Charlie Rubin

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Copyright 2003. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. Charles T. Rubin is a professor of political science at Duquesne University. An earlier version of this essay was presented at “The Ethical Dimensions of Biotechnology,” a conference organized by the Henry Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom in the Modern World, Claremont McKenna College. What awaits is not oblivion but rather a future which, from our present vantage point, is best described by the words “postbiological” or even “supernatural.” It is a world in which the human race has been swept away by a tide of cultural change, usurped by its own artificial progeny. –Hans Moravec, Mind Children

We are dreaming a strange, waking dream; an inevitably brief interlude sandwiched between the long age of low-tech humanity on the one hand, and the age of human beings transcended on the other. We are living in the latter days of humanity; cybertechnologies will quickly replace us. . . . Humanity, as we know it, will be facing rapid extinction, not from natural causes like the asteroid that obliterated the dinosaurs but from a situation of our own making. We will find our niche on Earth crowded out by a better and more competitive organism. Yet this is not the end of humanity, only its physical existence as a biological life form. (Paul and COX 1996, I-2,8)

... In his Political Justice, Shelley's father Robert Godwin wrote that Benjamin Franklin showed great insight when he “conjectured ... names, Frankenstein and Franklin,“Frank” meaning free, be a coincidence? ) Godwin notes further that 28 ...

S c i e n c e should be above criticism; indeed, criticism is central the n o t to m e t h o d of science. But criticism from outsiders is no t always readily received. In venturing some criticisms of science and scientists, I want to clarify one point f rom the outset. There is no question but that we are seeing today irrational or thoughtless attacks on science coming f rom nonscientists in the academy; certainly the barbarians are sur rounding the citadel. But, if I were a scientist, I would be looking a round me quite carefully to discover those o f my fellows who were preparing to open the gates to the invaders. Not all of science's problems today can be blamed on external critics, however u n i n f o r m e d their opinions. Science is being politicized f rom the inside as well. For example, in mid-September 1994, newspapers a round the country once again headlined global warming. The occasion was the release of a "new report" by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). "Emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases pose a serious threat to the world's climate and should be urgently addressed by governments and industries a round the world, a panel of leading scientists warned yesterday," the Washington Post a n n o u n c e d ) This kind of warning is hardly even news anymore. But another side of this story is also, apparently, not newsworthy: the item in the Post was not really true. From 12 to 15 September, a working group of IPCC scientists met to finalize five of six chapters for an IPCC special report on radiative forcing and emission scenarios, and to make sure that a "Summary for Policy Makers" that was being prepared was consistent with those chapters. Certain IPCC officials had prepared what they called a backgrounder press release well in advance of the meeting, embargoed until 15 September, about the meeting 's conclusions. Thus, the basis for the news stories was a press release that both pre judged the meeting's ou tcome and was in some respects only tenuously connected to what had actually been discussed. Many of the delegates--to their c red i t -were outraged. Their reaction may explain why, in a later story in the New York Times, Sir John Houghton , one of those responsible for the press release, was at pains to say he was speaking only for himself. Perhaps the delegates were prepared to be outraged by the fact that these same officials had pressed them, in violation of IPCC rules, to approve the Summary for Policy Makers without their having even seen the science chapters it was purpor tedly summarizing-hardly an example of the scientific me thod at work.

... The whole Atlantan enclave is sur-rounded by a grid of floating security pods (49–50 ... a world of prejudice, inequality, exploitation, competition, and crime—but also a world of nobility, self-sacrifice, self-discipline ... Some encourage freedom of expression, and others discour-age ...

The L factor in the Drake equation is widely understood to account for most of the variance in estimates of the number of extraterrestrial intelligences that might be contacted by the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). It is also among the hardest to quantify. An examination of discussions of the L factor in the popular and technical SETI literature suggests that attempts to estimate L involve a variety of potentially conflicting assumptions about civilizational lifespan that reflect hopes and fears about the human future.

... We need not go as far as Jonas does. Angus must be certain about the nonexistence of a whole for his argument to hold up. ... Polit-ical philosophy needs only the possibility of there being a whole for its en-terprise to be possible, as Leo Strauss has suggested. ...

Environmental thinking vacillates between two conceptions of our relationship to nature: one assumes that human beings are simply a part of nature, the other that what is natural is defined by what humans have not interfered with. Both can conduce to making human extinction appear a way to protect the integrity of nature. An alternate view notes that human beings by nature possess speech and reason, or logos, which leads to our ability to articulate a concern for nature. The examples of Deep Ecology and transhumanism suggest that only when nature and logos are completely abstracted from one another will thinking about nature in these terms support advocacy of human extinction. Still, this alternative requires confronting the modern “demoralization” of nature, which can coexist only uneasily with either…