The Answer To The Ultimate Question Of Life, The Universe, And Everything
“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory mentioned, which states that this has already happened.” -- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy(Trigger warning: Discussion of death, the meaning of existence, and a brief mention of suicide are ahead.)
Douglas Adams was a remarkable man who wrote some wholly remarkable books. His Hitchhiker series made a huge impression on me in my childhood, introducing me all at once to quirky British comedy and witty science fiction parody, painting a Universe that was colorful, whimsical, yet mysterious and absurd, in which -- when you came right down to it -- nothing ultimately made sense.
Then he died, which is less remarkable, really. Everyone who’s ever been born has eventually done that. He was living, you see, and then... he stopped doing that. All the greats of history have remained 100% consistent with this process: Shakespeare, da Vinci, Einstein, Presley (though Mostly Harmless casts some doubt on the last one). In fact, if one wants to be perceived as an historical figure, it appears to be a requirement. Two weeks after Adams’s death, on May 25th, Towel Day was proclaimed as an annual celebration of his life. This year marks the 20th anniversary of his departure from this “utterly insignificant little blue-green planet” orbiting “a small unregarded yellow sun” that is itself “far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy”.
Last autumn, my wife joined the distinguished company of Shakespeare and Adams. Death is a dreadful shame when it happens to your favorite author, but at that remove it remains a bit abstract. It’s rather different when it happens to a close family member, particularly a spouse with whom one has shared twenty-two trips around the small, unregarded yellow sun.
How can we humble, ape-descended lifeforms, an embarrassingly unambitious species that hasn’t even bothered to blow up any planets yet, hope to grapple with such mysteries?
I’ve written about religion before, a couple of years back. Under these new circumstances, those ideas feel more immediate and urgent. It raises the stakes when arguing the existence or non-existence of the human soul, or of God, when you can’t help but apply those ideas to someone you dearly love and miss. It’s no longer enough to state: “Odds are, there is no God and no afterlife. The physical Universe we see and hear around us is most likely the only one that matters to us.” The next logical question is: “How ought we to cope with that?”
The story so far… In the beginning, the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry, and been widely regarded as a bad move.
Well, you must admit, Creation does have its share of flaws. You know the ones I mean.
In the Hitchhiker books, the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is “42”. A huge supercomputer called Deep Thought spends 7 1/2 million years calculating that all-important answer, but it’s useless. It means nothing to anyone without the Question. This leads to building the even larger computer, which turns out to be the Earth itself, an engine whose entire purpose is to solve this deepest mystery of existence. Sadly, a nasty species called the Vogons show up and destroy it (us) before the program can complete. But at any rate, the computer’s program had already been disrupted, a couple million years earlier, by the unplanned arrival of another alien race, the Golgafrinchans (our distant ancestors). It later transpired that Arthur Dent, the last surviving human, had echoes of the corrupted Question embedded in his subconscious, and it was this: “What do you get when you multiply six by nine?”
All of which simply goes to show that the Universe is a deeply screwed-up place.
At the bottom of our meager human ability to reason about existence, there are the tenets of epistemology. This is arguably philosophy rather than science, but it’s important to consider how we can know anything about anything. Here, I’d like to borrow a quote from David Foster Wallace:
You pick up a brick, hold out your hand. You drop it. The brick falls to the ground. You pick it up again, drop it. Same result. After a while, you’re convinced it will always happen that way. But… what if the hundredth time is different, or the thousandth? How can you be sure it won’t be? Maybe the rule is really that on every 2^276,709 occasions, the brick hangs inexplicably in space (like a Vogon cruiser), and a talking goat magically appears to announce: “Congratulations, you win this century’s special prize: an Infinite Improbability Drive!”
Wallace offers a more pointed example, of the chicken in the henhouse. Every day, the chicken sees the farmer with a bag, and learns that this means it’s feeding time. One day, without any warning, the farmer shows up with an empty bag, and stuffs the chicken into it, destined soon to become the farmer’s next dinner. The chicken wasn’t wrong to think “farmer with bag means feeding time”. That was the logical conclusion to draw. It was right… until it was wrong.
