Dr. James Hughes is Director of Institute of Ethics and Emerging Technology, Bioethicist and sociologist at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. where he teaches health policy and serves as Assoc. Dir. of Institutional Research and Planning, holds a doctorate in Sociology from the Univ. of Chicago, where he also taught bioethics at the McLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics. Dr. Hughes is a Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of Humanity Plus, the Neuro Ethics Society, the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities, the Working Group on Ethic and Tech at Yale Univ., and is the celebrated author of "Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future."
NOTE: Transhumanism seeks to improve human beings by altering their DNA, adding genes, adding robotics and other technology to bring us to a state of post-human. Most do not believe in God.
Q: I'd like to get your response to all of the information that has been coming out on this subject and particularly in the Royal Society meetings. Have you paid any attention to this?
A: I did, and it's certainly on the radar screen of transhumanists in general. We are very interested in the topic of ET as it might reflect on our own trajectory here on earth.
Q: We're also approaching the anniversary of the day in April 1960 when astronomer Frank Drake at Cornell formulated his Drake Equation and kick-started the SETI program. Can you explain the Drake Equation, and what do you think of SETI?
A: I'm a strong supporter of SETI, and the Drake Equation is basically a set of calculations that try to figure out what the likelihood is of there being starfaring civilizations in our galaxy. A lot of it has been hand waving because we haven't had sufficient information about the formation of planets, for instance, around stars. But to the extent that we could, over the last 40-50 years, folks have been trying to plug into this equation. What we do know is that there is no visible evidence of other intelligent species in the galaxy, and that's pretty disappointing.
Q: Drake calculated a mathematical possibility of somewhere around 10,000 civilizations of ET intelligence. And I noticed coming out of these meetings, out of the UK over the last couple of weeks, that even the Royal Astronomer, Lloyd Martin Rees, who bends the queen's ear on such matters, had an article this week in which he said aliens may be staring us in the face, and we just don't recognize them.
A: Well, first, on the math possibilities,as I said, I think almost all people who try to plug in the numbers come up with the possibility that there have been in the past many civilizations capable of starfaring. Whether a civilization actually wants to go to the stars once they get capable of it is another whole question. I think that what Martin is pointing out is that we've been very anthropocentric about our expectations of what they would look like; most of the cultural expectations in the last 50 yrs have been of these kind of humanoid, flying saucer types; and it's most likely that the way the other species around the galaxy would have colonized or explored the galaxy, would have been in robotic - and potentially nanorobotic form. So if you start to extrapolate along THOSE lines, it may be that cockroaches may be one of the nanorobotic forms of life that aliens have sent here to check us out with. And that, of course, is certainly possible. It's a heck of a lot easier to send a tiny little robot through space in terms of payload and robustness of the form of life, than to send a big sack of meat and flesh and water [that would be us]. So, it's most likely that we wouldn't recognize as living, whatever they sent here.
Q: One of your friends is a Chair in the IEET, transhumanist philosopher, Director of the humanist Future of Humanity Institute at the Univ of Oxford, Nick Bostrum. Within the last year or so, he has written an editorial in which he says that he desperately hopes that we never find signs of ET life, advanced or otherwise, because of something having to do with what he called "the great filter." Can you explain what Bostrum was talking about?
A: It starts with the Fermi Paradox, which is the observation that so far as we can tell there's no evidence of other intelligence or starfaring civilizations in the galaxy. Now, there's the problem of time, that we may not have overlapped with their existence and the spread of their visible presence. There's many different kinds of problems with this, but it doesn't seem like they're out there. They're not doing the kind of galactic engineering that we might expect a civilization to do. Then, if that's the case, the question is: why, what happened to all the potential civilizations, that they never got to that stage? And then we want to try and extrapolate what's our likelihood of getting to that stage? So, what Nick is saying is if we were to see some evidence of them out there, then it's possible that the reason that they're aren't a lot of them is that they blow themselves up at a certain point. You get to the point of civilizational robustness, and then you invent nanotechnology or you invent quantum tunneling or something like that, and you just blow yourself to smithereens. If that's what happens to all of the potential civilizations out there, and there's a couple that make it past that, to the starfaring stage that they would become visible to us, that's bad news for us. If, on the other hand, what happens to all those civilizations is that you get up to the mammal (nano?) stage and then there's no payoff for intelligence, which is one of the hypotheses, that evolutionary theory says that intelligence is an accident, basically. So, if intelligence is an accident that we happened to have lucked into, and the reasons that we don't see starfaring civilizations is that all those others have life on them, but they never got intelligent life on them, then that's relatively good news for us, because that means that altho we may still blow ourselves up in the future, blowing yourself up in the future isn't what happened to every other potential starfaring civilization. It's just that they never lucked into intelligence. So that's what he's saying, is that hopefully we're past whatever filters there are out there that keep starfaring civilizations from being visible.
