The Future Belongs to the Optimists

It’s time to leave the cradle

An important note, parts of this post are fictional ¹

If you don’t want to read the entire speech, skip to the end of the post. It’s worth it.

So it’s been a while between posts again, things have been pretty busy as I have been working on finishing a big project. More about that later. First, I wanted to share a speech with you. It is the 2012 commencement address at the California Institute of Technology, given by the Swedish billionaire Christian Larsson.

June 15^th 2012

I’m going to ask you a question. It’s a question which has been asked many times in different forms, but perhaps the most famous example is that of Enrico Fermi. I’m going to ask you the same question he asked his colleagues in the summer of 1950: “where is everyone?”.

I’m not talking of those who are not here today with us. Or even those who are not in this city or this country. There are very few places left on Earth untouched by humanity. I’m talking about the vastness of the cosmos. The Milky Way has at least one hundred billion stars and around them, many more planets. Is the Earth the only place where life has begun?

There are many answers to this question. We used to arrogantly believe we were the center of the universe, everything revolved around us. We now know this not to be true.

Some subscribe to the Zoo Hypothesis. We are just so primitive that aliens do not contact us or cannot communicate on our level. They leave us alone to protect us and allow us to live in our natural environment. Just the same as we do with animals in a zoo or a game reserve. If you see some ants on the street walking back and forth carrying food to their nest, we can understand this. They have an organized society with workers, soldiers, even a queen. We can appreciate their society for what it is, but you wouldn’t try to have a conversation with an ant.

Maybe this is where I am being arrogant, but I don’t believe this solution to the Fermi paradox to be true.

The truth is, I believe, we are early. We are also incredibly lucky. The dinosaurs did not have a space program. You may laugh, but if they did, there is a good chance we would not be here today. Yes, we are early, coming about before most other life forms in the universe.

Live evolved on earth pretty much as soon as the oceans formed. However, it took two billion years for single-celled organisms to evolve into multicellular organisms and another two billion for us to arrive. On how many other worlds has this happened? How often do bacteria progress to building spaceships? The universe could be teaming with bacterial life or even complex life like the dinosaurs, but we would never detect this, at least not with our current technology.

Our timing is exquisite. The universe is already 13.8 billion years old. Despite this, it is unlikely other complex civilizations had a chance to evolve. The environment was just so hostile. The early stars constantly blew up. After all, this is where all of our heavy elements came from. Galaxies would crash into each other and supermassive black holes emitted massive amounts of radiation. All of this effectively sterilized the early universe over and over again.

Our sun - formed from the remnants of this chaotic and destructive early universe - came into being right at the end of this period. Conditions could not be more fertile for life than they are now. Great, you say, all good, nothing to worry about. But what about the great filter?

We have no way of knowing whether this is ahead of us or already behind. Is the greatest hurdle for life simply beginning in the first place? Maybe those dead chemicals don’t organize themselves into cells very often. Perhaps this is the great filter and we are already past it? This would be good, very good. Maybe it is almost impossibly hard for those cells to begin to form multicellular life and this is the great filter. This again would be very good. There are numerous examples of what the great filter could be along our evolutionary path.

Perhaps it is the evolution of big brains and the use of tools. The universe could be teaming with life like the dinosaurs or the animals we currently share our planet with. None of these species have developed advanced technology such as radio, which allows us to discover them. They will live out their existence until they are wiped out by an asteroid or their star finally dies.

Perhaps all life eventually evolves into complex life, intelligent enough to invent technology which will eventually become its undoing. There could have been many civilizations which existed before us which wiped themselves out through nuclear war, existential climate change or nano technology gone out of control.

If that were true, you might say we should be able to detect them. Life has existed on this planet for billions of years, but it is only in the last hundred years that we have become detectable to a distant observer. We could conceivably eradicate ourselves in less than another hundred. This makes the window of detection very small and incredibly unlikely advanced civilizations would co-exist long enough to become aware of each other.

What does all of this mean? It means I believe the great filter is more likely ahead of us than behind. Even if we manage to avoid a large scale nuclear conflict or a climate catastrophe, we could still get hit by an asteroid. And eventually, the Sun will die.

This means life is fragile and we must do everything in our power to preserve it and spread it throughout the solar system and beyond. Right now, all of our eggs are in one basket. It’s a perfectly good basket, but it’s the only one we have. We must not let the delicate flame go out.

The good news is this is in our very nature. Our ancestors left Africa some two hundred thousand years ago and spread to the Middle East, southeast Asia, Europe, and on throughout the globe. As the great Carl Sagan said, “Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still.”

