"bill_joy_-_why_does_the_future_not_need_us" - читать интересную книгу автора (Joy Bill)

summarized the scientific attitudes that brought us to the nuclear precipice:

"I have felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come
to them as a scientist. To feel it's there in your hands, to release this energy that
fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a
million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of
illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles - this,
what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see
what they can do with their minds."8

Now, as then, we are creators of new technologies and stars of the imagined
future, driven - this time by great financial rewards and global competition -
despite the clear dangers, hardly evaluating what it may be like to try to live in a
world that is the realistic outcome of what we are creating and imagining.


In 1947,The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists began putting a Doomsday Clock on
its cover. For more than 50 years, it has shown an estimate of the relative nuclear
danger we have faced, reflecting the changing international conditions. The hands
on the clock have moved 15 times and today, standing at nine minutes to
midnight, reflect continuing and real danger from nuclear weapons. The recent
addition of India and Pakistan to the list of nuclear powers has increased the
threat of failure of the nonproliferation goal, and this danger was reflected by
moving the hands closer to midnight in 1998.

In our time, how much danger do we face, not just from nuclear weapons, but
from all of these technologies? How high are the extinction risks?

The philosopher John Leslie has studied this question and concluded that the risk
of human extinction is at least 30 percent,9 while Ray Kurzweil believes we have
"a better than even chance of making it through," with the caveat that he has
"always been accused of being an optimist." Not only are these estimates not
encouraging, but they do not include the probability of many horrid outcomes that
lie short of extinction.

Faced with such assessments, some serious people are already suggesting that
we simply move beyond Earth as quickly as possible. We would colonize the
galaxy using von Neumann probes, which hop from star system to star system,
replicating as they go. This step will almost certainly be necessary 5 billion years
from now (or sooner if our solar system is disastrously impacted by the impending
collision of our galaxy with the Andromeda galaxy within the next 3 billion years),
but if we take Kurzweil and Moravec at their word it might be necessary by the
middle of this century.

What are the moral implications here? If we must move beyond Earth this quickly
in order for the species to survive, who accepts the responsibility for the fate of
those (most of us, after all) who are left behind? And even if we scatter to the
stars, isn't it likely that we may take our problems with us or find, later, that they
have followed us? The fate of our species on Earth and our fate in the galaxy
seem inextricably linked.