Q: Remember a few years ago, when the Cydonia phase in the Cydonia region on Mars was really popular? At that time we interviewed some of the scientists and some of the people from NASA, and I particularly remember talking to a Dr Thomas van Flanderin, who was still working in astronomy, in Celestial Mechanics at Yale. He had worked w/a team of scientists trying to determine what the mathematical possibiities would be that those structures in the Cydonia Region - the face, the 5-sided pyramid, some of the other stuff that's in that area - had arisen naturally, or by chance. And at that time they had determined that the chances of it would have been a thousand billion billion to one against that, and that in their minds it was certain that these were artificial structures. Since that time NASA has put out more high res images that seem to have dissolved that theory, at least in some people's minds. Of course, others say it's all just a big conspiracy and NASA's actually hiding it. But beyond that it raises this other question; that if we were to find a world - whether it's Mars or some other place - and actually be able to certify that there are the remains, evidence - archaology or something - old buildings and cities, or whatever, that illustrate that at one time maybe an eon ago there was intelligent advanced life, and now all of a sudden it's gone - this would be Bostrum's nightmare, right?
A: Not a nightmare so much as that it would increase the likelihood that we are going to face, in our technology development, the kinds of threats that might have wiped out other potential civilizations. It seems very likely from our current point of view, since we know that there's nuclear weapons and bioterrorism and things like that, that we could wipe ourselves out. And then the question is: how likely is the civilization like ours, with our powers, to wipe itself out? And if you look around the galaxy and you see that almost all of them did [potentially], then that would be bad news for us. So that's the problem.
Q: So it's kind of illustrating if there is such a thing as a great filter, which side of it we're on, before or after.
A: Right.
Q: Transhumanists envision a not-too-distant future when the human body and mind will be optimized through bioengineering, neurocognitive manipulation, nanotech, cyborg adaption, AI, and that could - among other things - create an ideal astronaut for space exploration, that might include self-preparing physical, mental acuity, robust longevity, even the ability to interface with the AI mind of the ship. What can you tell us about this, the pros and cons, if there are any?
A: If you are open to the possibility that humanity might be able to have a post-biological form, and I think increasingly astrobiologists ARE open to that possibility, then you think about the difficulty of trying to get living, breathing humans from here to another star system, how much space you would need on a ship - even if they were frozen - to boost; and how much energy you would need to take to boost that ship across the stars. Versus - if we imagine this scenario: that we were able to download consciousness into some non-biological form and create what transhumanists refer to hypothetically as computronian (?), some kind of extremely dense form of matter that has information properties, so that you were able to record your consciousness into some forms of matter. So you could download your big bulky meat brain into a tiny little spec of nanomatter, put it inside...presumably you could do a lot of other things, make yourself 1000x more intelligent than you currently are, but at any rate - you download it into this little spec of matter, and then all you have to do is boost that across the stars. You get to the other end, you turn on your consciousness, and activate the nanoprobe, and it begins to build some kind of body for you, and you download into that. So if we're capable of thinking about how to do that, and we imagine that other species have already figured out how to do it someplace, that's one of the reasons why trying to look for the greys, or lizard people or something like that is probably an absurd expectation for what form they would take. So, even if you don't go to that extreme, just trying to get to Mars and the amount of radiation human beings are going to be exposed to in a 6-mo trip to Mars, requires as-yet-uninvented forms of radiation shielding for a space ship that would really cook us on the way. So we need to figure out how to make the human body a lot more robust than it currently is, to be able to sustain extended periods of weightlessness, to be able to sustain exposure to gamma rays and space radiation that we would currently need if we were going to become a starfaring civilization.
Q: On the subject of how long it would take, how much fuel it would take, even if you did have people frozen, some of the people we've been talking to this week, that take almost nuts and bolts interpretation of UFO-type craft, talk about how it might be possible that they might be manipulating wormholes or something, so they may be traveling extraordinary distances in a moment in time .. and in some theoretical application may be not only traveling far distances but traveling back and forward in time. That's nothing more than quantum physics, theorizing. But there are some people who believe that this is how you would get around this problem that you're talking about.
A: Well, once you get to that level of speculation basically anything's possible. If it is possible to create stable wormholes that people could travel through ... most of the theories for creating wormholes for the purposes of time travel or space travel, require that you create the wormhole one place and then take one side of it, and zip it around the galaxy to some place else. So that still requires physical space travel - and you have to tow around half of a wormhole - to the other side of the galaxy. So it's possible that it's hidden someplace, certainly sci fi speculates about that, that maybe civilizations have been to our solar system before, and out by Jupiter we're going to find a tiny little wormhole that we haven't noticed yet, that is the other end of something that we'll be able to connect up to. But, so far, we haven't seen anything like that.
