A Message for a New Year

… here is a “Brin-Classic”   that I’ve updated as my wish for all of you as we embark upon a new era…

I hope to start 2014* with an upbeat tone -- something bright and hopeful. For, indeed, I am a hopeful kind of guy. I believe in our future. I have to. I have kids.

Moreover, I deeply believe that true hope is engendered not by absolute faith in narrow dogmas, but by curiosity, hard work and devotion to self-improvement – and love, of course -- traits that are built-in to human nature.

Whether you think they became part of us via evolution or a grand design, doesn’t really matter, at one level. The sermon taught by our long and fitful upward slog, from either Eden or the Caves, consists of generation after generation gradually coming to perceive and appreciate the dauntingly awesome complexity of this titanically vast Universe.

A complexity that we had better embrace, in all its ironies and contradictions. For no narrow doctrine can encompass it. Nor can any single mind grasp it. (Imagine the arrogance of those who claim that a few words, scrawled on ancient scraps of paper are the culmination of all discovery and revelation! Those words may be precious and offer some valid lessons. But to say “that’s all we need to know!” when obviously it’s a drop in the great sea....)

What seems to be possible is that together we can grope at the complexity -- like those blind men and the elephant -- reporting our findings to each other, criticizing and praising and comparing notes, combining insights from faith, reason and science -- fearlessly throwing out whatever superstitions or failed hypotheses have failed to sustain. Continuing to build on the best old and new notions, testing and demolishing and rebuilding, so as to make even better our next shiny models of the world.

This process frustrates and terrifies millions of our neighbors, who need definitions that are prim and authoritarian, from Platonist philosophers to retro-dogmatists of all stripes. Those who need a sense of prescribed-order range from Marxists to PC-postmodernists, to social darwinists… from market mystics to Randians, to fundamentalists. To all of these prescription junkies, the Enlightenment Worldview seems vague, too fluid, scattered, even immoral.

But the ultimate sermon of our era is that this method works, far better than those of the past, when pyramidal hierarchies of sword-bearing aristocrats and domineering clergy told everyone how to behave. How to think.

This new way is the only approach that has ever helped large numbers of people to thrive and do mostly good things, mostly of their own free will, despite our human propensity for rationalization and self-delusion.

This project is disdained by some as “humanism”... a new form of idolatry that raises and deifies Homo sapiens, aiming to topple God from his proper place as our loving guide. And there are a few caricature-types who go that route, never admitting that they are like their adversaries in many ways... that frenetic atheists are -- emotionally -- creepily similar to their hyper-religious foes.

== Narrowing it down to two versions of God ==

No, it is possible to include God in fascinating discussions that admit the fundamental fact surrounding us. (I call it the Big Sermon.) The blatant ambiguity surrounding matters of faith. The fact that prayers, if answered, are answered within. Likewise “miracles.” Hence no one can ever truly and decisively prove or verify a darned thing.

Indeed, the lesson must be that a benign Creator -- if one exists -- clearly chose ambiguity and distance for some reason. Not as a cruel and infantile “test of faith,” but as a very clear sermon that we are supposed to stand up and look around, and figure things out for ourselves.

I will get to some of this later, in the “Twelve Questions” essay that I have promised you since the 20^th Century. But for now, I invite you to picture two versions of a beneficent Creator. One who cares about us and what we do.

--- Version one ferociously punishes anyone who dares to lift a head and question. This one damns to cruel torment anyone who fails to recite exactly the right set of incantations, in exactly the right way, with exactly the right mental attitudes. The jealous craftsman of a narrow cosmos, just a few thousand years old and a few million miles extant, He rants and denounces and bitterly resents any questioning, offering us only two possible outcomes -- either perpetual thoughtless torment or endless thoughtless bliss. The choice is supposedly up to each of us...

....and yet, He never steps right out -- unambiguously booming from the sky (Monty Python fashion) -- to make the two doorways clear!

No, in order to pick a path between two discrete and simplistically diametric conditions -- heaven vs. hell -- you must successfully choose one specific set of written incantations to recite, with utter and unquestioning faith, from among all of the other prescriptive incantations that are offered, out there. Choose the wrong one -- even with utter sincerity, because that’s the one taught to you by loving parents -- and you roast.

