Triple Threat: Hawking’s Admonitions

More than a few physicists become famous in their own lifetimes: Bohr, Heisenberg, Meitner, and Fermi come instantly to mind. In addition to their contributions to the field, both Edward Teller and Richard Feynman wrote bestselling books aimed at popular audiences. Yet, among non-scientists none of those examples was or is fully a household name. Oh, someone of high school age or older in an average multi-person household is likely to know them, but probably not everyone. Only three physicists to date achieved true Elvis-style rock-star-level recognition in popular culture: Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and Stephen Hawking. By all accounts Isaac for all his gifts was personally a mean vindictive jerk with no sense of humor or self-irony, so perhaps he would not have fared well in a modern social media environment. (Then again, with those qualities he might have fared fabulously. Who is to say?) Albert Einstein did have a sense of humor and irony. He didn’t seek out the limelight much outside of physics, however; while not antagonistic to the general public, he preferred a more private existence. Stephen Hawking not only kept his humor (“Life would be tragic if it weren't funny”) but reveled in his pop culture status, even appearing in TV sitcoms such as The Simpsons and The Big Bang Theory. He was hard not to like, which made his passing a couple of weeks ago an event that was heavily covered as much on entertainment news shows as in more serious media.

Homer intrigues Stephen with
hypothesis of a donut shaped universe 

Hawking throughout his life kept stirring up the scientific community with thoughts on such things as the black hole information paradox, but he stirred up the popular press more often with his warnings and predictions about the future of humanity. Three in particular received much comment recently: a warning about aliens, a warning about Artificial Intelligence, and a counsel to settle other planets or face extinction. 

Regarding the first, humans willfully and repeatedly send messages into space in hopes they one day will be intercepted by extraterrestrials. One particularly groan-worthy instance was in 2008 when NASA used its Deep Space Network to beam out the Beatles’ Across the Universe. (If we are going to send syrupy sidereal songs, why not go all in thematically with Glenn Miller’s When You Wish upon a Star? But maybe ETs are into R&B or metal.) Hawking remarked that signaling our presence to aliens in this way might not be a good idea, and he wasn’t being a music critic: "If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans." He said it would be safer to avoid contact. This may well be, but it’s a little late to worry about it. Our unintentional signals overwhelm the intended ones. Defense radars, which are obviously artificial, have been signaling into deep space for 80 years and TV broadcasts aren’t far behind them. On many many frequencies earth flashes brighter than the sun. If there are any modestly tech-savvy critters within 80 light years who bother to look, they’ll see us, and that bubble of space grows constantly at the speed of light. Hawking knew this well, so I think he was just being playful with this one.

Hawking’s warning last year about artificial intelligence also got media attention: "I fear that AI may replace humans altogether,” he told Wired. “This will be a new form of life that outperforms humans." This is an old concern. In science fiction it long predates Skynet and Terminators. The word “robot” was introduced to the world in 1920 in the play R.U.R. by Karel Čapek. The robots in R.U.R. are humaniform AIs who are a boon to human civilization until a well-meaning human programs them with a sense of justice; they conclude it is just to overthrow humanity. More recently, Charles Stross imagined our demise at the hands of robots who make love not war. Humans in his novel Saturn’s Children preferred their machines to fellow humans to such an extent that they stopped reproducing and died out. The characters in the novel, set long after humanity’s extinction, are robots with an identity crisis. I think Hawking was semi-serious about his AI warning. He might be right, too, but I find it hard to be upset by it. AIs are our children and children generally do bury their parents – unpleasant, but the natural course of things.

Thirdly, Hawking warned us that earth civilization has only 100 years left and that we need to settle other worlds before then. A decade ago Hawking gave us 1000 years, but upon reconsideration in 2017 he cut it back to 100. The only way to avoid not just the end of civilization but an extinction event, he said, is to occupy more than one world: “My preference would be to pursue rigorously a space-exploration programme, with a view to eventually colonising suitable planets for human habitation. I believe we have reached the point of no return.”  If only those AI children mentioned above survive by then, that’s no problem; they can be built hardier than ourselves so they can occupy worlds without terraforming. If we actually want biological humans to live off-earth, however, the task will be harder. If we plan to go interstellar it will be ridiculously hard. That doesn’t stop science fiction writers from imagining it. (I tried a hand at it myself some years ago in the short story The Lion’s Share.) The consensus seems to be that we’ll just recreate our same old problems in a new place. Nonetheless, while I have no way to know for sure, I suspect Hawking was fully serious about this one, and there is something charmingly non-adult about that. All too few of us bother to grow up these days, and in a general way that is not a good thing. Yet, if you lose all things childlike in your heart, you become too cynical and jaded a creature to get any value out of grown-up ways.

So long, Stephen, and thanks for the warnings. I’m sure Homer and the guys at Moe’s will raise a mug of Duff beer.

The Big Bang Theory – aliens receive deep space message