The power of evolution
Biological evolution accumulates adaptive traits, encoding them in genes. In time the various solutions that biological organisms come up with to survive in their environments tend to become more complex. While it is true that in any given environment all organisms are equally well evolved, since per definition they are fit to their ecological niche, those that are capable of expressing a richer set of behaviors, whose genetic information allows them to respond in more nuanced and varied ways to their environment, are going to be more adaptable and better able to survive. The genes of the fittest organisms are transmitted through sexual reproduction. And the drive to reproduce, from the point of view of the genes, is the reason for organisms to exist. Without reproduction there is no way for the genes to spread, to prove themselves fit in the current or future environments where the organisms they code for have to survive.
The way human societies transmit knowledge, and accumulate novel ways to adapt to various environments, served us extremely well. There are no ecological niches that we have not adapted to on Earth. We have been able to analyze the challenges, find solutions, and then spread those solutions with variations more rapidly than any other animal species. Thanks to our culture we moved the rules of evolution to a new level, and benefited from the accumulation of useful units of knowledge that we used to our advantage. From initially using oral transmission of knowledge and culture, we have been able to adopt new, more reliable ways through writing, books, and formal systems of describing and reproducing knowledge and what it encoded for. Each culture at any given moment, per definition, is equally adapted to thrive in its own niche. The accumulation of experience and its transmission through knowledge makes more complex civilizations better capable of deploying certain solutions when they are needed, in order to them to survive in a changing environment. The acquisition of knowledge in the evolution of culture is a fundamental drive as necessary as biological reproduction is in biological evolution.
There is a surprisingly small set of conditions that are necessary to generate evolution: 1. Reproduction with variation 2. An environment with limited resources 3. A selection mechanism that favors the fittest. Based on these general criteria, many different environments can generate an evolutionary dynamic, not only the one we are already familiar with in biology. Stars evolve for example, not only through their individual lifecycles changing the type of fusion reaction that sustains them and their spectral emissions, but also through their subsequent generations. Competing for the interstellar material through their gravitational pull, more successful stars will in turn give rise to new generations of stars after their supernova explosion will have seeded a given region with material that can coalesce anew. Our own Sun is a star of a generation that has been born from the explosion of a supernova, and we know it because of its composition and that of our solar system, which contains elements that were synthesized inside the previous generation of stars. We have seen how culture and technology also evolve, generating complexity through progressive solutions that fit the needs of a given set of problems and environments.
Evolution does not itself have a goal, a purpose, beyond the immediate selection of fitter solutions within the constraints of a given environment out of the available ones. It is a blind mechanism. The accrual of complexity is a side effect of this mechanism, a natural clock that allows you, at least in theory, to wake up in a cave, walk out on the seashore during the starlit night, and conclude, from first principles, that you are living in an expanding universe, at approximately ten billion years from its birth. Future layers of complexity will certainly accumulate in large and small structures of the universe, showing with equal clarity to observers the working of the evolutionary clock.
One of the most intriguing applications of the principles of universal Darwinism, with a healthy multitude of assumptions that for the moment we are unable to verify, has been articulated by Lee Smolin, a theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute. Playing around with pen and paper, and observing the multitude of black holes in our universe, he asked himself if he were able to change the values of our physical constants in a way that would produce a universe with more black holes than ours, and he could not. The models either produced no black holes at all, or one giant black hole being the entire universe, rather than the interesting balance where black holes are at the centers of galaxies, and are produced by massive stars at the end of their lives. He assumed that, rather than being a closed end, black holes' singularities actually generate new universes, linked to their parents through the values of their physical constants, that receive some variation. In Keplerian fashion, it would be natural to assume that we live in a universe that is not of first generation, but rather has been born through a series of black holes, universe after universe. The fact that black holes appear to be maximally numerous in our universe reinforces the statistical probability that we belong to a branch of universes where the accumulated variations produced especially fertile ones. Analyzing the full spectrum of theories around this scenario, and designing possible experiments to verify it, is definitely worth of AGIs!
