The Story of the Universe: Part 1

In the beginning there was incredible heat, heat that was so unbelievably hot that atoms could not exist. Heat that was so intense that even protons and neutrons - the particles that make up atoms - could not exist.

The things that are smaller than protons and neutrons - called "quarks" - were the only things, at the beginning. There were quarks that were made of matter and quarks that were made of antimatter, in almost equal parts. For every thirty million antimatter quarks there were thirty million and one matter quarks. The matter and antimatter annihilated each other. The almost statistically insignificant prevalence of matter over antimatter led to the emergence of a universe made of matter.

At this stage the universe was thirty microseconds (.000030 of 1 second) old. By this time the remaining matter quarks began condensing into protons and neutrons. While the protons and neutrons were assembling themselves, the universe was expanding, very very quickly. It started from a single point and became truly, stupendously enormous within just a fraction of a second.

When the universe was 1 second old, nuclear fusion reactions began fusing the protons and neutrons into light nuclei such as helium, deuterium and lithium. By this time the temperature had dropped to only ten billion degrees kelvin (9,999,999,727 degrees celsius). Creation of light nuclei continued for about three minutes, after which continued expansion cooled the universe to about one billion degrees kelvin and the epoch of nucleosynthesis came to an end.

For the next few eons the universe didn't do anything much except continue expanding and cooling. It was still very hot and very bright. After about 300,000 years it had cooled to an average temperature of about 3000 degrees kelvin (2,726.85 celsius) and atoms were able to form. Some areas of the universe were slightly denser than others in their atom populations, and this density caused these first hydrogen and helium atoms to fall under the influence of gravity and start forming massive aggregations of gas, which much later became known as galaxies.

Within these aggregations, there were some even more dense aggregations, which were drawn together by gravity to become stars.

Nearly 9 billion years after the universe began, a star which later became known as "The Sun" formed, and during its formation a number of solid and gaseous objects also formed in orbit around it. Some of these objects were large enough to be classified as Planets. Some 1.2 billion years after the formation of the planets, random chemical reactions on one of them, which later became known as "Earth", caused the formation of amino acids. These amino acids in turn formed proteins. A random product of this process was ribonucleic acid (RNA). This substance had the property of being able to encode a sequence of proteins, and was also able to duplicate itself. With the formation of proteins and RNA, a new form of chemistry emerged on Earth, known as life.

With the process of protein sequence encoding and duplication, there also came a new phenomenon known as evolution. This process pitted organisms against randomly mutated replicas of themselves in a never-ending struggle for survival. If a mutation possessed qualities that provided itself and its offspring with improved survival prospects, that mutation would take hold and the original organism would die off.

For the next several billion years the process of evolution brought about life forms with increasingly complex structures, and after about 3.1 billion years, a new and highly complex kind of organism emerged, known as "animals". These first, incredibly complex animals were flatworms, jelly fish and algae. Impressive though these organisms were, evolution was not done yet. It continued to arrange animals into more and more complex structures until only 500 million years later "Mammals" began to appear. One hundred million, four hundred thousand years later, evolution created a mammal that was able to combine a large and complex brain with an ability to stand on its hind legs and use its opposable thumb and forefinger to manipulate objects. This mammal became known as "Homo Sapiens", and its unique survival technique was the ability to utilise its intelligence and manual dexterity to fashion and utilise "tools".

A further consequence of this intelligence was the propensity (among some of the species) to contemplate the universe and their place within it. This contemplation produced the mistaken conclusion (or philosophy) that life and intelligence are important and significant qualities and further, that the universe was created specifically in order to provide a habitat for things that possessed these qualities.

Homo Sapiens spent the next 600,000 years labouring under this misconception, and improving their tools. In the process they discovered electricity, which greatly enhanced the scope of their tools. Eventually they built electronic tools with the ability to perform simple calculations. These tools themselves evolved and became more complex, eventually evolving into more general information processing machines known as computers. Shortly thereafter, the advent of miniaturisation allowed computers to become small and inexpensive enough to be possessed by a great many of the Homo Sapiens, whereupon an international electronic communications network, known as the "internet", developed.