What a guy.

Only there is another version.

-- A craftsman of mind-boggling subtlety, who formulated Maxwell’s Equations and all the other staggeringly beautiful innovations of math and geometrodynamics and quantum subtlety that translate into “let there be light!” Whose vast universe spans billions of years and may encompass a plenitude of living worlds.

One who clearly left the workroom door unlocked and all His blueprints on the table, for bright, upstart apprentices to decipher, exercising their curiosity and impudent minds, the way the brightest and best young apprentices always have.

One who clearly has intent that we should figure it all out.

One who may even have in mind work for us to do. As co-creators.  As science has already clearly empowered us to do.

Okay, I’d still have a bone or two to pick with that fellow.  But at least He’d be impressive…

…and of course, there is the third possibility.  That we create Him. (Or Her.. It-ALL or I-am-what-I-am.) I’m not dogmatic about it, but that certainly seems the most likely case. With the point being that open, contingent minds can and should approach all this in a sense of exploration.  Even fun.

Because that's the hand we were dealt.

== Back to our mission ==

That was a bit of an aside. But it all comes back to the basic issue that’s at stake.  No matter whether we are in this alone, in a daunting-challenging cosmos, or not.

We have to keep believing in our ability to do well.

To learn new things... to re-evaluate our dearest assumptions... and listen to things that other people have learned.

To improve ourselves, our children, and our world.  To prove ourselves before the universe… to the only evaluating eyes that truly matter.

Our descendants.

Eschatology & Cosmic Evolution - (bet you can't make THIS political!)

The poilitcal lamp is definitely OUT for this one!

Some physicists have argued that the universe is doomed to be ripped apart by runaway dark energy, while others think it is bouncing through an endless series of big bangs and big crunches. Now these two ideas are being combined to create another option, in which our universe ultimately shatters into billions of pieces, with each shard growing into a whole new universe. The model could solve the mystery of why our early universe was surprisingly well ordered. 

(Um... did any of you read Heaven’s Reach? Does any of this sound familiar? )

In the new model, dark energy becomes very dense and sets the universe expanding at such a rate that it approaches the big rip. The universe tears into small patches that rush away from each other faster than the speed of light. But the destruction is then halted, as the density of dark energy becomes equal to the density of the universe. At this point, each patch crunches in on itself. "All the patches, of which there are a huge number, will separately contract into disparate universes," says Frampton. Each patch will then bounce outwards again, creating a new universe. This has got to be the third or fourth or eighth variation on universal reproduction and/or birth that I have seen from astrophysicists in the last decade or so, an era of profound imagination and speculation! It is starting to look pretty wild out there, in the wonderful realm of eschatology. So, let’s try to put it all in a bit of perspective.

Everyone who is not still in Kindergarten -- either literally or theologically -- knows that overwhelming evidence has proved that a Big Bang started it all - everything we see - about thirteen billion years ago. Some of our neo-cosmologies do poke about earlier, speculating about vast realms of “context” within which the Big Bang took place. See my novella “What Continues and What Fails...”

Where there is even more confusion is about the future. All right, so there was a bang. Where is it all heading?

Take the Big Bounce... under which notion the universal expansion slows down due to gravity, decelerates and stops, then reverses into a Crunch... that thereupon rebounds outward in a fresh Big Bang! This concept was in the 60s brilliantly dramatized by Poul Anderson’s epochal novel TAU ZERO. (Get it, read it!)

The Crunch view was later pursued with fantastic quasi-theological passion by Frank Tipler is his amazing THE PHYSICS OF IMMORTALITY: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead, in which he brought forward probably the most flamboyant and unabashed eschatology of all time... that the infrared radiation emitted by your own body, whenever you step outside, will someday all be collected by godlike descendants during the LAST WEEK of the universe and used to learn all about you! (And every other ancestor.) In order to resurrect you in effective (if totally subjective) immortality during the last few (objective) days of the cosmos, when computer-simulation power will supposedly be utterly limitless. Yipes!

