Reasons for Hope - Achieving a Brighter Future: Is Science a Hope or a Threat?

tonight's lecture is in the framework as you know of reasons for hope our ongoing series one of the chief possible reasons for hope in the modern world for four centuries has been science one of Martin Reese's predecessors as astronomer or royal one of his most distinguished predecessors obviously Sir Isaac Newton was formative in the creation of this idea that human reason applied to nature could provide us all with hopes for a better just more just and safer world and so science has been at the center of the whole project of Western hope but there is some deep sense in which the promise of science is in question I think as never before biotechnology cybertek AI awaken as much fear as hope it may be the case that science has always awakened some degree of fear nuclear weapons for example when they emerged in 1945 affected the whole way in which science was seen not merely as a sign of hope but also as a sign of alarm and danger and now I think added to that is the fact that scientific progress is putting enormous ongoing daily pressure or the technological consequences of scientific innovation are putting enormous pressure on the biosphere on our environment on our natural home so we have a deep ambivalence in the way we think about science it is on simultaneously a source of enormous hope its technological promise its promise in medicine and its promise in other areas gives us hope but it's also one of the ways in which we in which dystopian images of the future are taking shape and so who better to think about this with us men one of the greatest scientists alive and practicing today Martin Rees is an astrophysicist I told you already he's the astronomer royal which is a very grand title I've not told you just how grand all this titles are because he's not only Sir Martin he's also Baron Reis of Ludlow he's the former president of probably the greatest scientific society in the world the Royal Society he's a spokesman not only for Astro physics but also for science policy and is the author of a book that had a big effect on me which I commend to you it's published by Princeton University Press in 2018 it's called on the future and it puts in 200 pages pretty well the entire debate that we're having about whether science is a hope or a threat it's an enormous pleasure to have Sir Martin here he joked with me that we had planned this lecture for some time he sits in the House of Lords and has an active political role and this today unfortunately is the very day when the House of Lords has to consider one of the most important political issues they have to consider the legislation passed in incomplete reading in the House of Commons yesterday but Sir Martin Rees is the kind of person who when he makes the promise promise keeps it even if he has an absolutely gold-plated excuse to beg off namely that political duties called him kept him home so we're extremely grateful that Martin Rees is here to lecture his title is achieving a brighter future is science a hope or a threat let's give a very warm welcome to Sir Martin Rees [Applause] well good evening ladies and gentlemen it's a great pleasure and privilege to be here at this university and also to be welcomed by Michael who I've known since we were both young in Cambridge very long time ago and I've admired enormous Lee his career ever since it's great to be here with so many friends he mentioned that I was astronomer royal it's an odd title but I'm sometimes asked does that mean you do the Queen's horoscopes and I say well if she wanted one I'm the man she'd ask and people sometimes take me seriously and take seriously my predictions but then I come clean and I say I'm only a scientist and then they quite rightly lose all interest in my predictions because scientists are pretty rotten as forecasters although I have to say not quite as bad as economists and as Michael mentioned I have recently written a book called on the future which addresses hopes and fears for the coming decades and I offer I would say some scientific optimism coupled with some political pessimism and I speak here with diffidence which I know there are some experts here who know far more about the topics than then I have myself but I'll do my best the theme of my book is that this century is special the Earth's been around for 45 million centuries but this is the first when the main threats come not from nature but from one species ours and we could irreversibly degrade the biosphere the century or we could trigger a transition from biological to electronic intelligences or misdirected technology could cause a catastrophic setback so the stakes are very high essentially because we are so numerous so empowered by technology well we've had one lucky escape already which Michael mentioned which is that at any time in the Cold War era when armament levels escalated beyond all reason the superpowers could have stumbled towards Armageddon through muddled or miscalculation and that threat is really just in abeyance now nuclear weapons are based on 20th century science and our focus later in my talk on 21st century sciences bio cyber robotics and space which all offer huge potential benefits but they expose us to worrying novel vulnerabilities but before that let's focus on long-term threats that stem not from conscious decisions but from humanity's ever heavy a collective footprint because even with a cloudy crystal ball there are some things we can predict a few decades ahead for instance by mid century the world would be more crowded 50 years ago the world population was about three and a half billion it's now about a seven point six billion and this picture here shows in distorted form where the growth