After only a decade or so of popular internet usage, a new pastime evolved whereupon bored Homo Sapiens with too much time on their hands would share whatever facile thoughts they happened to be experiencing, with other users of the internet utilising communications interfaces known as Web Logs, or "Blogs". Within only a couple of years over 7 million blogs had appeared, testifying to the vast amount of time Homo Sapiens had on their hands. Some of these blogs contained interesting information, the vast majority didn't, but one almost universally adopted theme discussed in these blogs was the unique specialness and inherent value of the Homo Sapiens species; supported by their achievements in social, technical, artistic and other fields.

Despite the absolute lack of impact intelligence, or even life could be observed to have had on the universe; despite the lack of evidence that life or intelligence had even emerged on any other planet in the universe, the Homo Sapiens still harboured a belief that intelligence and life were in some way important and significant properties.

Homo Sapiens flourished on the Earth for a brief flyspeck of time, and the impact they made on the universe was so infinitesimally tiny as to be statistically negligible.

Intelligence for the Masses?

One ability that distinguishes humans from most other animals is that they can create tools to assist them in their various pursuits. Humans are not completely unique in this regard, some species of bird and monkey also create tools, but their tools are nowhere near as good as ours!

Humans have been making tools since the early stone age (about two million years ago), that's why we're so good at it. Before the 18th century, most of our tools were simple devices designed to give us some kind of mechanical advantage in accomplishing a given task. Then Britain gave the world the industrial revolution and the age of the machine was born. In the late 19th century Edison invented the light bulb and the age of electric tools was upon us. In the middle of the 20th century the transistor replaced the vacuum tube and the digital age was born.

It became possible to create machines that could perform calculations. At first these calculations were relatively simple and the machines were comparatively slow, but the relentless march of technology enabled machines to perform more and more elaborate calculations in less and less time. It wasn't long before some people noticed that the human brain is also a calculating machine, and that this latest kind of tool could be thought of as an analogue of the human brain. These people speculated that calculating machines would continue getting faster and more elaborate and that a time would come when it might be possible for a machine to equal the human brain in speed and complexity.

In 1956 the term Artificial Intelligence was coined by John McCarthy. Six years earlier Alan Turing had proposed the Turing Test as a means of determining whether a machine has the capacity to demonstrate thought. In 1965 Joseph Weizenbaum wrote a program called ELIZA, which enabled a computer to converse with a human on any topic. Since then a great deal of research has gone into trying to make machines smarter, and Ray Kurtzweil in his books: The Age of Intelligent Machines and The Age of Spiritual Machines speculates that by 2030, machine intelligence will not only surpass human intelligence, but in doing so, machines will become "conscious".

Opponents of the drive for machine intelligence are worried that if machines become smart enough, they will gain personalities and become evil, ambitious monsters that will usurp their creators and take over! What these people have failed to understand is that machines have already developed malicious personalities and have, for a number of years, been doing their utmost to turn our lives into a living hell.

The photocopier at my work, for example, knows exactly how to push my rage button. It sits there looking qualified and efficient while I carefully drill down through its menus telling it exactly what I want it to do (double sided, colour, staple and collate), then I entrust my valuable originals to it's helpful-looking feed-tray, press the GO button and the bastard immediately turns my originals into pulp, and jams up the copy paper so far inside its guts that nothing short of a crowbar will get it out again, then the bloody thing's broken for the rest of the day and I have to endure dirty looks from my fellow-workers until the bloke from Ricoh comes out and explains like I'm a 4 year old about how it's all my fault because I should have fanned the bloody paper before I put it in the machine. Excuse me but this is a $15 thousand machine, and all I'm asking it to do is photocopy a bit of paper! Try and tell me that machine doesn't have a personality.

And what about Windows? Do I really need to share a practical anecdote to convince anyone that this collection of ones and zeros is, in fact, a dangerously psychotic, insanity-inducing maniac? Every day this villain conspires to turn my documents into gibberish by incorrectly re-numbering my list points, applying absurd formatting to my letters, Americanising my spelling and then going catatonic and losing my last 4 hours of work into the digital void. "Did you save it?" asks the helpdesk guy. As if he needs to ask.

If you're waiting in terror for the day our obedient machine slaves turn on us, you can quit waiting, it's already happened, and we still think it's us that are in charge.