In an age of AI, Pope looks for “artisans of hope.”
In sounding this call to both disarm and to build, Leo turns to “twentieth-century Catholic author” JRR Tolkien. Though he can’t quite bring himself to say that he’s quoting Gandalf from Lord of the Rings, that’s exactly what’s happening.
(The encyclical says only that the quote comes from “the words of a protagonist in one of [Tolkien’s] novels.” Though Pope Francis previously spoke of Tolkien’s work, this appears to be the first time that Tolkien has ever been quoted in the highest levels of the church’s official doctrinal publications.)
It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.
I don’t think we will be able to colonize other words without superintelligence. We need it to develop high technology capable of traversing space. Anyone who thinks otherwise is vastly underestimating the extreme power requirements of space travel. To put it into perspective sending a 10 ton vessel - which is fairly small. That’s not a lot of stuff for a long multi-year journey to the nearest star Alpha Centauri - to 20% the speed of light would require 400 tons of antimatter and 400 tons of normal matter to detonate inside a engine that can exhaust all of that energy as propellant.
Our current understanding of “warp drive” being the alcubierre drive, would involve even more energy to create the warp field, as well as exotic matter like negative mass objects.
The sheer distance and astronomical amount of energy involved to cross the distance in a human lifetime is beyond our current understanding to solve. If we don’t develop superintelligence we are likely going to go extinct on Earth. We are already facing multiple catastrophic problems without superintelligence to help us.
I say we build the brain in the bottle.