The strong rise of new technology means that humanity has to face the danger of its own extinction. For example, the invention of nuclear weapons has shown how quickly mankind’s destructive power can develop. Atomic bombs are a thousand times more powerful than conventional explosives; many hydrogen bombs are thousands of times more powerful. Within decades, more than ten thousand nuclear bombs were created between the United States and the Soviet Union. The next generation of weapons of mass destruction, such as engineered viral biological weapons, could dramatically increase humanity’s destructive power once again – to the point of a war. Total force can threaten the entire life of a person.
If Homo sapiens extinct, what does that mean from a cosmological point of view? Would some other species evolve to be technologically capable and to explore science, create art, and build civilization in our place? In the end, I don’t think that’s guaranteed. The end of the Homo sapiens so there won’t be just an unimaginable loss from ours near and far law; It will fundamentally change the story of the universe.
It took 200 million years for humans to evolve from the first mammals. The last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees lived only 8 million years ago, and there are still hundreds of millions of years to go (at least) until the increasing luminosity of the sun makes the earth uninhabitable. for animals the size of humans. With this, you might think, if Homo sapienss went extinct and chimpanzees survived, a technologically capable species that would have been able to evolve from chimpanzees, like Planet of the Apes, in 8 million years or less. Likewise, as long as some species of mammal survive, even if all primates become extinct, we should not expect a technologically capable species to evolve within about 200 years. million years? This is a long time, but it is still short enough for such evolution to occur before the earth becomes uninhabitable.
This argument is too quick. We don’t know how unlikely major evolutionary transitions are, and some of them — including, likely, the evolution of a technologically capable species — are actually very unlikely. out.
This inference is based on the Fermi paradox: the paradox that, although there are at least hundreds of millions of rocky habitable planets in the galaxy, and even though our galaxy is 13.5 billion years old, – long enough for an interstellar civilization to be widespread on it – we see no evidence of extraterrestrial life. If the galaxy is so big and old, why isn’t it full of aliens?
One answer is that something about our evolutionary history is particularly unlikely. Perhaps habitable planets are in fact extremely rare (perhaps needing to be in a safe zone within the galaxy, with plate tectonics, large moons, and the right chemical composition), or certain steps on the way to the formation of the earth 4.5 billion years ago before the evolution of Homo sapiens particularly unpopular. Potentially possible steps include the creation of the first replicators from inorganic matter, the evolution of simple cells into complex cells with nuclei and mitochondria (known as ” eukaryotes”), the evolution of sexual reproduction and possibly even the evolution of a species, as Homo sapiensdistinguished from other primates by unusual intelligence, hypercooperation, cultural development, and the ability to speak and language. Recent research by my colleagues at the Institute for the Future of Humanity suggest that once we properly account for our uncertainty about how unlikely these evolutionary transitions are, the the empty universe is not surprising, even though it is vast.
