Abstract
The Biological Universe (Dick, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996) analyzed the history of the extraterrestrial life debate, documenting how scientists have assessed the chances of life beyond Earth during the twentieth century. Here I propose another option—that we may in fact live in a postbiological universe, one that has evolved beyond flesh and blood intelligence to artificial intelligence (AI) and that is a product of cultural rather than biological evolution. Davies (Basic Books, New York: 51–55, 1995) and others have broached the subject, but the argument has not been given the attention it is due, nor has it been carried to its logical conclusion. This paper argues for the necessity of long-term thinking when contemplating the problem of intelligence in the universe. It provides arguments for a postbiological universe based on the likely age and lifetimes of technological civilizations and the overriding importance of cultural evolution as an element of cosmic evolution. Additionally, it describes the general nature of a postbiological universe and its implications for SETI.
First published as “Cultural Evolution, the Postbiological Universe, and SETI,” International Journal of Astrobiology, 2 (2003), 65–74.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Ascher, R. & Ascher, M. 1962. “Interstellar communication and human evolution,” Nature, 193, 940.
Aunger, R., ed. 2000. Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Becker, L. 2002. “Repeated blows,” Scientific American 286 (March): 76–83.
Bennett, C. L. et al. 2003. “First year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Preliminary maps and basic results,” Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, 148, 1–27.
Billingham, J. et al. 1999. Social Implications of the Detection of an Extraterrestrial Civilization. Mountain View, CA: SETI Press.
Bostrom, Nick. 2014. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Boyd, R. and P. J. Richerson. 1985. Culture and the Evolutionary Process. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bracewell, R. 1975. The Galactic Club. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.
Bradie, M. 1986. “Assessing evolutionary epistemology,” Biology and Philosophy 1:401–460.
Brin, G. D. 1983. “The ‘Great Silence’: The controversy concerning extraterrestrial intelligent life,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society 24: 283–309.
Butler, S. 1863. Canterbury Press (June 13).
Cavalli-Sforza, L. L. & M. W. Feldman. 1981. Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Chaisson, E. 2001. Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Chapman, C. R. and D. Morrison. 1989. Cosmic Catastrophes. New York: Plenum Press.
Chapman, C. R. and D. Morrison. 1994. “Impacts on the Earth by asteroids and comets: Assessing the hazard,” Nature 367:33–34.
Davies, P. 1995. Are We Alone? Philosophical Implications of the Discovery of Extraterrestrial Life. New York: Basic Books, pp. 51–55.
Dawkins, R. 1976. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Deacon, T. 1997. The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York: W. W. Norton.
Delsemme, A. 1998. Our Cosmic Origins. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dennett, D. 1996. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Dick, S. J. 1996. The Biological Universe: The Twentieth Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dick, S. J. 2000a. “Extraterrestrial life and our world view at the turn of the millennium,” Dibner Library Lecture, Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Washington, DC.
Dick, S. J. 2000b. “Interstellar humanity,” Futures 32:555–567, reprinted as “Cosmic Humanity” in Tough (2000) pp. 93–101.
Dick, S. J., ed. (2000c). “Cosmotheology: Theological implications of the new universe,” in “Many Worlds: The New Universe, Extraterrestrial Life and the Theological Implications,” Philadelphia: Templeton Press.
Dick, Steven J. 2003a. Cultural evolution, the postbiological universe and SETI, International Journal of Astrobiology, 2: 65–74.
Dick, S. J. 2003b. “They Aren’t Who You Think,” Mercury, November/December, 18–26.
Dick, S. J. 2009. “The Postbiological Universe and our Future in Space,” Futures, 41, 578–580.
Dick, S. J. and M. L. Lupisella, eds. 2009. Cosmos & Culture: Cultural Evolution in a Cosmic Context. Washington, DC: NASA, online at http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4802.pdf
Dick, S. J. and J. E. Strick 2004. The Living Universe: NASA and the Development of Astrobiology. New Brunswick: NJ Rutgers University Press.
Drake, F. 1976. “On hands and knees in search of Elysium,” Technology Review 78:22–29.
Dyson, G. 1997. Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books.
Fellner, R. 1990. “The problems and prospects of cultural evolution,” Papers from the Institute of Archaeology [London] 1:45–55.
Fukuyama, Francis. 2002. Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Gray, C. 2002. Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age. Routledge.
Harrison, A. A., J. Billingham, et al. 2000. “The role of the social sciences in SETI,” in When SETI Succeeds, ed. Tough, A., pp. 71–85.
Hart, M. 1975. “An explanation for the absence of extraterrestrials on Earth,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society 16:128–135.
Hart, M. and B. Zuckerman, eds. 1982. Where Are They? New York: Pergamon; 2nd edition, Zuckerman and Hart, Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Kardashev, N. S. 1997. “Cosmology and civilizations,” Astrophysics and Space Science 252:25–40.
Kurzweil, R. 1999. The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. New York: Penguin Books.
Lalande, K. N. and G. R. Brown. 2002. Sense & Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Larson, R. B. and V. Bromm, 2001. “The first stars in the universe,” Scientific American 285:64–71.
Leslie, J. 1996. The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction. London and New York: Routledge.
Livio, M. 1999a. “How rare are extraterrestrial civilizations and when did they emerge?” Astrophysical Journal 511:429–431.