has been in the last 25 years East Asia and Africa in fact the number of births per year worldwide peaked a few years ago and is going down but nonetheless the population is destined to rise to 9 billion by the middle of the century and that's partly because most people in the developing world are young here's a contrast between the histograms the age distributions in West Africa lost a lot of young not very many old to Western Europe on average and even if the birthrate is stabilized at two per women then of course the people in Africa are going to live much longer and they will have their children and so even if the birthrate worldwide stabilizes the population is destined to grow to about nine billion and as I mentioned the main growth is in East Asia and it's there that the world's human and financial resources will become concentrated it's the end of four centuries of North Atlantic hegemony and it's more urbanization to prevent mega cities becoming turbulent dystopias will surely be a major challenge to governance population trends seem rather under discussed perhaps because doom-laden forecast by for instance a Club of Rome proved off the mark also some deem it to be a taboo subject tainted by association with eugenics in the 20s and 30s with Indian policies under Indira Gandhi and more recently with China's hardline one-child policy but as it turned out food production and resource extraction have kept pace with rising population famine still occur but they're due to conflict or male distribution not overall scarcity beyond 2050 it's not so clear what the population is going to do but to feed 9 billion will in itself require improved agriculture no-till water conserving and perhaps GM crops everyone can't eat as much beef as present-day Americans and use as much energy as they do and maybe dietary innovations are needed converting insects for instance highly nutritious and rich in proteins into palatable food and making artificial meat those are very bad iron technologies and to quote Gandhi there will be enough for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed as I said the population trends beyond 2050 are hard to predict with enhanced education and empowerment of women could reduce fertility rates when their highest and demographic transition hasn't yet reached parts of India and sub-saharan Africa and also urbanization tends to reduce fertility but cell UN projections suggest that if Africa continues to prefer large families then that continent population could double again between 2050 and 2100 to 4 billion thereby raising global population to 11 billion and Nigeria alone would then have as big a population as Europe and North America combined Africa's population be then 10 times Western Europe's well that's one scenario of course some people say population may decline after 2050 optimist say that each extra Mouse brings two hands and a brain but it's a geography or political stresses which are most worrying sub-saharan Africa is now poor and it can't escape poverty as the so called Asian Tigers did by undercutting Western manufacturing costs which robots can now do manufacturing and we have reshoring in rich countries another point is that although in Africa they don't have sanitation they do have smartphones they know what they're missing they know the injustice is an effect and migration is easy this is surely a recipe for instability multiple mega versions of the tragic boat people crossing the Mediterranean today so wealthy nations especially in Europe should surely urgently promote growing prosperity in Africa and not just for altruistic reasons and another thing if humanity's collective impact on land use and climate pushes too hard the resultant ecological shock could irreversibly impoverish our biosphere extinction rates are rising we're destroying the book of life before we've read it already there's more biomass in chickens and turkeys than all the world's wild birds and biomass in humans cows and domestic animals is 20 times that in wild mammals biodiversity is crucial to human wellbeing we're clearly harmed if fish stocks trendle to extinction there were plants in the rainforest whose gene pool might be useful to us but for many environmentalists preserving the richness of our biosphere has value in its own right over and above what it means to us humans to quote the great Harvard ecologist ear Wilson mass extinction is the sin that future generations will least forgive us for so the world's getting more crowded and the second firm prediction it will gradually get warmer in contrast to population issues climate change is certainly not under discussed though it is under responded to the key datum is here the famous Keeling curve which shows the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of last 50 years rising the oscillations every year because the more trees in a northern hemisphere in the southern hemisphere so when the leaves fall off those trees that gives a boost to co2 which are taken up in the next spring but the important point is that the rise is bringing the co2 concentration higher that's been for the last million years and very rapid change and the fifth of the famous IPCC reports presented a spread of projections for what the temperature would be four different assumptions about future rates of fossil fuel use it's still unclear how much the climatic effect of co2 amplified by Associated changes in water vapor cloud cover etc that's what's called the climate sensitivity and that means for any model doesn't in there's a range of uncertainty those bars on the right which is uncertainty in the science however despite the uncertainties there's one important message that everyone will agree on which is that under business-as-usual scenarios we