to be skeptical about religion these days.
1239823 Ah! Yes. A bit like that.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic... or religion.
More like Ancients than Asgards, even though the Ancients chose not to interfere. All that immaterial form and no war and stuff.
And I think similarly, though I choose not to believe without proof.
Though one can have dreams!
The biggest counter to your theory is one that might sound a bit feeble. Especially if you are under the impression that we don't really know anything yet as a species.
But its mostly that the degree to which we understand physics in the scale of things that exist suggests that Civilizations cannot exist that do anything particularly loud or interesting or we would see evidence of them at a few million light years.
What I mean by loud or interesting is that there is no evidence of anyone building the energy harvesting infrastructures or changing the universe from what would happen if it was a chaotic mess.
We would expect to build and change this universe in some manner, even if it was just to increase the prevalence of pretty garden worlds like earth.
We have models that give us sufficient accuracy of prediction about what light means to detect a planet roughly the size of the earth TUGGING ON A STAR AS IT ORBITS.
We have sufficient understanding of optics and light that with enough processing time you can use ANY SURFACE as a mirror to extrapolate something that is not facing you.
Such as reading the number and suite of a playing card that is aimed at a wall or sheet of cloth.
Everything reflects light that informs us about where that light came from.
We know how to determine a surprisingly amazing amount about the universe.
Granted we have not looked at very much of the galaxy to that degree, but we have comparably deep understanding of energies and mass and how they operate.
Great big star enveloping clouds of energy collection devices are much easier to detect then planets twenty times the size of jupiter and we were managing to detect that in the late 90s.
We have if you were curious gotten much better at looking since then.
The universe is quiet, and apparently lacking in anything of significantly harnessed energy in any manner we can distinguish from the results of random chaos.
There is nothing that looks like the energies needed to move objects across the universe at speed in a directed manner at anything faster then what would make a trip across the galaxy take millions of years (and even then we would expect to have been visited and the local neighborhood altered in some notable way).
If Life and Intelligence millions of years old exists it is very quiet and very subtle.
If it was here in the ancient past it has either long since left, or it has gone so dormant/passive it no longer has any direct interaction with us.
If beings are traveling the universe they are doing so by means that must leave essentially no trace, which means very slow or completely circumventing what is known, which is a difficult thing because the things we know is constantly expanding and driving out the possibilities of where they could be hiding something to utilize.
Then there is also the simple matter that building civilizations from scratch in novel ways and filling every single system with that and a tailor fit ecosystem seems a lot more efficient then waiting a significant fraction of the universe's age while energy and usable materials of the finite trillion some years of the universe' usefulness is wasted seems a little dumb for ancient optimized intelligence to me.
If they are there and quiet there would need to be a really good reason to not be using the universe fully for whatever it is they care about.
all observations suggest the universe around us is unshaped by mind.
The answer as to why is likely to be profound and awe inspiring.
1305863 You assume a few things right off the bat...
1) That harvesting a star's energy is the best, cheapest, cleanest way to gather energy. What if it is not? A Zero-Point module, like in Stargate should give us far more energy in a much easier and cheaper way. That's assuming that the zero-point quantum energy theory is real. But the idea here is, we don't know much about that, we just started exploring the quantum world a few decades ago and frankly at this point, we all very unstable theory. What if we find a way to turn any matter into pure energy? At that point, draining a gas giant would be far easier and far less visible.
2) That a growing civilization is loud... Sure, why not. But beside the fact that we may not even listen to the right channel or even the right way, only us would assume that civilization didn't find a way to broadcast in a very targeted way their communication and that a multilateral broadcast is the only existing way. Again, we started doing so not so long ago. Could we decipher communication in a pica-hertz frequency? Quantum entanglement is a real thing and should give us communication over the speed of light boundaries. The idea here is, if a civilization broadcast in such a chaotic manner, like us, and it only last 100 years... 500 years at most and that most of our comm is such a mess that nobody beyond a specific range is able to understand a word of what we say, what is the chance that we would point our ear at the right star at the right time to catch that blink of radio-wave comm that may just be too much of a mess to understand?
