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The Future of Science in the 21st Century

 

by Dr. Manuel Alfonseca

Escuela Politécnica Superior, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

Madrid, Spain

 

At the end of the nineteenth century, atheist or agnostic thinkers relied on Darwin’s theories to build philosophical schools that combined evolution with the eighteenth-century idea of ​​progress to assert that the history of life and man showed an indefinite progress that will continue indefinitely into the future. These ideas were promoted by biologists such as T.H. Huxley and Ernest Haeckel, and philosophers such as Karl Marx (Marxism), Herbert Spencer (social Darwinism), Auguste Comte (positivism) and Friedrich Nietzsche (nihilism), the last quoted the most ambitious, predicting that man would soon be succeeded and supplanted by a superior species: superman.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Nietzsche’s ideas were adopted by the English Fabian society, whose most prominent members (H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw) were men of letters rather than philosophers. The unfounded belief that Darwin’s natural selection ensures indefinite progress in human evolution was discussed by Chesterton:

Some... talk as if mere passage through time brought some superiority... Then again, some people fall back on sheer submission and sitting still. Nature is going to do something some day; nobody knows what, and nobody knows when. We have no reason for acting, and no reason for not acting. If anything happens it is right: if anything is prevented it was wrong. Again, some people try to anticipate nature by doing something, by doing anything. Because we may possibly grow wings they cut off their legs. Yet nature may be trying to make them centipedes for all they know. Lastly, there is a fourth class of people who take whatever it is that they happen to want, and say that that is the ultimate aim of evolution. And these are the only sensible people... to work for what you want, and to call that evolution... We need not debate about the mere words evolution or progress: personally I prefer to call it reform... Evolution is a metaphor from mere automatic unrolling. Progress is a metaphor from merely walking along a road—very likely the wrong road. But reform is a metaphor for reasonable and determined men: it means that we see a certain thing out of shape and we mean to put it into shape. And we know what shape. (Orthodoxy, chapter VII).

 

At the end of the 20th century, the situation was quite different. The biologists had changed sides. Nowadays, most of the atheists and agnostics of this profession deny that evolution can have a direction. This assertion has become a dogma that blinds them to all the opposing indications, such as the fact that the maximum amount of information available to individuals of at least one species has been continuously growing over time during the history of life and has experienced a dramatic increase since the emergence of man.

 

Against this, some philosophers cling to the evolutionary optimism of a century ago. For instance, Nick Bostrom and the transhumanists have concocted an updated version of Nietzsche’s superman. Their forecasts are based on two scientific advances presented as imminent since several decades ago: immortality, which will be attained when the advances in medicine increase life expectancy beyond one year per year; and artificial intelligence, the design of super-intelligent machines. Both advances could be combined to attain immortality through artificial intelligence, by downloading our conscience (something we cannot even define scientifically) into a super-intelligent machine, so that it would go on existing inside it.

 

Unfortunately for the transhumanists, the UN data show that the increase in life expectancy, far from accelerating, is decelerating (see table 1). These data have been taken from https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Download/Standard/Mortality/.

 

Table 1. UN data on life expectancy

Country	Life expectancy			Increase in life expectancy (years/year)
	1995-2000	2010-2015 real	2010-2015 predicted	1995-2015	2010-2015
Hong Kong	79.38	83.73	83.28	0.29	0.28
Japan	80.48	83.30	83.50	0.19	0.14
Italy	78.63	82.84	82.29	0.28	0.27
Switzerland	79.23	82.66	83.23	0.23	0.18
Singapore	77.67	82.64	82.20	0.33	0.29
Iceland	78.95	82.30	82.01	0.22	0.19
Spain	78.49	82.27	82.00	0.25	0.21
...
USA	76.40	78.87	78.86	0.16	0.15
...
World	65.58	70.48	70.01	0.33	0.33
...
Sierra Leona	36.69	50.19	45.34	0.90	0.86

 

It can be seen at a glance that the increase in life expectancy in the last five years is systematically smaller than the same increase in the last 15 years, which means that it is slowing, rather than going up, as the transhumanists predict. The effect is stronger in the country with the maximum life expectancy during these last 15 years (Japan) with the consequence that in the latest data it has been superseded by the city of Hong Kong.

The UN previsions for the increase in life expectancy during the 21st century, for the leading country and for the world, are shown in table 2.

 

Table 2. UN predictions for life expectancy

Five-year period	Life expectancy		Increase in life expectancy (years/year)
	Japan	World	Japan	World
2015-20	84.08	71.65	0.16	0.23
2020-25	84.81	72.69	0.15	0.21
2025-30	85.51	73.65	0.14	0.19
2030-35	86.20	74.57	0.14	0.18
2035-40	86.84	75.45	0.13	0.18
2040-45	87.47	76.28	0.13	0.17
2045-50	88.07	77.07	0.12	0.16
2050-55	88.68	77.83	0.12	0.15
2055-60	89.25	78.54	0.11	0.14
2060-65	89.83	79.18	0.12	0.13
2065-70	90.37	79.82	0.11	0.13
2070-75	90.97	80.41	0.12	0.12
2075-80	91.55	80.98	0.12	0.11
2080-85	92.07	81.53	0.10	0.11
2085-90	92.61	82.10	0.11	0.11
2090-95	93.15	82.65	0.11	0.11
2095-2100	93.70	83.17	0.11	0.10

 

In Table 1 we can compare the real data with UN predictions made in 2012 for the 2010-2015 period, and find that, for a given country, sometimes they are accurate (as for the US), sometimes they overestimate, and sometimes they underestimate. The reason is that the UN simply assumes that current trends will continue, and therefore its predictions are less reliable the longer the period predicted. Anyway, if not in detail, the average predictions can be considered a good preliminary estimate. It can be seen that, rather than acceleration, and contrary to the transhumanists, the UN expects a continuous deceleration of the increase in life expectancy during this century.