can't rule out late in the century really catastrophic warning and tipping points triggering long-term trends like the melting of Greenland's ice but even those who accept that have diverse views on the policy response and these divergences are not just because some are deniers of the science and I was aren't it's because they differ in their views on the economics and ethics in particular in how much obligation we should feel towards future generations the danish campaigner born Lumbergh he has bogeyman status among environmentalists unfair as he doesn't deny the science but he runs something called the Copenhagen consensus of economists and they downplay the priority of addressing climate change compared with shorter term efforts to help the world's poor but that's because he applies a standard discount rate five percent per year and in effect therefore writes off what happens beyond 2050 but if you care about those who will live into the 22nd century then as other economists like Martin vitamin and Nick Stern would argue you deem it worth paying an insurance premium now to protect those generations against the worst-case scenarios so even those who agree that there's a significant risk of climate catastrophe a century hence will differ in how urgently they advocate action today their assess book will depend on expectations of future growth and optimism about technological fixes but above all it depends on an ethical issue in optimizing people's life chances should we discriminate on grounds of date of birth as a parentheses I'd note there's one policy context where an essentially zero discount rate is applied and that's to radioactive waste disposal when the depositories are required to prevent leakage for 10,000 or more years which is somewhat ironic when we can't plan the rest of energy policy even 30 years ahead what will actually happen on the climate policy front the pledge is made at the Paris conference in 2015 or a positive step but politicians won't gain much resonance by advocating and welcome lifestyle changes now or a high carbon tax when the benefits accrue mainly to distant parts of the world and decades in the future to quote mr. young called Younker in a different context he famously said we know what to do but we don't know how to get reelected if we do it and that's the situation for the better politicians with regarding to climate change but there is one win/win roadmap to a low-carbon future and this is it it's the nation should accelerate research and development in all forms of low-carbon energy generation and into other technologies where parallel processes crucial especially storage of energy batteries compressed air pumped storage flywheels etc and smart grids that's because the faster these clean technologies advance the sooner will air prices fall so they become affordable too for instance India where more generating capacity is needed and where the health of the poor is currently jeopardized by smoky stoves burning wood or dull this otherwise pressure to build coal-fired power stations but if they could afford it they would jump directly to clean energy just like some countries have jumped directly to mobile phones and never had landlines well Sun and wind or of course the frontrunners but other methods have geographical niches geothermal power tidal energy and things like that and because of local intermittency we do need energy storage and also we need continental scale DC grids we'd like to carry solar energy from Morocco and Spain to the less sunny northern part of Europe and east-west to smooth over peak demand over different time zones maybe this should be part of China's belt and roads initiative going all the way from Europe right across to China and although I know it's controversial I think that it's worthwhile to boost R&D into a variety of fourth generation nuclear because these could prove through more flexible in size and safer than existing nuclear power stations which are based on nineteen sixties designs and the potential payoff from fusion is so great it's worth continuing prototypes of that indeed I think would be hard to think of a more inspiring challenge for young scientists and engineers than devising clean and economical energy systems for the world identified any engineers here but I am afraid I've often used the word science when I should have included technology and engineering and indeed my engineering friends like a cartoon which shows two beavers looking up at a big hydroelectric dam one beaver says to the other I didn't actually build it but it's based on my idea and armchair theories like me should be very modest compared to those who actually build things that work and meet public demand they're the ones who meets the biggest challenge just as a parentheses which I'm going to bypass there is discussion about so-called plan B which is when we have to accept that co2 is rising and we try to do something about it by putting stuff in the upper atmosphere to stop sunlight reaching or extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to undo the geoengineering we've done unwittingly by burning fossil fuels I mentioned this because these are other controversial topics which people might take seriously if it's clear that climate change is running out of control but let's hope we never need to use them well so much for climate change where we need as I said new technologies and did he beat evangelists for new technology not Luddites without these technologies the world can't provide food and sustainable energy for an expanding and more domani population but we need wisely directed technology indeed many of us are anxious that it's advancing so fast that we may not properly cope with it and we'll have a bumpy ride through this century and my