Educators From The United States

"Since the intelligences in the computer will be creative thinkers, they must be classified as "people". ...And so he claims... at the omega-point limit... an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent society of people. This society, Tipler identifies as God."

"The review in Nature called POI a "masterpiece of pseudoscience". ...I don't think it's that good."

"Both of my parents, each on their own, left everything they knew in Haiti to forge new lives in the United States. And because they understood that coming to America was not enough, they eagerly sought college education—to ensure the future they wanted for themselves and for their family."

"[W]hy worry about a big rock hitting the Earth, destruction of the biosphere by inadvertent human action, accidental nuclear war..? Surely the Boundary Condition rules out those much smaller worries... Don't worry; be happy."

"[H]ow... information will be reconstituted that will allow... resurrection of the dead. ...[N]o information has been lost (the black holes having been popped by a semi-mystical process...) ...admitting that opacity and thermalisation of information may present a bit of a problem ...we'll just ...conjure up a computer with a storage capacity of 101070 bits ...and to Hell with the lost information..."

"I noted many apparent gaping holes in his arguments or assumptions of facts contrary to the best available knowledge... [V]irtually all... dismissed with the all-purpose argument: "...ruled out by the Omega Point Boundary Condition.""

"I don't have any trouble... imagining nanotechnology, von Neumann probes, AI exceeding human intelligence within 50 years, or the biosphere expanding to fill... the universe. But none of that is new, and Tipler tells it less clearly than others..."

"[U]nless I'm missing something, the wheels fall off Starship Eternity."

"Ok, the visible universe has around 1080 particles in it. The universe at Tipler's point of maximum expansion is, say, 10,000 times bigger... But... we're not using mere matter to store bits anymore. We're using (drumroll) the Higgs field... And when will this happen? ..."between 10−1010 and 10−10123 seconds before the Omega Point is reached". Whew, saved by the Gong of Doom."

"It is often said that the central concern of religion is an attempt to answer... "What is the relationship between humanity and the universe (and/or God). I agree... the factual answers... led to the ethical norms of... religions. The sharp distinction between fact and value which is common in twentieth-century philosophy and in the West was not present in the traditional religions. ...[T]his sharp distinction is ...contrary to the continued existence of science ...The growth and existence of science require certain ethical norms: for example, THOU SHALT NOT IMPOSE YOUR THEORIES ON OTHERS BY FORCE. Only persuasion, based on rational argument and experimental results, is allowed."

"The essential difficulty with divorcing morality from facts is that... there would be no way to resolve moral disputes. Morality would... be... a matter of taste... [I]n... so-called disputes over morality there is... no disagreement over fundamental moral principles, only... over facts. ...[C]onsider ...the abortion issue. There is no dispute over "Thou shall not kill,"... only... whether a fetus is a "person.""

"[T]o really test the Theory, we will need the upgrade and either the SSC—the Texas Supercollider—or the European LHC. ...[P]erhaps it would be worth several billion dollars to establish that God exists, and that one day we will all be resurrected to live forever with Him/Her."

"ouch—what a disappointment! Nothing prepared me for just how B-A-D it is."

"And how are we going to use the Higgs field to compute, organise information systems out of free quarks and pure energy... the Boundary Condition Postulate... that says that on Easter Day, 2001, Jesus Christ will return, raise the dead, etc. ...inevitable."

"I take the last existing copy of the complete works of Tipler and heave it across the event horizon of my TidyTrash™ home black hole."

"I really admired Barrow and Tipler's Anthropic Cosmic Principle, and now... it's clear how much of the actual wordcraft... was the work of Barrow."

"It would... not be... inaccurate to regard one of the subprograms of the universal mind in the far future, one with a Turing Test-passing subprogram, as an "angel.""

"[I]nclusion of the whole past, present, and future universal history in the Omega Point is more than a mere mathematical artifact. ...[T]he Omega Point "experiences" the whole of universal history "all at once.""

"[W]e cannot "see" a person who lived a few centuries before, because the light rays... have... left the solar system. Conversely, we cannot "see" the Andromeda galaxy as it now is, but... as it was 2 million years ago. So we experience as "simultaneous" the events on the boundary of our past ... But all timelike and lightlike curves converge upon the Omega Point. ...[L]ight rays from all people who died... from all... people now... from all [future] people... intersect there. The light rays... from people... are not lost forever... [T]hese rays will be intercepted and intercepted again, by the living beings who... engulfed the physical universe near the Omega Point. All the information which can be extracted from those rays will be extracted at the instant of the Omega Point."

