Microsoft Word Kurzweil, Ray The Singularity Is Near doc

Intelligence as the Destiny of the Universe.
In The Age of Spiritual Machines, I introduced a related idea—namely, 
that intelligence would ultimately permeate the universe and would decide the destiny of the cosmos: 
How relevant is intelligence to the universe? ... The common wisdom is not very. Stars are born and die; 
galaxies go through their cycles of creation and destruction; the universe itself was born in a big bang and 
will end with a crunch or a whimper, we're not yet sure which. But intelligence has little to do with it. 

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Intelligence is just a bit of froth, an ebullition of little creatures darting in and out of inexorable universal 
forces. The mindless mechanism of the universe is winding up or down to a I distant future, and there's 
nothing intelligence can do about it. 
That's the common wisdom. But I don't agree with it. My conjecture is that intelligence will ultimately 
prove more powerful than these big impersonal forces.... 
So will the universe end in a big crunch, or in an infinite expansion of dead stars, or in some other 
manner? In my view, the primary issue is not the mass of the universe, or the possible existence of 
antigravity, or of Einstein's so-called cosmological constant. Rather, the fate of the universe is a decision yet 
to be made, one which we will intelligently consider when the time is right.
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Complexity theorist James Gardner combined my suggestion on the evolution of intelligence throughout the 
universe with Smolin's and Susskind's concepts of evolving universes. Gardner conjectures that it is specifically the 
evolution of intelligent life that enables offspring universes.
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Gardner builds on British astronomer Martin Rees's 
observation that "what we call the fundamental constants—the numbers that matter to physicists—may be secondary 
consequences of the final theory, rather than direct manifestations of its deepest and most fundamental level." To 
Smolin it is merely coincidence that black holes and biological life both need similar conditions (such as large 
amounts of carbon), so in his conception there is no explicit role for intelligence, other than that it happens to be the 
by-product of certain biofriendly circumstances. In Gardner's conception it is intelligent life that creates its successors. 
Gardner writes that "we and other living creatures throughout the cosmos are part of a vast, still undiscovered 
transterrestrial community of lives and intelligences spread across billions of galaxies and countless parsecs who are 
collectively engaged in a portentous mission of truly cosmic importance. Under the Biocosm vision, we share a 
common fate with that community—to help shape the future of the universe and transform it from a collection of 
lifeless atoms into a vast, transcendent mind." To Gardner the laws of nature, and the precisely balanced constants, 
"function as the cosmic counterpart of DNA: they furnish the 'recipe' by which the evolving cosmos acquires the 
capacity to generate life and ever more capable intelligence." 
My own view is consistent with Gardner's belief in intelligence as the most important phenomenon in the 
universe. I do have a disagreement with Gardner on his suggestion of a "vast ... transterrestrial community of lives and 
intelligences spread across billions of galaxies." We don't yet see evidence that such a community beyond Earth exists. 
The community that matters may be just our own unassuming civilization here. As I pointed out above, although we 
can fashion all kinds of reasons why each particular intelligent civilization may remain hidden from us (for example, 
they destroyed themselves, or they have decided to remain invisible or stealthy, or they've switched 
all
of their 
communications away from electromagnetic transmissions, and so on), it is not credible to believe that every single 
civilization out of the billions that should be there (according to the SETI assumption) has some reason to be invisible.