book expands on these concerns where ever more dependent on elaborate networks electric power grids air traffic control international finance just-in-time delivery etc unless these globalized networks are highly resilient their manifest benefits could be outweighed by catastrophic occasional breakdowns real-world analogs of what happened in twenty thousand and eight to the financial system our cities will be paralyzed whereas electricity supermarkets shelves there within a few days if supply chains were disrupted and air travel can spend a pandemic worldwide within days and social media can spread panic and rumor and psychic and economic contagion literally at the speed of light advances in microbiology Diagnostics vaccines and antibiotics of a prospect for containing pandemics but this same research has controversial aspects have you just mentioned two examples in 2012 two research groups one in Wisconsin one in Holland showed it was surprisingly easy to make the flu virus both more virulent and more transmissible to some this was a scary portent of things to come and they did in 2014 the US government decided to banned funding these so-called gain-of-function experiments and the new Chris Burke asinine technique for gene editing is hugely promising but there are ethical concerns about for instance the recent Chinese experiments on human embryos and also there are worries about possible runaway consequences what's called gene drive where you make a speaker species extinct it's fine if you do this to the mosquito that carries say the Zika virus but people talk about wiping out the grey squirrel to give a clear run to the brown squirrel we really want to do that I don't know and the worry is that these changes in ecologist could run out of control well I think it's clear that biotech is going to need regulation the gain-of-function experiments are clearly potentially dangerous regulation is needed but I worry that whatever red LEDs are imposed on potential grounds or ethical grounds they can't be enforced effectively worldwide any more than the drug laws can or the tax laws I worried that whatever can be done will be done by someone somewhere and that's a nightmare an atomic bomb can't be built without large-scale special-purpose facilities but biotech involves small-scale junior's equipment indeed biohacking is burgeoning even as a hobby and competitive game and we know all too well the technical expertise doesn't guarantee balance rationality the global village will have his village idiots and they'll have global range the rising empowerment of tech-savvy groups by bio as well as cyber technology will pose an intractable challenge to governments and to aggravate the tension between freedom privacy and security these concerns are fairly near-term within the next 10 or 15 years but what about 2050 and beyond well here we've got to be cautious in our predictions let's remember that the smartphone and the web would have seen magic even just 25 years ago so looking 22 2015 and beyond please keep our minds open or at least ajar to transform advances that may now seem science fiction on the bio front I think we can expect two things first a better understanding of the combination of genes which determine key human characteristics not a single gene things but things like intelligence and looks that depend on many many genes and also the ability to synthesize genomes which match these features in fact the great physicist Freeman Dyson conjectures a time when children will be able to design and create new organisms Joseph routinely as his generation claim of chemistry sets well if it does indeed become possible to play God on a kitchen table our ecology and even our species may not for long survive unscathed and what about another transformative technology robotics and artificial intelligence AI there's been exciting advances in what's called generalized machine learning deep mind a London company now owned by Google achieves a remarkable feat in its computer beat the world champion in the game of Go Chinese game and there's the world champion well it's made first not seen a big deal because you probably recall that more than 20 years ago an IBM computer beat Kasparov the World Chess Champion was the big difference the IBM machine was programmed in detail by expert players in contrast the machine that played go and he can now play chess as well was given just the rules and gained expertise by playing hundreds of thousands of games against itself in a single day it worked so fast and the programmers themselves don't know how the machines make seemingly insightful decisions it's of course the speed of computers which has been going up all the time this allows them to succeed by brute force methods and they learn to identify dogs cats and human faces by crunching through millions of images not the way babies learn they learn to translate by reading millions of pages of multilingual text for instance EU documents their boredom threshold must be infinite and the implications for our society from all this are already ambivalent if there's a bug in the software of an AI system it's currently not always possible to track it down and missus Leiter to create public concern if the system decisions have grave consequences for individuals if we're sentenced to a term in prison recommended for surgery or even given a poor credit rating we would expect to be able to get reasons given to us reasons which our contest will bias if such decisions were entirely delegated to an algorithm we'd be entitled to feel uneasy even if presented with compelling evidence that on average the machine made better decisions than the humans is it a user AI systems will become more intrusive and pervasive records of all our movements and health