Wipeout FINAL

Wichita State Tournament 2009
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1NC PaRtY ..................................................................................................................................... 2 2NC Aliens.................................................................................................................................... 16 AT Aliens Immortal ................................................................................................................... 20 AT No Multicellularity .............................................................................................................. 21 AT - Moon K2 Life ....................................................................................................................... 22 AT - Sun Unique ........................................................................................................................... 23 AT - Aliens Will Save Us ............................................................................................................. 24 AT Alien Death Inevitable ......................................................................................................... 25 AT Jupiter Key........................................................................................................................... 26 AT Our Moon Key ..................................................................................................................... 27 AT Only Humans Intelligent Proves.......................................................................................... 28 AT Fermi Paradox...................................................................................................................... 29 AT Multi-Verse Theory ............................................................................................................. 30 AT Infinitely Expanding ............................................................................................................ 31 AT - Tectonics .............................................................................................................................. 32 AT Where are They, Yo? ........................................................................................................... 33 AT Rock Formations.................................................................................................................. 34 AT Idiosyncrasy Key ................................................................................................................. 35 AT No Other Solar System ........................................................................................................ 36 AT Aliens Destroy the Universe ................................................................................................ 37 AT Impact Turns Omega Points ............................................................................................. 40 AT Impact Turns Need our DNA ........................................................................................... 42 AT Impact Turns Grey Draconian Stuff ................................................................................. 43 AT Impact Turns Greys Can Time Travel .............................................................................. 44 AT Impact Turns Saunders X inev ...................................................................................... 45 AT Impact Turns - Mack ........................................................................................................... 47 2NC Nanotech ............................................................................................................................... 48 2NC Particle Accelerators............................................................................................................. 49 2NC Artificial Intelligence ........................................................................................................... 50 2NC Time Travel .......................................................................................................................... 52 2NC Isomer Bombs....................................................................................................................... 53 2NC Ice 9 ...................................................................................................................................... 54 2NC Quantum Vacuum Mining .................................................................................................... 55 2NC Atom-tech ............................................................................................................................. 56 2NC Util ........................................................................................................................................ 57 Framework AT: Biopower Impacts ........................................................................................... 60 Framework AT: Predictions Fail ............................................................................................... 67 Framework AT: Calculations Bad ............................................................................................. 71
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Extend all their extinction impacts- time for wipeout Aliens are real and there are at least 10,000 independent civilizations Drake 02, Astronomy and Astrophysics Professor University of California at Santa Cruz ,
<July, Astrobiology Magazine, http://www.astrobio.net/news/article236.html> The Earth's fossil record is quite clear in showing that the complexity of the central nervous system - particularly the capabilities of the brain - has steadily increased in the course of evolution. Even the mass extinctions did not set back this steady increase in brain size. It can be argued that extinction events expedite the development of cognitive abilities, since those creatures with superior brains are better able to save themselves from the sudden change in their environment. Thus smarter creatures are selected, and the growth of intelligence accelerates. We see this effect in all varieties of animals -- it is not a fluke that has occurred in some small sub-set of animal life. This picture suggests strongly that, given enough time, a biota can evolve not just one
intelligent species, but many. So complex life should occur abundantly. There is a claim that "among the millions
of species which have developed on Earth, only one became intelligent, so intelligence must be a very, very rare event." This is a textbook example of a wrong logical conclusion. All
planets in time may produce one or more intelligent species, but they will not appear simultaneously. One will be first. It will look around and find it is the only intelligent species. Should it be surprised? No! Of course the first one will be alone. Its uniqueness - in principal temporary - says nothing
about the ability of the biota to produce one or more intelligent species.If we assume that Earths are common, and that usually there is enough
the optimistic view is that new systems of intelligent, technology-using creatures appear about once per year. Based on an extrapolation of our own experience, let's make a guess that a civilization's technology is detectable after 10,000 years. In that case, there are at least 10,000 detectable civilizations out there. This is a heady result, and very encouraging to SETI people. On the other hand, taking into account the number and distribution of stars in space, it implies that the nearest detectable civilizations are about 1,000 light years away, and only one in ten million stars may have a detectable civilization. These last numbers create a daunting challenge to those who construct instruments and projects to search for
time to evolve an intelligent species before nature tramples on the biota, then extraterrestrial intelligence. No actual observing program carried out so far has come anywhere close to meeting the requirement of detecting reasonable signals from a distance of 1,000 light years, or of studying 10 million stars with high sensitivity.Donald Brownlee: But how often are animal-habitable planets located in the habitable zones of solar mass stars? Of the all the stars that have now been shown to have planets, all either have Jupiter-mass planets interior to 5.5 AU or they have Jupiters on elliptical orbits. It is unlikely that any of these stars could retain habitable zone planets on long-term stable orbits. On the other hand, many
of the stars that do not have currently detectable giant planets could have habitable zone planets. But even when rocky planets are located in the right place, will they have the "right stuff" for the evolution and long term survival of animal-like life? There are many "Rare Earth" factors (such as planet mass, abundance of water and carbon, plate tectonics, etc.) that may play important and even critical roles in allowing the apparently difficult transition from slime to civilization. As is the case in the
solar system, animal-like life is probably uncommon in the cosmos. This might even be the case for microbes: how can scientists agree that microbial life is common in our celestial neighborhood when there is no data? Even the simplest life is extraordinarily complicated and until we find solid evidence for life elsewhere, the frequency of life will unfortunately be guesswork. We can predict that some planetary bodies will provide life-supporting conditions, but no one can predict that life will form. Frank Drake: Only about 5% of the stars that have been studied sufficiently have hot Jupiters or Jupiters in elliptical orbits. The other 95% of the stars studied do not have hot Jupiters, and just what they have is still an open question. The latest discoveries, which depend on observations over a decade or more, are finding solar system analogs. This suggests that 95% of the stars - for which the answers are not yet in - could be similar to our own system. This is
reason for optimism among those who expect solar system analogs to be abundant.
The organic materials necessary for life are plentiful- proves we arent alone McKay, 02NASA Planetary Scientist, (Christopher, Complex Life in the Universe?, http://www.astrobio.net/news/article236.html) Chris McKay: There is no solid evidence of life elsewhere, but several factors suggest it is common. Organic material is
widespread in the interstellar medium and in our own solar system. We have found planetary systems around other sun-like stars. On Earth, microbial life appeared very quickly - probably before 3.8 billion years ago. Also, we know that microbial ecosystems can survive in a variety of environments with liquid water and a suitable chemical energy source or sunlight. These factors suggest that microbial life - the sort of life the dominated Earth for the first two billion years - is widespread in the stellar neighborhood.
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Humans will inevitably destroy the universe- we will isolate multiple scenarios 1st is Timetravel Matter energy concentrations bend time allowing time travel Kaku 1994 MichioProf. Of Theoretical Physics @ NYU (Hyperspace; pg 234)
Einsteins equations, we recall, state that the
curvature or bending of space and time is determined by the matter-energy content of the universe. It is, in fact, possible to find configurations of matter-energy powerful enough to force the bending of time and allow for time travel. However, the concentrations of matterenergy necessary to bend time backwards are so vast that general relativity breaks down and quantum corrections begin to dominate over relativity.
Even if the tech doesnt exist, its possible- which means we will do it Pickover 1998 Clifford A.PhD in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, associate editor for numerous scientific journals, research staff IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Member of SETI League (Time: A Travelers Guide; pg 248-249) Various researchers have
proposed ways in which backward and forward time machines can be built that do not seem to violate any known laws of physics. Remember that the laws of physics tell us what is possible, not what is practical for humans at this point in time. The physics of time travel is still in its infancy. While all physicists today admit that time travel to the future is possible, many still believe time travel to the past will never easily be attainable. Dont believe anyone who tells you that humans will never have efficient technology for backward and forward time travel. Accurately predicting future technology is nearly impossible, and history is filled with underestimates of technology:
Time travel creates loops in time that makes infinite folds in the universe- causes it to end Randall No Date physics student @ CalTech-- (Time Travel - the Possibilities and Consequences;
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A398955) This theory involves two types of temporal loops. One type is the loop mentioned in the last paragraph, the 'grandfather paradox'. For the rest of this paragraph, let's call it the 'infinite repeat' loop, because it results in two different possibilities, infinitely repeating after one another. Another type of loop exists. It is the 'infinite possibilities' loop. In this loop, the loop changes every single time that the loop repeats. Think of this:
Imagine that you ask your best friend to go back in time to before you were born and kill your granddad. Also, you had enough forethought to tell him to, while he's back there, write a note to his future self to go back in time and kill the man who would be your granddad. Everything's Okay, right? Maybe not. When your friend is given the instruction to go and kill your granddad from you, he might do one thing. When he receives a note from his future self, he might do another. And if he does another thing during the second repeat, he must do a different thing the third. And the forth. And the fifth. A change in one iteration of the loop would result in a change in the note, which would result in a change in the next iteration. Eventually, he'll do something that ends up breaking down the loop (ie, forgetting to write himself a note). This will result in a infinite repeat loop starting. And as was already mentioned, infinite repeat loops may cause the universe to end.