So, there you have it. We can’t really know anything for certain. Our research has convinced us the Universe has been around for billions of years, and -- excepting some sketchy bits extremely close to the beginning -- has operated under the same physical laws, like gravity, ever since. But the mere fact that they’ve operated consistently for all this time does not give us 100% confidence that the rules of the game won’t suddenly and dramatically change, without prior written notice, five minutes from now.
There are other limitations on what we can know. On your next half-hour break, consider watching Veritasium’s fantastic video, This is Math's Fatal Flaw. It explains two vital principles we hapless hairless apes have somehow managed to uncover, through pure reason:
1) Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. Any system of axioms and logical proofs must either be inconsistent (harboring contradictions), or incomplete (containing true statements that can’t be proven within the system).
2) Turing’s Halting Problem. When executing an algorithm (such as a computer program), it’s impossible to know whether the program will eventually halt, or get stuck in an infinite loop. As applied to math, it’s equally impossible to determine whether proof of a mathematical statement, derived from the axioms, can ever be found.
On the Halting Problem, Veritasium’s video employs as an illustration John Conway’s “Game of Life”, a “zero-player game”, or what we’d now call a cellular automaton. You can know the rules, and the initial starting conditions, with absolute clarity. But you still won’t know the outcome. The only way to know is to run the simulation, and until/unless certain clear boundary conditions emerge (such as a new state looking exactly like an older one), that only tells you what happens up to that point in time.
Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica (a system for performing symbolic and algebraic computation), also took an interest in cellular automata, particularly Rule 110, a two-dimensional automaton that likewise exhibits bafflingly complex and seemingly random behavior with no random input whatsoever. This property, of complexity emerging from simple rules and simple starting conditions, appears to have had on Wolfram the same effect as a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster. It melted his planet-sized brain, and prompted him to write his literally weighty tome A New Kind of Science, which includes multiple pages of fine-print illustration of Rule 110’s output. Another such rule, Rule 30, has actually been used by Mathematica to generate pseudo-random numbers.
This is closely aligned with Chaos Theory, the idea that known starting conditions and known rules (laws governing behavior of the system) are insufficient to predict where you’ll end up. The weather is a well-known example of a chaotic system, but you don’t need anything that large or complicated to demonstrate it. It’s even been shown that the behavior of a water-wheel, a simple round piece of wood, can become chaotic and unpredictable when pushed by a steady stream of water if it’s the right pressure. It speeds up, it slows down, it sometimes reverses course and sometimes does not...
Veritasium has another video on Chaos Theory and the Butterfly Effect that further illustrates the point. A system can be fully deterministic and yet, somehow, still impossible to predict over the long term. It seems like a contradiction; it makes as much sense as 42 being the Ultimate Answer. We’ve used reason itself to prove that reason has limits. We will never know everything. Even if we survive a thousand years and evolve into who-knows-what, we must still live with some uncertainty.
As Adams might have put it: “The Question and the Answer are mutually exclusive. Knowledge of one logically rules out knowledge of the other… but there is a certain amount of uncertainty about it.”
This sense of “I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the Universe” is, to me, what the Hitchhiker’s Guide series is truly about. Adams was an atheist himself, after all (a self-described "radical atheist", i.e. not an agnostic). His characters spend their time running around, searching for answers, or ditching that quest to search instead for a simple, happy life. Whichever path they choose, they’re thwarted by Murphy’s Law at every turn.
This brings us to existentialism, the philosophy (or perhaps, suite of related philosophies) that state: People are free to choose what to do with their lives. My personal favorite existentialist philosopher is Albert Camus, whose outlook is called absurdism. It basically states that people, faced with a Universe that is (to all appearances) totally indifferent towards them, have three options as to how to respond:
Suicide. Well, that’s always an option so it must be on the list, but Camus dismisses it as adding to the absurdity rather than working to counter it. You exist, you have volition, so you may as well make the best of things. Obviously this is a delicate topic, so let’s move on.
“Philosophical suicide”, i.e. turning off the inquisitive philosophical part of your brain. Embracing a religion is an example. You take a leap of faith, and adopt a set of beliefs that derive meaning from another, less absurd transcendent plane beyond the one we can see before us, and thus, get on with your life. Camus judged this choice to be absurd as well.