One of the fundamental themes of this book is that phase changes happen, and that the linear change of a given variable is not a reason for complacency. Water heats up until it starts boiling, and as surprising as that can be, once we understand the underlying principle, we can take advantage of what is happening. Evolution, blindly as it goes, produces amazing solutions to problems. It found, for example, a way to use light for information gathering by organisms in 50 to 100 different ways: there are several types of eyes, independently evolved of each other. As long as the environment is there, and there are new variations to try, evolution is very patient, with billions of years available to it. If we were two primitive unicellular organisms, having a conversation in the primordial soup, there would be many reasons to be proud of our primacy. "A billion years have passed," I would say, "and we are the pinnacle of evolution." "I bet that there will be another billion years, and we'll still be on top!" you'd reply, and you'd be right. "Not one, two billion years!" I'd retort, but I'd be wrong. Through trial and error, multicellular organisms would be born, and the Cambrian explosion would have produced forms of life unimaginable to bacteria. And while they still matter, the Earth itself would be transformed and stop being able to support life if bacteria disappeared, what's interesting, the changes that matter, that have consequences for the rest of history in the future, happen elsewhere. With the accumulation of complex genetic information, and the expression of complex behaviors, the way organisms adapt to environments changes too. The cultural component of our accumulation of knowledge is fundamental to our adaptability. Evolution will never be the same; we are not going to wait around uncounted generations until we blindly stumble upon a solution that allows us to fill a new ecological niche. There are environments that appeared impossible for life to conquer for a long time. For billions of years water seemed the only place to live in. Continents were barren deserts, with no plant or animal life at all on them. But what seemed impossible before became possible through the smart solutions that blind evolution created, the variations in crazy attempts, most of which went nowhere, but some of which ended up conquering the planet. We are now starting to look out on environments even more hostile than deserts appear when you look at them from the welcoming oceans. Space beckons, and our curiosity, sense of adventure, and thirst for knowledge drive us forward to attempt to colonize it the way life coming out from the oceans colonized the continents. It is likely that evolution is needed to create our level of awareness and our level of technology to even make the first attempts at this. We do not at all know if we are smart enough to make these attempts sustainable, or if we are just executing blind variations to solutions that are dead ends.
When Italian physicist Enrico Fermi collaborated in the Manhattan Project with other European emigres like the Hungarians John von Neumann, Edward Teller, and Leo Szilard (yes, the running joke was that the security challenges of the project could be resolved if only Fermi and project director Oppenheimer would leave and the others went on in their indecipherable Hungarian), together with his American colleagues, the desert sky of New Mexico was dazzling. Looking up every night, seeing the stars and the breathtaking swath of the Milky Way, itself the image of hundreds of millions of stars too far to see individually, it was impossible not to think of how small Earth and humanity were, in the scale of things in the universe. Kepler was the first to put humanity in its place, through a revolution that stripped it from presumed centrality, making Earth just one of the planets of an entire solar system. And our Sun is itself just one star, of a fairly common type, out of a billion that constitute our galaxy. Hubble and Messier did the same with our galaxy, the Milky Way, just one of billions of galaxies in the universe. Certainly humanity, with its proud technological civilization, was not unique, but just one of many. Then where is everybody? We don't know what the probabilities are of the successful development of a technological civilization in the universe. We only have one data point to rely on, for the moment. The Drake equation, which lists a series of parameters for habitable planets, the evolution of life, the duration of a technological civilization and so on, frames the question, without truly answering it. Until a few years ago we didn't know what the distribution of stars with planetary systems was. Now, with the results from the Kepler space observatory showings thousands of planets around hundreds of stars, it looks like they are practically everywhere. The next big step in understanding how and where life can develop is going to be taken with the missions to the Jovian moons like Europa, where under the ice covering the entire surface there is liquid water, filling a volume that is two-three times larger than all of the oceans of Earth. If we find bacterial life, at least, in those oceans, then it is going to be very natural to extrapolate and assume that other ice covered moons in alien planetary systems also have life. Suddenly some of the parameters of the equation will be less unknown. Even assuming that no super intelligence ever develops, and that it is not possible to travel faster than light, if we find a way to build starships to visit other solar systems, and in turn build new ones there for further interstellar exploration and colonization, in a mere couple of million years we'd conquer the entire Milky Way galaxy. Nothing in terms of astronomical time scales, but also very little in terms of biological evolution. At that point, with the levels of engineering that is available to us, we would really transform the galaxy. Our closest galactic neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, is two million light years away. A hypothetical astronomer, pointing her telescope towards the Milky Way, would be astonished: "Look at that. What happened there? That galaxy is blossoming!" When we point our telescopes and look at the millions of galaxies that we can study in the universe, there doesn't appear to be anything happening on the scale of what we would do if we were to colonize interstellar space. Where is everybody?