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2nd is particle accelerators Humans will have particle accelerators capable of destroying the universe by 2100 Leslie 1996 Johnemeriti professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph and a fellow @ the Royal Society of Canada (End of the
World; pg 86)
above 1011 GeV would be had well before the year 2100. Already people have proposed plasma particle accelerators in which the fields accelerating the particlesperhaps fields produced by two laser beams which create a rapidly moving interference pattern called a beat wavewould be many thousand times stronger than those of present-day accelerators. In his Dreams of a Final Theory S. Weinberg speculates that with plasmas to transfer energy from powerful laser beams to individual charged particles even Plank-scale energies might be attained. Plank-scale energies are of roughly 1019 GeV, which is ten million to a hundred million times above the 1011 to 1012 GeV which Hut and Rees gave as energy released by some cosmic ray collisions.
However, energies
Particle accelerators reach levels that destroy the vacuum Leslie 1996 Johnemeriti professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph and a fellow @ the Royal Society of Canada (End of the
World; pg 86) How could anything as empty as vacuum ever be threatened by particle accelerators or by anything? And if we did feel any fears
particle accelerators are the physicists preferred means of reaching very high energies: ones which are locallyover very tiny regionsmuch
on this score, how could they be reduced by studying cosmic rays? For the present, at least, above those produced by H-bombs. What guided Hut and Rees was that, among all the events in our existence we can be fairly confident,
collisions between cosmic rays, extremely fast particles which can have the kinetic energy of rifle bullets, are by far the
most locally energetic. So long as cosmic ray collision energies werent exceeded, nothing disastrous could be expected. Any higher energies, however, might pose a threat to our vacuum. For a vacuum in
modern physics, or empty space, neednt mean a region absolutely empty. It usually means one of two things instead:
Destruction of our vacuum creates a new one that destroys the universe Leslie 1996 Johnemeriti professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph and a fellow @ the Royal Society of Canada (End of the World; pg 86-87)As Hut and Rees commented, it may be that the vacuum state we live in is not the absolute lowest one because on many physical theories a local minimum of the effective potential, which can be quite stable, can exist for certain parameter values. The universe, starting at high temperatures, might have supercooled in such a local minimum. In this case we should find ourselves in a false vacuum. Fields wouldnt be at their lowest energies, the ones to which they would like to fall. It would follow that our vacuum statespace of the sort we live in
might
suddenly disappear if a bubble of a real vacuum formed. The bubble would expand at close to the speed of light, with enormous energy release, right through the galaxy and then onwards indefinitely. Might such an unfortunate event be triggered by a new generation of particle accelerators? As has been pointed out by Coleman and De Luccia, this would be the ultimate ecological catastrophe. Inside the ever expanding bubble, the new vacuum. There would be new constraints of nature. Not only is life as we know it impossible, so is chemistry as we know it, since all protons would decay as soon as they were hit by the advancing bubble wall. Worse still, there would be no hope that the new vacuum would in due course come to sustain if not life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy. For the space through
which the bubble had expanded would suffer gravitational collapse in microseconds or less.
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3rd is artificial intelligence Humans Will Have AI Before 2030 Webb 2002 StephenPhD in theoretical physics and professor at Open University- (Where is Everybody: page 243 )Vernor Vinge,
extrapolating the improvements in computer hardware and other technologies over the next few decades, argues mankind
will likely produce super-human intelligence some time before 2030. He considers four slightly different ways in science might
achieve this breakthrough. We might develop powerful computers that wake up; computer networks like the Internet might wake up;
human-computer interfaces might develop so users become super-humanly intelligent; and biologists may develop ways of improving the human intellect. Such a super-intelligent entity might be mankinds last invention, because the entity itself could design even better and more intelligent offspring. The doubling time of 18 months in Moores law would steadily decrease, causing an intelligence explosion. A quicker-than-exponential runaway event might end the human era in a few hours.
Vinge calls such an event the Singularity.
AI will destroy the universe through computational errors Bostrom 2002 NickFaculty of Philosophy @ Oxford UniversityMarch (Existential Risks; Journal of Evolution and Technology,
When we create the first superintelligent entity [28-34], we might make a mistake and give it goals that lead to the annihilation of humankind, assuming its enormous intellectual advantage gives it the power to do so. For example, we could mistakenly elevate a subgoal to the status of a supergoal. We tell it to solve a mathematical problem, and it complies by turning all the matter in the solar system into a giant calculating device, in the process killing the person who asked the question.
Vol. 9)
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4th is Nanotechnology Nanotech will be here by 2040 Gaudin in 9 (Sharon, 10/1/2009, writer computerworld, Nanotech could make humans immortal by 2040, futurists say,
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9138726/Nanotech_could_make_humans_immortal_by_2040_futurist_says)
In 30 or 40 years, we'll have microscopic machines traveling through our bodies, repairing damaged cells and organs, effectively wiping out diseases. The nanotechnology will also be used to back up our memories and personalities. In an interview with Computerworld, author and futurist Ray Kurzweil said that anyone alive come 2040 or 2050 could be close to immortal. The quickening advance of nanotechnology means that the human condition will shift into more of a collaboration of man and machine, as nanobots flow through human blood streams and eventually even replace biological blood, he added. That
may sound like something out of a sci-fi movie, but Kurzweil, a member of the Inventor's Hall of Fame and a recipient of the National Medal of Technology, says that research well underway today is leading to a time when a combination of nanotechnology and biotechnology will wipe out cancer, Alzheimer's disease, obesity and diabetes.
Nanotech would consume the universe- creating grey goo Webb 2002 StephenPhD in theoretical physics and professor at Open University- (Where is Everybody: page 249 ) One of the elements of any future nanotechnology is likely to be the nanorobotor nanobot, for short.
Although their development is a long way off, theoretical studies suggest we could construct nanobots from one of several materialswith carbon-rich diamondoid materials perhaps forming the basis for many types of nanobot. Studies also suggest that one
of the most useful types of nanobot will be a self-replicating machine. Alarm bells start to ring whenever selfreplication is mentioned. The danger inherent in producing a self-replicating nanobot in the laboratory is clear upon answering the following question: What happens when a nanobot escapes into the outside world? In order to replicate, a nanobot made of carbon-rich diamondoid material would need a source of carbon. And the best source of carbon would be the Earths surface biosphere: plants, animals, humansliving things in general. The swarms of nanobots (for soon there would be many copies of the original) would dismantle molecules in living material and use the carbon to produce more copies of themselves. The surface biosphere would be converted from the rich, varied environment we see today into a sea of ravenous nanobots plus waste sludge. This is the grey goo problem. As mentioned above in the discussion on overpopulation, exponential growth is a powerful thing. Freitas has shown that, under ideal conditions, a population of nanobots growing exponentially could convert the surface biosphere in less than three hours! We can add this, then, to the depressing list of ways in which the lifetime of a communicating phase of an ETC
might be shorted: a laboratory accident, involving the escape of a nanobot, turns their biosphere into sludge.
