the size of the universe and the likelihood of intelligence

I recently came across an interesting quote in an article I was reading:

If the universe lasts forever, then any event that can happen, will happen, no matter how unlikely. In fact, this event will happen an infinite number of times.

The article has to do with the laws of physics and why time must eventually end, but I had thought about this idea previously while thinking about abiogenesis and the evolution of intelligence.

The large scale structure of the universe seems uniform. Once you pull out far enough, it's all filaments and voids. Since it's basically the same everywhere, the likelihood of an event occurring in one part of the universe should be the same as the likelihood of it occurring in another part of the universe.

Of course this depends on the type of event and scale we're talking about. Supernovae are a relatively frequent occurrence at the level of individual galaxies. But there might be 100 gamma ray bursts per day across the entire universe (which is considerably larger).

We could generalize this and say that for any cosmological event there's a particular probability density (P) for it which could be expressed as the likelihood of finding such an event occurring in a randomly chosen galaxy the size of our own. For the above two examples, P_supernova > P_{gamma-ray-burster}, though we don't know by exactly how much.

So what's the P for life? If you chose a Milky Way-like galaxy in the universe at random, how many planets could you expect to find in it, on average, that had ongoing processes of biological evolution taking place?

What's the P for intelligent life? What's the scale of the universe at which P_{intelligent-life} = 1? What's the average density of intelligent life for the universe as a whole? (Since the universe is roughly uniform in condition, it makes sense that everything is about equally distributed.)

As I mentioned in the previous post, if the Medea hypothesis is true, it might be very difficult for life to evolve even to the level of complexity and order we see in Cambrian biology, let alone intelligent life like our own. The scale of the universe at which P_{intelligent-life} = 1 might be extremely large, maybe even larger than the observable universe. It would explain why we don't see any intelligent civilizations even though we should if any existed.

It also might explain why the universe is so large. According to some cosmologists, the difference between the size of the observable universe and the actual universe is the same as the difference between an atom and the surface of the earth. (Mind you, the observable universe is already unfathomably large.)

Why do we observe such a large universe? Perhaps it's because that's the only kind of universe that can support the sort of life that would evolve to ask the question, "Why do we observe such a large universe?" Smaller universes might exist, though they never reach a scale large enough for intelligent life to become probable.

sustainability, part 2

I want to clarify the post I wrote on sustainability yesterday. There are many definitions of the word "sustainability", and I don't want to give the impression that I'm impugning environmentalism. I'm not. In some contexts, it's a feel-good buzz-word with little substance, but that's not the case for all uses of the word.

One important, legitimate use of the concept has to do with promoting sustainable development: "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." (link) Of course this encompasses a lot, and different organizations and institutions have approached the subject differently. In general what it points to is the need to reconcile social and economic demands with environmental ones. How do we increase human affluence while at the same time dealing with the pressures placed on the environment by population growth, energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, soil erosion and depletion, species extinction through deforestation and over-fishing, pollution of fresh water sources, etc.?

These aren't marginal questions. On the contrary, I believe they're the problems demanding the most immediate attention right now. Many of them might be soluble, and their solutions are connected on a deep level with issues of human justice. More on that in a bit.

But there's another definition of "sustainable" I was using in my last post which is separate from but connected with the sense intended by environmentalists. That has more generally to do with how biological systems remain diverse and productive over time. It's separate from the environmentalist conception of sustainability in the sense that it's more general, and it does not necessarily imply human decision-making. An ecosystem in this sense might be sustainable or unsustainable in the absence of humans. For example, if you have a closed system in which organism A is the natural predator of organism B, the system (relationship between the two organisms) is unsustainable if A can completely kill off B in a generation or two before B can replenish itself through reproduction. So they're separate concepts.

But the two concepts come into relation when we think about the specific impact human civilization has on the environment. And they're certainly in relation—I would say confused with one another—when someone claims that modern human civilization is the original and sole source of unsustainability in the larger, ecological sense. It was against this latter claim which I was trying to intervene.