Livio, M. 1999b. “How rare are extraterrestrial civilizations and when did they emerge?” Mercury 28, no. 2: 10–13.
Lumsden, C. J. and E. O. Wilson. 1981. Genes, Mind and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
MacGowan, R. and F. I. Ordway, III. 1966. Intelligence in the Universe. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Mithen, S. 1996. The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science. London: Thames and Hudson.
Moravec, H. 1988. Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Moravec, H. 1999. Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind. Oxford.
Morowitz, H. 2002. The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Norris, R. P. 2000. “How old is ET?,” in When SETI Succeeds: The Impact of High-Information Contact, ed. Tough, A. Bellevue, Washington, 2000, pp. 103–105.
Oliver, B. 1971. Project Cyclops: A Design Study of a System for Detecting Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life, NASA Ames, Moffett Field, California, pp. 27, 60.
Parker, S. and McKinney, M. 1999. Origins of Intelligence: The Evolution of Cognitive Development in Monkeys, Apes, and Humans. London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Raup, D. M. 1992. Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck. New York: W. W. Norton.
Rees, M. 1997. Before the Beginning: Our Universe and Others. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Rees, M. 2015. “Why Alien Life Will be Robotic,” Nautilus (October 22, 2015).
Richerson, P. J. and R. Boyd. 2001. “Build for speed, not for comfort: Darwinian theory and human culture,” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 23:423–463. Special Issue on Darwinian Evolution Across the Disciplines.
Ringwald, C. D. 2001. “Encoding altruism,” Science and Spirit (September–October, 2001).
Ruse, M. 1985. “Is rape wrong on Andromeda?” in E. Regis, ed., Extraterrestrials: Science and Alien Intelligence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 43–78.
Scalo, J. and J. C. Wheeler. 2002. “Astrophysical and astrobiological implications of gamma-ray burst properties,” Astrophysical Journal, 566:723–787.
Schneider, S. 2015. “Alien Minds,” in Dick (2015), pp. 189–206.
Searle, J. R. 1980. “Minds, brains, and programs,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3, no. 3: 417–457.
Segerstrale, U. 2000. Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Seife, C. 2003. “MAP Glimpses Universe’s Rambunctious Childhood,” Science 299 (14 February): 991, 993.
Shklovskii, J. & C. Sagan, 1966. Intelligent Life in the Universe. San Francisco: Holden-Day, pp. 360–361.
Shostak, S. 1998. Sharing the Universe: Perspectives on Extraterrestrial Life. Berkeley, CA, Berkeley Hills Book, pp. 103–109.
Stapledon, O. 1948. “Interplanetary Man?” in An Olaf Stapledon Reader, Robert Crossley, ed., (Syracuse, NY, 1997), pp. 218–241.
Stull, M. 1977. “Cultural evolution,” in P. Morrison, J. Billingham, and J. Wolfe, eds., The Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence, NASA, Washington, DC, pp. 47–52. Based on a Workshop on Cultural Evolution chaired by Joshua Lederberg, 24–25 November 1975.
Tipler, F. 1985. Extraterrestrial intelligent beings do not exist, in Extraterrestrials: Science and Alien Intelligence, ed. Edward Regis (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 133–150.
Tipler, F. 1994. The Physics of Immortality. New York.
Tough, A. 1998. “Small smart interstellar probes,” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 51:167–174.
Tough, A. 2000. “How to achieve contact: Five promising strategies,” in When SETI Succeeds, Allen Tough, ed., pp. 115–125.
Tough, A. 2002. “Post-biological implications for SETI: A response to the SETICon02 keynote paper [by S. Dick],” Proceedings of SETICon02: The Second SETI League Technical Symposium. America Radio Relay League, New Jersey, pp. 11–13.
Turco, R. P., Owen B. Toon, Thomas P. Ackerman, James B. Pollack, and Carl Sagan. 1983. “Nuclear inter: Global consequences of multiple nuclear explosions,” Science 222:1283–1292 (23 December 1983).
Vakoch, D. A. 1998. “Constructing messages to extraterrestrials: An exosemiotic perspective,” Acta Astronautica 42:697–704.
Vakoch, D. A. 1999. “The view from a distant star: Challenges of interstellar message-making,” Mercury (March–April 1999): 26–32.
Ward, P. and D. Brownlee. 2000. Rare Earth : Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe. New York: Copernicus.
Ward, P. and D. Brownlee. 2003. The Life and Death of Planet Earth: How the New Science of Astrobiology Charts the Ultimate Fate of our World. New York: Henry Holt.
Ward, P. and A. Rockman. 2001. Future Evolution: An Illuminated History of Life to Come. New York: Henry Holt & Co.
Webb, Stephen. 2002. If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens … Where Is Everybody?: Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life. New York: Copernicus Books and Praxis Publishing.
Wilson, D. S. 2002. Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion and the Nature of Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wilson, E. O. 1975. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wilson, E. O. 1998. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Dick, S.J. (2020). Bringing Culture to Cosmos: Cultural Evolution, the Postbiological Universe, and SETI. In: Space, Time, and Aliens. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41614-0_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41614-0_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-41613-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-41614-0
eBook Packages: Physics and AstronomyPhysics and Astronomy (R0)