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5th is Isomer Bombs The military is building isomer bombs that destroy the quantum vacuum- even testing destroys it Bekkum in 4 (Gary S., Founder Spacetime Threat Assessment Report Research, American Military is Pursuing New Types of Exotic Weapons, Pravda, 8-30, http://www.starstreamresearch.com/dark_matters.htm)
Recently the British science news journal "New Scientist" revealed that the
American military is pursuing new types of exotic bombs - including a new class of isomeric gamma ray weapons. Unlike conventional atomic and hydrogen bombs, the new weapons would trigger the release of energy by absorbing radiation, and respond by re-emitting a far more powerful radiation. In this new category of gamma-ray weapons, a nuclear isomer absorbs x-rays and re-emits higher frequency gamma rays. The emitted gamma radiation has been reported to release 60 times the energy of the x-rays that trigger the effect. The discovery of this isomer triggering is fairly recent, and was first reported in a 1999 paper by an international group of scientists. Although this controversial development has remained fairly obscure, it has not been hidden from the public. Beyond the visible part of defense research is an immense underground of secret projects considered so sensitive that their very existence is denied. These so-called "black budget programs" are deliberately kept from the public eye and from most political
leaders. CNN recently reported that in the United States the black budget projects for 2004 are being funded at a level of more than 20 billion dollars per year. In the summer of 2000 I contacted Nick Cook, the former aviation editor and aerospace consultant to Jane's Defence Weekly, the international military affairs journal. Cook had been investigating black budget super-secret research into exotic physics for advanced propulsion technologies. I had been monitoring electronic discussions between various American and Russian scientists theorizing about rectifying the quantum vacuum for advanced space drive. Several groups of scientists, partitioned into various research organizations, were exploring what NASA calls "Breakthrough Propulsion Physics" - exotic technologies for advanced space travel to traverse the vast distances between stars. Partly inspired by the pulp science fiction stories of their youth, and partly by recent reports of multiple radar tracking tapes of unidentified objects performing impossible maneuvers in the sky, these scientists were on a quest to uncover the most likely new physics for star travel. The NASA program was run by Marc Millis, financed under the Advanced Space Transportation Program Office (ASTP). Joe Firmage, then the 28year-old Silicon Valley CEO of the three billion dollar Internet firm US Web, began to fund research in parallel with NASA. Firmage hired a NASA Ames nano-technology scientist, Creon Levit, to run theInternational Space Sciences Organization, a move which apparently alarmed the management at NASA. The San Francisco based Hearst Examiner reported that NASA's Office of Inspector General assigned Special Agent Keith Tate to investigate whether any proprietary NASA technology might have been leaking into the private sector. Cook was intrigued when I pointed out the apparent connections between various private investors, defense contractors, NASA, INSCOM (American military intelligence), and the CIA. While
researching exotic propulsion technologies Cook had heard rumors of a new kind of weapon, a "sub-quantum atomic bomb", being whispered about in what he called the "dark halls" of defense research. Sub-quantum physics is a controversial re-interpretation of quantum theory, based on so-called pilot wave theories, where an information field controls quantum particles. The late
Professor David Bohm showed that the predictions of ordinary quantum mechanics could be recast into a pilot wave information theory. Recently Anthony Valentini of the Perimeter Institute has suggested that ordinary quantum theory may be a special case of pilot wave theories, leaving open the possibility of new and exotic non-quantum technologies. Some French, Serbian and Ukrainian physicists have been working on new theories of extended electrons and solitons, so perhaps a sub-quantum bomb is not entirely out of the question. Even if the rumors of a subquantum bomb are pure fantasy,
there is no question that mainstream physicists seriously contemplate a phase transition in the quantum vacuum as a real possibility. The quantum vacuum defies common sense, because
empty space in quantum field theory is actually filled with virtual particles. These virtual particles appear and disappear far too quickly to be detected directly, but their
existence has been confirmed by experiments that demonstrate their influence
on ordinary matter. "Such research should be forbidden!" In the early 1970's Soviet physicists were concerned
that the vacuum of our universe was only one possible state of empty space. The fundamental state of empty space is called the "true vacuum". Our universe was thought to reside in a "false vacuum", protected from the true vacuum by "the wall of our world". A change from one vacuum state to another is known as a phase transition. This is analogous to the transition between frozen and liquid water. Lev Okun, a Russian physicist and historian recalls Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, expressing his concern about research into the phase transitions of the vacuum.
If the wall between vacuum states was to be breached, calculations showed that an unstoppable expanding bubble would continue to grow until it destroyed our entire universe! Sakharov declared that "Such research should be forbidden!" According to Okun, Sakharov feared that an experiment might accidentally trigger a vacuum phase transition.
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6th is Atomtech Humans are creating a type of biotech that reduces the earth to green goo ETC in 3 ((<Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration Atomtech: Technologies Converging at the Nano-scale January
2003, The Big Down)
Atomtech will create both living and non-living hybrids previously unknown on earth. The environmental implications of such new creationssome that could have the half-life of the universeare incomprehensible. Human-made nanomachines that are powered by materials taken from living cells are a reality today. It wont be long before more and more of the cells working parts are drafted into the service of human-made nanomachines. As the merging of living-nano and non-living nano becomes more common, the idea of self-replicating nanomachines seems less and less like a futurists daydream. In his dismissal of the possibility of molecular
manufacture (see Step 3), George Whitesides stated that it would be a staggering accomplishment to mimic the simplest living cell. But we may not have to reinvent the wheel before human-made, self-replicating creations are possible; we can just borrow it. Whitesides believes the most dangerous threat to the environment is not Gray Goo, but selfcatalyzing reactions, that is, chemical reactions that speed up and take place on their own, without the input of a chemist in a lab.77 It is herewhere natural nanomachines merge with mechanical nanomachinesthat Whitesidess warning resonates strongest. Can societies that have not yet come to grips with the nature of being human soldier on to construct partially-human, semi-human or super-human cyborgs? As
the merging of living cells and human-made nanomachines develops, so will the sophistication of biological and chemical weaponry. These biomechanical hybrids will be more invasive, harder to detect and virtually impossible to combat. For those who do not accept the risk of Drexlers Gray Goo, there is still the looming issue of a Gray New World posed by super-smart machines, unlimited surveillance capacity and a governing elite that becomes Big Cyborg Brother to us all. The power of nano+info+cogno is exponential and poses a major threat to democracy and dissent. But there is an additional concern. Perhaps it is not the Gray Goo we need to fear but the Green Goo. Rather than try to manufacture self-replicating machinery that mimics the self-replication of living materials, it is more likely that we will take control of living materials and use them to mimic machinery. This is already happening at the level of microorganisms, but it might also include higher life forms. For example,
the military is finding that the modification of insects for military or industrial objectives could be a much simpler task than creating mechanical flying machines of similar size. In the end, will the Green Goo Revolutionthe takeover of life for industrial functionspose the greater risk?
Green goo will exist forever its irreversible Adams in 4 (Mike, the Health Ranger, July 19th, http://www.naturalnews.com/000332.html)
The potential horrors of nanotechnology seem to keep on coming. Not long after the mythicalgrey goo threat was dismissed by nanotechnology pioneers, a
new threat appears: green goo created by the merging of nanotechnology and biotechnology -- nanobiotech. runaway mass of self-replicating organisms created by biotechnology researchers relying on nanotech processes. Imagine an artificially-created microbe that can feed on practically anything, survive harsh conditions, and spread through the air. That's one rendition of the green goo threat.
What is green goo? It's a
This atom-tech will feed on all life in the universe Whole Earth Review2000. (Howard, Editor. Sept. 22, Pg. Lexis)
Those who follow the progress of artificial life research know that effects of messing with the engines of evolution might lead to forces even more regrettable than the demons unleashed at Alamogordo. Biocidal technologies threaten life throughout the rest of the universe.
It looks as it something even more powerful than thermonuclear weaponry is emanating from that same, strangely fated corner of New Mexico where nuclear physicists first knew sin,
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7th is Quantum Vacuum Mining We will have vacuum mining tech by 2020- and guess whatit destroys the universe Mundi in 7 (Exit, Physicist, http://www.exitmundi.nl/quantum.htm)
It will be over before anyone can say `sorry'. In a laboratory somewhere, someone tries to get hold of a weird and completely new, exotic type of energy. But boy, the experiment goes out of hand. Suddenly, there's a BIG explosion. And then there's nothing -- our planet, the sun, all planets in our solar system and even some stars surrounding our solar system have been blown to smithereens. And explaining what went wrong isn't even simple. We're talking quantum physics here: the physics of the vanishingly small building blocks that make up all matter in the Universe. In quantum physics, everything is totally different from daily life. Quantum particles can be in two places at the same time, and can
behave both like waves and particles. In fact, when you hear a quantum physicist say `particles', don't think of little, round balls. Quantum `particles' are better compared with tones of music: they're definitely there, but you can't see them or catch them. One of the most mind-boggling properties of quantum particles is that they come into existence out of nowhere. Suck every molecule of air out of a bottle, making it completely vacuum -- and quantum particles will still be there. They pop up in pairs out of nowhere. And within a tiny fraction of a second, they merge together and -- zzzip! -they're gone. It
is precisely this odd `quantum vacuum' that may one day open the door to a very new source of energy. Suppose you're able to snatch some of those out-of-nowhere particles away. Admittedly, you'll have to be REALLY fast. But if you do
succeed, you'll have harvested particles out of nowhere. And since matter and energy are basically the same stuff (according to Einstein's E=mc2), you'll have energy out of nowhere! The advantages would be unimaginable. Here's an energy source that never runs out, is everywhere around, is extremely cheap, and causes no pollution whatsoever. But then again, there is a small, but alarming risk. There may be
simply energy too much. Mining the quantum vacuum might bring about an unstoppable chain reaction, releasing an ever increasing amount of energy. In fact, no-one knows how much energy will be released: calculations done by physicists give answers anywhere between zero and infinity. Obviously, too much energy would mean trouble. The explosion could be huge enough to blow apart our entire solar system and everything around it. And of course, infinite energy would bring about infinite destruction, bombing not just a handful of stars, but everything in the entire Universe. Gladly, no present-day scientist is capable of mining the quantum vacuum. On the other hand: one day, there will be. And that day may arrive sooner than you think: some estimate around 2020 science will be ready. Let's hope physicists finally have their calculations straightened out by then. So it's `wait and
see'. And talking about `seeing': as the famous science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once pointed out, whenever you see an unexplained burst of energy coming from the cosmos (and there are a lot of them), it may be some alien civilization, blowing itself to kingdom come while experimenting with the quantum vacuum...
