From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4_at_msn.com)
Date: Tue Oct 02 2007 - 09:55:06 PDT
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2007/10/biologically-ba.html
October 01, 2007
Advanced Civilizations in the Universe - A Galaxy Insight
"Biologically based technological civilization...is a fleeting phenomenon
limited to a few thousand years, and exists in the universe in the
proportion of one thousand to one billion, so that only one in a million
civilizations are biological."
Steven J. Dick, NASA Chief Historian
If extraterrestrial intelligence exists, Stephen Dick concludes in an
article in the International Journal of Astrobiology, it has probably
evolved beyond biology to an advanced form of artificial intelligence that
is the product of million or billions of years of technological and cultural
evolution similar to the civilizations Arthur C Clarke envisioned that
created the Tycho Monoliths in 2001 -A Space Odyssey. In a post-biological
universe machines are the dominant form of intelligence.
o Dick the emergence of life and the evolution of intelligence is literally
pre-programmed by the laws and constants of physics, which function similar
to cosmic DNA.
The emergence of life and intelligence, according to Dick, was coded into
the cosmic playbook from the first moment of the Big Bang. Intelligent life
is destined to eventually dominate the cosmos and ultimately to serve as the
instrument of cosmic replication.
In his book, The Biological Universe: The 20th Century Extraterrestrial Life
Debate and the Limits of Science, Dick argues that at the dawn of the 21st
century calls for us to take into account the Copernican principle that life
on earth and humanity is in no way physically central in the universe: "we
are located on a small planet around a star on the outskirts of the Milky
Way galaxy."
The first concept, the question of life beyond our home planet, Dick
explained in his essay, has exercised human imagination, and has stirred
irrational fears, since the ancient Greeks, fears that in large part were
responsible for the death more than 400 years ago, on February 17, 1600,
when Giordano Bruno was summoned from his Inquisition prison cell in Castel
S'ant Angelo across the Tiber from the Vatican, marched to the Campo dei
Fiori, and burned at the stake in large part for his belief in an infinite
number of inhabited worlds. So anathema, Dick writes, was the subject of
other worlds that even historians of science avoided it until the 1970s.
This worldview of the cosmos as a biological universe is a revolutionary
perspective as profound a revision in our way of think as the Copernican and
Darwinian revolutions. It is a worldview that believes that "planetary
systems are common, that life originates wherever conditions are favorable,
and that evolution culminates with intelligence."
Posted by Casey Kazan
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