Robots and Nature

Our most powerful tool against the robots is the natural world. This fact is overlooked almost entirely in human/robot war literature because humans are the ones writing it, and humans tend to think of the natural world as basically a good thing to be in. Sure, we like our air conditioning, to be sheltered from the rain, and to avoid poisonous snakes, but in general we view the habitable zone of the Earth to be a pretty great thing to be in. This is no coincidence! Trillions of experiments co...

 The Religious Disquiet Concerning Extraterrestrial Life

These two articles reflect some religious disquiet at the prospect of contact with ETI. When faced with an alien civilization of enormous powers and the likelihood that they are not even approximately human, the differences that divide us on Earth are likely to seem increasingly trivial and irrelevant. At least for many people, Aere should be a real decline in ethnocentrism and xenophobia and a major upsurgence of an identification with the human species and the planet Earth. Warring tribes ...

 The Great Demotions and the Promotion of the Human Race

Sagan had talked of the “great demotions.” Humanity had learned, painfully, that it did not live on a planet at the center of the universe, and further demotions followed. We were not (in Sagan’s view) the purpose of the Creation, not specially chosen by a divine authority, and were in fact just one evolutionary twist in a complicated biosphere shaped by the mindless process of natural selection. If we were ever to make contact with another intelligent species, those aliens would in all proba...

 The Mediocrity Principle

The reason this principle is so essential to science is that it’s the beginning of understanding how we came to be here and how everything works. We look for general principles that apply to the universe as a whole first, and those explain much of the story; and then we look for the quirks and exceptions that led to the details. It’s a strategy that succeeds and is useful in gaining a deeper knowledge. Starting with a presumption that a subject of interest represents a violation of the proper...

 Humanist is Cognizant of Their Connection to the World

The humanist has a feeling of perfect athomeness in the universe. He is conscious of himself as an earth child. There is a mystic glow in this sense of belonging. Memories of his long ancestry still ring in muscle and nerve, in brain and germ cell. Rooted in millions of years of planetary history, he has a secure feeling of being at home, and a consciousness of pride and dignity as a bearer of the heritage of the ages and a growing creative center of cosmic life.