Finitude and Chance Pt. 3
Thursday, November 21
Today, a continuation of a Dawkins quote I featured last month.
This is another respect in which we are lucky. The universe is older than a hundred million centuries. Within a comparable time the sun will swell to a red giant and engulf the earth. Every century of hundreds of millions has been in its time, or will be when its time comes, 'the present century'. Interestingly, some physicists don't like the idea of a 'moving present', regarding it as a subjective phenomenon for which they find no house room in their equations. But it is a subjective argument I am making. How it feels to me, and I guess to you as well, is that the present moves from the past to the future, like a tiny spotlight, inching its way along a gigantic ruler of time. Everything behind the spotlight is in darkness, the darkness of the dead past. Everything ahead of the spotlight is in the darkness of the unknown future. The odds of your century being the one in the spotlight are the same as the odds that a penny, tossed down at random, will land on a particular ant crawling somewhere along the road from New York to San Francisco. In other words, it is overwhelmingly probable that you are dead.
In spite of these odds, you will notice that you are, as a matter of fact, alive.
I think we can extend this thought even further — it’s not just astonishing to be alive, but also to be alive in this particular century.
Holden Karnofsky has written about the fact that, in the past few hundred years, economic growth and technological progress have turned exponential. We shouldn’t expect this to continue indefinitely at the current rate. If it did, according to speculation from Bryan Caplan, then in a mere 8,000 years (astonishingly soon on a cosmological time scale), every atom in the universe would need to generate as much value as the current global economy does today.
So, if the past was predominately stagnant, and if the future must be as well, we are in a strange moment where progress has turned exponential, like a whirlpool that we’re all briefly caught in amidst a sea of stillness.