The Science...

Science and The Future

What do you think about when you read the word "future"? A huge city with white walls, fast flying cars, robots serving tea to their creators? Or the same city you are now, but older, dangerous, people hunting people to survive?

The Future is promising. Someday we may be able to live forever with super-regenerative bodies, exchanging malfunctioning or damaged organs with new cloned ones, improve our own body with powerful cybernetic devices or genetical improvements, speeding up the evolutionary process of million years to a few years.

Someday we may be able to blend our minds with computers, making the learning processes as simple as turning on a TV set. To travel to other worlds, we could live fully virtual lives in computers and, when a planet apt to support life is found, our bodies could be recreated from our genetical data stored in the computers' data banks. We may even be able to develop new kinds of bodies, better adapted to live in planets different of our own.

I don't think these are only dreams. There's no impossible matter in any of such suppositions. The only thing that can take them away from us are corrupt government, the religious superstitions, unscrupulous business people. They make war, encourage the segregation, take profits from the hunger and illness. I get really depressed to see countries enriching on the pharmaceutical industry.

If we let them continue to do that, there'll be no future, only the recall of past demons.

The Beginning and The End

Did the Big Bang really happened? Is our Universe the only one? Is it really expanding? Will it someday collapse into a universal black-hole? Is Time a real dimension or just a way to put some order in this chaotic Universe?

I don't know. The Science can make suppositions but can't prove anything till it's obvious. And not just obvious to someone, but to anyone. Science is dictatorial to scientists and democratic to everyone else. It's just the contrary of religions: the prophets can say anything and the believers can't doubt.

The scientists suppose the Universe began about 15 billion years ago. Many religions are sure it was created 5 or 10 thousand years ago by a god, looking exactly as if it was created 15 billion years before, just to put to the proof the humanity's faith. What would you think about a god that doesn't trust his own creation? And why he made us with so many doubts and unanswered questions? Is he sadistic or just not as perfect as it is told? I think the answer is far simpler: no god created the Universe. There may or may not be a god, any god, but it surely didn't created the Universe and has nothing to do with us. Although the idea of a sadistic god makes some sense when we look the way our world is today...

But the religions may be right in one thing: the end of our world may come by human hands. No, no, the planet cannot be destroyed so easily, it would need too much energy to vanish it from the stellar system. And no, I didn't say "will come", I said "may come" by human hands.

The humanity is really simple to end. Let's check some common apocalyptical prophecies:

Flood

The first registered disaster related to a flood occurred in Sumeria. The rain submerged the village and created the legend about a family that survived the flood floating in a ship. The same legend was later incorporated in a dozen different religions. And how could the humans cover the whole world with water? They couldn't. There're not enough water on Earth to do that, even melting all ice of the polar zones. But they could flood the main cities of the planet by raising the average temperature of the planet, what can be easily done with the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Most of the greatest cities of Earth were settled near the oceans, because they were a natural source of food and the only transportation media among the continents. Today, many marine species are disappearing and the air is the main transportation medium. Actually, it's more certain humanity will destroy the oceans than the contrary.

Ice Age

One of the oldest legends about a world covered with ice is the Nordic "Ragnarok". Earth had many ice ages, most of them covered just the northern hemisphere, because there're no solid land on the north pole, like Antarctica on the south pole, to hold the ice and to avoid it to travel toward the tropical zone, decreasing its temperature. The white colour of the ice reflects more sun light and makes the temperature decrease even more. It's not that simple to create an artificial ice age. The chances of a "nuclear ice age" are, fortunately, getting very small.

Fire

The fire has been, since the rise of the humanity, a friend and an enemy. We learned to control the fire and it allowed us to reach our actual level of development. But a subproduct of fire, the pollution, may cause the fall of humanity. It can raise the temperature of Earth, melting the polar ice and flooding coastal cities. It can also poison us with lethal substances. Till now, very few has been done to stop the environment pollution. Fire is, indirectly, one of the best candidates to our doom.

War

The initial need of land to grow plants and create animals in the beginning of the human society led to an abstract need of power and wealth in the past eras. And for the power and wealth, many lives were ended, of humans and other animals. The wars are present along all humanity existence. It doesn't look possible that humanity are stupid enough to engage in a global war till the destruction of every living being, although a few dictators really tried.

Disease

Epidemic diseases killed thousand people in the past. Could another destroy all humanity? With all knowledge we have today, only a very lethal and easily transmissible disease could do it. It takes very long time to develop such natural parasites and they generally don't have that time, once its weaker ancestors are detected and killed by antibiotics. And how about a biological weapon? It's hard to believe there's someone crazy enough to release an artificial parasite capable of killing so fast, risking to be itself infected and killed.

Hunger

Humanity is increasing its quantity and reducing its quality in the last centuries. There're today about 6 billion people and a food production that probably couldn't support all of them, even if well distributed, and it's not. In the world we live now, food is a privilege of the ones that can pay for it, and most that can don't deserve it. In the beginning of the human history, more descendants meant greater chances of survival. The development of weaponry and the control of fire gave us something the natural selection didn't foresee, the technology. And humanity increased faster than it could grow plants and procreate animals. Some groups have already realized that, but to many others, quantity still means survival. Today, quantity may be the cause of our extinction.

Divine Wrath

If humanity becomes bad, really bad, could a god wake up angry some day and say "die" to us? If it's really a god, no, because it's not helping us now with our problems with pollution, wars, diseases etc. So, it has no right to judge us, a god that let such things happen. Some religions say it's our decision to start and stop wars, pollution etc. And why aren't our decision and right to judge our own actions? What kind of unfair god would let us suffer so much and then terminate us as an unsuccessful experiment?

There're many other kinds of apocalyptical ends (asteroidal collision, extra-terrestrial invasion etc.), but the only one that is almost sure to happen is the explosion of our Sun, about 5 billion years from now. But I believe that will not be the end of humanity. Some day we'll be free of the pollution danger, there'll be enough food for a reasonable population, nobody will make war for omnipotent gods, including the "Money God", and we will be able to travel out of our system, searching for other stars to settle. It's a wonderful future I dream of, and if everyone makes everything possible to reach it, we'll have our paradise, with no god to charge us any tax.

Life Beyond Earth

From my first memories till today, I remember I liked to watch TV series about wild life and scientific research. A series named "Cosmos", created by Carl Sagan, taught me to think how life should be in worlds other than Earth. Many years later, when I began my undergraduating course at Unicamp, I discovered the Isaac Asimov's books. I learned to think of possible alien civilizations, not only about their biological features, but mainly about their social behavior.

Stories like "War of the Worlds" lost most of their fascination, because there're no plausible motivation to an alien civilization to cross many light-years of void space to simply destroy another. Stories and movies based on that kind of plot are only barely interesting for entertainment and generally not even for that.

"Are there life beyond Earth?" It's almost sure. A world starting with the same conditions Earth did has good chances to develop life. How many worlds in this Universe have such conditions? That's a difficult question to answer. The scientists estimate from 300 to less than one of such worlds in a galaxy like ours. Those estimations are not the only problems to an "alien contact". The other civilizations must be advanced enough to have radio receivers and, more than any thing else, they must have antennas directed to our planet or else they'll not be able to detect our transmissions to the space, which are not very frequent.

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UNDER CONSTRUCTION

The Science People

Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Orson Scott Card...

"Absence of evidence doesn't mean evidence of absence." - quoted by Carl Sagan about the failure of the SETI project. This Page is dedicated to him for his extraordinary visions of the Universe.

Page last modified on 1997-April-10 Thursday.

Page under construction.