A Contemplation on Progress

 In three days, if all goes well, the Artemis II rocket will lift off to send people around the moon.  It will be the first time in 52 years that we have launched people beyond low earth orbit, with the highest mission orbiting about 875 miles above the earth.  Artemis II will replicate the 1968 Apollo 8 mission, circling the moon without landing, at 240,000 miles from Earth.

Just a few days ago was the 100th anniversary of the first liquid-fueled rocket launch.  Robert Goddard’s rocket weighed ten pounds and reached an altitude of 41 feet.  It made me think about the changes that a person can see over a lifetime.  Changes in the era between 1900 and 1970 were particularly striking.

In 1967, 41 years after Goddard’s rocket, the U.S. launched its first Saturn V rocket.  The Saturn V weighed 6 million pounds; 600,000 times more than Goddard’s rocket.  Saturn V reached an altitude 32,000,000 times higher than Goddard’s rocket.  The Soviet Proton-K was a comparable rocket.  We might also compare the 1977 Voyager 1 space probe to Goddard’s rocket.  Voyager has traveled 2,000,000,000,000 times father than Goddard’s rocket, so far.  So very far. 

You can see similar improvements in aircraft.  In 1919, an advanced aircraft was made entirely of wood, with linen wings coated with cellulose.  It weighed 2400 pounds, could carry a 1100 payload, which included two people.  It had a powerful 250 HP engine and a range of 450 miles at 125 mph.  In 1969, only 50 years later, Boeing flew the first 747 jumbo-jet.  Its engines generated about 300,000 horsepower.  It weighed 358,000 pounds while empty and could carry 377,000 pounds, which could include 366 passengers and 25 crew.  The 747 had a range of 5300 miles and a top speed of 700 mph.  I could compare the 747 to the Wright Flyer of 1903, but the point is already clear.

In the fifty years between 1915 and 1965, we also made advances in blowing up things and people.  The largest non-nuclear bomb ever made was used in WWI, in 1917, with an explosive yield of about 34 tonnes of TNT.  In 1961, forty-one years later, the Soviet Union exploded the Tsar Bomba with a yield of 50 megatonnes, or 1,500,000 times the yield of the WWI explosion.  Soviet engineers actually introduced a design variation to reduce the yield of the bomb by about 50% for testing.  

At some point, we stopped making things bigger, when rockets and airplanes and bombs were big enough.  Instead, we’ve made progress in making things smaller (including packages at the grocery store).  It’s harder to see the scale of the improvements, although it’s easy to appreciate the usefulness of a smartphone.  In 1945, the ENIAC computer weighed 30 tons and occupied 1800 square feet, (larger than our first house).  ENIAC could perform 5000 basic operations per second, which was a huge improvement over earlier mechanical-electrical devices.  Today’s best computer chips are about 8 inches by 8 inches in size, and can perform 63 trillion operations per second.  That’s more than a 50 billion-fold improvement in processing speed at a weight of 2.6 pounds, or 0.00004 times the weight of the ENIAC.

I’m left wondering what comes next.  I did my first physics and chemistry classes with a slide rule.  In my senior year of high school, I got a hand-held device that could multiply, divide and take a square root.  Now, I have a hand-held device that can interpret and answer verbal questions and commands, just like the ship’s computer in Star Trek.  That technology was supposed to be 300 years in the future.  

Somewhere in the world, there are technologies which are only novelties today.  Within 50 years, some of these will have million-fold or billion-fold improvements with revolutionary societal impact.  AI has already produced stunning results, and it just coming up the learning curve.  Leading AI researchers have admitted that they are not sure whether the AI systems are conscious, or not.  I think we’ll see technologies from quantum computing and communications that might seem surreal by today’s standards.  Practical nuclear fusion energy may finally be realized within 50 years.  I would not be surprised to see macroscopic manipulation of time, space or gravity.  Science fiction has imagined such things, and science fiction often precedes actual inventions.  

What else will happen?  One thing that clearly needs improvement is our way of organizing the planet into warring nations and governing.  ff we do not blow ourselves up or ruin the planet, there will be very interesting developments for the next generation.  

Where are the Great Cephalopod Cities?

