"God" vs. the Singularity
en:Talk:Intergalactic travel#The Main Factual Point
Why I hold there will be scientific confirmation or disconfirmation of the concept soon.
- First, by "God" I don't mean the Abrahamic concept, but rather the rationalization thereof, i.e. a contingent being, most likely manifest as a collective which has evolved in a manner similar to that by which life has evolved on the Earth. The being could be outside this universe and could be its creator or neither of these.
- Second, there are the facts of common reasoning and basic astrophysics. Since the lowest value the Drake Equation can have is one, and the lowest value a generalization of it can have is "about 1 (per galaxy)", it is therefore a direct consequence of a simple Copernican argument that the chances of this being the first galaxy to evolve intelligent life is roughly equal to the reciprocal of the number of such, as I understand it about 100 billion to 1.
- Third, I assume in this century sufficient advances to make a positive statement of fact. Astrophysics will advance so that a generalized Drake Equation will have been given empirical support on the number of planet that could support life. SETI and the like will confirm or not that EM level civilizations have or have not existed at least in this galaxy.
- At this point the epistemological basis will be set for making an assessment of the existence of 1 above.
Disconfirmation: Does the title default to us?
The thing that reason indicates but does not dictate is that we are not the first species to reach the level of scientific civilization, discounting for the moment whether in fact we have. The odds on that should be proportional to a 100 billion to one. In fact there should at least some that have done so at least thousands of years before now in our time relative to the origin of this universe.
In the Abrahamic concept the being is in a direct relationship with Man and directly affects event on Earth at least up until about -600 BCE. So assuming the being is outside this universe, there could be one of two situations: either we find there is no other apparent life at our level or higher in the universe or that there are relatively many. A few more advanced than us would be many relative to our current understanding. If none, then that could be taken either as an indication that the being purposely acts to prevent there being any, i.e. a "confirmation" of an active culling of such species.
The notion of "outside this universe" could also change and be substantiated or not by astrophysics/cosmology but the case to be dealt with is this one. One could take no ETSI¹ as an indication of a culling of species that reach our level or above, the final limit of the attribution of an intentional force behind nature and by virtue of the confirmation of the culling this time a reasonably convincing one.
ETSI vs. "God"
Here something must be said about the distinction between a thing believed in and a thing found to be true when there are tangled relations between the two. The Abrahamic supreme being appears to be nothing more than a projection of primitive humans, a unification of an earlier stage of their development where they attributed anthropomorphic personalities to a variety of animate and inanimate elements of their environments.
In 1 above I conflated ETSI and the god of Abraham. It is unlikely that this would be done with an actual ETSI and that is the expected resolution based on the reasoning above. Of course there are some people who are simply impervious to facts in maintaining a belief systems and for them even contact with ETSI in another universe will not shake their convinctions much as must have been the case when those systems emerged from the mentioned predecessors. The difference is the time scale at which events will unfold, within a human lifetime as opposed to over many.
There is more to be said about the conflation in 1 above, actual ETSI, and associated concepts of realized supreme being in re the allegorical truth of the Abrahamic tradition but later ...
¹ Extra Terrestrial Superior Intelligence
