The Book of Earth
Introduction: thought experiments in terrestrial intrinsic value
In several thought experiments I have asked readers to imagine what ought to survive humanity in the event of our extinction (this was the theme of my A Thought Experiment on the Relative Value of Nature and Culture and Thought Experiment Second Thoughts), as well as whether or not we would wish terrestrial life to go on to a experience a greater history in the universe even if we (humanity) could not be part of it (this was the theme of my Terrestrial Bias thought experiments). So here is another thought experiment in that tradition, and, as is my wont, I will elaborate several variations on the basic idea.
The setting of the thought experiment: the highly selective historical record
One of my favorite passages from Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is a paragraph in which Darwin illustrates the imperfection of the geological record. Darwin wrote:
“For my part, following out Lyell’s metaphor, I look at the geological record as a history of the world imperfectly kept and written in a changing dialect. Of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved, and of each page, only here and there a few lines. Each word of the slowly-changing language, more or less different in the successive chapters, may represent the forms of life, which are entombed in our consecutive formations, and which falsely appear to have been abruptly introduced.” (from the last paragraph of Chapter X)
It is not only the geological record that is imperfect in this way, but all the evidence for all the historical sciences, including history itself. One of the reasons it has been so difficult to define history is because we have only the present before us, so that anything said about the past is extrapolation and reconstruction.
There is a stratigraphy of civilization that is as imperfect and as open to interpretation (if not more so) than the stratigraphy that has allowed us to reconstruct the past history of our planet. At each level of this stratigraphy of civilization we have only a few artifacts to tell the story of a world far more capacious than the paucity of surviving artifacts. As a single example of what I have in mind, there are only four books that remain from Mayan civilization, the Maya Codices. What if there had remained only one, single book from Mayan civilization, and suppose further that this was the only evidence we had of Mayan civilization. Would we be able to make any sense of it? This is the setting of our thought experiment.
Book of Earth thought experiment, No. 1
Suppose that you could choose one and only one book as the sole surviving relic of human civilization. This book will be conveyed intact to some intelligent alien species completely unfamiliar with Earth, its life, and human civilization, but possessed of the cognitive capacity and the requisite curiosity to reconstruct and appreciate the human achievement, though this reconstruction and appreciation would be severely limited by the limitation of the evidence that they would have available for this task.
Many people, I think, would choose to save the holy book associated with their particular tradition of civilization — the Bible, the Koran, the Sutras, the Bhragavad Gita — while others would choose a classic of their mother tongue — Shakespeare for English speakers, Dante for Italian speakers, the Story of the Stone for Chinese speakers, or the Tale of Genji for Japanese speakers, and so on. One might even select the Dresden Codex, one of the four remaining Mayan books. I would be tempted to select Njál’s Saga.
There would be something to be said for this approach. Classics, religious or otherwise, are the works most likely to contain some conception of human nature and the human condition that transcends the specificity of the literary work in question. The religions of the Axial Age in particular are based on a conception of human nature believed to be universal, though in subsequent history we have been forced to confront universalist claims in uncomfortable ways, so we better understand that human nature as represented in one tradition is not necessarily human nature as represented in another tradition.
Is there an existing book that could serve even roughly as an introduction to the entirety of human civilization, the human condition, and human nature? Is there any book with the requisite scale and scope that could adequately and fairly represent the breadth of human experience?
Book of Earth thought experiment, No. 2
Suppose that, of all the products of our civilization, that only one book survives our extinction as the sole testimony of humanity. The book is not chosen, but, like most archaeological finds, is a more or less random survival that happened to be preserved through chance. If only one such book remained as the sole testimony of terrestrial civilization, what would be the chance of reconstructing some semblance of human experience?
A detailed inquiry into this question would take us into some difficult territory of the relative universality of the intellect. If, once consciousness emerges and intelligence develops in some (i.e., any) biological organism, it then follows a developmental trajectory determined in part by principles intrinsic to consciousness and to intelligence, rather than principles inherent in local biology and the ecological context of that life, then some alien scientist might be able to recognize any random book that came to hand from another civilization as a representative of a particular genre of literature — comedy, tragedy, history, and so on — and from the principles inherent in any one type of genre reconstruct how a civilization would be depicted from this standpoint.