Yes, modern civilization as it currently exists is not sustainable. If development continues in a straight line from where it is now, our civilization will in all likelihood collapse.

But it's also true that every civilization which has ever existed—and almost every form of human society above the hunter-gatherer level—was also unsustainable. In some cases it was for internal, economic and political reasons; in many cases it was for ecological reasons. Jared Diamond goes through these examples in detail in his book Collapse.

But what few people appreciate is that some hunter-gatherer societies were also unsustainable in both senses of the word. They wreaked ecological havoc, and their form of development led to their demise. The Clovis culture of North America serves as an example. So do the first inhabitants of Australia. Human life itself appears to become unsustainable in many cases, even in the absence of capitalism and modern industry.

Now, unsustainability does not entail annihilation. I think almost anyone would agree that Roman civilization was unsustainable. It did, after all, collapse! Whether that was for ecological reasons or not isn't important here. What matters is that the techniques of production developed by the Romans were not completely lost. In fact, many of them survived and were developed down through the Middle Ages by European Christians and by Muslims in the Near East. Sometimes techniques are totally lost, like writing when the Mayan civilization collapsed. But it's not as though the collapse of the Roman Empire threw Eurasia back into the stone age. We might say the Roman Empire as a particular kind of human civilization was unsustainable, even while in a more general sense we can say that human civilization itself, as a genus, has sustained itself and continued to develop.

This brings us to the question of the sustainability of life itself. Here we have to deal with the broad, ecological category of sustainability. Does life remain diverse and productive over time?

I would say it depends on the time scale you look at, and it depends when in the history of time you're looking. If you're looking after the Cambrian explosion, and you're looking at a time-slice of a few tens of millions of years, then yes, you're liable to find sustainability. But if you take the Phanerozoic (the last 540 million years) as a whole, the picture looks quite different:

This is a graph of biodiversity since the Cambrian explosion. (The Cambrian explosion marks a radical proliferation of life. It's when modern body plans came into existence.) The yellow triangles on the chart represent the major mass extinctions. They're known as the "big five" because there are five of them: (1) the Ordovician-Silurian event (27% of all families and 57% of all genera wiped out), (2) late Devonian extinction (19% of all families, 50% of all genera and 70% of all species, gone), (3) the Permian-Triassic extinction (mother of all extinction events in which 53% of marine families, 84% of marine genera, about 96% of all marine species and an estimated 70% of land species are wiped out), (4) Triassic-Jurassic extinction event (20% of marine families and 55% of marine genera went extinct), and (5) the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) extinction event (this is the one that killed the dinosaurs, but it took 70% of all species with it, too).

The best known of all these is of course the last one, the extinction of the dinosaurs. That's also the one paleontologists are almost certain was caused by an outside event, the collision with the earth of a 15 km wide asteroid. This is probably why many people have been led to believe that extinction events are caused by the intervention of things like comets or volcanos. But there's hardly any consensus as to what caused these extinctions, or the five other minor extinctions (blue triangles on the chart). Is this a case of the smooth, sustainable evolution of life being interrupted by chance bollide impacts or volcano eruptions? Or does life bring these mass extinctions upon itself when it develops too far in a direction which is unsustainable?

The point comes home more emphatically when we switch time-scale. Let's pull back and think about the period before the Cambrian explosion, what used to be called the "Precambrian" period but is now called the Archean and the Proterozoic. Now we're thinking about life on the order of billions or hundreds of millions of years, not tens of millions of years. If we imagine the Earth were only 12 hours old, we would be talking about what happened between about 2:00 (about when life started) and 10:00 (a little after animals came about).