 In 1896, H.G. Wells published the short story “In the Abyss”, imagining the discovery of an intelligent humanoid species living in abyssal ocean depths.  Nearly a century later, James Cameron, perhaps borrowing the title, made the film “The Abyss”, also featuring the discovery of an intelligent humanoid species living in abyssal ocean depths.  Cameron’s creatures were phosphorescent tentacled beings, whose changing colors and patterns resemble various cephalopod species.

Cephalopods are as intelligent as most mammals.  So, where are the great cephalopod cites, in the present day or fossil record?  

This image of a cephalopod city was created by AI.   
The AI agent chose to use gastropod shells as an architectural theme, unprompted. 

Cephalopods first evolved in the late Cambrian to early Devonian age, about 485 million years ago.  The earliest forms were shelled, free-swimming predatory animals, similar to today’s nautilus.  Ammonites were the most common and diverse forms of cephalopod, with over 10,000 scientifically recognized species.  Ammonites flourished for about 345 million years in the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras before dying off due to the Chicxulub meteor impact 66 million years ago.  Along with ammonites, there were shelled cephalopods of various orders, including the older orthocerids and bactritids and younger belemnites, nautiloids and unshelled coleoids (squid, octopus & cuttlefish).  Coleoids and nautilus are still living today.  Together, these orders lived and evolved for nearly 500 million years.  

Cephalopods are mobile, predatory, relatively intelligent, and sexually competitive.  These are all characteristics which would seem to predispose them to the development of tools and weapons, which might then lead to construction of protective housing, other technology and culture.  Why don’t octopuses use little spears to hunt?  Where are the ammonite spearheads in the fossil record?  Where are the great cephalopod cities?

Today’s octopuses are surprisingly intelligent but have limitations which might prevent the development of technology.  First, octopuses have very short lives.  Second, they are solitary by nature, and are less likely to synergize ideas with fellow octopuses.  Third, they die before maturation of their young, which prohibits transmission and propagation of culture and technology.  Squids, however, are social, and possibly even communicate with each other using color-changing patterns on their bodies.  Why didn’t squids develop some kind of tool-using technology?

Cephalopods are reasonably brainy and have the physical ability to manipulate their environment.  They had 500 million years to develop even the most basic technology.  Why didn’t they develop spears for hunting and huts for protection?  

Obviously, the question is not specific to cephalopods.  Where are the dinosaur firepits, arrowheads and spearheads?  The fossil record is certainly more than adequate to reveal these, if they existed.  Where are the dinosaur huts, stone monuments, pyramids and cell phones in the fossil record?  Dinosaurs had 175 million years of abundant evolutionary diversification across a wide range of inhabited environments.  If the obstacle to cephalopod cities was the lack of fire, why didn’t dinosaurs succeed where the cephalopods failed?  Why are hominids the only creatures in the history of life on earth to develop logical language, culture and technology?

Conclusion
This essay is really about the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence and the place of humankind in the universe.  We don’t need to search distant stars to find Fermi’s Paradox.  We can look at our own planet through deep time, where many species lived and died without developing even the beginnings of technological civilization.  

The development of technological intelligence is extraordinarily rare, even when evolutionary conditions seem to predispose life toward that development.  Perhaps as Darwin speculated with keen insight, human intelligence is a fluke of sexual selection, as unique and improbable as a peacock’s tail.  Perhaps it is a result of a particular set of conditions involving tree-dwelling social creatures making a transition to life on the grasslands.  Even within the hominids, homo sapiens is an outlier, the only species that progressed beyond the stone age after nearly three million years of evolution involving dozens of hominid species.  Perhaps humans’ ability to develop technology beyond stone tools is due to the abundance of metals in the Earth’s crust, which resulted from the improbable collision of the Earth and a Mars-sized planet named Theia.

We know the history of one planet very well.  Although this planet did produce a technologically capable species, that development took an inordinately long time.  Across geologic time, numerous species were pre-adapted to technological development, having reasonable intelligence, the ability to manipulate objects, sexual competition and social behaviors.   But these species failed to make the transition to technological  sentience.  No species other than humans has systematically made durable tools, constructed shelters, stored and used energy, created language capable of logical statements and developed societies.  

In the history of our planet, only humans developed social and technological sentience.  
In any meaningful way, humans are unique and alone.