There are many problems in this world I would like to see solved: poverty and suffering, Government's interference in personal choices, dictatorships, stupid wars and crusades, needlessly bureaucratic governments, corporationism, monopolies and cartels, needless killing of intelligent life, both through unnatural and "natural" causes, existence of unnatural inefficiencies in our society such as one-click patents, the practice of misapplying tangible-property laws unchanged to thoughts and expressions, hatred based on stupid reasons like the name of one's Flying Spaghetti Monster, the problems of finding the fastest and surest path to human progress, maximizing human happiness, and finally, caring about my own, my loved ones', my family's and my friends' happiness, etc. I am very passionate about working on these all problems.
But, to me, no problem seems as pressing as what I shall call the "One Basket Problem" --- all our eggs are in one basket, and we need a backup.
By almost any criterion1, continued survival is the most important problem. For example, the best way to maximize human happiness is to first ensure that the species doesn't go extinct. In fact, I believe that our entire value system stems from the instinct to survive -- in that sense, asking that we survive is both logical and moral.
1 ((One has to choose this criterion carefully. Suppose your criterion was "minimize human suffering." The optimal solution would then be to have no humans at all, and to let the species die most painlessly. This is probably not what you had in mind. You probably wanted to both keep us around and minimize suffering. The criterion will usually be a combination of our desires to keep us around, maximize happiness and minimize suffering.))
If we look out in the vast universe, intelligent life seems amazingly sparse, for whatever reason (See my blurb on "Where are they?" - link: FermiParadox, for example). We are the only ones that we know of. To me, nothing seems more important than ensuring that this rare thing we have, keeps going; that intelligent life continues2. In a long, 15 billion years of the interplay between various pieces of rock, and through a very long process, chance-events have recently culminated in a remarkable result in a remote corner of the universe: the emergence of tiny, intelligent, "thinking" blobs, possessing a few appendages, on the surface of a small, fragile, and amazingly beautiful, blue-green rock. Once it emerged, this intelligence rapidly improved. Once it reached a threshold, progress happened even faster because of accumulation of knowledge (technology, culture). In the last eye-blink, these tiny blobs have accomplished such things as visiting other nearby rocks. This intelligence is now all set to explode on the scene that is our universe. It is all set to modify and improve itself. But, it currently lives in a remarkably fragile and dangerous environment. As you see in the picture below, those "other rocks" tend to be really barren, and the blue-green planets with intelligent blobs on them extremely rare; so rare that we know of only one.
2 ((..preferably in forms that are not ab-initio "alien" AIs. Even things like human-computer hybrids that could be the result of successive self-improvement of human beings via use of computing technologies would be preferable to the former. It is not that I am biased towards our human gene-pool or towards carbon as opposed to silicon. I just feel that our value-system will be more easily transferred to the new entities-in-charge if we are the ones who are or become those new entities.))
We need a backup.
The world is a dangerous place. Dinosaurs going extinct was just a minor hint of the danger -- life itself continued then. Technology has made things more dangerous. But, technology has also brought us tremendous benefits. The threat of dangers is not a good reason to halt progress. However, it is a good reason to take precautions. And, the most sensible and simple precaution we can take is to make backups. That is all I ask.
I am not asking anyone, or the world, to shun technology. I love technology. But, I feel that sometimes we pursue technology without being duly cautious. Did you know, for example, that in the 1940s, U.S. tested the then-new atomic bombs OVER the fear of some scientists that they might set the whole atmosphere on fire? That may have been a small probability that arose from our lack of knowledge, but how can we have ever taken that chance?! What do you consider worse -- a few decades of an unfavored political system, or the complete eradication of human and other life, which is a rare and lucky result of 1,000,000,000 or more decades of interplanetary play? Did you know that physicists today do not hesitate to propose experiments that can risk a phase-change of the whole of universe, or experiments that propose to spring off other universes ("bubbles") from the bubble that our own universe is? Can't these experiments wait a few more decades for us to assess the risks more thoroughly, and to overcome such risks? You might have heard that the genomic blueprint of anthrax was published online recently for all to see, before it got taken off upon the request of (Ray Kurzweil and) Bill Joy, who has been labeled a "neo-Luddite" by tech-enthusiasts.