and our financial transactions will be in the cloud managed by a multi-national quasi monopoly the data may be used for benign reasons for instance for medical research but its availability to Internet companies is already shifting the bounds of power from governments to globe-spanning conglomerates and our other privacy concerns are you happy for instance if a random stranger sitting near you in a restaurant can var facial-recognition identify you and invade your privacy or if fake videos of you become so convincing that visual evidence can no longer be trusted the arms race between cyber criminals and those time to defend against them would become more expensive and vexatious when the criminals have AI criminals succeed by reinforced learning on big training sets but will they ever understand humans that's hard because it involves observing actual people in real homes or workplaces and the machine will feel centrally deprived by the slowness of real life and will be bewildered the peacoats Stuart Russell who's a leading AI theorist at Berkeley he says the machine could try all kinds of things scrambling eggs stacking wooden blocks chewing was poking its finger into electric outlets but nothing would produce a strong enough feedback loop who convinced the computer it was on the right track and lead to the next necessary action and robots are still clumsier than a child in moving pieces on a real chess board they can't jump from tree to tree like a squirrel although there is a robot made by Boston Dynamics there it is which can apparently do somersaults he's got a combination of legs and wheels and ai has a long way to go the go playing computer uses hundreds of kilowatts of power but the brain of the man who challenged it uses 30 watts about a light bulb and he could do many other things apart from play go but what about what AI will do in the work place it'll take over a lot of boring manual work but not all plumbing and gardening will be among the hardest jobs to automate but it will also do some white-collar work routine legal work medical diagnostics and even surgery the big social and economic question is this will this second Machine Age be like earlier disruptive technologies the car for instance and creates as many jobs as it destroys or is it really different this time the money earned by robots could generate huge wealth for an elite but I was just in my book that to preserve a healthy society will require massive redistribution of that income to ensure that everyone had at least a living wage this shouldn't be a handout but should be achieved by creating huge numbers of upgraded public service jobs where the human elements crucial for instance caring for people these are now undervalued by demand is huge but also teaching assistants custodians gardens and public parks and so forth if enough tossed jobs could be created to replace those in call centers and Amazon's warehouses that's surely to be welcomed it's a win-win situation I can see this happening in Scandinavia perhaps though there may be some ideological barriers in United States and some other countries but let's look still further ahead hey I can cope with complex fast changing networks traffic flows or electric grids that's certainly good news the Chinese could have an efficient planned economy that Marx could only dream of and it could help silence - perhaps he can find the recipe for a high temperature superconductor or settle where the string theory is the Right theory if robots could observe and interpret their environment as a deputy as we do they would be truly perceived as intelligent beings but then they'd be beings to which or to whom we can relate and such machines of course pervade popular culture and the movies but then they raise these philosophical ethical questions do we then have obligations towards them we worried of how fellow humans and even animals can't fulfill their natural potential so should we feel guilty if our robots are underemployed or bored what if a machine developed a mind of its own would it stay docile or go rogue popular culture portrays a dark side may I get out of it box infiltrates the Internet of Things and pursues goals misaligned with human interests some AI pundits take this seriously and think the field already needs guidelines just as biotech does but others like for instance Rodney Brooks the inventor of the Baxter robot regard these concerns as premature they think it'll be a long time before artificial intelligence need worried us more than real stupidity does but be that as it may it's like did the society would be transformed by autonomous robots even though the jury is out on whether they would be idiots of war or display superhuman capabilities he is the futurologist Ray Kurzweil who now works at Google he argues of once machines have surpassed human capabilities they can observe design a new generation of even more powerful ones and it has explosion he wrote a book called the age of spiritual machines where he predicted that humans would transcend biology by merging with computers in old-style spiritualist parlance they would go over to the other side well it is happens we then confront the classic philosophical problem of personal identity could your brain be downloaded into a machine if so in what sense would it still be you should you be relaxed about your original body then being destroyed what would happen if several clones were made of you these are ancient conundrums for philosophers but practical ethicists may need to address them later in this century but Kurzweil incidentally is worried that his nirvana may not happen in his lifetime so he wants his body frozen in liquid nitrogen when he dies until it's possible to be resurrected we'll have his brain downloaded