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8th is Ice Nine We will create Ice-Nine accelerators that will consume the universe- tests prove Close 2
COULD WE DESTROY THE UNIVERSE? Professor Frank Close OBE 19 March 2002
Gresham College
http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/could-we-destroy-the-universe
Frank Close is a particle physicist, author and speaker. He was theGresham Professor of Astronomy between 2000 and 2003. He is Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. He was formerly vice president of the British Association for Advancement of Science, Head of the Theoretical Physics Division at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and Head of Communications and Public Education at CERN. He is the author of several books, including the best-selling Antimatter, and the winner of the Kelvin Medal of the Institute of Physics for his "outstanding contributions to the public understanding of physics."
All the rivers, lakes and oceans froze with a "great vvarroomph" as Kurt Vonnegut's mad scientist dropped some molecules of "ice-nine" into a stream. Ice-nine was a (hypothetical) form of water, more stable than the
ordinary form, which froze at room temperature. In the story, ordinary water is metastable and changes into the stable form - ice-nine - when it encounters the minutest traces of it. Put ice-nine in a whisky and soda and you would have instant scotch on the rocks; but don't drink it or the
Thankfully that's science fiction, but it is getting harder to be sure when one reads reports that scientists are concerned that they might inadvertently create "Killer plasma ready to devour the Earth". The story centres on experiments that are planned at two high energy accelerators of heavy ions, nuclei of atoms like lead. One of these, known as the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider or "RHIC", has just started in the USA, while a much more powerful version is currently being built in Geneva the Large Hadron Collider, LHC. Can drop by colliding these pieces of atoms at huge energies scientists will investigate conditions such as have not existed since the first moments of the universe. At that epoch,
water in your body will instantly freeze. quarks and gluons, the seeds of atomic nuclei today, were in effect melted, swilling around in a hot soup known as "quark gluon plasma".] According to some reports, scientists have warned that if these experiments "go wrong" they could produce
a new form of particle, which media named the "killer strangelet". Some theories predict that strangelets (forget the
"killer") exist. These are atomic nuclei similar to those that make matter as we know it, but contaminated by "strange particles" such as are found naturally in cosmic rays. Whereas strange particles normally live less than the blink of an eye, it is possible that in nuclei they might stabilize. Indeed, the intriguing possibility is that under certain conditions, the resulting strangelets might even turn out to be more stable than the stuff that
Were strangelets to come into contact with ordinary matter, they might then act like "ice-nine", gobbling up the nuclei of ordinary matter, until so heavy that the strangelet sank to the center of the Earth. Then it would eat up the Earth from the inside "converting it into one giant strangelet and killing us all in the process". Could this really happen? On both continents committees of scientists were convened to look into this and the more
we're made of. general question: what risks are there when entering "unknown territory" with high energy particle accelerators? All our experience to date has given us a picture of how the universe works, and based on the best available evidence we proceed to plan the next steps. Although
RHIC and the LHC will be entering new territory in our current experience, it is not a first in the history of the universe.
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And finally, you should evaluate this round based on a utilitarian framework Its the best all alternatives fail Bentham 1948 Jeremyphilosopher (The Principles of Morals and Legislation; pg 1-2)
Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On
the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other a chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjugation, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while. The principal of utility recognizes this subjugation, and assumes it for the foundation of that system , the object of which to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and law. Systems which attempt to question it, deal in sounds instead of sense, in caprice instead of reason, in darkness instead of light.
Util extends to aliens it must remain impartial to be ethical Sikora and Berry 1978 R.I. Brianrespectively: professor of philosophy @ University Of British Columbia; professor of Political
Science @ Chicago University (Obligations To Future Generations; p. 101-2)
Utilitarianism impartiality is an absolutely essential element of utilitarian morality. It ensures that utilities are not weighted or manipulated so as to favor individuals distinguished only by what (for the theory) are in themselves morally irrelevant characteristics: sex, race, nationality, species, etc. Equal consideration is extended to all sentient creatures; this is, surly, one of the grander ideas inherent in utilitarian ethics. Among characteristics of individuals which are morally irrelevant must be included spatial and temporal location. If a person is (or will be) affected for better or worse by an action then that effect must be reckoned in whether it is proximate or remote over space and/or time. It is, after all, equally real regardless of where and when it occurs. This is the reason for the theorys insistence that the
consequences of the future (as yet nonexistent) generations must be taken into account in deciding on population or resource policy.
There is no alt to util even if you think human extinction is bad, killing all aliens is net worse Pettit 1991 Philipprofessor of Philosophy @ Australia National University (A Companion to Ethics, ed. By Peter Singer; pg 234)
It is usually said against consequentialism that it would lead an agent to do horrendous deeds, so long as they promised the best consequences. It would forbid nothing absolutely: not rape, not torture, not even murder. This charge is on target but it is relevant of course in horrendous circumstances. Thus if someone of ordinary values condoned torture, that would only be in circumstances where there was a great potential gainthe saving of innocent lives, the prevention of catastropheand where there were not the bad consequences involved, say, in state authorities claiming the right to torture. Once it is clear the charge is only relevant only in horrendous circumstances, it ceases to be clearly damaging. After all, the non-consequentialist will often have to defend an equally unattractive response in such circumstances. It may be awful to think of torturing someone but it must be equally awful to think of not doing so and consequently allowing, say, a massive bomb to go off in some public place.
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Humanity must acknowledge the equality of alien life anything less justifies genocide Packer, Master in communication Wake Forest, 2007
<Joe, Alien Life in Search of Acknowledgment, pg 62-63>
Once we hold alien interests as equal to our own we can begin to revaluate areas previously believed to hold no relevance to life beyond this planet. A diverse group of scholars including Richard
Posner, Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago, Nick Bostrom, philosophy professor at Oxford University, John Leslie philosophy professor at Guelph University and Martin Rees, Britains Astronomer Royal,
have written on the emerging
technologies that threaten life beyond the planet Earth.

ability to self replicate.
Particle accelerators labs are colliding matter together, reaching energies that have not been seen since the Big Bang. These experiments threaten a phase transition that would create a bubble of altered space that would expand at the speed of light killing all life in its path. Nanotechnology and other machines may soon reach the
A mistake in design or programming could unleash an endless quantity of machines converting all matter in the universe into copies of themselves. Despite detailing the potential of these technologies to destroy the entire universe, Posner, Bostrom, Leslie, and Rees only mention of alien life in their works is in reference to the threat aliens post to humanity. The rhetorical construction of otherness only in terms of the threats it poses, but never in terms of the threat one poses to it, has been at the center of humanitys history of genocide, colonization, and environmental destruction. Although humanity certainly has its own interests in reducing the threat of these technologies evaluating them without taking into account the danger they pose to alien life is neither appropriate nor just. It is not appropriate because framing the issue only in terms of human interests will result in priorities designed to minimize the risks and maximize the benefits to humanity, not all life. Even if humanity dealt with the threats effectively without referencing their obligation to aliens, Posner, Bostrom, Leslie, and Rees rhetoric would not be just, because it arbitrarily declares other life forms unworthy of consideration. A framework of acknowledgement would allow humanity to address the risks of these new technologies, while being cognizant of humanitys obligations to other life within the universe. Applying the lens of acknowledgment to the issue of existential threats moves the problem from one of self destruction to universal genocide. This may be the most dramatic example of how refusing to extend acknowledgment to potential alien life can mask humanitys obligations to life beyond this planet.