Tipler thus vied with Freeman Dyson for the encomium of “greatest theologian of the 20th Century”... an honor that Freeman appeared to have won, when it was shown that HIS eschatology is probably more relevant, because our metagalaxy’s expansion appears to be accelerating rather than slowing, implying the existence of more than sufficient Dark Energy to keep the expansion going forever. Dyson’s quasi-theology describes how life might cope with and eventually resign itself to the final dissipation into absolute-zero nothingness. The big chill.

Only, meanwhile, Stephen Hawking and others had fixated on black holes, those marvelous, one way tunnels that may... possibly... emerge in a completely new cosmic “context” -- possibly even triggering new episodes of creation and universal inflation. And, if so, according to Lee Smolin, there may be vast cycles of “evolution” as mother universes use black holes as the eggs to parent new daughter universes whose genetic code it, in effect, the detailed set of physical parameters and laws and “gosh numbers” that get passed down the line, mutating slightly and experiencing “selection” in favor of maximum reproductive success, in probably the most mind-boggling concept of our age.

Meanwhile, OTHERS have been speculating that all of this is way, way premature. I was shocked, shocked, to learn recently that the SHAPE of the cosmos is still considered debatable, despite signs of endless expansion, and that some astronomers have re-discovered and legitimized the old notion that the “actual universe” is flat and infinite! In other words, the “Universe:” that we see may have come from a bang 13 billion years ago. but that happened in one small patch of a vastly wider expanse of already-existing spacetime that could contain vast numbers of such firecracker creations at the same time, outside of our light-cone of perception.

In other words, some are now saying that the Big Bang was really an explosion!”

An actual, honest-to-God explosion, taking place INSIDE a much vaster context, a truly immense “macro-universe” that is made of real distance, and boggling amounts of real space. Really? But... but... but didn’t you cosmologists yatter at us for generations about how naive that view was? How the bang was a sudden and impressive expansion of “metric” but did not explode “into” anything because it contained everything, period?

This new/old/rediscovered notion, which actually is easier to envision than the standard model of the last 50 years (a Big Bang that consists of expansion without any pre-existing setting to expand into) now seems completely boggling, simply because I thought all the big-domes had already declared it completely excluded. With many a snort of disdain.

Only now guys are talking seriously about a “meta” universe in flat space that is as much bigger than our measly teeny 13 billion light year “universe” as than universe is bigger than the solar system!

Confused yet?

Okay, NOW go back to the top and re-read the news article. That dark energy might drive accelerating expansion until it the metagalaxy breaks apart, then dark energy diffusion allows many long-delayed collapses, which trigger new black holes... new “bounce” creations...

Um, is this in the context-free standard Big Bang? The dimensionally separated “new universe” variation of the standard model preached by Hawking and Smolin? Or in the new/old/restored notion of a vast-flat mega context cosmos? I guess this dissipate-breakup-collapse-bounce idea could happen in any of the three!

Oh, wow, the Big Guy is really laughing now, I betcha. Smartass modernist humans.

Still, we are apprentices. Sniffing. Trying. Gotta make Him proud.

(See also: Is Theology Compatible with Science...Sci Fi and Progress?)

Universe by Design? Accident? Or Simulation?

Did our universe come about by design? By accident? Or are we living in a simulation?

Leonard Susskind's new book, The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design pits Intelligent Design against string theory and the megaverse. Susskind, one of the developers of string theory, takes on the 'Anthropic Principle' -- that the universe seems to be perfectly tailored to us: If it wasn't we wouldn't be here to observe it.

Surprisingly, Autodesk founder John Walker, in his review, sides with intelligent design, but not by a deity -- rather by post-Singularity intelligences creating a reality simulation: "What would we expect to see if we inhabited a simulation?"

Yes, I have discussed this in fact & fiction, many times. But the “symptoms” delineated by Susskind are definitely the kind plumbed by theoretical physicists who have a more extensive union card than I do!

To see this scenario played out in one of my short stories, go to: Stones of Significance  or my story, Reality Check.

