Today I want to share with you a conversation between the two people closest to God, Hawking and Arthur Clarke.
The dialogue originated from a 1988 show about God, the Universe, and Everything.
They sat across from each other, talking about the meaning of science fiction literature for human beings, talking about their understanding of the universe and their imagination of alien civilizations.
What is the meaning of science fiction? Are there really extraterrestrial civilizations? Should we follow the laws of the Dark Forest or embrace other civilizations with openness and tolerance? Will God be bound by the laws of science? ...... Any one answer is the ultimate speculative deconstruction of humanity and the universe!
Let's see what the universe looks like in the eyes of the cosmic bigwigs.
The parties to the dialogue:
Arthur Clark
Arthur Clark:
One of the "Science Fiction Big Three" and the greatest space prophet. Successful predictions of solar sails, artificial intelligence, human landing on the moon... The geosynchronous satellite orbit we use now, also known as Clark orbit, was established almost entirely according to Clarke's predictions. Astronaut Armstrong, who represented humanity's first lunar landing, was a die-hard book fan of his. The whole of NASA is almost a fan of him.
Hawking
Stephen hawking:
After Albert Einstein, the world's greatest scientific thinker and theoretical physicist. His research laid the foundation for our understanding of black holes and the origin of the universe today.
Host: So what do you think of the real role that science fiction plays? Is it pure fantasy? Or do you think it has done a very practical job in broadening our minds and in bringing us to these great topics of today?
First of all, no one is really against utopianism, as long as it is used in the right place. In fact, C.S. Lewis once said to me, "Only jailers don't like utopianism!" (Pun: ) "(Laughs) We all want to fantasize a lot from time to time, but science fiction is often very far away from utopianism."
In fact, you could argue that science fiction is a fantasy based on reality. It is a fantasy that uses practical problems to reflect on. For example, our origins and future, in fact, today I can't think of any other medium that pays more attention to practical problems and reality than science fiction.
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Host: So Professor Hawking, do you have anything to say about that?
I don't believe the stories of the "flying tea saucer", but it is just a so-called "UFO". If time travel is feasible, then we should have already been visited by someone from the future.
I feel like if we're already being visited by people from other times or planets, then the thing should be more compelling and probably very unpleasant. Unless it's at a safe distance, I don't want to come into contact with other alien civilizations.
It might be like native North American Indians trying to get in touch with white people, and I desperately hope they've never sold Manhattan Island (laughs).
Host: I bet they're definitely not going to sell now (laughs).
Host: Arthur, do you think we have enough wisdom to find it?
Well, I have some doubts. Because we are still very primitive creatures, and the universe is very old. I don't know, and I want to think about how we can do that. But I immediately had another thought: Wait until we find it, and then what? What are we going to do next?
Host: But now people prefer to treat them with an optimistic mood: if their attitude is not mild, they are at least not as hostile and aggressive as we were originally afraid. Arthur, is this also the case with your writing trends?
Yes, I'm an optimist, and I believe that any vicious super civilization will self-destruct in the blink of an eye. Maybe it's like we're doing to ourselves right now, so if we had physical contact with aliens, I'm sure they'd be gentle.
There are so many answers to this question that they may have come in the distant past. For example, they may visit once every 10,000 years.
I mean the vastness of the universe, even though they have several fleets of reconnaissance ships scattered around every corner. The cycle will only be a little shorter than I said, maybe every 1,000 years. Or maybe they already know everything about us.
And they may have good reason to set up quarantine zones around our planet, and they may be so many levels higher than us that they have no interest in us at all. You see, we're like air.
If you accept it, you can say that they despise us. We can guess like this bottomlessly about answers we haven't anticipated yet. But I guess all we can do is wait and try to find more evidence. Perhaps their detectors show that "there is no intelligent life on Earth."
They may have watched our TV show and decided to say, "Yes, there really aren't 'intelligent' creatures up there.". [Laughs]
Well, on "Should humans colonize other planets?" "The answer to this question, I want to answer is: otherwise we can stay in Europe and let the robots explore the New World." This naturally saves many people from a difficult situation.
But of course we didn't do that, we went and settled there, on that new continent. It has to be admitted that all the planets in the solar system, including Mars, are different from the environment in the Americas or any corner of the earth.
But one day, people will call them their homeland. One day, martians will appear, and they will be our great-grandchildren, and they will think that Earth is a terrible place to live. As for whether we will pollute those environments, I think to some extent it will.
Colonization will always involve destroying what is there, and I'm pretty sure that in the next century, no, in fact the conference on polluting the universe and the planet will already be held in the United States. In the near future this will be a serious problem in low Earth orbit, but we must control it.
On Earth we have to cut down forests to build cities, and on the moon I'm afraid that one day we'll run out of lunar space, and we might sweep away the whole of Mars and transform its atmosphere. But I do wish we could keep part of the universe as it was.
Host: But we're also going to make ourselves different on Mars, and I mean we're going to evolve into different shapes.
Mars will change us, in fact, into new environments, occupy new niches, is part of the step of biological evolution, this is how biological evolution. Then we go on to explore, investigate, and perhaps finally complete our mission as living things.
Host: Do you think God is free to interfere with the universe? Or is he also limited to the laws of science?
The question of whether God is limited by the laws of science is somewhat similar to the following question: "Can God create a stone that He Himself cannot move?" "I don't think there's any point in speculating about God's ability to do that. In contrast, we should actually examine the universe that exists in us to see if it is limited.
All of our observations show that the universe operates according to well-defined laws. These laws may have been made by God, but it seems that at least since God made the universe work, He has never interfered with the universe and destroyed them.
Yet for some time now, we had thought that at the beginning of the universe, all laws would fail. This means that God will have absolute freedom to plan how the universe begins. But recently we have realized that these laws may still be valid at the beginning of time.
If this is the case, God has no freedom. How the universe begins will depend entirely on the laws of science.
EDIT: Skeptical Explorer