Embrace the absurdity. You shrug, you flip the Universe the bird, and you jaunt off to live your life and create meaning in it despite the possibly Sisyphean nature of the endeavor. In Camus’s view, this option is rebellious, and almost heroic.
Adams’s Arthur Dent, the poor schmuck that the Universe batted around like a cat with a catnip mouse, fit the mold of the Absurd Hero. He lived as he wanted, making his own choices, seeking meaning in life even when it was hard to find, and had a long string of odd adventures along the way. All the major characters embody this idea to some degree, but it was surely Dent with whom Adams identified. As the least popular member of the Heart of Gold crew, his suggestions often elicited eye-rolls from the other characters. Sometimes though, he was right (if only by accident), and unlike the more jaded Ford and Zaphod, he never surrendered to mindless, hedonistic escapism. Arthur’s heart was always in the right place.
In the Hitchhiker series, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (the electronic book within the real book) has been called “more controversial than Oolon Colluphid’s trilogy of philosophical blockbusters, Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes, and Who is this God Person Anyway?”. Speaking for Himself, God left behind a final message for his Creation: “We apologize for the inconvenience.”
So the monotheistic God exists (or once did), but then again, so do Thor and some other Asgardian deities. There’s also a Great Prophet Zarquon, who returns from the dead, rather belatedly, in the middle of the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. All he manages to say, in the final moments, is "How are we for time?" Even when God, gods, or messiahs are about, they seem unlikely to provide any useful answers.
There’s an argument put forth by Colluphid for God’s non-existence, based on the unlikely existence of the Babel Fish, a creature conveniently able to translate any form of language if you stick one in your ear. It takes the Intelligent Design argument and flips it around. It goes something like this (or like this):
God: I refuse to prove that I exist, for proof denies faith, and without faith, I am nothing.
Man: But, the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.
God: Oh dear, I hadn't thought of that. (He promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.)
Man: Oh, that was easy! (And for an encore Man goes on to prove that black is white, and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.)
Back in the real world, the most lucid argument about God I’m aware of can be attributed to Thomas Nagel, author of The Absurd. If you were only to read one work of philosophy in your entire life, you could do worse than to read that one. Really, give it a go, it’s only 13 pages long.
Nagel’s argument is not precisely about whether God exists or not, but rather about how, or from where, we derive meaning. If we don’t consider our lives to be inherently meaningful (that is, we don’t take meaning as axiomatic), then we have to “take a step backward”, seeking a larger frame of reference for our lives. This is the point where people look to be part of something bigger than themselves, such as their family, their nation, or their God. You could stop there, but… why? You can continue to ask the “why is this meaningful” question, even about God. I imagine a conversation with God going a bit like this:
God: I want you to live your life in service of others.
Man: All others, you mean? Or just the nice and deserving ones?
God: Everyone is deserving of my love, and therefore of yours.
Man: And… so pacifism is the goal, is it? What about the really nasty people who go around starting wars? Should we stop those people to protect other people?
God: Admittedly you do have to defend yourself sometimes. I’m just saying --
Man: There’s a lot of that around, in fact, isn’t there? We live in a brutal Universe when you think about it. Beasts of nature killing each other for food…
God: (sighs audibly)
Man: ...asteroids wiping out the presumably blameless dinosaurs. Why’d you create it that way, if you just want us to be peaceful? Why create suffering?
God: Er… look, setting that question aside, the goal is for you to try to make the Universe a better place.
Man: A better place for humanity? What if there are aliens, and they have an incompatible vision for what “better” looks like? Wait, are there aliens?
God: You’re not getting me that way.
Man: Is this a game, or a test you’ve created for us, or…? What do you get out of this? What’s your purpose for creating the Universe?
God: That’s going to be tricky to explain. You don’t have my frame of reference.
Man: And who created you, anyway? And what’s their frame of reference, which presumably you can’t understand either?