once a company in Arizona which will freeze and store your body for this time I was surprised in fact to find a three of my academic colleagues in England had gone in for this so-called cryonics to have paid the full whack of about $80,000 the third had taken a cut-price option of just having his head frozen I was glad these three were all from Oxford and not from my University and I told them I'd rather end my days in an English churchyard than an American refrigerator but of course more seriously research on Aging is being prioritized will the benefits be incremental or is aging a disease that can be cured dramatic life extension will plainly be a real wild card in population projections with huge social ramifications but it may happen along with human enhancement in other forms and it's at least surely possible on the cards that human beings their mentality and their physique may become malleable through the deployment of genetic modification and cyborg techniques moreover the future evolution a kind of secular intelligent design would take only centuries or maybe less in contrast to the thousands of centuries needed for Darwinian evolution and this is a game-changer when we admire the literature and artifacts that survived from antiquity we feel an affinity across a time Gulf for thousands of years with these ancient artists and their civilizations but we can have zero confidence that the dominant intelligence is a few centuries hence we'll have any emotional resonance with us either they may have some algorithmic understanding of how we behaved and now let me turn to another technology space because it's beyond Earth in environments hostile to humans that cyborg and AI technologies have the most spectacular scope and where the change it will happen fastest and where I think they should worry us less during this century the whole solar system will be explored by swarms of miniaturized robots far more advanced than those we already have and for instance the Cassini craft which spent 13 years exploring the moons of Saturn or the European robot which landed on a little robot on this comet or the American probe which sent back this picture and many other pictures of Pluto 20,000 times further away than the moon is think back to the computers and phones of the 1990s when these three probes I've just mentioned were designed and realized how much better we could do today the next step will be deployment in space of robotic fabricators we can build large structures for instance on telescopes with huge gossamer thin mirrors solar energy collectors and such like but what about manned spaceflight the practical case for that gets ever weaker will each advance in robots and miniaturization so will it have resurgence let's remember it's 50 years since neil armstrong's one small step on the moon and I cherish this picture sign for me a few years ago by 7 of the Apollo astronauts in the 1960s there was a space race against the Russians NASA then got about 4% of the US federal budget had that place continued to have been footprints on Mars long before today but once the race to the moon was won there was no motivation for continuing the requisite expenditures now about 0.6% rather than four hundreds have ventured into space but anticlimactically they've done no more than circle the earth in low orbit many of them in the international space station shown here and they only make news when something goes wrong when the loo fails for instance or when they perform stunts like the Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield who played his guitar in the space station so will there be any inspirational Apollo star projects in the future there's no denying that's nasa's curiosity probe which is tumbling across a giant martian crater you can see it's tire marks there about the course of the way up that may miss startling discoveries that no human geologist could overlook but machine learning is advancing fast as his sensor technology in contrast the cost gap between manned and unmanned missions remains huge NASA's man program has always been impeded by public and political pressure into being very risk-averse the Space Shuttle failed twice in hundred thirty-five launches astronaut or test pilots would willingly accept this 2% level of risk but the shuttle was proposed as safe and this caused huge trauma in America and huge expense but because of this safety culture NASA will confirm political obstacles in achieving any grand goal within a feasible cost China has the resources in the doozies government and maybe the willingness to undertake an Apollo style program it could do this but if it doesn't then I feel the future of manned space flights lies with privately funded adventurers prepared to participate in a cut-price program far riskier than Western nations could impose on public supported civilians I'm thinking of Ellen Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos his Blue Origin these companies were soon offer orbital flights to paying customers and were I an American I would in fact only support NASA's unmanned program I'd argued that private enterprise ventures bringing a Silicon Valley culture into a domain long dominated by NASA and a few aerospace conglomerates should front all manned missions as cut-price high-risk adventures to be many volunteers some perhaps even accepting one-way tickets driven by the same motives as early explorers Mountaineers and alike the phrase space tourism should be avoided because it allows people into thinking these ventures are routine and low-risk they should be sold as dangerous sports or intrepid exploration but I think that by 2100 courageous thrill-seekers people in the mold of Serano find in Britain and people who do round-the-world ballooning and hang