Q: One of the physicist for CERN speculated that their large collider might actually open a gateway or a portal through which he said "we might send something or which something might come through to us. "So it's interesting speculation when it's coming from some of these people who do hold high degrees in physics and think that, at least on a theoretical level, it would be possible. Some of the other people we've talked to this week think that this whole idea that you're trying to use some kind of advanced science is silly, because whatever these ETs are, they are metaphysical. They're supernatural. Or extra dimensional, in that they're not traveling anywhere. They're around us all the time and maybe employ some kind of science for moving in and out of our 3-dimensional or 4-dimensional reality. But, I want to stick with transhumanism right now. There have been a number of new films, books, even comics, that employ the transhumanist theme of quasi-mortals involved in space exploration and discovery. One of the reviewers for James Cameron's new film, "Avatar," stated in his movie review five or six days ago, that this entire movie from his point of view was transhumanism from start to finish. He pointed at how 100% of the characters in the movie were doing everything they could do in the movie, because they were enhancing their bodies with external secondary means, plugging into remote links to Navi , having human/hybrid bodies, space marines using exo-skeleton suits. He talked about how the Navi are able to biologically interact with animals, and even the lesser characters were constantly using 3-D, immersive displays for nearly everything they do. I'd like to get your feedback on anything you may have noticed about the emergence of transhumanist themes in pop culture, especially as it involves the future dream of space exploration.
A: This has been a long time interest of mine. I started doing research on this about 20 years ago. My interest in particular is whether popular culture is reflecting an increasingly positive image of post-human, non-human intelligence. So I have been tracking the empires, zombies, aliens, robots, etc. as examples of trends, both in terms of our attitudes toward things like race - for instance, if you look at "Men in Black," the very first MIB movie starts with a very explicit reference to cross-border Mexican immigration, and attitudes toward them being also transplanted over there - to attitudes toward aliens on our planet. Many of these attitudes that people have toward alien life reflect popular anxieties about other cultures and peoples, and how quickly society is changing, and whether they're in control, and things like that. That's one aspect of it. But on the other hand, as transhumanists, we expect that there are going to be robot/humans and there are going to be human/animal hybrids, and we're concerned about how they're being portrayed because we think that there is a lot of potential for a hostile, negative public reaction [not surprisingly!]. So, we're interested in seeing that there be positive images, or at least sophisticated images that are both positive and negative. And I have not found a positive trend. I think you find positive images like "Avatar" but they're alongside a plethora of vampire and zombie films and films where the aliens want to suck out your brain. So for every time you find an example of post-human existence in a nonhuman body, you find examples of horrific images as well.I don't really think that there's a Hollywood conspiracy to soften this up. Hollywood is basically selling the images that people respond to, and they respond as much or more to horrific images of these things as they do to positive ones.
Q: I guess my point is that vision in film is often tomorrow's reality. Back when I was a kid we were watching Buck Rogers, now it's true in the 21st Century. He had that big watch, and within one generation we're carrying around devices that have more computing power than some of the big original military computer systems had during WWII. So I look at what we're seeing in film right now, and I think it will be tomorrow's science, and talking to you helps to separate what is reality and what will probably never happen.
A: I do think the Navi tech that they portray in the movie of humans being able to plug their consciousness into genetically compatible or neurologically compatible bodies is eventually going to be possible. That's kind of transhumanist dogma, that everything will eventually be possible.
Q: There's a lot in the transhumanist philosophy and vision for the future that concerns me because of my worldview [Questioner, Tom Horn, is a Christian] but I do believe that most of what is being speculated about is going to happen.
A: Well, pretty much by definition, if singularitarians are right that we're going to invent some superhuman consciousness and it will be capable of becoming godlike, as they call it, then yes, as soon as we get that then it would be possible in the next year, invent the Navi technology, and then do what they show in that movie. But whether those godlike AIs would want to stick around and help out humanity to invent ways of helping the disabled or not, that's one of the reasons I'm not a singularitarian.
Q: You kind of answered this a little earlier, but I want to rephrase it from this movie. The Navi, they're very humanlike. They feel passions almost identical to us, they have sex, they bear children, they raise families in
clans. They're an alien race very much like us, based on our concepts of what we think aliens would be or could be or should be - And how they, even in moral ways, would be superior to those gun-toting grunts that are going to want to mow everybody down in the film. How realistic is it, though, do you think, that if a discovery of ETI turned up in the very near future that we would be looking at people who are a very human-like species, and not just nanorobot roaches that you referred to earlier, but something that might be more similar to us, or is that just a pipe dream? Is there even any working theory that would suggest that if life is developing in an advanced stage on another planet that there are reasons why biologically it would be able to develop similar to us as hominid?