"There is an interesting connection between my claim that the Omega Point is a Person because it contains a Turing-Test-passing subprogram, and the Christian notion of Person, as this word is applied to God. In classical Greek, the word prosopon (πρόσωπον)—persona is the Latin equivalent—primarily meant "face" or "countenance," but the word also meant a mask that an actor wore to indicate the character... By the fourth century A.D. ...this word had come to refer to those innate aspects of the human mentality which differentiate one human being from another. Today the word... refers to the total individual human mind, including the innate and learned aspects... [T]o interact with us human beings as a Person... the Omega Point would be revealing only a miniscule portion... a Person in the original sense and in the fourth century sense... '."

"Wolfhart Pannenberg... suggested... there may exist a... universal physical field (analogous to Teilhard's "radial energy")... as the source of all life, and... identified with the Holy Spirit. ...[T]he universal wave function... is a... field with the essential features of Pannenberg's... "energy" field. ...If this identification is made ...as a matter of physics ...God is in the world, everywhere... with us... at all times."

"The in its counts as a person because, at any time in our future, the collective information processing system will have generated, or will be able to generate, subprograms which will be able to pass the ; high intelligence will be required at least collectively in order to survive in the increasingly complex environment near the final state."

"[T]he human-type mind is a manifestation of an extremely low level of information processing... Nevertheless, the Omega Point is still a Person... because a Being with Its level of computer capacity could easily create a Turing-Test-passing subprogram to speak for it. ...[O]ur resurrected selves probably will interact with such a program... For lack of a better term, I shall refer to the total universal information processing system in existence at any given global time as the "universal mind.""

"The germ theory was resurrected... by Pasteur and his new medical physics. Thus... physics had to be extended to medicine in order to save the germ theory. Similarly, for religion to survive, physics must be extended into theology."

"The Omega Point is in essence the Tillich-Pannenberg God: Being itself, but the mode of Being is futurity. This establishes the Omega Point as the God... there cannot be more being than all Being..."

"[T]his necessary existence... and omniscience... can... be consistent with... free will... by showing that... William James's definition of and free will might be physically realized in . This physical indeterminism can arise only in the context of quantum gravity... completely different from the "indeterminism" arising from the uncertainty principle. (Nonrelativistic quantum mechanics is... deterministic)"

"[I]s the God (...Person ...) the God? ...the uncreated Creator of the ...universe ...Who exists necessarily ... i.e., the Person's nonexistence would be a logical contradiction."

"Only if God is not in any sense contingent can one avoid regress posed in the query, who created God?"

"This new... physical indeterminism was... discovered in the 1980s and is... a consequence of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem"

"Paul Dirac was the first physicist to argue for the Postulate of Eternal Life: "With my assumption... life need never end. There is no decisive argument for dediding between [certain] assumptions. I prefer the one that allows the possibility of endless life. One may hope that some day the question will be decided by direct observation."

"One avoids... contradiction between contingency and necessity by avoiding... sharp distinction between God and... reality. This... distinction... leads to gnostic heresy: ...a wholly other God... divorced from our ...world. It also leads... to the Problem of Evil... naturally resolved in the Omega Point Theory."

"[T]he eternal life assumption... implies... there must exist in this future (but in two precise mathematical senses, also in the present and the past) a Person Who is simultaneously transcendent to yet immanent in the physical universe of space, time, and matter. In the Person's immanent temporal aspect... changing (forever growing in knowledge and power), but in the... transcendent eternal aspect, forever complete and unchanging. How this comes about as a matter of physics will be described..."

"With the introduction into physics of the Dirac/Dyson Eternal Life Postulate, science has taken the last independent stronghold of theology."

"The probability that intelligent life which eventually attempts interstellar communication will evolve in a star system is usually expressed by the :p = f_pn_ef_lf_if_cwhere f_p is the probability that a given star system will have planets, n_e is the number of habitable planets in a solar system, f_l is the probability that life evolves on a habitable planet, f_i is the probability that intelligent life evolves on a planet with life, and f_c is the probability that an intelligent species will attempt interstellar communication within 5 billion years after the formation of the planet..."

"The problem with the Drake equation is that only f_p—and to a lesser degree n_e— is subject to experimental determination... [O]ne must have a fairly large sample; for f_l, f_i, and f_c we have only... the Earth. However, if... any intelligent species... will begin... galactic exploration within 100 years after developing... interstellar communication... the sample size is enlarged... Since f_p—and n_e can... be determined by direct astrophysical measurement, the fact that extraterrestrial intelligent beings are not present in our solar system permits us to obtain a direct astrophysical measurement of an upper bound to... f_lf_if_c, which depends only on biological and sociological factors."