gliding and things like that may have escaped bases independent from the earth probably on Mars Ellen mask himself says he wants to die on Mars but not on impact and he's now 47 I think so he might make this 40 years from now but don't ever expect mass emigration from the earth no way in our solar system office and environments even as Clement as the top of Everest or the Antarctic and here I disagree incidentally with musk and my late colleague Stephen Hawking I think is a dangerous delusion to think that space offers an escape from the Earth's problems dealing with climate change on earth is a doddle compared to terraforming Mars there's no planet B for ordinary risk-averse people nonetheless we should I think cheer on these brave space adventurers because they'd have a pivotal role in spearheading the posthuman future and determining what happens in the 22nd century and far beyond and this is why there'll be ill adapted to their new habitat so they'll have a more compelling incentive Elizabeth here on earth to redesign themselves they'll harness a super-powerful genetic and cyber technologies that have been developed in coming decades these techniques will one hopes be regulated here on earth but settlers on Mars will be beyond the clutches of the regulator's and we should surely wish them good luck in modifying their progeny to adapt to alien environments and this might be the first step towards divergently to a new species so it's these spacefaring adventurers not those of us comfortably adapted to life on earth who will spearhead the posthuman era moreover if they make the transition to fully inorganic intelligences they will need an atmosphere and him a furs a ROG especially if constructing massive artifacts so it's in deep space not on earth nor even on Mars that non-biological brains may develop powers that humans can't even imagine and I've said few doubts that machines were gradually surpass or enhance more and more of a distinctively human capabilities Ray Kurzweil and his ilk say it'll be a few decades the course just said to be a few centuries but either way the timescale is but an instant compared to the time scale for the Darwinian selection that led to humanity's emergence this is a familiar time chart a four billion years from the first life to our present biosphere so the outcome of future technological evolution given at the time lying ahead before the Sun dies is even longer it's 6 billion years and the universe may go on forever and to cook Woody Allen eternity is very long especially towards the end so we can imagine that in the far future there will be intelligences whose capabilities we can't even imagine surpassing humans of as much as we intellectually surpass slime level for instance what about consciousness philosophers debate whether consciousness is special to the wet organic brains of humans Apes and dogs so might it be that electronic intelligences even if they intellect seem superhuman was still lack self-awareness or in a life or his consciousness emergent in any complex network where some say this is irrelevant and semantic like asking whether submarines swim but I don't think it is I think this question crucially affects how we react to the far future scenario I've just sketched if the machines are zombies we wouldn't accord their experiences the same value as ours and the posthuman future would seem bleak but if they're conscious we too surely welcome the prospects of their future take over so I've talked a bit about the far future where entities from Earth could spread far beyond but this of course raises a question that everyone always asks is there life out there already before perhaps our descendants ever go there well we all agree that we don't know if there is I have to say though better being a strong a royal that I get letters from people who think they do know they've been abducted etcetera they met the aliens and I write back to them saying do they really think that if the aliens had made a huge effort to traverse interstellar distances they would just meet one or two well-known cranks make a corne circle and go away again and the second thing I tell these people is to write to each other and not write to me but even though we don't know it is one of the great questions obviously where we now know that there's no way in our solar system where there's any advanced life here's Mars there may be freeze-dried bacteria but nothing else there there may be something swimming under the ice here this is Enceladus a moon of Saturn but if you might not horizon sit around with the stars we've learned something in the last twenty years it really makes the night sky much more interesting we've learned that most of the stars we see in the sky are orbited by retinues of planets just like the earth is orbited by the familiar planets and indeed most planets most stars have planets and probably one in six has a planet rather like the earth and the question is did life start on those as it started here on earth we just don't know because saying that a planet is habitable doesn't mean it's inhabited now let me just show you this is a remarkable system of the discovered a few years ago which is a miniature solar system the star is about one percent as bright as the Sun and it's got seven planets orbiting it and their year is one and a half days for the innermost one and eighteen days for the outermost one this may not be a very good place for life to exist for various reasons but it's amazing that we now have things like this I should mention that we infer these planets not by seeing them but by looking for their effect on this parent star if they transit in front they make the stop here a bit dimmer when their gravity makes the stars motion wobble but we'd really like to