And so on. Even if you could know the mind of God, that would not answer all the questions. There can be no such thing as an ultimate purpose, because you can always ask again “All right, but why that?” You get stuck in an infinite loop. At some point, you have to decide to stop seeking reasons for reasons for reasons. We want what we want because we’re built to want those things. Just as Gödel proved that some true statements can’t be proven, “the ultimate purpose of the Universe” is not something we can ever discover.
Nagel talks about how the sense of life’s absurdity is often illustrated in terms of the vastness of time, and our relative insignificance. Adams, too, explored this idea.
“So many of you come time and time again to watch this final end of everything, which I think is really wonderful, and then return home to your own eras and raise families, and strive for new and better societies and fight terrible wars for what you know is right. It gives one real hope for the whole future of lifekind. Except of course we know it hasn't got one.” - Max Quordlepleen, comedian, and host of Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe
This is a similar idea to the one about deriving meaning from God. If you believe meaning can only be derived by “leaving one’s mark on history” or “being remembered” or the like, then it’s reasonable to ask whether anything can be meaningful in a Universe that will eventually end.
Quordlepleen, speaking at Milliways, also mentions the Universe having been around for “170 thousand million billion” years (170 quintillion years, or 1.7 x 10^20). This may have been an educated guess on Adams’s part. Milliways patrons can watch the stars wink out as they finish their cocktails. Our real-world scientists today believe the Universe has now existed for roughly 13.8 billion years. Theories vary about how old the Universe might get, and it greatly depends on what you decide to call “the end”. But it’s commonly held that star formation will end some 100 trillion years hence (10^14 years) and they’ll surrender the stage to black holes. Those are expected to last a whole lot longer, perhaps a googol (10^100) of years -- most of it rather dull.
Hard science though this is, such conclusions are necessarily highly speculative. We have still only scratched the surface of how the Universe works. It’s believed that the majority of the Universe is made up of “dark energy”, and nobody yet knows precisely what that is. A bit more knowledge could result in wildly different predictions. If humans survive even as long as our Sun (another 5 billion years), that gives us gobs of time to search for loopholes. For that matter, over the next century, we may succeed in inventing an AI far smarter than ourselves, after which all bets are off. So… maybe someday we’ll know more. Or maybe we’ll go extinct instead. On top of everything else, there’s the shakiness of the Principle of Induction to consider. Maybe once we get the Universe figured out, it will indeed be replaced by something even more inexplicable.
Switching from the vastness of time to the vastness of space, Adams conceived of a device called the Total Perspective Vortex. Its function: to display the enormousness of the Universe before the viewer, rendering that person a gibbering wreck as their brain collapses under the weight of knowledge of their own abject insignificance. It was originally built to prove a point, and thereafter, was used as an instrument of torture.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy actually gives the Universe’s size as “infinite”. Whether that’s right or wrong, we like to think we know what it means. But thanks to Georg Cantor, we now have to contend with different sizes of infinity, another mind-melting concept. Discussion of that idea will not fit comfortably within this article, so we’ll barge rudely past it.
In point of fact, we do live in an extremely large Universe. By some estimates, there may be a septillion stars (10^24). Perhaps more, perhaps less. Those stars are all huge compared to our Earth, yet most of the Universe is empty space between the stars. Knowing how large it is, how old it is, and how much longer it’s likely to exist, does make us feel unimportant by comparison. But bigness does not automatically equal importance. Viruses are tiny, but very important. If it turns out that life only exists on this one planet (unlikely though that prospect appears to me), then all those uncountable stars would only be impressively vast amounts of dead matter. As they were to our ancestors, they’d just be twinkling lights in the night sky overhead. At least until we figure out how to visit one. Put another way: The stars are vast, but they’re meaningless until we assign meaning to them. We do that.
Self-consciousness is a pain in the neck, isn’t it? We often express a bit of envy at the broader animal kingdom. They don’t have to ask why they’re doing what they’re doing. They’re just existing, and living their lives.
We hairless apes have been grasping at meaning for as long as we’ve been self-aware. When your best caveman buddy Og is mauled to death by a saber-toothed tiger, or something, you’re bound to wonder: He was here, and now he’s gone. Where has he gone? There’s his body; why isn’t he still in there? When my club breaks its handle, I can fix it by replacing the handle. Why can’t I fix Og?
