Seeker

by Douglas E. Richards

“To appreciate the nature and significance of the coming ‘singularity,’ it is important to ponder the nature of exponential growth. Toward this end, I am fond of telling the tale of the inventor of chess and his patron, the emperor of China. In response to the emperor’s offer of a reward for his new beloved game, the inventor asked for a single grain of rice on the first square, two on the second square, four on the third, and so on. The emperor quickly granted this seemingly benign and humble request. “One version of the story has the emperor going bankrupt as the sixty-three doublings ultimately totaled eighteen million trillion grains of rice, which would require rice fields covering twice the surface area of the Earth, oceans included. “Another version of the story has the inventor losing his head.” —Ray Kurzweil, The Law of Accelerating Returns

what biological machinery had managed to do on Earth for billions of years. When a human sperm and egg came together to form a single cell, this cell possessed the programming and technical capabilities needed to self-assemble an entire human, the perfect example of nanofabrication in practice. This single cell used raw materials found in its environment to quickly produce an identical cell, which then became four, which then became eight—eventually multiplying into the trillions. And each duplication event along the way required a cell to find the molecular constituents of its DNA and assemble a perfect copy, three-billion letters long, something it did with astonishing fidelity. Then, as if having a single cell direct the manufacture of trillions of others wasn’t impressive enough, these identical cells would begin to specialize along the way. Following the dictates of a complex set of instructions, some miraculously transformed into eye cells, some into brain cells, some into heart cells, some into muscle cells, and so on. The automated self-construction of a human being from a single cell, including a working brain hundreds of billions of neurons strong, was a staggering, mind-boggling feat of engineering. But since nature made this look relatively easy, it was largely taken for granted. Those who celebrated mankind’s engineering genius as being incomparable, raving about the magic of a 3D printer capable of creating tiny plastic action figures, almost never considered...

Struggle, purpose, accomplishment, and challenge are what truly brings meaning to existence.

The lesson of evolution is that struggle and competition are the only sculptors that can ensure a species reaches its highest potential. Only a struggle for the ultimate stakes can bring out the best on all sides, as each side is forced to adapt and improve in response to the other, in a constant escalation of potential.”

“War appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention.” —Henry Maine

In an international poll, ninety percent of respondents said that worldwide poverty has gotten worse in the past thirty years, when, in fact, it has fallen by more than half.

“Because hope and optimism doesn’t sell nearly as well as pessimism and despair. Your news outlets earn clicks and viewership by sowing alarmism and division. Your social media plays to addictions and creates unprecedented social pressures. You’re wired by evolution to find bad news more motivational than good. To seek it out.

Good news is no news, so the media megaphone is at the disposal of any politician, journalist, or activist who can plausibly warn of a coming disaster.

2016 article in Popular Science, entitled “Earth May Be Unique In The Universe: what does that mean for the search for alien life?” EXCERPT: After completing a census of the cosmos, a research team based in Sweden thinks that Earth may be more special than we thought. Scientific American’s Shannon Hall explains: Astronomer Erik Zackrisson from Uppsala University and his colleagues created a cosmic compendium of all the terrestrial exoplanets likely to exist throughout the observable universe, based on the rocky worlds astronomers have found so far. In a powerful computer simulation, they first created their own mini universe containing models of the earliest galaxies. Then they unleashed the laws of physics—as close as scientists understand them—that describe how galaxies grow, how stars evolve, and how planets come to be. Finally, they fast-forwarded through 13.8 billion years of cosmic history. What they concluded was that Earth may be unique among the universe’s estimated 700 million trillion rocky planets.