3) That space travel requires big noisy ship... We know nothing of what is beyond light speed. We know quantum entanglement appear to break that rule, but we don't know how or how to use it. For all we know, traveling faster than light could be as easy as rowing on a flow of tachyon and consume almost no energy. Or if we ever find a way to reduce the relative mass in a specific sphere, we would need a engine the size of my hand to push an aircraft carrier sized ship. I don't think the solution to light-speed travel will be massive ship that occlude stars in their path. Could be stargates... Quantum teleportation or any other tech that has almost no visible footprint.
4) An aged civilization would colonize around like viruses. It's somewhat assuming that such civilization would never break the limit of their body, that they would continue to need food like we do. That they would feel the need to build huge cities on planets. That they would need to shape or change the shape of things. That they would need to continue to suck resources like we do. If tomorrow we discover a clean, cheap and non-invasive energy source, our footprint on our own environment is halved. If we find a way to mold matter to our wishes, our footprint on this world disappear completely.
If you ask a physicist, he will answer you that we only started to know how much we don't know, and it's frightening the amount we don't have a clue about. We have somewhat of an idea how matter look like on an atomic level, but no idea how it works. Any unified theory could drastically change how we see the atomic and subatomic level. Hell, at this point the quantum physic is half philosophy half physic with thing like "if you observe something, it behave differently".
To me, it would be very saddening if our understand of the universe was good or even great. It would mean there's almost nothing else to discover. It would mean that we are stuck in the way we are and there's nothing else to look for.
What I believe is, we just made our few first steps. We don't know where to look, or even how to look for the obvious. We can't predict what our technology would be in 20 years. We can't phantom what it would be in a 100. How could we even imagine what a million years space-faring civilization would even look like? Energy? Matter? Or something else we just have no idea yet? We were amazed by stealth jet a few decades ago. What would make you think we could detect stealth ships made in a million years from now?
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EDIT:
I love serious adult conversations, they entertain me to no end.
If it seems like things are getting a bit heated on your end please let me know though and I can stop, I'm doing this as a fun discourse between thinking folk, not to stir up angst and drama over something or other.
On One:
If energy can be acquired in a 'quiet' way as you describe then there is no reason for star travel at all.
No reason to leave any given point in space.
No reason to leave any given corner because its perfectly possible then to calculate everything at all that is possibly going to happen anywhere ever.
This would indeed answer the fermi paradox, space travel and expansion has no point. Seems a bit wasteful to just give up on the universe but its a possibility.
On Two:
It is more USING energy is loud, on the information broadcast thing human beings are actually about 50-100 years away from being indistinguishable from background noise due to data compression techniques.
If we were more unified this would already have happened.
I was saying that civilizations that do things tend to give off energy and signs that are noticeable and the more they do the more noticeable it is.
Civilization is loud, if an alien telescope 20-100 lightyears away with modern capabilities had the right angle on us they could tell what we have put in our atmospheres.
Earth is pretty obvious.
On Three:
If an energy source is exerting the power to move an aircraft carrier, then it is EXERTING the ENERGY to move an aircraft carrier, that energy leaks into the universe and changes things. To say another way, yes I move an aircraft carrier with something the size of my hand, but it is still going to leave a wake in the ocean of an aircraft carrier being moved at X speed.
What we don't see are signs of anything being moved at high speeds that looks anything like a vessel that can carry coherent information, let alone any hard ware.
And if they are moving things faster then light and it does not take some rather extreme quantities of energy to be utilized (and leave evidence in the universe) then the mechanism to do it also gives whoever has the means to travel faster then light the means to create what is described in point one, which nullifies any point in traveling.
No really, if you can twist the universe that way and mess with thermodynamics you no longer need to go anywhere ever again.
On Four:
If you have a means of performing Point One then Yes there is no reason to expand over the universe or have any foot print at all.
If you do not, the universe is finite, the total amount of anything you feel is important to preserve or create is dependent on how much energy you can wrangle and energy is at a limited quantity and distributed all over the universe.
It does not matter if I am running my happy people sim on a substrate of simulated stuff that can handle the equivalent of a trillion happy human beings in the mass of a sugar cube. If I am trying to maximize something I care about (like happy human beings) why should I stop at one sugar cube over a billion billion?
On Point Five which you did not number but I noticed you doing anyway:
Quantum mechanics is not a mystery box it is math, the math is well evaluated and predictively accurate to extremes that are mindbogglingly precise and outside of the conditions of most of the universe observed. It is in some ways closer to true then anything else ever conveyed by human beings at least in terms of predictive accuracy. It is the analogies that sound mysterious and weird because they are not human intuitive. There are gaps in the model, places it does not work, but these are not as prevalent and all encompassing as people think.
Yes a new unified theory would mean that we know something that is MORE true then quantum mechanics, but until then and even at that point quantum mechanics will be JUST as TRUE in all the situations it was shown to be such.
In the same way that nasa normally can do fine performing all of its orbital maneuver calculations using good old newton instead of all the complications brought on by relativity.
Quantum Mechanics will have held true for everything it has covered and will always be as true as we have determined it to be so far.
1306037 It's not "heated". I just enjoy arguing. I never get mad or angry by arguing.
1) Because star travel would only be about gathering energy or resources? That would be a pretty boring reason for traveling out there. Discovery of new knowledge sound far more entertaining in long term.
As for predicting everything, that's assuming it's possible to do quantum prediction. If such point is really reachable, then our own future will become annoyingly set in stone. Or the computer predicting that will blow a fuse with the "since I know the future, I'll do different" paradox.
But even if we manage to know all the science there is, there will still be reasons to travel and explore. Art, ideas or anything else another civilization could bring us. Ideas are infinite.
2) Loud for us, loud for inefficient machine. Earth is pretty obvious now. What will it be in a thousand years? Oil consumption has its limit. Hydroelectricity, solar energy or wind turbine are impossible to detect because they do not modify our atmosphere and only use energy already put in the thermal-system of our planet by our sun.
Earth is pretty obvious and I would not be surprised every civilization in a 100-200 LY radius knows we are here. We are noisy and we disrupt our environment big time.
But because we are noisy - now - doesn't mean it's the norm. We know so little, so how can we know we have the mean currently to detect noise of other civlization if they are using technology totally unknown to us? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
3) Yes. But do we have the means to detect wake in space light-years away? We have a hard time to detect solar masses because our only way to detect it is gravity-lensing. Unless you're moving a star around, I doubt we could detect any ship out there.
There's lot of talk about using gravity - space distortion - to move a ship around. If that actually work, the footprint of a ship moving very fast would be far less than a Saturn 5 taking off. Again, we just started traveling around, very slowly and very inefficiently. They started using ion engine only recently and in a decade they improved their efficiency by 12 times! What will it be in 100-200 years?
Also, faster than light travel would be notorious to be undetectable for us. If something is traveling that fast towards you, you will only see it after it reached you!
4) It goes back to the original blog post. If you know all what science has to offer, there is still one thing interesting to see; others grow and do the same as you. Why would a parent ever have children? What's interesting in them is watching them grow.
As for Quantum mechanic, while its math are all sounds, they are all theories that appear to match a good part of the current knowledge. Every years they have to change them because they discover some new sub-atomic particles or some unexpected properties. If they had those math all done, they could predict the properties and behavior or any atom, any ions, or any molecules. But they can't. When they create a new heavier atom - they are at 118 mass right now - they still need to check it out to see how it behave. 118 should be a noble gas, but it appears it's not. Again, no idea why. They think there's a island of stability as those atom are more stable than current quantum math predicted, but they don't know why. They still need to look at the matter to even know its color!
In other word, we know so little!
And another reason why space travel would still happen; vacation.
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1:
The only thing that prevents you from building a computer to predict the whole universe is that you'd need something bigger then the whole universe to predict it in energy and or matter (which amount to the same thing) And actually the computer could be used to predict its own inclusion as long as you give it even more energy/matter to make it more complex a simulation.