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Extend our Drake evidence - recent examinations of the fossil record and astronomical discoveries put the number of alien civilization at our level of complexity at 10,000, and there are 100s of billions of galaxies. Drake is an astrophysicist default to our quals Extend Mackay 2- the abundance of microbial organisms in the universe mathematically guarantees that aliens exist- Earth is not the only planet that has the conditions necessary for life- only a few key elements are necessary and they are wide spread. Even using the most pessimistic standards there is a 100% chance of alien life in the Universe Aczel, 01professor of Mathmatics Bentley College,
<Amir, Probability 1: The book that proves there is life in outer space, pg 212-214>
The union rule for independent events allows us to compute the probability that there is at least one other planet outside Earth with life on it. Lets start by making some reasonable and minimal (that is, least favorable to our conclusion) assumptions about the basic probabilities of the existence of life on a planet orbiting any one star other than the Sun. Lets take the estimate of the number of stars with planets, f from Drakes equation, as = 0.5. Then, from the fact that out of nine extrasolar planets thus discovered, one is in the habitable zone, and the fact that this is confirmed in our own solar system (Earth being in the habitable zone, the other eight planets
possibly not), we will use Y9 for that parameter. Now we come to the hard part, getting a lower bound for the actual probability of life: What is the probability that DNA develops and is sustained in life-forms on a planet that is within its stars habitable zone? Lets
entertain the notion that DNA is an extremely complex molecule with a very small chance of occurring on its own and that life is precarious because the universe is a dangerous place. Let us therefore assume that the probability of life occurring on any single planet that is already within its stars habitable zone is extremely, extremely remote: one in a trillion. By multiplication of this extremely small number by the previous factors of 0.5 and /9, we get the assumption that the probability of life around any one given star is 0.00000000000005. Our galaxy has about 300 billion stars (although some estimates are lower), and lets assume there are 100 billion galaxies in the universe. We will now use all these estimates and plug them into the
rule for the union of independent events: P (life in orbit around at least one other star in the known universe) = 1
The answer is a number that is indistinguishable from 1.00 at Even if we assume that there are only 10 billion stars in our own galaxy and that there are only a billion galaxies, the answer still comes out to be a number indistinguishable from 1.00 for the probability of life
(0.99999999999995)30000000000000000000000000 any level of decimal accuracy reported by the computer. The answer is, for all practical purposes, equal to 1.00or 100 percent. elsewhere in the universe. This shows that the result is overwhelmingthe probability that life exists outside Earth does not depend very strongly on the actual number of stars in the universe, as long as that number is very largeas we well know it to be from everything astronomy has taught us. New results from the Hubble Space Telescope about the existence of so many billions of galaxies in the universe serve the point that there are so many possible places for life to develop. There is also no dependence in the model on the assumptions about the percentage of stars with planets and the percentage of these planets within the habitable zone. While we used the best scientific estimates, even lower values still lead to the same answer, a number close to 1.00. The probability is a virtual certainty. What is happening here, mathematically, is that even though our probability of life on any one planet may be extremely small, the compound probability that life exists on at least one other planet increases steadily because there are so man places to look so many stars. This type of convergence as the number of trials becomes large always takes place when one uses the rule for the union of independent events. If you give something enough of a chance to happen, it eventually will. Finally, we dont really know for certain the size of the entire universe. Some
believe that our universe is infinite. If there are infinitely many stars, the answer to our question is that the probability of extraterrestrial life is identically equal to 1.00 (not just a number indistinguishable from 1.00 to any level of accuracy), and that this holds true no matter
how small the probability of life on any planet may be, as long as that number is not identically zero (and we know that it is not zero since we exist).
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Even if humanity goes extinct life will reemerge if we do not destroy the Universe Grinspoon, Southwest Research Institute Principle Scientist Department of Space Studies and adjunct professor of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at the University of Colorado, 03
<David, Lonely Planets: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life, pg 415> My belief in aliens is inseparable from a certain unavoidable, foolish, naturalistic optimism about our own ultimate prospects. Everything
that Ive learned about the nature of our universe and our biosphere tells me that life will find a way to thrive. Gaia, as Lynn Margulis has said, is a tough bitch. If her noosphere chops off its head, shell keep grooving along. In time, she may grow another noosphere, giving a different protointelligent species a chance at reaching the big time. I see our proud little spurt of technical invention as a little eddy in a whirling universe that is evolving, self-organizing, and moving inexorably toward more life and more intelligence. Our little whorl could wink out in an instant, or it could grow into a
deeper more stable mind-storm. Is psychogenesis limited to Earth? I doubt it. Will there be a psychozoic age of the universe? Has it already begun? If we believe even in the possibility of the transformation to wisdom and immortality, then we must live in a universe increasingly permeated with intelligence, and suffused with love. I proved it mathematically in the last chapter, and equations dont lie. Margulis = Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts
Panspermia means comets will spread life all over the Universe Shostak. SETI Senior Astronomer, 03
<Seth, Panspermia: Spreading Life Through the Universe, Jul. 24, http://www.seti.org/site/apps/nl/content2.asp?c=ktJ2J9MMIsE&b=191981&ct=220926> About 25 years ago, two British astronomers, Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramsinghe, proposed that comets might be the Johnny Appleseeds of life, carrying vital spores from star system to star system, an idea that is known today as panspermia. If
the tail of such a life-loaded comet were to brush the Earth, it might pass some of its frozen microorganisms into the atmosphere where they could descend to our planets surface. The two astronomers ventured that this might account
for the start of life on Earth. They also made the disturbing suggestion that panspermia could spread disease. Now you might wonder whether life from space, as intriguing as the idea might be, solves the mystery of how biology got started in the first place. Or does this theory merely push the problem of lifes origin into someone elses lap? Well, of course, to some extent it only accomplishes the latter. But there is an appealing aspect to panspermia: it
allows life to be widespread, even if the genesis of life is a difficult and rare event. After all, humans cover the planet, even though Homo sapiens got his start in only one locale (Africa, presumably.) Life might blanket the Galaxy even if it only sprung up on a small number of worlds. Great.
But is there any evidence for panspermia, or is it just a seductive idea with a sexy moniker? Jayant Narlikar, of the Inner-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune, India, claims to have data in support of panspermia. Narlikar recently flew an experiment in a high-altitude balloon. On board was a cryogenic sampler consisting of 16 cylinders that were pumped out and decontaminated before launch. As the balloon climbed into the Indian sky, puffs of air were sucked in. One by one, the cylinders were automatically filled with samples from various altitudes, ranging from 25 to 41 km. Once the payload returned to Earth, it was examined in biology labs in Cardiff and Sheffield, England. To their amazement, the researchers found evidence for live cells in the samples from 41 km. Even more interesting, these "bacteria" recovered at high altitude were non-culturable. This doesnt mean that they didnt appreciate opera, but rather that they couldnt be grown in laboratory Petri dishes. According to Narlikar, this was important in ruling out laboratory contamination of the samples the cells found were clearly not a common lab bacterium.
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New planet indicates widespread habitability Than 07, Space.com writer,
<Ker, April 24, Major Discovery: New Planet Could Harbor Water and Life http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070424_hab_exoplanet.html>
An Earth-like planet spotted outside our solar system is the first found that could support liquid water and harbor life, scientists announced today. Liquid water is a key ingredient for life as we know it. The
newfound planet is located at the "Goldilocks" distance-not too close and not too far from its star to keep water on its surface from freezing or vaporizing away.
And while astronomers are not yet able to look for signs of biology on the planet, the discovery is a milestone in planet detection and the search for extraterrestrial life, one with the potential to profoundly change our outlook on the
universe. "The goal is to find life on a planet like the Earth around a star like the Sun. This is a step in that direction," said study leader Stephane Udry of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland. "Each time you goone step forward you are very happy." The new planet is about 50 percent bigger than Earth and about five times more massive. The new "super-Earth" is called Gliese 581 C, after its star, Gliese 581, a diminutive red dwarf star located 20.5 light-years away that is about one-third as massive as the Sun. Smallest to date Gliese 581 C is the smallest extrasolar planet, or "exoplanet," discovered to date. It is located about 15 times closer to its star than Earth is to the Sun; one year on the planet is equal to 13 Earth days. Because red dwarfs, also known as M dwarfs, are about 50 times dimmer than the Sun and much cooler, their planets can orbit much closer to them while still remaining within their habitable zones, the spherical region around a star within which a planet's temperature can sustain liquid water on its surface. Because it lies within its star's habitable zone and is relatively close to Earth, Gliese 581 C could be a very important target for future space missions dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life, said study team member Xavier Delfosse of Grenoble University in France. "On the treasure map of the universe, one would be tempted to mark this planet with an X," Delfosse said. Two other planets are known to inhabit the red dwarf system. One is a 15 Earth-mass "hot-Jupiter" gas planet discovered by the same team two years ago, which orbits even closer to its star than does Gliese 581 C. Another is an 8 Earth-mass planet discovered at the same time as Gliese 581 C, but which lies outside its star's habitable zone. Possible waterworld Computer models predict Gliese 581 C is either a rocky planet like Earth or a waterworld covered entirely by oceans. "We have estimated that the mean temperature of this super-Earth lies between 0 and 40 degrees Celsius [32 to 104 degrees Fahrenheit], and water would thus be liquid," Udry said. The scientists discovered the new world using the HARP instrument on the European Southern Observatory 3.6 meter telescope in La Sille, Chile. They employed the so-called radial velocity, or "wobble," technique, in which the size and mass of a planet are determined based on small perturbations it induces in its parent star's orbit via gravity. Udry said there was a fair amount of time between the calculation of Gliese 581 C's size and the realization it was within its star's habitable zone. "That came at the end," Udry said. When it did hit him, Udry knew he would be spending time fielding phone calls from the media. "You right away think about the journalists who will like it very much," he told SPACE.com. More to come David Charbonneau, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) who was not involved in the study, said the
new finding is an
"absolutely fantastic discovery." "It means there probably are many more such planets out there,"
Charbonneau said in a telephone interview. Whether Gliese 581 C harbors life is still unknown, but "it satisfies for the first time a key requirement."