To me, an even deeper question emerges when I look inward. Why is it me in here? I have to assume there’s nothing special about me as a human. That is, while I might be unique (just like everybody else), nothing is fundamentally different about me. Yet I am me. For as long as I live, I shall experience this life, and nobody else’s. I find this, too, to be a brain-melting conundrum.
Evolution has endowed us with social abilities, particularly empathy, mirror neurons, the ability to imagine what’s going on in another person’s head. When I see someone stub his toe, I wince. Though I might not feel it, I can sure imagine it. Fiction has expanded on this ability. Now we get to lose ourselves in books, to imagine what it’s like to experience life as a person who never existed. Particularly after following them through several books, characters like Arthur Dent become as real to us as actual people. For now, this is as close as we can get to experiencing a different life. Imagination, and dreams, of course. But in each case, it’s this life to which I return.
Imagination is a fabulous evolutionary trick. We can think through what might happen if we lured that saber-toothed tiger, the one that ate poor Og last week, into this cave, with all the rest of us wielding clubs just around the corner. We can plan it out before we try it. Or, we can imagine building a structure across that inconveniently placed river, a bridge, and how that might let us quickly reach the other side, instead of having to trek for two hours up the bank and two hours back.
Imagination may be less useful when we envision Og still hanging around after his death, cheering us on as we avenge his restless spirit. It’s inspiring, no doubt, and motivating, and there could be value in that. Perhaps there’s also solace in thinking that some part of Og lives on. Our brains evolved to keep us alive -- as a species, that is, not as individuals. When young Argg bravely volunteers to be the bait for the saber-toothed tiger, it probably helps if he believes that, should he perish in the valorous attempt, he’ll be reunited with Og and the other elders of the tribe. It’s nice to think so. It’s useful to think so. But that doesn’t make it true.
It could be true. But so could a million other things.
We love our stories. We imagine that if we want it badly enough, we can move objects with our minds. And if we make ourselves One with The Force, we can persist after death, like Obi-Wan Kenobi. We create entire universes in our minds: Star Wars, Star Trek, the Discworld, a rich universe within the mind of each author, growing and evolving as each story adds onto the life of each character. As compelling as they are, they are not this stubbornly persistent Universe, the one that asserts itself when we stub our toes on the bedpost, breaking our immersion. Those universes are, sometimes, arguably better than the real one. At least there, we know the story has a plot. There is a purpose. Back here in reality… well, if there’s a Creator, he/she/it is being cagey about it, to say the least.
It hasn’t stopped us from telling our own stories about this Universe, stories meant to explain what will happen to us after we “move on”. We’ve told many of them, populated with gods, demons, heroes, and villains of all sorts. To Christian believers, Heaven and Hell, as described by the Bible (and embellished by works like Dante’s Inferno), are taken at face value. Some of us find those ideas a bit odd and inconsistent, and create our own fictional universes to tinker with those ideas. Just on TV, there’s Supernatural, with its cast of angels and demons, and God Himself pulling the strings -- eventually revealed to be a self-aggrandizing antagonist. There’s Lucifer, based on Neil Gaiman’s character from the Sandman series, in which “The Devil” is the protagonist, rather egotistical and flippant, but mostly just a misunderstood angel with daddy issues (and who never lies and has zero interest in corrupting souls). There’s Good Omens, based on the Neil Gaiman / Terry Pratchett collaboration, which sees an angel and a demon team up to stop the apocalypse, because they’d rather hang out on Earth a while longer, thanks very much. There’s Preacher, in which God has gone missing, Heaven is a bit lost without his leadership, and Hell lets Hitler escape -- and while Preacher Jesse Custer does try literally to find God, he’s also a deeply flawed and violent person who does as much damage as good. There’s Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell, the Adult Swim comedy series, in which the demons are former humans, incompetent at their jobs. And all those are based on Christianity which is, after all, only one religion of many.