Now we start to notice some drastic events. Starting around 3500 ma, photosynthesis starts. The cyanobacteria in the world's oceans are converting sunlight and CO₂ into food, and they're releasing oxygen into the oceans. First the oxygen is absorbed by the water and the rocks in the oceans. After a few hundred million years of that, the oceans become saturated, and the oxygen starts to fill the atmosphere. The theory accepted by the scientific community is that the oxygen oxidized the methane in the atmosphere. The methane could no longer act as a greenhouse gas. So the earth froze. And not just a little bit. The whole thing froze. It may have been the greatest mass extinction in the whole history of life. Even before the drastic increase of oxygen in the atmosphere, the oxygen in the world's oceans would have been toxic to the anaerobic lifeforms that lived there. Whatever managed to survive the first catastrophe was probably wiped out by the second.

So there's widespread scientific consensus that at least once, life went in a direction which was unsustainable, i.e., which created instability and which decreased diversity.

I didn't realize this when I wrote the post yesterday, but there's a book that just came out on this subject by Peter Ward.  Ward also has a TED talk, but it's a bit scattered at the end, in my opinion.

I think there's a lot of evidence in favor of Ward's position. On the long-term scale, we have at least one drastic ecological catastrophe caused by life itself. On the short-term scale (last 540 ma) we have 10 extinction events (5 of them major), and while some of them were caused by outside events, it's unlikely all of them were. It really seems as though life has a tendency to fuck itself over (I'm not using "fuck" here in a technical sense, by the way).

I think there are a few implications of this:

1. Intelligent design just has to be wrong. Imagine you're an intelligent designer—presumably omniscient and omnipotent and, above all, Good—and you set yourself the task of creating intelligent beings by means of a purely causal process (because for some reason, even though you're omnipotent, you can't just snap your fingers and create them). Not only do you design a system in which 99.9% of all species which ever existed go extinct (to say NOTHING of the individuals who have feelings, personal goals, whatever). You design it so the system is actually suicidal in many, many circumstances. (Imagine that if you ran the experiment a million times, most of the time it would kill itself completely and produce nothing.  We don't yet have other planets to compare ours to, but maybe this is what happens.)  There's no design in this system! Even a person with below-average intelligence could do better.
2. The likelihood of life evolving from prokaryotes and archaea to eukaryotes and beyond is probably low. It seems if you get above a certain threshold (perhaps represented by the Cambrian explosion), suicide attempts on the part of life are still frequent, but they're less effective. (Assuming the worst mass extinctions were pre-Cambrian.) This might be why so much of the history of life on earth is represented by such simple organisms. It takes a LOT of trial and error to cross that threshold. Once one does, the evolution of complex bodies and sentience might be relatively meteoric (if still highly problematic). But between exoteric catastrophes and suicide attempts by life, it may be hard to cross that line.  So most attempts at sentient beings fail.
3. If (2) is right, that might explain why we don't see signs of intelligence in the universe. Ward makes just this case in an earlier book. Another possible explanation is that superintelligent civilization is out there, but it has no interaction with electromagnetic radiation (they don't emit it, and they don't use it for energy). That's possible, but then so is anything. Going by available evidence, I'm betting the first life we encounter looks like this and not like this.
4. From a certain abstract point of view, there's nothing novel about the fact that our way of life is unsustainable. Life may never have been sustainable for very long periods of time. And yet it's evident that life continues. Despite all these catastrophes, life came into existence only once on earth. The experiment has been interrupted many times by ecological catastrophe, but it has continued.

Of course the problem with this last point is that it's true only in a very abstract sense. Sure, cyanobacteria had the power to change the entire ecosystem of the earth and did. But it took them about a billion years to do it. That's roughly the amount of time that elapsed between the invention of the technique of photosynthesis and the first snowball earth. Never before has there existed a force on earth capable of bringing out such widespread catastrophe on the order of centuries. Our technology and our intelligence have collapsed the geological time scale down to the human time scale. We don't only reap the rewards of progress exponentially. We reap the dangers that way, too.

No doubt plenty of people think "So what? Once humans are gone, life will continue without us. There's nothing we can do to the ecosystem worse than what previous forms of life have done.  Maybe it's better to revert back to simple organisms."

Our survival instinct militates against this, of course. But I think there's a good reason to reject fatalism.