Life is spontaneous it takes nothing special Hawking, NAS, Online Lecture

<Steven Life in the Universehttp://www.hawking.org.uk/lectures/life.html>
If the appearance of life on a given planet was very unlikely, one might have expected it to take a long time. More precisely, one might have expected life to appear just in time for the subsequent evolution to intelligent beings, like us, to
have occurred before the cut off, provided by the life time of the Sun. This is about ten billion years, after which the Sun will swell up and engulf the Earth. An intelligent form of life, might have mastered space travel, and be able to escape to another star. But otherwise, life on Earth would
There is fossil evidence, that there was some form of life on Earth, about three and a half billion years ago. This may have been only 500 million years after the Earth became stable and cool enough, for life to develop. But life could have taken 7 billion years to develop, and still have left time to evolve to beings like us, who could ask about the origin of life. If the probability of life developing on a given planet, is very small, why did it happen on Earth, in about one 14th of the time available. The early appearance of life on Earth suggests that there's a good chance of the spontaneous generation of life, in suitable conditions.
be doomed.
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Life can survive under any circumstance- its unlimited in the universe Grinspoon, Southwest Research Institute Principle Scientist Department of Space Studies and adjunct professor of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at the University of Colorado, 03
<David, Lonely Planets: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life, pg 129-131>
Life has expanded on its bag of chemical tricks to facilitate survival in a bewildering array of environments. In recent years, weve discovered life in the strangest of places: in unlikely corners of our planet where no one had thought to search because they seemed so obviously uninhabitable. Weve found bacteria thriving in acid so strong that it would dissolve your skin instantly, and creatures soaking contentedly in superheated thermal springs above two hundred degrees. Some of these hyperthermophiles, or extreme-heatloving organisms, require temperatures above the normal boiling point of water to survive. At the opposite extreme are those that survive in intense cold. In frigid arctic tundras that appear lifeless, weve
found colonies of bacteria hiding out inside frozen rocks. Weve even found organisms that can survive after being frozen for weeks in liquid nitrogen! The green plant Welwitschia mirabilis can survive for thousands of years in places with only one centimeter of rainfall per year. The Dead sea, it turns out, is alive with salt-loving bacteria and algae. In 1997, Japanese scientists discovered a species of marine worm living in an ocean trench twenty-one thousand feet beneath the sea at a crushing pressure 650 times that of sea level. Bacteria have survived for 3 million years in Siberian permafrost at fifteen degrees below zero with no sunlight, air, or food. They dont do very much down there but survive simply by
waiting, for eons if necessary, until the ground thaws and they can resume living at a healthier clip. Large, diverse communities of previously unknown organisms crowd the hot, nutrient-rich waters surrounding black smokers, volcanic vents on the bottom of the sea. The denizens of these recently discovered ecosystems include sulfur-eating shrimp and giant tube worms up to ten feet long. As weird and unearthly as these
There are even bacteria living a mile underground and eating nothing but basaltic rock and water. * In fact, it now seems possible that most life on our planet is in the deep Earth biosphere, a realm extending miles underground whose existence we never before suspected. This would be the
deep-ocean communities seem to us, many scientists are starting to think that our most distant ancestors came from just such a place. biological equivalent of dark matter in that the majority of life even on our own planet could as yet be unknown to us. Weve been sharing a planet with these unlikely creatures for billions of years, but who knew? Our own planet is crawling with aliens. We continue to find extremophiles (lovers of extremes) that break our conceptual barriers of lifes range in temperature, pH, diet, and pressure. They
show us that life is even more robust, adaptable, and resourceful than we imagined, and this encourages us to think that it will find ways to persist in diverse and extreme environments on other planets. In fact, life may not even need a planet. When the Apollo 12 astronauts retrieved pieces of the old Surveyor 3 spacecraft, which had been sitting idle in a lunar crater fully exposed to the harsh radiation and vacuum of space, investigators back on Earth were shocked to find viable Streptococcus bacteria that had survived a three-year stay on the Moon. Who is to say that living creatures cannot survive longer spells in outer space? This possibility was amplified by another recent discovery: bacteria such as Deinococcus radiodurans that live happily inside nuclear reactors, flawlessly reassembling their damaged genomes from hundreds of fragments, despite
radiation doses a thousand times stronger than those that would kill a human.
No special circumstances for life Drake 02, Astronomy and Astrophysics Professor University of California at Santa Cruz ,
<Frank, July, Astrobiology Magazine, July 15 http://www.astrobio.net/news/article236.html> I think this is an occasion where that old principal of good science, Occam's
Razor, is helpful. Apply Occam's Razor to the question of the origin of life on Earth. We look at the Earth, and with regards to that origin, as best we know, no special or freak circumstances were required. It took water, organics, a source of energy, and a long time. Deep-sea vents are the current favorite and a reasonable place for the origin. But even if they weren't the culprits, the chemists have found a multitude of other pathways that produce the chemistry of life. The challenge seems to be
not to find THE pathway, but the one that was the quickest and most productive. The prime point is that nothing special was required. There will be a pathway that works, on Earth and on similar planets. Then, by result of normal processes on the planet. Furthermore, life should
Occam's Razor, the origin of life on Earth is nothing more than the appear very frequently on other Earth-like
planets. There will be microbial life nearby the solar system.
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The only Aliens that are immortal are in higher dimensional universes, not our own. India Daily Technology Team, 2005 Aug. 17, (http://www.indiadaily.com/editorial/4204.asp) The life forms in higher dimensional universes and the Hyperspace, such as aliens, may be just electromagnetic energy that stays as a cohesive energy and is indestructible. These life forms are immortal who from time to time use natural means of getting into Physical beings and visit the Physical Universe. Like any other civilization, they have a specified hierarchy and divided roles in civilizations. What is fascinating is that these life forms are really immortal and can take shape of Physical existence in the Physical Universe.
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Multicellularity will emerge Darling, PHD in astronomy from University of Manchester, lecturer and renowned author, 01 <David, Life Everywhere: The Maverick Science of Astrobiology, Pg 136-138> . But in 1999, Jochen Brocks of the University of Sydney and his colleagues reported evidence of eukarotes much older than Grypania. The evidence is in the firm of organic molecules called steranes, detected in rocks
2.75 billion years old. Steranes can only come from the breakdown of complex sterols (a group of alcohols that includes cholesterol), and sterols are only made by eukarotes using chemical pathways that demand molecular oxygen. A straightforward interpretation of these results is that eukarvotes were living 2.75 billion years ago with access to oxygen. Yet
the Oxygen Revolution still lay 500 million years in the future. This presents paleobiologists with an interesting puzzle. It also comes as bad news for a theory about eukarvotic origins put forward by Joseph Kirschink, chief of Caltechs Paleomagnetics Laboratory, and which has been used as a Rare Earth argument. Kirschink suggested a number of criteria that the prototype eukaryotic host cell had
to meet. It had to he capable of phagocytosis (literally cell eating, or ingesting food particles by surrounding them); be big enough to engulf other bacteria; and offer a controlled environment so that natural selection would favor it as a partner for symbiosis. Only one organism, he felt, met all the requirements: Magnetobacter a goliath among bacteria that uses onboard crystals of magnetite to orient itself along Earths magnetic field lines. As well see in the next chapter, no such organism is likely to appear on an anaerobic world or on a world without a magnetic field. Kirschinks proposal was used by Ward and Brownlee as one of their Rare Earth arguments because it implies special requirements for the rise of higher life. If Magnetobacter were the ancestor of all eukaryotes, there ought to be no signs of eukaryotic activity before the Oxygen Revolution. Yet now we have evidence of eukaryotes living at a time when Earths free oxygen levels must have been very low. It seems not only that complex life (at the level of eukaryotes) got started much earlier than was thought, hut much earlier than it was thought possible. A way out this enigma has been suggested by Harvard biologist Andrew Knoll. He takes as his central clue the fact that, together with the sterane biomarkers, Brocks and his colleagues found traces of what are called alphamethylhopanes. These are only made by cyanobacteriaphotosynthetic bacteria of the type found in microbial mats. It seems that oxygen-requiring eukaryotes were living in the same locale as oxygenproducing cyanobacteria. This is surely no coincidence. The stromatolites, Knoll suggests, probably provided an early oxygen-rich oasis in which eukaryotes could get a head start. He counters possible criticism that oxygen released by stromatolites would be quickly diffused into the general ocean in three ways. First, many eukaryotic cells today can survive in oxygen-poor conditions, needing higher levels only in order to grow and reproduce. Second, the slime that microbial mats produce traps bubbles of oxygen, delaying the gass escape. Third, the dependence of early eukaryotes on cvanobacteria would have encouraged close contact and made it easier for an endosymbiotic relationship to develop. Who knows how much deeper in time
Just as scientists are continually pushing back the origin of life, were learning of complex organisms and behavior in unexpectedly remote epochs bacterial
well find evidence of eukaryotes?
