The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

by David Deutsch

I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an explanation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious ad hoc magic.

Because they did not yet know how to do science, their knowledge was only a little less parochial than biological knowledge.

Since the Enlightenment, technological progress has depended specifically on the creation of explanatory knowledge.

This increasingly intimate connection between explaining the world and controlling it is no accident, but is part of the deep structure of the world.

That is to say, every putative physical transformation, to be performed in a given time with given resources or under any other conditions, is either – impossible because it is forbidden by the laws of nature; or – achievable, given the right knowledge.

everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge.

Even with present-day technology, it would be possible to build a self-sufficient colony on the moon, powered by sunlight, recycling its waste, and obtaining raw materials from the moon itself.

Analogía para el Azufre?

Oxygen is plentiful on the moon in the form of metal oxides in moon rock.

Some elements are rare on the moon, and so in practice these would be supplied from the Earth, but in principle the colony could be entirely independent of the Earth if it sent robot space vehicles to mine asteroids for ...

all technological knowledge can eventually be implemented in...

the ‘perspiration’ phase can be automated

And the more advanced technology becomes, the shorter is the gap between inspiration and automation.

Using knowledge to cause automated physical transformations is, in itself, not unique to humans. It is the basic method by which all organisms keep themselves alive: every cell is a chemical factory.

Acá también está el argumento de “What is life?” De Margulis

So human reach is essentially the same as the reach of explanatory knowledge itself.

An environment is within human reach if it is possible to create an open-ended stream of explanatory knowledge there.

have mentioned that there has never been an unproblematic time for humans; that applies as much to the future as to the past.

On a timescale of decades, we shall be faced with choices to make substantial modifications to the biosphere,

it will be a project of planet-wide control, requiring the creation of a great deal of scientific and technological knowledge as well as knowledge about how to make such decisions rationally

any given century there is about one chance in a thousand that the Earth will be struck by a comet or asteroid large enough to kill at least a substantial proportion of all human beings.

a typical child born in the United States today is more likely to die as a result of an astronomical event than a plane crash.

don’t think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet. But I’m an optimist. We will reach out to the stars.

And most people are not satisfied merely to be confident in the survival of the species: they want to survive personally.

an unproblematic state is a state without creative thought. Its other name is death.

Nor will we ever run out of problems. The deeper an explanation is, the more new problems it creates.

no utopia is possible, but only because our values and our objectives can continue to improve indefinitely.

‘The Earth’s biosphere is incapable of supporting human life’ is actually a special case of a much more general truth, namely that, for people, problems are inevitable.

since the human ability to transform nature is limited only by the laws of physics, none of the endless stream of problems will ever constitute an impassable barrier.

Neither the human condition in particular nor our explanatory knowledge in general will ever be perfect, nor even approximately perfect. We shall always be at the beginning of infinity.

the historian Roy Porter’s book Enlightenment.)

The Continental Enlightenment was impatient for the perfected state – which led to intellectual dogmatism, political violence and new forms of tyranny.

The British Enlightenment, which was evolutionary and cognizant of human fallibility, was impatient for institutions that did not stifle gradual, continuing change.

Intergalactic space is indeed very empty by human standards. But each of those solar-system-sized cubes still contains over a billion tonnes of matter – mostly in the form of ionized hydrogen.

As for the cold, and the lack of available energy – as I said, the transmutation of hydrogen releases the energy of nuclear fusion.

All people in the universe, once they have understood enough to free themselves from parochial obstacles, face essentially the same opportunities.

That is to say, the rule is person-friendliness to people who have the relevant knowledge. Death is the rule for those who do not. These are the same rules that prevailed in the Great Rift Valley from whence we came, and have prevailed ever since.

Outside our parochial perspective, astrophysics is incomplete without a theory of people, just as it is incomplete without a theory of gravity or nuclear reactions.

So the explanations of almost all physically possible phenomena are about how knowledge would be applied to bring these phenomena about.

Of all the physical processes that can occur in nature, only the creation of knowledge exhibits that underlying unity.

the only phenomena that our best current instruments can detect at stellar distances are (1) extraordinarily luminous ones such as stars (or, to be precise, only their surfaces); (2) a few objects that obscure our view of those luminous objects; and (3) the effects of certain types of knowledge.

It follows that humans, people and knowledge are not only objectively significant: they are by far the most significant phenomena in nature – the only ones whose behaviour cannot be understood without understanding everything of fundamental importance.

It appears, nevertheless, that most environments are not yet creating any knowledge. We know of none that is, except on or near the Earth, and what we see happening elsewhere is radically different from what would happen if knowledge-creation were to become widespread. But the universe is still young.

The fact that everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge. ‘Problems are soluble.’

The ‘perspiration’ phase can always be automated.

Apart from the thoughts of people, the only process known to be capable of creating knowledge is biological evolution.

Human brains and DNA molecules each have many functions, but among other things they are general-purpose information-storage media: they are in principle capable of storing any kind of information.

One could retreat to the position that all these apparently poor design features do have some undiscovered purpose. But that is a bad explanation: it could be used to claim that any poorly designed or undesigned entity was perfectly designed.

Spontaneous generation is the formation of organisms not as offspring of other organisms, but entirely from non-living precursors

But it was finally refuted by some ingenious experiments conducted by the biologist Louis Pasteur in 1859 – the same year in which Darwin published his theory of evolution.

And that is specifically because it signals the presence of knowledge. How was that knowledge created?

A good design is hard to vary: