Moore’s Law– Homo Sapiens May be the Milky Way’s First Intelligent Civilization
Posted on Oct 11, 2021 in Astronomy, Cosmology, Extraterrestrial Life, Science
As life has evolved its complexity has increased exponentially, just like Moore’s law, which states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. The regression suggests that if life takes 10 billion years to evolve to the level of complexity associated with homo sapiens, then we may be among the first, if not the first, intelligent civilization in the Milky Way, negating Drake’s Equation.
Life –A Process that Began Before Birth of Solar System?
Our Solar Nebula formed from the remnants of an earlier star, suggesting that life from this period might be preserved in the original gas, dust and ice clouds. Life on Earth may be a continuation of a process that began many billions of years before the formation of our Solar System.
“Humanity’s greatest achievement might be building our successors
In a 2013 study, geneticists Alexei Sharov at the National Institute on Ageing in Baltimore and theoretical biologist Richard Gordon at the Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory in Florida, extrapolated this trend backwards and found that by the measure of Moore’s Law, life is older than the Earth itself.
Taking Moore’s Law Back to the Origin of Life
The team takes Moore’s Law back to zero complexity and the origin of life, by measuring the complexity of life and the rate at which it has increased from prokaryotes to eukaryotes to more complex creatures such as worms, fish, amphibians and eventually mammals. The result is an exponential increase identical to that behind Moore’s Law with the doubling time, however, expanding to 376 million years rather than two years.
The application of linear regression of genetic complexity on a log scale extrapolated back to just one base pair suggests the time of the origin of life is 9.7 billion years ago. This cosmic time scale for the evolution of life has important consequences: life took ca. 5 billion years to reach the complexity of bacteria; the environments in which life originated and evolved to the prokaryote stage may have been quite different from those envisaged on Earth.
The Complexity Graph
The graph below shows the complexity of organisms, as measured by the length of functional non-redundant DNA per genome counted by nucleotide base pairs (bp), increases linearly with time (Sharov, 2012). Time is counted backwards in billions of years before the present (time 0).
Additionally they suggest that the evolution of advanced organisms has accelerated via development of additional information-processing systems: epigenetic memory, primitive mind, multicellular brain, language, books, computers, and Internet. As a result the doubling time of complexity has reached about every 20 years.
“Human Future Belongs to AI”
“Even though our roots stem from a soup of chemicals on early Earth, there should be no nostalgia attached to our beginnings nor to our current evolutionary phase,” wrote Harvard’s Avi Loeb in Microbes, Natural Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence. “The future,” he predicts, “belongs to Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems that through machine-learning will supersede natural intelligence. AI systems could roam through interstellar space and last longer than stars, representing the ultimate winners of Darwin’s survival of the fittest. The flame of consciousness that our body carries could be transferred to AI avatars that promote our goals in the Universe at large – as if they were our children.”
So, are we our Galaxy’s first Intelligent civilization? “We typically understand others with an intelligence that is lower than ours, but may miss the subtlety of those with superior intelligence,” observes Loeb. “This reminds me of the tale told by the German physicist Hans-Peter Dürr, about a fisherman who announces a new law of nature that “all fish are bigger than two inches”, until he realizes that this is the size of the holes in his fishing net. Similarly, we miss details about reality that our mind cannot grasp.”
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1304.3381: Life Before Earth
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