For the first time in the history of life—maybe in the history of the universe—someone cares about individuals. God doesn't care about individuals. If He did, he wouldn't have sacrificed 99.9999999% of them in the process of evolution. The process of evolution cares nothing for individuals. All it selects are genes. (As William James pointed out long ago to Herbert Spencer, evolution is survival of the fittest species, not the fittest individual.) I think one could argue about how much even previous human civilizations have cared about individuals compared with this one.

We have an almost endless list of ecological, economic, and social justice problems. Two billion people on our planet still struggle to put shoes on their feet and food in their stomachs. A woman in the United States has to worry about whether or not she'll be assaulted while walking down the street for no other reason than that she was born a woman. We wipe out thousands of species each year. We're a disgusting mess—just like you would expect from any form of life—just more nuanced and satisfied with ourselves over it. It could make one beg for plague or bollide.

But if you extricate yourself and think about it—not optimistically, not pessimistically, but just abstractly and rationally—our suffering is a sublime achievement of the universe. We feel injustice done at the expense of the dignity of the individual. It hurts the body, and it hurts the capacity to reason.

If we leave the universe, there will be no one to champion the rights of the individual. There will be no justice. Certain species will endure, and others will be wiped out. Nothing but the pure mechanism of action and reaction will exist. There will be no justice. Nor will there be pity or forgiveness. There is no God, if by that we mean a rational, moral author of the world. Before us there was no concern with the individual or with purpose, and if we die, they will die with us.

By a (probably) rare stroke of luck, evolution has brought us to this point where we can, at least in one sense, negate the process of evolution. Evolution has valorized the genus over the individual. Maybe we can reverse that. The possibilities are too tantalizing and the implications are too spectacular not to try.

Anyway, I said I would mention something about the relationship between ecology and social justice, and that we might have the capacity to resolve our sustainability problems. Check this out. It's a talk by Hans Rosling on population growth. (I posted something by him before.) You should watch the whole thing. He's one of my favorite TED speakers, and his animated graphs are awesome (though in this one he goes low-tech). Choice quote:

Child survival is the new green. Only by child survival will we stop population growth. But will it happen? I'm not an optimist. Neither am I a pessimist. I'm a very serious possibilist. It's a new category. Where we take emotion apart and we work analytically with the world. It can be done. We can have a much more just world. With green technology and investments to end poverty and global governance, the world can become like this.

I want to return to this topic, but I'm exhausted from writing tonight (2 hours straight now—I wonder if anyone reads this stuff). I think we live during an amazing time during which absolutely unprecedented events are occurring. Some might read the narrative of technological advance as something which makes human freedom obsolete. But on the contrary. If I'm right in what I've said in this post, than individual human choice is more important and more powerful than ever. It's the ultimate test of human reason to see if we can make it through the current impasse. For those who are ambitious and creative, it's the best time to be alive.

sustainability

If you think about it, every society above the hunter-gatherer level has been "unsustainable" in one way or another. It's by no means a new feature or one restricted to industrial society. Yet over the long haul, the positive feedback mechanism between population growth and technological advance has remained intact. One civilization may not be able to resolve its immediate problems and prevent its collapse, but another civilization comes along and revolutionizes those old techniques. It's at least true of the trajectory followed by Eurasian cultures since the late Pleistocene. Every solution gives rise to a new set of problems, and every new set of problems inspires a new set of solutions. The transitions are anything but smooth, and they're usually disadvantageous to individuals people and individual societies. But one can easily perceive a general advance in the aggregate.

Hell, even hunting and gathering societies haven't always been sustainable. The Clovis culture wreaked widespread ecological havoc on North American fauna, hunting many species of animal to extinction. One doesn't need an extraterrestrial cause to explain the end of the Clovis culture. They were the Native American equivalent of suburban sprawl today. Just spread out and use it up! The same thing happened in Australia when hunter-gatherers arrived there. They hunted many species to extinction. It was a completely unsustainable way of life.

