GO TO: 2097 SPIRITUALITY
__ A physicist explains why God is in the chips __
By the last decades of the 21st century, church worship will still take the form of reading passages of traditional texts - the Bible, the Koran, the Rig Veda - but physicist-priests will preside over the ceremonies. They will show worshipers how the Word echoes the greatest discovery of physical cosmology: that the laws of physics require the existence of God, Heaven, resurrection, and eternal life. Technically, the churchgoers will be scientific rationalists because theology will be a branch of science. Scientists are required to be skeptical, but in fact, belief in God 100 years from now will be like belief in the theory of evolution today: All educated people will accept God as fact.
What these educated future faithful will find hard to believe, however, is the old 20th-century idea of a soul. It will be perfectly obvious to them that what we regard as the metaphysical and transcendent human essence is nothing more than a particular (and very complicated) computer program run on a computing machine called the brain. Today, everyone knows the Earth is round because we can travel around it. Future generations will know there's nothing mystical about wetware because by 2100, Moore's law will have given us tiny quantum computers powerful enough to upload a human soul. God-fearing churchgoers at the turn of the next century will, in fact, rejoice at in silico life. It is a necessary step in carrying out God's plan - to go forth and multiply throughout the universe.
There is only one practical method of interstellar colonization: spaceships small enough to accelerate efficiently to near light speed. Quantum computers could code an entire simulated city containing thousands of humans in only a few grams. Nanoscale von Neumann machines - capable of making any other machine - will round out the payload. Powered by matter-antimatter annihilation, a 1-kilogram spaceship could reach Proxima Centauri, the nearest star, in only five years. Acceleration will be very fast because virtual humans need experience only the usual 1-gravity acceleration in their virtual environment. Adjusting the spaceship-computer's clock speed could make travel time seem as short as the blink of an eye. Human uploads have such a natural advantage over present-day people in the environment of space, it's exceedingly unlikely flesh-and-blood beings will ever engage in interstellar travel.
The von Neumann machines will take advantage of the huge amount of material - meteors, asteroids, planets - present in all star systems to construct more von Neumann machines. If the spacecraft makes two copies of itself in Proxima Centauri to send to nearby Tau Ceti and Sirius, and those probes in turn make copies of themselves to send to still other star systems, the entire Milky Way will be explored and colonized in less than 1 million years. In another 10 million years, the Local Group of galaxies will be explored and colonized. In another 100 million years, the Virgo cluster of galaxies will be completely colonized. Earth will be entirely dismantled to provide the raw material for the expanding bio-sphere long before its scheduled rendezvous with the expanding sun 5 billion years out. The beauty of the colonization process is that it's exponential, completely engulfing the universe with computer-borne human life 10 million trillion years from now.
The physicist-priests of 2100 will be alive to witness the beginnings of this process and will preach that near the end of time our progeny will have turned every last atom in the universe into computing machinery. Furthermore, this computer-cum-universe will be able to guide the manner of the universe's collapse in a way that maximizes its computational power - to infinity. By the very end of time, this Universal Computer will know everything it's possible to know. If our descendants who live in it are anything like ourselves - a safe assumption - one of the first things they'll do with this processing power is simulate everything in the past. The first human-to-computer uploads of 2100 will prove that a perfect simulation is the thing being simulated - that a silicon soul doesn't need a physical body to inhabit. So eventually everybody who ever lived will be resurrected inside a living machine indistinguishable from God. Isn't it amazing what you can do with unlimited hard-disk space? Amen.
MORE
- Mind Uploading Home Page metalab.unc.edu/jstrout/uploading/MUHomePage.html
- The Living Universe Foundation www.luf.org
- Frank J. Tipler www.math.tulane.edu:80/~tipler