It is, at least, an interesting idea, even if it is unlikely. But it is a scenario that also points beyond itself to further inquiries. Would life more-or-less as we know it give rise to an intellect more-or-less as we know it? If yes, then a terrestrial book would be likely understood to some degree if it fell into the hands of some species that shared our biology, or something like our biology, but the more that any species diverged from terrestrial biology, the more its intellectual endowments would diverge from human intellectual endowments, and the difficulty of reconstruction would increase with this divergence.
Even given intellectual curiosity and a scientific desire to understand, there may well be an unbridgeable gap between human and non-human intelligence such that human concepts simply cannot be understood by an alien mind (and, by the same token, alien concepts might be beyond the capacity of the human mind to grasp). This would constitute a particular application of Colin McGinn’s conception of transcendental non-naturalism, such that, “Our epistemic architecture obstructs knowledge of the real nature of the objective world.” (I quoted this passage previously in Transcendental Non-Naturalism and discussed the idea in this post and others.) Epistemic architectures may differ among species, and among intelligent species, so that any one given epistemic architecture obstructs knowledge of real nature of the experience native to some other epistemic architecture.
Book of Earth thought experiment, No. 3
Continuing the theme of a single book as the sole surviving artifact of human civilization, would it be possible to write a book (or, perhaps better, edit a book) that would represent the full range of human experience? Or, alternatively, would it be possible to give some account of what is essential to human experience, which seems to be what is often meant when we speak of human nature and the human condition?
Any such effort would of necessity be finite and highly selective, so that much would be left out. The question is, whether leaving out the greater part of the fundamental detail that constitutes the substance of most human life, or, in giving the essential detail of some particular life or some particular tradition (and leaving out all the rest), an impression can be given of human life that is not so skewed that something of the diversity of the human condition is captured.
This problem has already been faced in a practical way by those who have created time capsules and the golden records that were affixed to the Voyager spacecraft. The records on the two Voyager spacecraft include coded images as well as musical selections and greetings in many languages. The selection was made by a committee headed by Carl Sagan. One wonders how the committee to make the selection was constituted. In order to make a selection, one must first make a selection. A different committee or a different chairman would have almost certainly had a different result, though probably not a radically different result.
It is likely that this exercise will be faced again — time and again — as long as human civilization endures. There is always another time capsule being installed in some ceremony or other, and there are likely to be other spacecraft eventually sent out of our solar system, farther and faster than the Voyager spacecraft. Each these artifacts poses the question to us anew, and subsequent answers to the question may different with each iteration.
Parting reflection in the form of one more thought experiment
In considering the possibility of the reconstruction of human civilization by some alien scientist (a theme I also pursued in The Zoo Hypothesis as Thought Experiment) from fragmentary materials, what happens if we take the opposite assumption: the reconstruction of human civilization from complete (or nearly complete) records? Suppose (and, if you like, you can call this Book of Earth thought experiment No. 4, though this title is no longer strictly accurate) that we possessed a nearly complete record of human civilization — perhaps humanity is extinguished in a nuclear holocaust employing only neutron bombs, so that all life is extinguished but all our artifacts remain. Would a better, more accurate, or more adequate reconstruction of human civilization be possible under these circumstances?
We face something like this dilemma as historians seeking to reconstruct the lost world of the past, and even with the most generous remains at our disposal it can be difficult in the extreme to do justice to a civilization of the past, especially when all living continuity with the present has been lost, and no traditions survive that can guide us at least by suggesting certain methods of reconstruction. With another species with no continuity whatsoever with human traditions, this problem would be magnified by orders of magnitude.
While these questions are “academic” at the present moment, they may one day be quite relevant. If humanity extends its reach to the stars, we may find the remains of alien civilizations long past, and historians and archaeologists will want to reconstruct these civilizations to the extent that they can do so. Given this scenario, we place ourselves in the role of the alien observer from without. If, on the other hand, humanity goes extinct, the remains and relics we leave will be the only testimony of what we have done here. Are these future artifacts adequate to the task of declaring the human condition? If we have some intimation of our coming extinction, we may want to make hard choices about some durable legacy we might leave to be discovered by alien archaeologists who, as scientists, will experience that irresistible intellectual drive to try to understand the broken fragments they find on the ruined surface of our planet when first they visit.