 

In their famous book of hard scientific popularization, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, published in 1986, the cosmologists John Barrow and Frank Tipler make the following prediction that, according to them, should be fulfilled in 100 years, i.e. around the end of the 21st century:

1.      In 100 years we’ll have succeeded in creating every kind of life in the laboratory, so we’ll be able to build a complete human being from chemical components and information about the human genome, which can be stored in a digital memory.

2.      In 100 years we’ll have managed to build artificial intelligences as intelligent as human beings, able to replace us in any place and circumstance.

3.      Our current space technology allows us to reach a speed of 0.0003c (where c is the speed of light). If no further speed increases are attained, such a spaceship would take 50,000 years to reach the nearest stars.

4.      The ship in question will carry one or more artificial intelligences, along with the information necessary to synthesize human beings as soon as they reach their target. The ship won’t need expensive equipment to keep the crew alive; consequently the cost of the expedition would be little more than the cost of the Apollo Project. The star reached won’t need to have planets suitable for life. The synthesized human beings could be installed in space stations built after arriving there from raw materials in the planets or asteroids in that planetary system.

5.      The artificial intelligences making the trip would build, from the same raw materials, new probes that would be sent to neighboring stars, so the whole galaxy could be colonized in quite a short time by exponential expansion.

6.      Therefore, by the end of the 21st century the colonization of the galaxy will be started.

 

This prediction depends on two initial hypotheses: points 1 and 2. If it were impossible to synthesize living human beings from inert matter, or to build artificial super-intelligences, the whole prediction would fall to the ground. The problem is that at least one of those points, 1 and 2, may be unattainable.

 

In his book, Barrow and Tipler predicted that the first complete living cell would be synthesized in the laboratory by 2015. This prediction has not been fulfilled. As for artificial intelligence, it has been considered imminent since 1958, but until now its predictions have failed.

 

When speaking about a possible end of science, this term can have two very different meanings: either that science can come to an end because there’s nothing more to be discovered (physicists use to be more optimistic here than biologists), or that the apparently unending chain of discoveries we have witnessed in our civilization since five centuries ago could come to an end. This second sense is what I’ll consider now.

Are there any symptoms that our scientific progress could stop sometime during the 21st century? Here I propose a few:

• The bureaucratization of research: Although there are now more researchers than ever before, qualifying the results of their investigations is increasingly difficult. We are witnessing a worldwide unstoppable trend toward the simplification of these qualifications, through concepts such as the H and i10 indexes and their automatic calculation, using tools like Google Scholar, which depend on the number of citations of published articles. It has been proved, however, that it is relatively easy to trick Google Scholar.
• The irrepressible urge to publish: Researchers are under pressure to publish as much as possible. This often has the consequence that the research results are not published together, but divided into several items, which lowers their quality and makes the overall understanding of the results difficult.
• The shift of the financial burden: Traditionally, the economic cost of published papers was taken over by the publishers of scientific journals, who reimbursed it by charging their readers. Today many journals require authors to pay before their articles are published, so we are in the Kafkaesque situation that the same researchers who are pressured to publish many articles must pay for their publication.
• Constructivism: Radical movements of environmentalist, feminist or Afro-centrist trends (between others) argue that science is a social construction, determined by the culture in which it was born, and suggest that the accumulated scientific heritage should be destroyed, to start again under different circumstances (each movement has its own proposals).
• Democratic epistemology: The idea that the fundamental principle of democracy (the predominance of the most widespread opinion) should apply to all branches of human life, including science, can have dire consequences for scientific activity. In science, what matters is truth, not the number of people who have a certain opinion.
• Many of the new discoveries being made in many sciences are almost always conditional. Rather than findings of fact, usually they just forecast possible findings that could be made in the future. To confirm this, it is enough to notice that the news of many supposedly scientific improvements are usually qualified by word such as can, could, or might, which means that they belong to the future.
• The loss of our roots: Western science arose in a Christian cultural environment with a linear view of history that enabled the emergence of the idea of scientific progress. This is a unique vision: in the classical civilizations (Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, even Greece) dominated a cyclical view of history, not well suited to the idea of progress. In recent times we are witnessing a loss of those Christian roots and its replacement by a new ideology that doubts the very existence of truth, the foundation of science. Until now, scientific and technological developments have continued thanks to the momentum they had gained, but can we ensure that this trend will continue indefinitely, despite the undermining of its fundamental principles?

 

The reason why Christianity has made possible the huge development of science in the West has been the fact that the following two statements play a fundamental role in the Christian conception of the world:

1. The universe has been created by God. Since God is rational, he has created a rationally comprehensible universe, subject to logical laws. In doing so, however, God could have created universes subject to quite different laws.
2. Man, as a rational being created in the image of God, is capable of discovering and understanding the laws with which God has endowed the universe. To do this, we must resort to experimentation.

 

This ability to discover and understand the laws of the universe through experimentation, recognized and fostered by the Medieval Church, has unleashed the scientific revolution which still continues. No other civilization (not even the Arabs and the Chinese) has witnessed so long a period of scientific development.

Since our civilization is de-Christianizing, it is to be feared that we shall lose our advantage over other civilizations, so that our scientific development will eventually stop. Although historical processes are very slow, there are indications that this might happen.

 

In the Roman Empire, during the third and fourth centuries, nobody imagined that the end of their civilization was near. While the Roman society became increasingly bourgeois, the least desirable jobs (including military service) were relegated to immigrants, who were then called barbarians, meaning foreigners. The beginning of the end, which came in the first decade of the fifth century with the sack of Rome by the hosts of Alaric, took by surprise almost everyone in the Empire. We should not be so certain that history cannot be repeated.