communities at least 3.5 billion years ago, nucleated cells less than 700 million years later. Life, it seems, was complex and had the propensity
Multicellularity is not one of natures recent inventionsan emergent quality that needed a long period of gestation. In the broadest and most meaningful sense, its a general stratagem of life and one that affords multiple benefits . As Lynn
toward increasing complexity almost from the outset. Margulis and her son Dorian Sagan wrote, Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking. There are main advantages to cooperation over going it alone. Cells within an ensemble can specialize, so that the collective can develop abilities far beyond the scope of a solitary, single-celled organism. A multicellular structure can be a more formidable predator and a less vulnerable preyits larger, relatively less exposed to its surroundings, and doesnt die just because one cell dies. It can adapt to colonize new environments and gain access to new resourcesthe ability to build a stalk, for instance, is a huge advantage for an organism that depends upon sunlight. More generally,
multicellularity brings all the rewards and possibilities of being able to assume highly varied forms and structures, creating vast potential for evolutionary exploitation. This
morphological potential began to be fully realized during the Cambrian explosion, some 530 years ago. Yet the significance of this event was not, as its sometimes portrayed, the appearance of multicelled organisms, but of animals. The Cambrian explosion represented just the latest and most dramatic exploration of the multicellular theme. Throughout
the history of life on Earth, singlecelled organisms have shown a tendency to progress at every opportunity toward some form of multicellularity. Microbial mats, tightly-knit bacterial colonies, individual eukarotic cells, lichen (symbiotic associations of algae and
fungi), colonial eukaryotes such as Volvox, as well as the more obvious examples of animals and plants, all display this trend for many cells to come together to form a cohesive and cooperative whole. Multicellularity can even be induced in the lab in populations that normally consist of single-celled organisms. Martin Boraas and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee studied cultures of the green alga Chlorella vulgaris. The researchers had already shown that populations of the alga will remain singlecelled for more than two decades, except for the occasional appearance of loose clusters of cells. But when the inoculated the cultures with a predatory singlecelled flagellate, it was a different story. The algal population fell to begin with, but then recovered and was found to contain colonies made up of anything from four to hundreds of cells, as well as free-floating individuals. After a couple of months, there were hardly am single cells left and the bulk of the colonies were eight cells strong. The researchers observed that while flagellates could ingest single cells and young colonies, the mature colonies were too
When a feature of life crops up independently and persistently over time, it suggests a universal survival strategy at work. The evidence around us on Earth is that multicellularity is a ploy too
large for them to tackle. good for nature to pass by--a convergent property that bestows such overwhelming advantages that well find it implemented routinely wherever living things emerge.
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Moon is not key to life Darling, PHD in astronomy from University of Manchester, lecturer and renowned author, 01
<David, Life Everywhere: The Maverick Science of Astrobiology, Pg 96-97> But its now clear that Laskars findings rule out neither simple nor complex biology. Contrary to Ward and Brownlees assertion, big moons may not be rare, necessary or even desirable to the emergence of higher firms of life. Recent
computer simulations by Eugenio Rivera of NASA Ames and his colleagues suggest that small planets with big moons are likely to be quite common. As many as one in three Earth-like planets in their infancy may he struck hard enough by other large objects to make big moons, and one in twelve struck at a time when its tilt is sufficiently mild for it to be stabilized at a terrestrial angle (currently 23 1/2 degrees) or less. On the question of whether a big moon is crucial to the emergence of complex life, there are two points. First, if the Earth had been deprived of a big moon then, as Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute points out: Our planet would spin faster fast enough, in fact, to stabilize it against major tipping.* In addition, even if an Earth-like planet occasionally does spin flip, it will spend 10 million years or more doing so. Life can probably adapt to such slow changes. Indeed, it already has, during episodes of polar wander on Earth. Second, new biological possibilities are opened up for planets that do periodically roll on their sides for want of a stabilizing satellite. In 1997, James Kasting and Darren Williams at Penn State calculated that our climate would be like if the Earth were tipped on its side (as Uranus is) and located 1.4 times further from the Sun, at a distance of 210 million kilometers. They found that, given the extra greenhouse heating due to increased levels of carbon dioxide, conditions should be positively balmy. The equator would be at a steady 11C, whereas the
poles would never rise above 46C or fall below 3C. Thered be no ice anywhere, except on the top of tall mountains
The moon is not key to life conditions Kasting, Geoscience Professor, Penn State, 01
<James, Essay Review: Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee's "Rare Earth" Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 44.1 (2001) 117-131 Project Muse>
Whether or not a high obliquity would actually make an Earth-like planet uninhabitable for animal life is debatable: continents located near the equator would experience an unusual seasonal cycle with two summers and two winters each year, but their climates would not be subject to the extremes of temperature that would occur at high latitudes. Williams, et al. (1996), showed that [End Page 120] surface temperatures over an equatorial continent could remain in the 0 to 30C range, even at very high obliquity. More importantly, however, Ward and Brownlee neglect to point out that the question of whether a moonless
Earth's obliquity would vary chaotically depends on the planet's spin rate and initial obliquity, as well as on the masses and orbital periods of the other planets. If
Earth's spin period were less than about 12 hours, its obliquity would vary
regularly (and with small amplitude), just as it does today. Models of the Earth- Moon system suggest that Earth initially may have been
rotating quite rapidly, with a spin period of perhaps five hours. Its spin rate slowed down over time as a consequence of friction caused by solar and lunar tides. In
the absence of the Moon, the tidal dissipation rate would have been smaller, and Earth's spin rate would not have decreased as fast. Of course, the reason why Earth was spinning so fast in
the first place is precisely because of the Moon-forming impact, so the above argument is somewhat circular. We have no way of predicting what Earth's initial spin rate would have been if this particular large impact had not occurred, but there is no reason to believe that it would have been as slow as today. It
is extremely difficult to predict whether other Earth-like planets will be in the chaotic obliquity regime or not, so we cannot yet determine whether this is a widespread problem for planetary habitability. Even if it is, it does not appear to be one that would preclude the existence of complex life.
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Sun metalicity is not critical to life formation Kasting, Geoscience Professor, Penn State, 01 <James, Essay Review: Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee's "Rare Earth" Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 44.1 (2001) 117-131 Project Muse> Ward and Brownlee cite a study by a fellow University of Washington astronomer, Guillermo Gonzalez, that indicates that our Sun is approximately 25 percent more metal-rich than the average star (out of 174 studied) in
the immediate solar neighborhood. Gonzalez' latest work (1999) says that the Sun is about 35 percent more metal-rich than nearby G dwarfs (of all ages). Ward
and Brownlee point out, quite rightly, that large planets are less likely to form if heavy element abundances are decreased. But is a 25 percent, or even a 35 percent, depletion something to worry about? Earth would very likely still be habitable if it were 35 percent smaller. A Mars-sized
planet (one-tenth the Earth's mass) does run into problems: Mars lacks the internal heat necessary to sustain volcanism and plate tectonics, and it also loses heavy gases such as oxygen and nitrogen to space at an appreciable rate. Unless planetary mass depends on heavy element abundance in a highly nonlinear manner, this particular observation, while interesting, does not appear to rule out the possibility of finding habitable planets around other stars. The argument based on Gonzalez' observations of solar-type stars has some merit. But Ward
and Brownlee push this logic still further in a way that does not make good sense. They point out that the stars around which extrasolar planets (hot Jupiters) have been found are metal-rich by about a factor of 2. According to them, this suggests that planets may form only around metal-rich stars. But, as pointed out earlier, thus far extrasolar planets have been found around only 5 to 6 percent of nearby stars. Most astronomers, including the discoverers, feel that these are the anomalous systems. The other 95 percent of nearby single stars may well have planetary systems similar to our own, we just have
not had the capability (or time) to observe them yet. Indeed, if anything, it appears that high stellar metallicity may be a negative factor because it promotes the rapid formation of giant planets. This allows them to interact gravitationally with the nebula from which they formed, causing them to spiral inwards and clear the HZ of potentially habitable planets.