There have been catastrophic chokepoints in the evolution of species, mass extinctions that we have discovered in the history of life on Earth. There have been at least five of these events, where up to 90% of the species disappeared. Due to profound changes in the chemistry of the atmosphere, asteroid impacts, and rapid and radical global climate change, without any regard to the struggles of life to achieve the levels of complexity and adaptation to ecological niches, these events have shaped evolution globally. It is conceivable that there could have been one that wiped the planet, making it totally sterile. Actually there has been one like this at the very beginning of the solar system, when a planet the size of Mars collided with Earth, practically fusing both with the energy of the impact. Out of the results of that catastrophe the Moon was born, and Earth completely reshaped. At the time probably life hadn't started on the planet yet, but if a similar event would have happened later, it couldn't have survived. In the history of the evolution of the human species there have been remarkable events as well that highlight how surprisingly delicate and improbable the path leading to us has been. (Of course we suffer from selection bias: there are many orders of magnitude other paths that are as improbable or more than ours, which we just don't take into consideration.) In our genetic makeup, there is one component, the mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited exclusively through the maternal line. By studying its variation in populations it is possible to establish that about one hundred thousand years ago, in the African savannah, there was a group of hominids, our direct predecessors, that included not more than seven females. We all descended from this small group of individuals, our literal Eves. These are filters to the development of a technological civilization, and to that of a spacefaring civilization. Per definition, being in our past, we have been able to, or have been lucky to overcome them. Figure 11: The evolution of the ozone hole over the Southern Hemisphere from 2008 to 2016. There are a lot of ways that we can destroy ourselves that we are also aware of. Global thermonuclear war would be one of the most effective. Degradation of the environment, with the destruction of ecological support systems, is all around, with desertification, acidification of the oceans, and air and water pollution. Figure 12: A radical change in the blink of an eye. There have been some remarkable examples of international collaboration. When Paul Crutzen discovered the hole in the atmosphere's ozone layer, which allowed the more harmful parts of the solar radiation to reach the surface, there was the possibility that if this continued it would destroy the DNA that is in the cells of every living organism. It was possible to establish that the destruction of the ozone layer, and the forming of the hole, was due to the extensive use of chlorofluorocarbons, CFCs, in industrial processes, refrigerators, and as the propellant of personal deodorant sprays. A worldwide agreement then was reached to ban these chemicals, to find substitutes for their various uses. It was a triumph of science and of international collaboration. And it was a very effective one too: the ozone hole stopped expanding, started to shrink, and now it is effectively closing. We have saved humanity, life, and the planet! Per definition we are only as smart or just a little bit smarter than the latest challenge that didn't kill us. There are challenges ahead that we can already see and prepare for. Monitoring near-Earth asteroids and studying ways to alter their orbits to avoid fatal impacts is one of them. Banning and eliminating nuclear armaments is another. Finding sustainable ways of powering our industrial civilization, and extending its benefits to billions of people more, is certainly a necessity we can't shrink away from. Then there are the unknown unknowns, which we are unprepared for. There are some who believe that a long-living technological civilization is an oxymoron, that its flame is so intense that it rapidly consumes itself. And that AGIs could be a catalyst in this destructive process.