"This argument assumes that the five probabilities... do not vary rapidly with galactic age. The available astrophysical evidence and most theories of the formation of solar systems indicate... this... is valid."

"Once the exploration and/or colonization of the Galaxy has begun, it can be modeled... by the mathematical theory of island colonization... developed... by MacArthur & Wilson... since... islands... are closely analogous to stars in the heaven, and von Neumann machines are even more closely analogous to biological species."

"[T]hus... any intelligent species would develop at least the rocket technology capable of... a travel velocity ves of 3 x 10-4c. At this velocity the travel time to the nearest stars would be between 104 and 105 years. This... would necessitate... self-repair capacity... Nuclear power-souces would supply the power... If power utilization during the free-fall period was... low, even chemical reactions could supply the power."

"As ves is of the same order as the stellar random motion velocities, very sensitive guidance would be required... not... an insuperable problem with the assumed level of computer technology."

"The factors f_lf_if_c should not depend strongly on the evolution of the Galaxy... and so can be regarded as constants. Since the Galaxy is between 11 and 18 billion years old, the number N of stars older than 5.3 billion years is about twice the number of stars formed after the Sun, and thus approximately equal to the number of stars in the Galaxy, 1011. Thus p \leqslant 10^{-11}. If we accept the usual values of f_p=0.1 to 1 and n_e = 1 found in most discussions... then f_lf_if_c \leqslant 10^{-10}. The number of communicating civilizations now existing in our Galaxy is less than or equal to p x (number of stars in galaxy) = 1; that is to say, us."

"[A] von Neumann cannot become obsolete... instructed by radio to make the latest devices..."

"[T]he claim that the central concern of religion is nonsense. Throughout human history, the central concern of religion has been human self-interest. In the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, all morality has been obtained from declarative sentences of the form "Thou shalt not kill—because you'll go to Hell if you do!" In the Hindu-Buddhist tradition... "...—because you'll be born as a cockroach if you do!" ...In both cases, the appeal is to physics, not to fundamental moral postulates."

"Tipler's Taub universe event horizon can opener makes the black hole horizon go away. What about the singularity? ...[Y]ou now have a very large number of naked singularities... converging toward the Omega Point, which should make things even more interesting for the universal brain emerging there."

"Hunter has pointed out that by using a Jupiter swingby to approach the Sun and then giving a velocity boost at perihelion, a solar system escape velocity... is possible with present-day chemical rockets... [M]ost other stars should have planets (or companion stars) with characteristics sufficiently close to... the Jupiter-Sun system to use this launch strategy in reverse to slow down in the other solar system."

"I shall provide a physical foundation for eschatology—the study of the ultimate future—by making the physical assumption that the universe must be capable of sustaining life indefinitely... for infinite time... [W]e have to have some theory for the future of the physical universe—since it unquestionably exists— and this is the most beautiful postulate: that total death is not inevitable. All other theories of the future necessarily postulate the ultimate extinction of everything... there is nothing uglier than extermination. We physicists know that a beautiful postulate is more likely to be correct than an ugly one. Why not adopt the Postulate of Eternal Life, at least as a working hypothesis?"

"The political polarization doesn’t help, but it is striking that the erosion in public trust is bipartisan. That should be telling us something, that there’s a broad-based questioning of the value of higher education. Yes, there are some elements that are being inflected by partisan politics, but this is pretty widespread."

"[T]he problem of interstellar travel has been reduced to... transporting a von Neumann machine to another stellar system. This can be done even with present-day rocket technology."

"Suppose there were a computer... which could run a completely faithful simulation of me—even a simulation at the quantum level so good the Pauli Exclusion Principle wouldn't let us in the same room. Would it be me? Would my consciousness somehow be shared..."

"[H]ow would this work if the brain and computer were separated by several light years? And if not, then what difference does it make if 1032 years of death intervene before the simulation begins to run? ...continuity of consciousness?"

"[T]he information to manufacture a human being is contained in the genes of a single human cell. Thus if an extraterrestrial intelligent species possessed the knowledge to synthesize a living cell—and... experts assert... the human race could develop such knowledge within 30 years—they could program a von Neumann machine to synthesize a fertilized egg cell of their species. If they possessed artificial womb technology—and such... is in the beginning stages... on Earth... they could... synthesize members of their species... As suggested by Eiseley... these beings could be raised... by the robots... free to develop their own civilization..."