X-Message-Number: 14599
Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2000 13:08:09 +0200
From: David Stodolsky <>
Subject: Natural Ethics?

I will argue for a "transcendent," natural religion that would be 
adopted as obvious by all advanced civilizations. Religion is defined 
as a belief system assuming dependence on a power superior to natural 
law. The belief system will give guidelines for ethical behavior.

Are we limited to this Universe? If the "we" is human beings, then it 
seems we are limited to this reality/universe. But if the "we" is a 
transcendent intelligence of which humanity is or can be a part of, 
then all bets are off.

We regard our physical laws as an instance of all possible realities, 
which we just happen to have due to the conditions at the moment of 
formation of our Universe. It may be possible to create new universes 
with different physical laws:
http://www.transhuman.com/mirrors/www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Omega/baby.txt
and it is argued that successful industrial civilizations will 
eventually create black holes (baby universes). See "Possible 
Implications of the Quantum Theory of Gravity, An Introduction to the 
Meduso-Anthropic Principle" by Louis Crane.
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/hep-th/9402104
This is a nontechnical paper about how the activities of 
technological civilizations could influence the evolution of baby 
universes. The Meduso-Anthropic Principle refers to certain life 
forms which are vastly different at different stages of development, 
such as corals and jelly fish. In this case a universe is a "meduso" 
stage which gives rise to the "anthropic" stage, intelligent life, 
which in turn produces new universes, and so on. Thus, intelligent 
life transcends physical law in the cosmos as a whole. Our Universe 
could be a black hole in an other universe created by intelligent 
life there. This should induce a reverence for intelligent life!

The guideline for behavior we can derive from this is that humanity 
better develop the ability to produce black holes, if we want to 
function as first class citizens of the cosmos. This is a non-trivial 
task, that will take a while. One approach is to capture the entire 
output of the Sun and redirect the energy to a sphere of ultra-high 
energy lasers. They would fire at the same time and a black hole 
would appear at the beam-crossing point. Black holes make ideal power 
sources, all matter dumped into them is converted to energy. Now, 
where do we get that spare Sun?

(OK, I know you are thinking: Where is the speculative part? :-)

Could we even play a role in production or stabilization of our own 
Universe? That is, be crucial actors in a "loop" of universes 
including our own? Now we are getting speculative, but "On a General 
Class of Wormhole Geometries" (DeBenedictis & Da) gives "an example 
which demonstrates how multiple closed universes may be connected."
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/gr-qc/0009072


dss
-- 
David S. Stodolsky, PhD    PGP: 0x35490763    

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