The End of the World As We Know It

There was an interesting piece on the editorial page of yesterday's Wall Street Journal (sorry, no link):

Billions to trillions of years from now, the stars will have exhausted their nuclear fuel, the oceans will freeze, the sky will become totally dark, and the universe will consist of dead neutron stars, black holes, and nuclear debris. Intelligent life will be huddled next to the dying embers of fading black holds, like the homeless next to small bonfires.

Sounds like pretty bad news. But the author, Michio Kaku, spends the rest of the piece specualting about possible "exit strategies" for intelligent life into other regions of a possible "megaverse," or parallel universes, or higher dimensions, through "worm holes." He even suggests we might just shoot our DNA through a microscopic worm hole using nanobots so we can have them reconstitute us in one of those alternate universes without actually going there ourselves.

Kaku is a professor of theoretical physics at CUNY, so I'm going to take it on faith that he's not getting this stuff from watching old episodes of Deep Space Nine on Netflix.

But here's my question for him and his fellow scientists: given your view of things, why worry at all about the fate of intelligent life?

If you're a thoroughgoing materialist -- and I'm assuming that most theoretical physicists are – then "intelligent life" is nothing more than a convenient name we have given to a rather transient set of epiphenomena arising from certain configurations of matter-energy. Those epiphenomena are of no more or less significance than all other epiphenomena arising from other such configurations. They are of absolutely no value whatsoever, since the notion of "value" is itself just another such epiphenomenon – it is not a descriptor of things in themselves.

To follow this argument out to its consequences for the present: why worry about anything, if you hold to this kind of materialism? For example, why be an environmentalist? I'll bet most of my friends in the biology department, who probably hold orthodox, pro-environmentalist views, would agree to the notion that living things are essentially biomechanical automata, which are, in turn, simply epiphenomena of the fundamental forces and particles and their interactions.

But biological epiphenomena are of no more value than the epiphenomena following upon, say, a nuclear holocaust. So why save the snail darter? The fact that they are interesting or beautiful to us is of no real significance, since the concepts of "interest" or "beauty" are entirely parochial.

If the answer is, so we won't die, my response would be, "According to your view of things, the universe is indifferent to our survival, nor is there any more value in us than in any other cosmic debris. You're asking me to contribute to cause which itself just a tiny eddy in the great swirl of quarks and neutrinos. I think I'll just have another martini instead."