In September 1962, almost fifty years ago, President Kennedy gave one of his most famous speeches, in which he set the United States on course to put a man on the moon. That trajectory, had it continued as it should, would have taken us on to Mars and beyond by the end of the century. Right now, it would not be uncommon to visit the moon. Some of you may even have been there already to conduct some of your research. On Mars, we would have research facilities of a scale not unlike what we have now in Antarctica. What happened though? We faltered. Now it is high time we pick ourselves up and carry on. We must make life multi-planetary.

At the beginning of his speech, before even beginning to talk about space, Kennedy talked about the scientific progress to date. He made the analogy of compressing the entire 50,000 years of recorded human history into 50 years. Let us use Kennedy’s analogy without even updating it to where we are now. I quote “Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them. Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only five years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than two years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than two months ago, during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power.”

So you see how fast the pace of change has become, and it only continues to get faster. There are many hurdles to overcome and we must adapt. Adapt to our new environments. This is something which we have been doing for tens of thousands of years, but sometimes we can give Mother Nature a little helping hand. We are on the verge today of having techniques where we can tweak the human genome to help us. Natural selection has done this for us, but it takes thousands of years. If only we were more resistant to radiation, we did not lose bone density or our eyes did not change shape in microgravity, we would be much more suited to space exploration.

This might make you uncomfortable, but it is something we have been doing for years. Our ancestors started selecting the strains of wheat which grew best and suited their environment. Animal breeders directed the characteristics of the next generation to make them more useful as working animals or more desirable pets. We have been doing this for thousands of years.

Now before you tell me this is some sort of eugenics with selective breeding, this is absolutely not what I am suggesting. The diverse cultural mixing pot we have in many places is a good thing. All I am suggesting is with couples who are already planning on having children, we can tweak their DNA to make them better suited for life beyond planet Earth. To give Mother Nature a helping hand.

As we spread throughout the solar system and beyond, we will change. The descendants of those first settlers will have different cultures, more advanced technologies, and their languages will have changed. But they will still be human. In the same way we are different from our descendants who first left Africa some two hundred thousand years ago, but we would still recognize each other.

What is the alternative? We revert back to a hunter gatherer society? By all accounts, what we know of the last remaining examples of this type of society, they seem to live a happy existence. However, this planet which for now every human has called home can only support a few tens of millions of people organized in this form of society. How do we get from current global population levels down to this without some form of extermination event on an unimaginable scale?

Besides, we have all but forgotten how to live this sort of existence. Even if we were able to relearn it, we would be sitting ducks for the next mass extinction event.

Since the very beginnings of life, the sole purpose of existence has been about securing resources. Whether it was single-celled organisms inhabiting the area around a hydrothermal vent and competing for the chemicals dissolved in the vents fluid, or different mammals competing for the resources of a forest. As our society developed and became more complex, we formed collectives which evolved into the nation state. States which compete against each other for access to resources. Whether this resource is oil, mineral reserves or simply more land for their expanding population.

Humans differ from other animals on earth in that we have developed, to a limited extent structured society which sometimes prevents this competition from developing into warfare. If you wanted a little meat from the carcass of a gazelle which has just been killed by a lion, you cannot negotiate with the lion to acquire some. You either fight for it, go hungry, or acquire another source of food which you can out compete for.

When life forms on other planets throughout the galaxy and becomes complex, this type of competition will arise on a galactic scale. This does not mean we have to conquer all corners of the galaxy and wipe out all other civilizations, we may find some we can happily coexist with. There may, however, be some intent only on extermination of all others. There may be some who simply push others out of existence through destruction of their habitat in the same way we have done to many other species here on earth.

Ether way, we do not want to be wiped out or end up in the cosmic game reserve. We are early and just as we stand on the shoulders of giants; we owe it to our descendants to take the first steps into the solar system.

We can do it. Our destiny lies in the stars. The future belongs to the optimists.

Apologies for the deception. That speech is obviously entirely fictional, the actual 2012 Caltech address was made by Elon Musk.

For a number of years I have been working (on and off) on a science fiction novel which had the working title “Orphans of Apollo”. I’ve thrown around a few alternatives and actually think that works well, so I’ve decided to keep it.

I hope reading Larsson’s speech has piqued your interest. I will be serialising the novel first on its own Substack, which you can check out at the link below. The story will be free and there will be additional paid posts giving a bit of background to some of the ideas and explanations of the science and engineering which appear in the story.

At present I have a completed first draft and I am in the process of editing this, as I complete editing the scenes will then make it to the Substack. It will be launching on 20^th July 2024. I picked that date simply to give me a bit of time to schedule posts, plus it’s the 55th anniversary of the first moon landing, so it seemed appropriate enough.

If speculative science fiction/alternative history is your thing, I hope to see you over at Orphans of Apollo.

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1. The speech in this post is fictional and by the character Christian Larsson in the novel “Orphans of Apollo” by me, A M Turnbull.