actually see see them and we can't do that yet but I'd like to advertise that the world's largest telescope is being built by the European Southern Observatory the European consortium in in Chile and Europeans aren't they imaginative in in that nomenclature it's called the extremely large telescope the VLT and it's got a mirror which is 39 metres across that's about three times the length of this room which is a mosaic and this will be able to actually get some spectrum of the light from some of these planets like the Sun orbiting other stars to see if there's any evidence for a biosphere this would be really really exciting remember when it's going to be done and where there are continents and ocean it could learn things like that but we still don't really know the likelihood of life we don't know how life began even on the earth but we want to understand that and we want to look and see if its life is elsewhere but the question are we alone fascinate so many that I think these searches for intelligent life called SETI searches are worthwhile even though the chance of success is small and I'm involved in a in sharing and advisory group which is for a program bankrolled by a Russian oligarch in California called Yuri Milner and although chance is small I think it's good he's spending his money this way rather than on a football team or a bigger yacht but SETI searches that's a topic for a different lecture or maybe the question period so let me just briefly conclude by focusing back closer to the here room now because as I said the beginning even a concertina time line extending billions of years into the future as well as into the past we're living in a special century first when these transformations from organic to inorganic life can happen when we can spread beyond the solar system etc or when if we take a dark a few our followers could foreclose the immense treater potential and leave it anarchic and depleted planet my book emphasizes how our society is brittle and it's connected and vulnerable I argue that we fret too much about small risks air crashes carcinogens in food low radiation doses preparing denial about newly emerging threats which could be globally devastating similar environmental I've talked about those other the potential downsides of novel technology wise mantra is that the unfamiliar is not the same as the improbable so what's our message scientist universal culture spanning all nations and faiths so scientists can straddle political divides more easily and of course they can advise on many of the key challenges cope with potential shortages of food water resources and transitioning to low-carbon energy and of course they have an obligation themselves to promote benign applications of their work and warn against the downsides and universities can use their staffs expertise and their convening power to assess which scary scenarios which echo threat or risk the mystified technology can be dismissed as science fiction and how to best avoid those that can't be dismissed and they can't all be dismissed but politicians won't prioritize global and long-term measures unless enough voters endorse such policies I quoted yum curlier on this so scientists must enhanced their leverage by involvement with NGOs blogging and journalism and by eliciting charismatic individuals and the media to amplify their voice and let me mention two recent instances of this the papal Academy Sciences had a conference in 2014 which was important input into the papal encyclical laudato si which had a worldwide influence in the lead-up to the Paris climate conference in 2015 the Pope got a standing ovation at the UN and because he's got a billion followers in Latin America Africa in East Asia that eased the path towards census in Paris and to quote another example from my own country a minister called Michael Gove was not really renowned for his idealism he has promoted a law to ban non-reusable plastic drinking straws and things like that and he's only doing this I think because he knows his public support and his public support because of the BBC's blue planet programme fronted by our secular Pope David Attenborough especially the images of albatrosses returning to their nests and regurgitating plastic debris instead of the longed for food for their young that's an image that's become as iconic as the famous polar bear on the melting ice floe so these images make a large public care about these concerns and then the politicians do respond and of course it's encouraging to witness poor activists among the young unsurprising as they could hope to live to the end of a century and their campaigning like the recent climate campaigning is surely welcomed and gets ground for hope so finally spaceship earth is hurtling through the void these passengers are anxious and fractious their life-support systems vulnerable to disruption and breakdown but at the moment there's too little planning too little horizon scanning too little long-term thinking and my final thought is that we need to think globally we need to think rationally we need to think long-term empowered by 21st century technology but guided by values that science alone can't provide and I'd like to quote with my scientific heroes the eloquent biologist Peter Medawar he said I quote the bells the toll for mankind I like the bells of Alpine cattle they're attached to our own necks and it must be our fault if they don't make a tuneful and melodious sound thank you you

Channel: Central European University

Views: 189

Keywords: Achieving a Brighter Future, Martin Rees, United Kingdom's Astronomer Royal, CEU, Central European University, Michael Ignatieff

Id: APpDej1R-IA

Length: 58min 57sec (3537 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 30 2019