The Clash Say It Best
Moving on from Cosmology to the Meaning of Life (indicating you have to read the Post below in order for this post to flow nicely…scan down, please.) That’s Meaning with a capital M and Life with a capital L. The big notion… what’s it really all about, Alfie? Well, there are a couple of different notions on that. Let’s discuss them.
First: picking up where 
Michio Kaku left off: if we’re well on our way to becoming a Type I civilization from the anarchy of Type 0, and if we make it past the annihilative fates that may have befallen others in the galaxy and universe, then we’re likely to meet some other folks along the way. Other folks from galaxies far, far away … you know, the scrolling screen 
Star Wars thing. He says in a couple hundred years. If that occurs, then Stephen Hawking will likely have gotten it wrong. And we won’t have followed the path recommended by Rust Cohle from True Detective. Come again? Oh, let’s go further into those two notions.
First Hawking, which I alluded to in the last post. Stephen’s contributions have been extraordinary to cosmology, but some of his ideas about what it means to be human are, well, frankly, a bit depressing. Think The Matrix and you’ve got a pretty good idea of his notion of what it means to be human.
In fact, they use an illustration in his Grand Design series showing a bunch of brains in jars connected to some kinds of overarching infrastructure – sort of like the babies in The Matrix. That scene still gives me the creeps. Anyway, he believes we are mere players in a giant computer’s game, and that the individual’s life is meaningless because it’s merely the perception of life. The Creationists just go crazy bad-mouthing poor Stevie for his notions. But is he sort of on the right track?
Next we turn to the immortal words of the character Rust Cohle in the new HBO series True Detective. If you haven’t seen it, you should, if for no other reason than to watch the interaction (or the lack thereof) between the two leads Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey (have you noticed how weird Matthew’s gotten of late, with his appearance and his roles?) So here is Rust’s idea of the meaning of life, from Episode 1, “The Long Bright Dark”:
“I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self; an accretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody. Maybe the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.”
Think Rust is channeling Hawking? I’d say. So which will it be: stick around and become a Type I civilization, harnessing the energy of the planet, not just coal, oil or solar, and see what the next installment of life has to offer? Or do as Rust says, stop reproducing and go the way of all those other civilizations that didn’t make it. Is that really our choice to make? Or is it all just a random jumble of programmed actions, and when the giant computer’s chips overheat or the programmer gets tired of playing and switches off the machine, will we miss out on seeing what else is out there? I guess you’ll have to decide for yourself.
But I mentioned in the last post having gone back to the original short story Arthur C. Clarke wrote that became 2001: A Space Odyssey. 
Recall the scene in the film with the apes touching the monolith shortly before one giant ape clubs another to death, and then the scene immediately switches to the moon ship and The Blue Danube (that’s Johann Strauss music ya know…). What Clarke and Kubrick were alluding to rather cleverly was the notion of the monolith starting “us” on the path to evolution from apes to space travelers, with violence and death a hazard to be dealt with along the way. And what is the monolith? The creationists would say God. Michio says Clarke’s story intended the monolith to be a Von Neumann probe, sent to the moon to signal to a Type III civilization that a Type II civilization had arrived, and to come check it out. The film continues on, with what I had always assumed was the notion of the circle of life. Recall that ending image? Instead, maybe Kubrick was depicting a Type II civilization member, developing outside a human mother, since humans stopped evolving and therefore became extinct like the Dodo? Recall a Type II civilization derives its energy from the stars, as their planet’s energy is presumably depleted or endangered.
Michio has something interesting to say about evolution in that same chapter I referenced in yesterday’s post. This is a bit long, but I think it’s worth reading.
“Evolution tends to accelerate when there are isolated pockets of individuals and harsh environmental conditions. Within a small colony or tribe, small genetic differences due to inbreeding are gradually magnified, creating genetic ‘drift’ within the same species.” “Today, breeding populations are usually in the millions. In general, the larger the breeding population, the slower the rate of evolution. Because a Type I civilization will no longer have isolated breeding populations, there will be a gradual mixing of peoples which will terminate their evolution as a species.”
So the end of the evolutionary line for humans will be when we become a Type I civilization. That’s what Rust recommends for us but for completely different reasons. When we become a Type I civilization, the need to evolve as individuals will cease, but what comes next? Michio suggests that the population of the earth will top out at 12 billion in the 22nd century. That’s about when he suggests we’ll make the leap to the Type I civilization. Will we make it that far? And is that all just part of that cosmic computer game’s programming? It does kind of feel like Luigi the Mario Brother would have made it through the initial hazards, only to go on to the next series of more difficult jumps. So maybe Hawking and Morpheus are really onto something! Think about it…