If you can break thermodynamics and get effectively infinite matter/energy you don't need to GO anywhere to explore every single possible arrangement of energy the universe could produce over any arbitrary volume of space to any arbitrary duration of time.
If you know all science you know all the things needed to create entirely new versions of life in any arrangement that could ever occur (or honestly quite a number of ways it cannot occur), which ultimately is a finite number of arrangements (a number of arrangements that is larger then the number of atoms expected to be in the universe, but still finite, and thus if you have access to infinite energies you can explore for much cheaper then building star ships).
2:
On the earth is obvious, earth sans intelligent life and radio/industrialization is still obvious within 100/200 light years.
Jupiter is MORE obvious of course but we have the means to detect an earth sans radiowaves at that distance now, we have not yet but the search is still ongoing and we have a lot of stars to cover.
3:
I'm talking about what happens to objects when they move at speed and what it would take to make one accelerate as such. They alter the universe/themselves in ways we can detect already.
If they use any form of energy to propel themselves (neutrino, photon, ions, plasma, atomic bombs, gasoline, pressurized beer, bending timespace into a warp drive) we have the physics know how to predict what it would look like if they are being used to move things at much more then interplanetary speeds.
We have not seen these yet.
ION drives are undetectable more or less because they are very low energy, so once an ion drive is able to accelerate you to useful speeds in reasonable time (I would not volunteer for a trip on an ion drive driven ship any time soon it takes years to get up to speed) they would be spilling energy that is detectable and rather distinct.
And with Gravity/Spacetime bending to move objects we are building gravity wave observatories to look for certain predicted interstellar phenomena, currently the fine tuning is still tricky and they need to have more observatories around the earth before they can usefully triangulate signals detected to exact locations/directions but we are building those already.
So depending on just exactly how they are bending space time yes we could detect that, and we can detect planetary masses effecting stellar masses. Its actually fairly straightforward math wise.
4: if you want to watch a civilization grow you can make one yourself for cheaper at home then going out and exploring, you can even make one that is 'surprising' and 'novel' if you have the processing speed and accurate enough models. This is ultimately the problem.
The main reason to not do it this way is if it is cheaper to go out and explore then to run the sims at home to that degree of fidelity.
If traveling around is very very cheap however FINDING new life out in the 'real world' might still be more time consuming them feeding energy sources with your cheap travel mechanism to power a simulation device that can be used to show you what you'd like to have/find.
If the universe can be traveled quickly, easily and cheaply it makes it much more likely to find entities and evidence of them.
The harder/more difficult it is the less likely aliens would be to find and potentially evidence of them but also the less reason there is for them to travel in the first place.
5: We are finding new particles arrangements then we expected, but this is not always necessarily even in conflict with the standard model, it can sometimes be as simple as "oh never thought to run that math like that, ah yeah it is there after all" but that is a lot of math.
Also these are not being found under 'normal' conditions that exist in most of the universe.
We are finding new particle arrangements then expected under conditions of such intense energy in such incredibly small regions of space that they are in those pinpricks more energy dense then the core of the sun...
I'd have to check my numbers before I attest to hyperbole beyond that but I suspect its actually under conditions of high energy greater then comparable volume in MOST stellar cores if not all of them.
These are things that are at the fringes and little crannies of what has been observed of the universe.
There is much we don't currently know, but they are at very vast scales or very tiny ones...
Dark Energy and Dark Matter are still currently only detected to do anything at scales of galaxies or more.
Unless your going to propose aliens on the scale of galaxies (not out of the question but still) it still puts limits on what the fermi paradox allows for aliens to be doing or being.
Pretty much Until we see evidence of something to break the great silence of the paradox the realm of 'here there be dragons' that science gives us is continuing to shrink and there is not much room left on the map of the universe for anything anyone has conceived of regarding aliens.
And the more we learn about the universe the more troubling the great silence is...
Beyond all of this though we still need to determine how likely biogenesis is, until then we don't quite know enough to make a solid prediction on the matter.
But if it turns out life is common (especially complex intelligent life) then I'd start looking to the sky with much more worry.
That's a very intriguing and thought-provoking post.
2476276 Happy you enjoyed it.