I'll be even more provocative: life itself is "unsustainable". Environmentalists talk about how inefficient and wasteful modern society is. Newsflash: over 99% of species which have ever existed have gone extinct. It took just that much trial and error—probably 4 billion years worth of it—to create life that even had the concept of "sustainability". Anyone who thinks the universe or life were designed "intelligently" needs to stop and wonder why even an imbecile couldn't come up with a system less efficient, less "designed" than evolution. It's a mess.

This idea that everything on Earth is interconnected into a harmonious whole, and it's humans who have disrupted it, has begun to come under attack. Paleontologists now believe that life itself on several occasions has brought about widespread global catastrophe. We hear every day about the dangers of CO₂ in the air (and rightfully so), but how many people know about the oxygenation catastrophe that overtook the entire globe 2.5 billion years ago? Cyanobacteria pumped oxygen, a poisonous gas, into the atmosphere, and it probably led to a global extinction event. I wonder if any wise, environmentally-minded bacteria said, "Hey guys, wait a second. I don't think this toxic waste dumping is sustainable!" Of course then we wouldn't be here to talk about it. Oxygen is poisonous to us, too, which is part of the reason we age and die. A perfectly unsustainable form of metabolism, if you think about it. Except we circumvent the catastrophe just long enough to have science, learning, love, and humor.

So there's never been anything remotely ecologically sustainable about human existence or even about life. The main threat to life has always come from life itself, not from bollide impacts. Yet life is robust. It only had to have happened once, such that every living thing today is descended from the same universal ancestor that existed almost 4 billion years ago. That means that the response of life to its inherent unsustainability is to surpass its own limitations. This produces new problems of sustainability, and yet life (and now intelligent beings) step up to those challenges, too.

I think the trajectory of this - at least now - is toward the problem of energy simpliciter. Not just the problem of food. Not just the problem of motive force. Not just the problem of fuel. But the problem of energy itself. If we do experience a technological singularity this century, then by the end of the century, non-biological intelligence will far outstrip biological intelligence in our civilization. Our problem won't be producing food, obviously. The main problem will be (a) how to perform computations using the least amount of energy possible and (b) how to keep the temperature of the process below that of a few thousand solar mass stars. We'll have to keep taking in energy from the universe (photons) and exploit cold spots.

But the universe is horribly inefficient. The energy produced per cubic centimeter per second in the center of the sun is approximately equal to the energy density produced in a compost pile or in a lizard's metabolism. It's owing to the sheer mass of the sun that it produces as much energy as it does and goes as long as it does. So your woodburning stove - a manmade object - is orders of magnitude more powerful than the sun. It's very interesting how far the order and complexity of human invention already outstrips nature. The idea that superintelligent, non-biological civilization will simply become the hunters and gatherers of energy in the universe is ridiculous. That advanced civilization will have to produce its own means of subsistence just as much as we produce ours now.

Of course the ultimate sustainability problem is represented in the laws of thermodynamics. This is the problem Asimov deals with in The Last Question. According to inflationary cosmology, the universe is the ultimate free lunch, essentially created out of nothing. A superintelligent civilization might be able to exploit this subtle fact of science in much the same way as engineers are able to exploit subtle differences in air pressure to generate heavier than air flight. My guess is that there are many degrees of creating something from nothing, and that the generation of the cosmos is the most inefficient way we'll discover. The power of intelligence might one day far outstrip the power of nature even to produce a universe or a multiverse.

In short, there might always be something like a "sustainability problem". But if the past is any indication of the future, such problems will not be the end of the story but just another beginning. Even if intelligence is not eternally capable of surpassing every natural barrier placed before it, it seems to be in its essence to try.

the politics of intelligence

The point of view I suggested here is that the universe is intelligent. The universe has always had intelligence, since it has always had some form, and as this form has evolved, so too has the intelligence of the universe. This is another way of saying that the basic building blocks of the universe are not inchoate particulars (what Aristotle and the Greeks referred to as "hypokeimenon" or "hyle") but rather patterns, shapes, or intelligible appearances ("morphe" in the Greek philosophical lexicon).

