The Disney-Pixar computer animated film WALL-E that opens in theaters today introduces young viewers to the idea that Earth could someday be made uninhabitable to humans and left to robots. You see, WALL-E [Waste Allocation Load Lifter--Earth Class] is the last operating robot left on Earth. His job is to try and clean up the all the trash the humans left behind before they abandoned Earth for a less cluttered place among the stars.
Waist-deep pollution aside, there is a long list of cosmic catastrophes that could leave Earth’s surface a pile of rubble and uninhabited: asteroid and comet impacts, gamma-ray bursts, and supernova explosions. In fact, it seems like a small miracle we’re still here today in a rock ‘em sock’em universe of never-ending titanic blasts and collisions.
Another fear is that we do-in ourselves with technology run amok.
Just this week CERN declared its Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful particle accelerator built to date, is perfectly safe. It is not the doomsday particle accelerator as soothsayers have warned. Critics are worried that the LHC is so powerful that it will form microscopic black holes, vacuum bubbles, and strangelets -oh my! Any mini-black black hole fabricated from subatomic collisions would quickly evaporate before it gulped down Earth, say LHC physicists. (An excellent description can be found at Jennifer Ouellette’s Twisted Physics blog of June 26)
Never shy on making big-budget disaster films, Hollywood has fed the "end-of-world" genre with movies like Deep Impact, Waterworld, Dr.Strangelove, and The Terminator.
It wasn’t a science fiction writer but Bill Joy, the co-founder and chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, who made an ominous doomsday prediction in 2000. He warned that our most powerful 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology - are threatening to make humans an endangered species. Joy believes that our own creations will bring on a technological armageddon that will wipe us out, allowing artificial life to supersede us.
Science historian Steve Dick argues that the emergence of intelligent life may just be a brief transitional period in the history of the universe. Civilizations may have flowered when the galaxy had synthesized enough carbon to make organic life. But perhaps intelligent life is fundamentally unstable and quickly dies away.
After sentient biological species go extinct their mechanical creations take over. Dick speculates that we are not receiving signals from E.T. because we are latecomers in our 13 billion year-old galaxy. We live on the cusp of an emerging post-biological era where the majority of sentient life forms have evolved beyond flesh and blood. The party’s over for anyone whose ancestors climbed out of the primordial ooze.
SETI astronomers worry about this and call it cultural evolution, where technology overtakes biological evolution. This would mean that the basic premise of SETI might be wrong. In reality there’s no one out there who cares to talk to us.
The movie WALL-E introduces the idea that perhaps the galaxy could be filled with abandoned lonely robot leftovers of intelligent societies that have vanished. But in reality these so-called “post-biologicals,” as Dick puts it, may be taking over from their frail, mortal creators.
Machine intelligence would not be confined to the vagaries and dangers of living on a planet’s surface. Being repairable -- or at least rebootable -- artificial life would be immortal for all practical purposes. These robots could roam the Milky Way at will.
Dick thinks that intelligent machines might communicate among themselves, i.e. “do you smoke after binary interface?” But they would have no motivation to send out signals to us.
Their perception of reality would be imponderably different from ours. We have only limited success in communicating with dolphins and whales. How are we going to talk to something that might resemble an oversized cappuccino machine and have a sticker on it that says, “Made in Epsilon Eridani”?
One evil twist, popularized in several Star Trek TV episodes, is that artificial entities become malevolent and seek out and destroy biological life because it is a scourge on the galaxy. So, check your homeowner’s insurance policy against loss by alien robot invasion.
If in fact WALL-Es roam the galaxy they are as oblivious to us as we are to garden ants.
Or, we’re just a novelty to them.
“Imagine!” they beep and whistle, “there’s thinking meat on that small blue planet!”
Image: Courtesy of Disney/Pixar
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