One can't write about Adams and religion without also bringing up Monty Python. (Adams collaborated with the Pythons on multiple occasions, particularly Graham Chapman, and holds the rare distinction of having a writing credit on a Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch, plus a couple of cameos on the show.) The Pythons loved to poke fun at religion:
God: Arthur... Arthur... King of the Britons...
Arthur: (falls to his knees and bows his head)
God: --Oh, stop groveling! If there's one thing I can't stand, it's people groveling.
Arthur: Sorry.
God: And don't apologize! Every time I try to talk to someone, it's "sorry, this" and "forgive me, that" and "I'm not worthy"... What are you doing now?!
Arthur: I'm averting my eyes, O Lord!
God: Well, don't! It's like those miserable Psalms, they're sooooo depressing. Now, knock it off!
Arthur: Yes, Lord!
God: Right!
They also released an entire movie entitled The Meaning of Life, and though it's generally not acclaimed as their best, it does have some fabulous moments. The true jewel in their crown is surely The Life of Brian, their send-up of Christianity -- though importantly, not of Christ. In fact, they had great respect for Christ's teachings, and aimed their lampoonery instead at religious leaders and sheep-like followers:
Brian: Look. You've got it all wrong. You don't need to follow me. You don't need to follow anybody! You've got to think for yourselves. You're all individuals!
Followers: (a large crowd speaking in unison) Yes, we're all individuals!
Brian: You're all different!
Followers: Yes, we are all different!
Dennis: I'm not.
Followers: Shh. Shhhh. Shhh.
Brian: You've all got to work it out for yourselves!
Followers: Yes! We've got to work it out for ourselves!
Brian: Exactly!
Followers: Tell us more!
This distinction was lost on many offended critics -- whose outrage, ironically, may have illustrated the very point the Pythons were making. This led to an incredible televised debate between two Pythons (John Cleese and Michael Palin), a Bishop, and a Roman Catholic journalist. Cleese later stated that he quite enjoyed it, and that he felt they were winning the argument. My favorite quote is from Cleese:
'“Four hundred years ago, we would have been burnt for this film. Now, I’m suggesting that we've made an advance.”
Cleese isn't arguing here that making fun of Christianity is in any sense more evolved than being a Christian. Rather, he's arguing for religious tolerance, for the freedom to choose. As an individual, you can decide for yourself whether any given religion makes sense to you. The Universe having taught us that we can never know everything, a measure of humility is called for. That includes atheists acknowleding that God might indeed exist, and true believers refraining from launching inquisitions. It's best if nobody burns anybody else.
Recently, of course, we’ve also had to contend with people using their imaginations to dream up alternative facts. Instead of telling us that God wants us to do this or that, or that the afterlife will be like this or like that, they tell us that what we think really happened… did not. When people are already struggling to cope with unpleasant realities, such as climate change, income inequality, and a global pandemic that interferes with one’s ability to attend a game of cricket, sowing doubt in basic facts seems a rather cruel trick to play at this time. But perhaps it works, in part, because people are so exhausted and strung out that they’ll cling to any charlatan’s promises.
“Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it.” -- Marvin, the Paranoid Android
Er… yes. We have quite enough of a challenge already, figuring out what is real, and how to solve real problems. We ought not to create additional headaches for ourselves by sowing doubt in foundational democratic institutions, just to win an election.
Let’s return to pragmatism. There is such a thing as reality, the real reality, the thing that persists even after you refuse to believe in it. The bedpost is real -- stub your toe on it again if you don’t believe me.
It’s fun, certainly, to think about the Principle of Induction packing up its toys and walking away. But were that ever to happen, we’d have no clue what was coming next. That makes the idea both logically sound, and utterly useless in deciding what to do next. You can’t plan for the unforeseeable.
Likewise, although logic tells us there are gaps in what we can know -- and always will be -- that hasn’t prevented us from learning a lot. We know tons more than we did a few decades ago, about physics, and chemistry, and biology (witness new discoveries such as CRISPR). We’ve invented computer technology that has dramatically changed our civilization, and the change is still happening. The knowledge that we can’t know everything, and that we can’t know anything with complete certainty, should not cause us to pretend that we know nothing. We know a lot, enough to accomplish a lot.