A: Xenobiologists have been doing their own version of the Drake Equation, trying to roll back the question of what is life, to its starting point, and say what are the different kinds of materials you could use to build life out of; so, there's speculation about silicon-based life, and life that could exist at the bottom of a gravity well of a Jupiter-like planet. So if you look at the entire space of life on earth; the majority of the biomass on earth is not human. Its bacteria, beetles, things like that. So, if you just look at earth, you're probably not going to run across humanoids in your exploration of the rest of the galaxy.
Q: Lord Rees said that ET could be looking right at us and we might not even know it, and that lifeforms - at least as microorganisms or something like that - we're finding in Antarctica are very hardy and can exist in conditions, even in volcanos, that 100 yrs ago we wouldn't have been able to believe. And now they're finding some indications that - like the moons of Europa - and on Mars, there's indication that there was water; There still may be some surface water and that there could be forms of life in those subsurface water systems. Do you think there's anything to that? Do you think it's probable that when we do make it to Mars that we will discover that there are things like that on Mars. Could it pose a potential threat to us, the Andromeda Strain?
A: I'm not so much worried about the Andromeda Strain, altho NASA has had protocols since we first landed on the moon for decontamination of space materials that are brought back from other planets, so there are protocols that are long thought out about how to deal with potential risk of infection. I'm quite certain that there has been cross contamination between Mars and earth in terms of at least microbiological life, and this is based on my reading of other astrobiogists. So I think we'll find at least some rudimentary life forms in the rest of the solar system.
Q: Let me turn this now to the more esoteric. The Vatican has for the last several years had comments from
various astronomers talking about how they believe there is a real possibility that we will soon be faced with our space brothers. Balducci actually made some fairly startling claims that ETs were already interacting with earth, and at the highest levels of Vatican administration there were people there who were aware of it. And even before that you had Vatican insider Malachi Martin out there saying the reason the Vatican is so heavily invested in the study of deep space at that observatory in Arizona was 'because they know what's approaching the earth,' and that it will be of the utmost importance in the next 5-10 years. His 10-year time frame ran out about 24 months ago, and you do have what seems like a significant amount of information coming out of the Vatican. So, do you think the Vatican knows something we don't, or is it simply positioning itself for the inevitable in order to somehow preserve its authority under any future scenario?
A: I think you and I know as much about alien life as the Vatican does. I don't think the Vatican has any hot line to some previous alien visitation or has an ambassador to Alpha Centauri or anything. I think what the Vatican is, though, is the oldest continuing institution in the world, and as a consequence it has a kind of organizational intelligence, not to mention Jesuits and the Vatican observatory, which is well respected - and people who work in astrobiology who are associated with that. So that's a little bit of intellectual vigor that
it brings to these questions, as well as an interest in organizational survival, so it does do some of those kinds of futurist speculation in a way that's very interesting, and I think that they're certainly right to try to anticipate what the effect might be for their theology, of these kinds of changes. Now, they haven't been terribly intelligent in the past. You know, they hung on to the heliocentric model of the universe for quite a long time, and persecuted people like Galileo in a way that really didn't help their case, and they resisted the growth of democracy for 150 years and it didn't help their case. And I don't think they're that smart about trying to figure these things out, but at least they're asking an interesting question.
Q: At Arizona State University there's a project that they came up with called "The Sophia Project." Are you familiar with that? In the press release it said the purpose of this study is to investigate the experiences of people who claim to channel or communicate with deceased people's spirit guides, angels, other wordly entities, ETs, and/or a universal intelligent God and that the objective is to investigate whether that can be
validated - that this communication is occurring. This means in some people's opinions ET is already here. This takes it back to this multi-dimensional reality. What do you make of any of that?
A: I'm a skeptic.
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Comments: It is absolutely fascinating to see the huge gulf between the thinking of theologians, UFO researchers, field investigator VERSUS the military and scientists. They are generally diametrically opposed to each other in their views of UFOs. The first group believes they are inter-dimensional demonic entities, and the second group tries to portray them as solid physical beings from other planets.
Also intriguing to me is that, while the actual scientific results prove that there is no known life off Earth, the (so-called) scientist's opinions are littered with words and phrases such as: 'possibility, theory, if, no visible evidence, potential, if we lucked into, a thousand billion billion to one against it, so far we haven't seen it' - and yet they are billed as the objective ones. Their abilities to close their minds to the actual evidence is the same rigidity of mindset as their belief in the theory of evolution. They refuse to budge off their views, none of which can be proven. At the same time, they are "skeptics" when it comes to the real evidence of demonic activity.
The other thing noteworthy of this interview is that it gives some insight into the very real world of transhumanism - and human/animal hybrids - that have already actually been created and exist in labs around the world.
No wonder God is coming back to judge the world.
Royal Heir
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