https://www.labxchange.org/library/items/lb:HarvardX:68789c56:lx_simulation:1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKWkbWUn71s
What new question does the reading and interviews raise for you about the ways in which the discovery of extraterrestrial life could affect human economies, religions, and science? What makes this question difficult to answer?
These readings and interviews raised a somewhat sinister question for me: should we trust scientists to be the ones to properly consider "the ways in which the discovery of extraterrestrial life could affect human economies, religions, and science," as the prompt for this question raises? This question seems difficult to answer, because the very qualities that make someone an effective scientific mind — skeptical humility, modesty, single-minded devotion to their vocation — also leave them open to a kind of anti-humanistic suspension of judgement, easily tipping over into nihilism. Avi Loeb exemplified this tendency in his interview with professor Goodman. He rehashed the idea of technological replacement: "It's quite likely that biological creatures like ourselves will be replaced by things that are much more durable like robots with artificial intelligence, 3D printers." His interlocutor, professor Goodman, asked whether this prospect bothered him. His answer simultaneously evinced the noble selflessness, and the monstrous anti-humanism of the scientific worldview: "Not at all, I'm not attached to myself whatsoever. In fact, I would be happy to go into a black hole to learn what's inside. I don't care about myself so much. I would be happy to board a spacecraft led by aliens even though I would not come back." He brought up the comparison of human insignificance and cosmic magnitude that traces back to Lucretius' De Natura Rerum: the universe "gives you some perspective, gives you modesty. You are not so important in the grand scheme of things."
Perhaps this mindset is necessary to become a scientist. Yet I find it concerning that a group with disproportionate influence over the future of the human race, seems so apathetic about the fate of humanity, on principle. Kelsey Johnson puts it well in her book, specifically addressing the possibility of creating artificial life: "There is, however, a big fat chasm between the 'can we' and 'should we' questions. It is easy to get caught up in how cool it would be to see living cells form out of basic materials and everything that might teach us about our origins. I would argue that we should consider taking a step back from time to time and genuinely question whether we should" (ebook, 89-91). I hope scientists take her ethical injunction seriously. In her interview with professor Goodman, Jill Tarter dismissed these domains of life as primitive and polluted by irrational myth. Describing her experience reading the "Cyclops Report" on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence at the beginning of her career, she said, "After thousands of years of asking the priest and the philosophers what we should believe, there were suddenly some tools, computers and radio telescopes, that could allow scientist to try and figure out what is, rather than what somebody told us to believe." But contrary to her framing, scientists also have to make the kind of moral and even religious value judgements she consigns to the barbarous past of "the priest and the philosophers," when they decide whether or not certain experiments are worth conducting in the first place.