Further, human individuality (subjectivity, consciousness, and moral awareness) is not a mere statistical outlier with respect to the rest of the universe. It is not evanescent mist hovering above the churning sea of brute material existence. It is an integral part of this process—maybe the most complex and ordered stage of it—which started with the Big Bang. Human individuality expresses something essential in the universe itself, since it is part of the continuum of ever-increasing complexity and order of forms of the physical world.

This is not to say humans are somehow more evolved than other things. Bacteria are no more or less evolved than human beings. Nor is it to say an asteroid couldn't come along tomorrow and wipe us out (though the odds of this happening decrease constantly). There is in all probability no "higher power" looking out for us. None of this is part of any preordained plan. But individuality does not have to be part of a plan in order to be at the center of a philosophical understanding of the cosmos. It only need to contain within itself everything it needs in order to survive, and by means of its own resources, create the scaffolding for its transition to a higher level of order and complexity.

Asteroid impacts, frozen earths, and other calamities have befallen the world already, and they will happen again. And yet all the evidence points toward life having formed once on earth, not many times. So even the simplest forms of life have within them the power to weather cosmological contingencies—even those crises created by life itself. All the great extinctions we know about happened to creatures far more complex than the prokaryotes. The received wisdom is that as we become more complex, we're also more fragile. The higher we build the edifice of intelligence and (eventually) technological civilization, the more vulnerable is our deck of cards to the slightest breeze.

And yet the speed and consistency with which consciousness has developed since the Cambrian explosion, straight through those extinctions, is astonishing. Having complex bodies, central nervous systems, spinal columns, brains, opposable thumbs, abstract thought, and emotions haven't made us more susceptible to the caprice of nature. On the contrary, they seem to have allowed us to master nature. Nature has rapidly evolved many sorts of creatures, all of which have unprecedented abilities to solve problems using finite resources. There have been catastrophic interruptions along the way, but overall the great experiment of life has gone unimpeded for almost four billion years now. The proof is in our genetic code, which has recorded the results of this experiment going all the way back to the last common ancestor.

Most would agree that, if we include things like bacteria, life in general is probably immune to extinction caused by any natural event, save the swelling of the sun into a red supergiant which engulfs the earth. And it's probably a safe bet that there are few natural events which could completely exterminate human life. The question remains whether it could be done by technological means.

The 20th century saw the development of means to bring this about. The 21st century will see the creation of further means to do it. It would be ironic if the very means by which intelligence had learned to weather the contingencies of a hostile universe became the cause of its extinction. I see no reason in principle why we shouldn't destroy ourselves with our technology. But at the same time, I also see no reason why we have to destroy ourselves. We clearly have the capability of using technology in ways that are non-destructive if not totally responsible. We survived the threat of global thermonuclear war, after all. Our most pressing existential threat at the moment comes from the impact of technology on the ecosystem. There's still no telling what effects will come of the massive oil spill which is still spewing into the Gulf of Mexico. Replacements for hydrocarbon energy sources are being created rapidly and should help the global economy move toward zero emissions over the course of the next few decades. But will that be fast enough? Are we too late? It would be tragic to fail at one of our greatest moments, and yet there's nothing to rule such endings out.

It comes down to the role that individual subjectivity—arguably nature's weirdest invention—is to play in all of this. On the one hand there's runaway technological advancement which no one seems to have the power to stop. Assuming technology is the seventh kingdom of life, it is a form of life whose characteristic behavior is to grow, multiply, and evolve without any regard for other living things in the ecosystem. And yet it is a form of life which has a symbiotic relationship with us. As yet it cannot evolve in the absence of human action and human institutions.

But—and here's the important part—those institutions embody more than a drive toward technological mastery. They also embody, in part, our moral awareness, our desire for fairness, our respect for other sentient creatures—in short, they embody human subjectivity.