From Walker’s posting: . “What would we expect to see if we inhabited a simulation? Well, there would probably be a discrete time step and granularity in position fixed by the time and position resolution of the simulation—check, and check: the Planck time and distance appear to behave this way in our universe.

. . “There would probably be an absolute speed limit to constrain the extent we could directly explore and impose a locality constraint on propagating updates throughout the simulation—check: speed of light.

. . “There would be a limit on the extent of the universe we could observe—check: the Hubble radius is an absolute horizon we cannot penetrate, and the last scattering surface of the cosmic background radiation limits electromagnetic observation to a still smaller radius. There would be a limit on the accuracy of physical measurements due to the finite precision of the computation in the simulation—check: Heisenberg uncertainty principle—and, as in games, randomness would be used as a fudge when precision limits were hit—check: quantum mechanics.

. . “Might we expect surprises as we subject our simulated universe to ever more precise scrutiny, perhaps even astonishing the being which programmed it with our cunning and deviousness (as the author of any software package has experienced at the hands of real world users)? Who knows, we might run into round-off errors which “hit us like a ton of bricks”!"

See these topics explored in my essay: Could Our Universe Be a Fake?

---More cool Items...

* Looking toward a bold future: Scientists are now talking about people staying young and not aging. Ray Kurzweil is taking it a step further: "In addition to radical life extension, we’ll also have radical life expansion. The nanobots will be able to go inside the brain and extend our mental functioning by interacting with our biological neurons."

* A computer controlled by the power of thought alone has been demonstrated at a major trade fair in Germany. The device could provide a way for paralysed patients to operate computers, or for amputees to operate electronically controlled artificial limbs. But it also has non-medical applications, such as in the computer games and entertainment industries.

* Google Inc. apparently hopes to persuade everyone with a computer to entrust all their digital data with the online search engine leader, even though the company is having trouble controlling its own internal communications. Plans for a Google service offering "infinite" storage capacity leaked out last week when the company inadvertently shared some information about several projects, including one named "GDrive," on its Web site.

. . Ironically, this endeavor depends upon Google’s “don’t be evil” sense of trust, engendered at great cost over the years... and now threatened by public perception of a “cave-in” to the Government of China, on the issue of censorship. One of the hot topics we should all watch and discuss. 

* Human genes involved in metabolism, skin pigmentation, brain function and reproduction have evolved recently in response to recent environmental changes, according to a new study of natural selection in the human genome. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8812&print=true

* Here’s an item that could go in political OR non-political categories: ”Search engine newcomer Kosmix, which lets users look in specific topic areas, recently introduced its politics engine. For any search term, Kosmix organizes results into conservative, liberal or libertarian categories, allowing seekers to explore results associated with a certain political persuasion. Though still in its alpha version, the politics engine is fairly adept at teasing out ideological orientations on the web.”

. . Now, at first sight this looks very much like another predictive hit for EARTH, tools empowering people to filter the world so that the Net will only bring them information that reinforces their pre-conceptions. Great, all we need is more slavish devotion to the crippling left-right metaphor that has taken a sophisticated, 21st Century civilization down the path of 18th Century culture war. Is this the intention? Or is it possible the designers of this system might try to “not be evil” by incorporating methods that provoke re-appraisal of simplistic litmus-nostrums?

. . One way to save this idea might be to encourage users to take questionnaires like the one I have long posted at: http://www.davidbrin.com/questionnaire.html But I don’t have the time/energy to contact these guys.

* In the category of yet another predictive hit for EARTH,, crotchety fools are using high tech to harass kids: ”A high pitched "dog whistle" device is to be used by police in north Staffordshire to stop groups of nuisance youths hanging around shops. The Mosquito sends out a pulsing 80-decibel frequency noise which can usually only be heard by teenagers and those in their early 20s. The device is fitted outside the shop and can be turned on by shopkeepers to move youths on.”

For the first time, scientists have confirmed Earth is melting at both ends, which could have disastrous effects for coastal cities and villages.

and coolest yet....

Scientists have discovered a mutant chicken with a full set of crocodile-like chompers.


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