Amazon, my employer (for whom I do not speak), operates a storage service called S3. They say it’s “designed for 99.999999999% durability”. That is, once they have a copy of some data, they expect to lose it accidentally only 0.000000001% of the time. By contrast, the chance of being struck by lightning in a given year is somewhere around 1 or 2 out of a million. That would be a 99.9999% not-being-struck-by-lightning guarantee.
We can build some amazing things, because our technology is based on science. We use “the scientific method” to find facts, but that’s a fancy name for a simple idea. We start by assuming that what we think is true really is. We then investigate the part we’re not so sure about. We come up with a hypothesis, an educated guess that leads to predictions, and then we test to see whether our guess was right or wrong. Since people make mistakes -- lots and lots and lots of mistakes -- we then have to do it again, preferably several more times by different groups of people, to see if we keep getting the same result. Science's conclusions are always implicitly suffixed with "...unless you have a better idea."
You’ll never get a scientist to admit they’re 100% certain about anything. That’s because they know about the Principle of Induction, Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, the Halting Problem, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and a lot else besides. When scientists say they’re confident that global warming is a real phenomenon and that it’s caused by human activity, they’re confident on roughly the scale of not-being-struck-by-lightning. They could be wrong, and you could be struck by lightning. But it’d be a bit silly to plan your life around either of those.
We do know something about the more “mundane” truths. We know there aren’t Jewish space lasers, for example. That’s made-up nonsense. Moreover, it’s harmful nonsense, as is any lie that aims to scapegoat a group of people. We know that notions like this are invented out of whole cloth, posted on social media (frequently Twitter), then spread from person to person, couched within a lot of “we heard from this person” and “we’re hearing a lot of people saying”. This rumor mongering is then legitimized by agencies like Fox News, or when repeated by powerful people (or thankfully, by formerly-powerful people). Regrettably, when we apes hear an idea repeated often enough, it starts to sound familiar and therefore more plausible, even if it’s utterly wacky. Conspiracy theories like Qanon have led millions to see everything through the fun-house mirror of a malignant fantasy world.
It’s not practical to expect everyone to become a climatologist, and discover the truth about climate change for themselves. It takes years of study to learn to do science properly, and most people don’t have that kind of time on their hands. If you know someone who has been absorbed into the alternative-fact universe, someone who will listen to what you say, then I’d encourage you to reach out. Studies suggest that widely-known figures, celebrities, are ineffective at changing the minds of the masses. What does work is hearing the truth from someone trusted, such as a family doctor.
Organizations like the New York Times make mistakes, of course -- all the time. They’re human. But they try their best to uncover the facts and state them clearly. They seek confirming sources, and consider their sources’ credibility. There is a world of difference between that, and the irresponsible behavior of Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity or Alex Jones. It’s the difference between an honest mistake and a concerted effort to deceive.
So long as someone’s not actively denying reality, or deluded by people who are, I’m fine with people believing whatever they want about a spiritual realm. Perhaps it’s easier to believe that death is not the end. It doesn’t work for me, personally, but if it works for you, that’s all right. Just don’t tell me that you can fix real-world problems through prayer. If God helps anybody, He helps those who help themselves. I hold no respect for any God whose believers use Him as an excuse to sit on their hands. Worse yet is when people suggest, for example, that AIDS was intended as a punishment for gay men. If your imagined God excuses or condones the suffering of real-live human beings, I’ll stomp on your God’s toes as I brush past you both to help the afflicted.
We’re all living together on a tiny bubble in space, a pale blue dot, an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet in a Universe which is “bigger than the biggest thing ever, and then some”. We may not matter to that Universe, but we matter to ourselves, and to each other. We can’t be certain what’s ahead, but we do know many things with pretty high confidence, and we have a pretty good system for learning more. If we can only get onto the same page, more or less, about what is real and what is not, adopt sane rules about using technology responsibly, retain our humility, and afford each other a little basic respect, then we have an opportunity, a once-in-a-Universe opportunity, to decide for ourselves what to do with our future. So let’s agree to do something awesome with it.
If for some reason you don't feel you've had enough to read yet, enjoy more Douglas Adams quotes.
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