It's a highly complex relationship because there's very good reason to believe that, without technological advance, we could never have arrived at the moral, political, personal, and ecological awarenesses we currently have. The evolution of technology—and human society and culture more generally—has brought about a penetrating critical awareness of itself. Technology—which just seems to inherently destroy the earth and make us kind of stupid and insane while it also makes life easier in certain respects—brings about not only an awareness of the dangers of technology but also the ability to shape and control the development of technology (while not being able to stop it or reverse it). This is necessarily part of the nature of technology itself, owing to its symbiotic relationship with us. It has to reflect our values, for better or for worse.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger correctly pointed out that "the essence of technology is by no means anything technological." What he meant is that the essence of technology can't be resolved from a technical perspective, as though it were just another engineering difficulty. I think Heidegger is correct when he says the essence of technology goes beyond the gizmos and gadgets we associate with it, and that its destiny was established long before the scientific revolution of the 17th century. What I'm saying—which is different from what Heidegger is saying—is that we're at a dangerous moment of decision right now. Technological advance is not going to stop. In all likelihood we will not "blow ourselves up", at least not to the extent necessary to make a significant dent in a trend which has gone on, so far as we can see, for millennia, through the collapses of civilizations, through plagues, economic collapses, and world wars. And even if we do stop it, it's just going to start up again either here or somewhere else in the universe. In fact, since the large-scale structure of the universe is by all appearances perfectly uniform, what we're going through here and now is probably happening everywhere else it can at the same time.

What I'm saying is that this development is, at least in its broad features, probably inevitable. So if it's going to happen anyway, why not try to make it reflect, as much as possible, the things that are really valuable? Because what we're really being offered here—maybe for the first time in the universe—is the ability to self-consciously guide evolution, maybe even to turn it into a completely rational process.

You might think to yourself, "We're completely screwed then. Just look at how irrational and unjust the world is!" But that's plainly not true. If you want to see irrational and unjust, go back 400 or even 200 years. In 1800, the average life expectancy world-wide was shorter than it is in most of the worst places today. If you think quality of life is bad now, try to imagine what it was like before there was a nation-state. Most—I would argue all—of the awareness we have acquired of the difference between right and wrong, fair and unfair, just and unjust, has come from an ugly, brutal, calamitous history. But we have learned from it, and more importantly we have learned to apply the lessons from it. That learning process hasn't ceased. It just feels that way because you're alive now. Everyone always thinks their time is the worst, but I guarantee you almost anyone from the 18th century—even an upper class person—would trade places with you in a heartbeat if you described to them what our world is like. Chattel slavery is no longer recognized as legally legitimate. The ideas in the Declaration of Independence have been marshaled in defense of struggles for independence and self-determination which have spread across the entire globe. Those ideas have been extended, far beyond what their framers initially thought possible, to encompass more than abstract political rights but also to include things like economic, racial, and gender justice. We can speak and do of so much more than anyone would ever have thought possible even a century and a half ago. It's because we have so much more to think about and it's because we receive so much more information about the world on a daily basis that we feel like things aren't getting better but worse. But if you pull back and look at it, there's a lot more going on.

The point of this is not to say that we've arrived at our destination or that everything is going smooth so just let other people worry about it. The forces of injustice, irrationality, and evil are strong in this world. The appearance that things are crazy and that there are dangers everywhere is not an illusion. It's reality. There's more at stake now than there may ever have been since life first appeared on earth. I do think it's that drastic. What I'm trying to convince you of is that it's not an uneven match. For those of us who care about ethics and who care about fairness and justice—the race is in fact too close to call. You need to understand the stakes, and you need to be involved.

So what is to be done?

The first step is to understand the broad story that I've outlined above. The whole question of intelligence and its role in the world has to be understood from a cosmological perspective. Because only when you understand it from a cosmological perspective will you be motivated to act, even when there are setbacks and things seem bleak. I would say this is the most important part. If you have trouble with philosophy, then embrace an appropriate religion, one that emphasizes compassion toward all sentient beings and in which there is a higher power who sides with the oppressed against the oppressors.