Tech-enthusiasts, I am on your side! I probably love technology more than anyone I know. For example, so excited I am by it that I have been an unpaid "salesman" of roomba for several years. I am not a "Luddite" or a "neo-Luddite." I love where we are headed. I am excited about the new world that is rapidly becoming a reality, a world where we will get to see and visit beautiful star-systems, a world in which computers are smart, nanotechnology rules, we don't fall sick, age or are fragile, the line between us and computers is thin... the world in which artificial or engineered self-replicating bacteria, microbes, nanobots or "bacteriobots" (engineered microbes) build anything we fathom within minutes; the world which will soon lead to greater "shocks" like Jupiter Brains, Matrioshka Brains, Dyson Spheres, Intelligence Explosion, Technological Singularity, computronium, etc. Step back, take in the larger picture, and let go of your biases towards carbon and human beings for a minute; think of the universe as a stupid random collection of rocks and matter; one would very much like to see these rocks organize themselves into something more than rocks, perhaps into one or more thinking masses of computronium, and that does seem to me to be the logical and desirable outcome of the long evolutionary process that got us here. That is the closest we can come to discovering a "purpose" or "meaning" (apart from 42) or the "why" of "life, universe, and everything"
However, between the current world and that new, wonderful world lies some time and the discovery of new technologies. That is where lie possibilities of complete and utter disaster, like "grey goo," a super-intelligent unfriendly AI, nuclear threats, runaway global warming, asteroid impacts, supernova explosions, etc. To imagine grey goo, imagine a self-replicating, carbon-eating nanobot/bacteriobot gone amok, either by chance or engineered to do so by a terrorist, quickly destroying all intelligent life in the process.
As we take the plunge at our breakneck pace into all those new technologies, why not create a backup? That is all I ask. Every computer system administrator knows that making a backup is very important. Currently, all our eggs are in one basket, and not just metaphorically. If you regard the existence of intelligence or intelligent life as a good thing, we are the universe's only known hope. We can't afford to be careless with ourselves.
Why not take a small time, say, 40 years, and colonize Mars first? Forty years is nothing compared to the long, very long journey we have undertaken in reaching here. Say; over the next forty years, we establish a self-sufficient base on Mars. During this intermediate time, we should be especially careful when pursuing dangerous technologies on earth. That is all I ask.
Forty years really is nothing compared to the time we have spent getting from there to here. After that, feel free to research self-replicating carbon-eating bots, engineer super-intelligent AIs, publish anthrax genomes online or pursue other potentially dangerous technologies, at a breakneck pace (though, of course, I would still recommend doing all that carefully.). Then, even if a big accident wipes out all human life on earth, there is some chance that humans on Mars will continue the species, and vice versa.
And, you guessed it, there are private projects in progress that propose rapid colonization of Mars (for example, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Mars and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4Frontiers). And, I believe that such are the causes to which a major portion of my monetary contributions will go. But, if one or more governments or big organizations got behind such a project, it would make a lot of difference.
P.S.: To Singularitarians: Consider your argument of why Singularity is good. Take any definition of "net happiness" or "net intelligence" or whatever else you consider desirable -- try to maximize its expectation value. Your equations will indeed show you that Singularity is a good thing. But, now add the small possibility of a disaster, say, the possibility of a disaster inherent in technologies that lead up to the Singularity. Your equations should now show you that creating a backup is an optimal solution, even if that means slightly delaying the Singularity. Mine do, whichever way I look at them.
P.P.S.: I also wanted to point out that my estimates for the timeline for Mars are probably not overoptimistic; they could even be conservative. For example, even though I use the numbers "40 years" and "in need of funding," 4frontiers is a for-profit company, which believes (IIUC) that it should have a working (and commercially viable!) base by 2025.
-- Deepak Goel (deego at gnufansNOSPAM period org), July/August, 2006.
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