Then you have to help support or build anything that furthers these values. This isn't "activism" in the ordinary sense of going to protests or getting pieces of paper signed. You can build the right kind of civilization in a lot of different ways. You should always support transparency and fairness in political processes, no matter what. For instance, support giving broad powers to IAEA inspectors in Iran, but more importantly, support giving those same powers to inspectors in the United States—not to punish the United States, but because if we do it, then that means everyone else will have to do it too.

Create and share knowledge in all its forms: literary, musical, scientific, philosophical, technological, visual, etc. Don't hoard knowledge; share it. Our ability to share knowledge is growing exponentially. It's a tremendous opportunity. Don't just share information. Think about it and relate it back to the broader picture: the story of our civilization and the essential conflicts in it. Oppose totalitarianism in all its forms. Always support individual rights.

Things not to do. Don't just go to protests. Protests are for old liberals stuck in the 60s and for anarchists hate technology and who juggle and do puppet shows. It's occasionally useful as a tactic, but mostly it's mouthwash for leftists, something to make them feel fresh.

Another thing not to do: don't spend the majority of your time "critiquing" things. Of course one should be critical, i.e., use critical reasoning, in all things which are really worthwhile. But do it in the service of something constructive. Create knowledge and avenues of action with it. Don't use it to create despair or to make yourself feel powerless. Powerlessness is an illusion. Never in all of human history have individuals had more power to change the world.

Never martyr yourself or sacrifice yourself to a degree which is unreasonable. There is nothing noble in being oppressed or deprived. Remain aware of unfairness and privilege. Side with those who are treated unfairly against those who treat them that way. Always look for creative ways to use knowledge to subvert unfairness. But just because you're part of a privileged strata of society does not mean that all there is for you to do is to renounce your privilege and take up the cause of someone less privileged. People who come from a reasonably comfortable background and go to liberal arts colleges come away thinking (a) the world and everyone in it is screwed, (b) they're bad unless they're screwed too, and (c) the only thing you can do to redeem yourself is renounce privilege. This is the liberal arts school view of the world. It's pure preachy moralizing with no connection to reality. Ignore it.

There's actually a lot you can do as a "privileged" person, and it doesn't require you taking the equivalent of friar's vows. (I really don't like the word "privileged"—try using that word with a lower-middle-class or working class family just because they happen to be white and see what kind of reaction you get. It's a bad strategy. It's a bad tactic.) Going to college gives you the ability to do knowledge-work. You can study part of the system as a whole—or even the system itself—and look for more avenues for action and intervention. There are a lot of things you can do once you move beyond self-flagellation.

There are so many avenues for positive action that there is no excuse for doing nothing. But I think the key to everything else is starting with the right perspective, the perspective of intelligence. If you believe we're living in a meaningless universe or that, as an individual with a modicum of awareness, you're like the last living survivor of a zombie apocalypse, you're going to have a really hard time doing anything besides laying in bed, drinking, or whining.

No, the world is not great, but you have to see it for what it is. Sometimes that requires less information, not more. For example, if you read the news thoroughly every day, you're liable to form a skewed picture of what the world is like. The news of the day is always negative. You need to step back from that and take in, not necessarily more information, but a broader perspective. Creating knowledge sometimes requires us to destroy information or at least ignore it. That's how your mind recognizes things like faces or furniture—it destroys the background data and focuses on the pattern. That's what you need to allow your mind to do with our civilization and with some of human history.

If we're moving toward something like an Omega Point, then the lesson to take away from it is the one I outlined here. The universe is intelligent, not dumb, i.e., it is part of its nature to give rise to more intelligent processes. Conscious moral awareness is therefore at home in the world. Making the world reflect our values is not a hopeless cause. It's the being of history itself. We're here for a reason—not one preordained by a higher power, whatever that means, but one given to us by ourselves for our own care and use.

That any of us exists at all is a mystery. That we exist now is very strange. We live in a time of unprecedented promise and peril. There probably has never existed a more important or interesting time to be alive. That's knowledge worth using.