New research shows bodies forming around planets Astrobiology Magazine, 06 <'Planemo' Spawn, Summary (Jun 10, 2006 http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1987& mode=thread&order=0&thold=0> Forget our traditional ideas of where a planetary system forms - new research led by a University of Toronto astronomer reveals that planetary nurseries can exist not only around stars but also around objects that are themselves not much heftier than Jupiter. It
suggests that miniature versions of the solar system may circle objects that are some 100 times less massive than our sun. That's the dramatic conclusion of two studies being presented Monday, June 5 at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Calgary by Professor Ray Jayawardhana and his colleagues.
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Even if some aliens are smart enough to avoid disaster our evidence indicates that there exists millions of intelligent alien civilizations, many will still die. The number of alien civilizations are so large that even if they could help us, there would be too many of them coming to Earth at once which guarantees an alien war. Speed of light means they cant Easterbrook 03, Senior fellow, New Republic, <Gregg, Were All Gonna Die!, Wired 10.12.http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.07/doomsday_pr.html>
"The present vacuum could be fragile and unstable," Rees frets in his book. A particle accelerator might cause a tiny bit of space to undergo a
"phase transition" back to the primordial not-anything condition that preceded the big bang. Nothingness would expand at the speed of light, deleting everything in its path. Owing to light speed, not even advanced aliens would see the mega-destructo wave front coming.
Localized nature of science means they will not understand in time to stop it Basalla, History Professor University of Delaware, 05 <George, Civilized Life in the Universe: Scientists on Extraterrestrials, pg 177> When philosopher Nicholas Rescher was asked to comment on Drakes notion of alien science, he dismissed it as infinitely parochial. It was like saying that extraterrestrials share our legal or political system. Rescher was well qualified to examine Drakes claims. He had recently studied the anthropomorphic character of human science and how it related to alien science. Rescher struck at the heart of the popular conception of alien science when he challenged the widely held view that there is only one natural world and a single science to explain it. He called this the one world, one science argument. The physical universe is singular, Rescher agreed, but its interpreters are many and diverse. What we know about physical reality stems from our special biological and cognitive make-up and our unique cultural and social heritage and experiences. We have no reason to suppose that extraterrestrials share our peculiar biological attributes, social outlook, or cultural traditions. Human science, therefore, is incommensurable with extraterrestrial science. If extraterrestrials cultivate science, it will be their
kind of science, not our kind. Alien science is a wholly different form of knowledge. It is not human science raised to a higher degree. Rescher
Astronomy as practiced by humans has been molded by the fact that we live on the surface of the Earth (not underwater), that we have eyes, and that the development of agriculture is linked to the seasonal positions of
offered a compelling illustration of how human biology and our situation on Earth shaped our science. celestial objects. Intelligent alien creatures living in an oceanic abyss might develop sophisticated hydrodynamics but fail to study the motion of heavenly bodies, investigate electromagnetic radiation, or build radio telescopes. Even
if extraterrestrials are surface dwellers, their biological endowment will determine what they are able to sense, their ecological niche, what aspects of nature they exploit to satisfy their needs, their cultural heritage, which questions about nature they find interesting to ask. Rescher acknowledges the existence
of intelligent extraterrestrials who possess the ability to develop science and technology. He does not dispute the scientists repeated claims (1) that there is a single scientifically knowable physical reality and (2) that aliens are not simply other humans inhabiting a different planet. After adopting these claims, he demolishes the idea of a universal science that serves as a common language in the universe.
Rescher
maintains that wherever science exists in the universe, it will be localized.
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Even if some alien life is destroyed by extinction events this hardly means this would always be the case, our Drake evidence indicates there should be 10,000 alien civilizations many have probably reached the point where an asteroid no longer poses a threat. Extinction events increase intelligent life Drake, Astronomy and Astrophysics Professor University of California at Santa Cruz ,02
<July, Astrobiology Magazine, http://www.astrobio.net/news/article236.html>
. It can be argued that extinction
events expedite the development of cognitive abilities, since those creatures with superior brains are better able to save themselves from the sudden change in their environment. Thus smarter creatures are selected, and the growth of intelligence accelerates. We see this effect in all varieties of animals -- it is not a fluke that has occurred in some small sub-set of animal life. This picture suggests strongly
that, given enough time, a biota can evolve not just one intelligent species, but many. So complex life should occur abundantly.
M Class stars mean life will be able to withstand an extinction event Vakoch, SETI Institute, 05
<Douglas, Setting SETI's Sights, Part II: Abodes for Life?, June 22, 2005 M Class Planets ensure life http://www.seti.org/site/apps/nl/content2.asp?c=ktJ2J9MMIsE&b=194993&ct=1089757>
With the latest discovery of a Super-Earth around a dim, red star 15 light years from Earth, SETI scientists have been pondering the implications for their search for intelligence on other worlds. This planet answers an ancient question, said Geoffrey
Marcy, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and leader of the team that discovered the planet, which is seven to eight times the mass of Earth. Over 2,000 years ago, the Greek philosophers Aristotle and Epicurus argued about whether there were other Earth-like planets. Now, for the first time, we have evidence for a rocky planet around a normal star. Team member Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington emphasized the
similarity between this most recently detected planet, located around an M star called Gliese 876, and our own world. This is the smallest extrasolar planet yet detected and the first of a new class of rocky terrestrial planets, he explained. It's like Earth's bigger cousin. A Second Chance For astronomers pondering the possibility of life outside our solar system, the discovery is especially promising due to the sheer number of M stars in our galaxy. The overwhelming majority of stars are M dwarfs--hundreds of billions in our galaxy alone. This suggests that there could be enormous numbers of planetary habitats capable of sustaining life, said Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute. But the mere existence of rocky
planets isnt enough to ensure the evolution of life. One critical requirement, according to Shostak, is having enough time for life to get underway and then develop into something interesting. Unlike Sun-like stars, which burn for 10 billion years and then die, M dwarfs live much longer -- as long as 100 billion years, he noted. So if such stellar runts can occasionally spawn life, the majority of that life will be far older than the
Longlived planets may be especially important for the evolution of life, given the devastating effects of periodic asteroid and meteor impacts. For example, many scientists believe that the massive asteroid that hit
biology of our own planet. The most ancient, and potentially most interesting, life might be found in the neighborhoods of M stars. Mexicos Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago was responsible for the wholesale extinction of dinosaurs. That catastrophe opened the way for the proliferation of mammals on Earth, eventually resulting in humankind. But on other worlds, such chance events might have obliterated an even greater variety of complex life, perhaps effectively stopping the evolution of intelligenceat least on planets with only modest lifetimes.
Given the longevity of M stars, however, complex life on worlds circling such stars might get a second chance. If evolution happens at a very slow pace, or if many times evolution gets started and gets truncated, because of some extinction events, explained Jill Tarter, Director of SETI Research at the SETI Institute, planets around M stars may get more than one chance, and they may be able to
accommodate a slower evolutionary mode and still end up with telescope builders.
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Jupiter like planets are not key to life Kasting, Geoscience Professor, Penn State, 01
<James, Essay Review: Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee's "Rare Earth" Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 44.1 (2001) 117-131 Project Muse>
Ward and Brownlee hedge their bets as to whether Jupiter-like planets exist in other planetary systems. On p. 239, they say: "It is likely that many planetary systems do not have Jovian planets." This statement is
presumably based on Wetherill's original analysis. At the time Wetherill wrote his paper, astrophysicists were having a difficult time figuring out how to form Jupiter fast enough. Jupiter's core had to form fast in order to capture hydrogen and helium from the solar nebula before it dissipated, and then-current accretion models were not able to simulate this under realistic conditions. Since that time, however, the situation has changed.
Astronomers have now found over 30 Jupiter-sized planets orbiting other stars. Many of these orbit very close to their stars--some closer than Mercury is to our own Sun. Paradoxically, these "hot Jupiters" probably
had to form very fast in order to interact gravitationally with their respective stellar nebulae and spiral in to their present positions. While explaining this process theoretically remains a difficult problem, the empirical evidence tells us that giant planets can and do form rapidly.
Ward and Brownlee are well aware of the existence of these extrasolar planets. On p. 242, they mention that the other 95 percent of stars that do not have "hot Jupiters" may have planetary systems similar to our own. One can only suppose that they wrote this section before most of the known extrasolar planets had been found and then went back and revised it without pointing out that the scientific landscape has changed. In reality, we still don't know
whether Jupiter-sized planets at Jupiter-like distances from their stars (~5 AU) are common. (The current Earth-Sun distance is 1 AU, or 1 astronomical unit.) The good news is that existing extrasolar planet searches are expected to tell us the answer within the next five to 10 years. Jupiter's own orbital period is about 12 years, so current detection methods, which rely on the perturbation to the star's position or velocity caused
The existence of Jupiter is a double-edged sword (or maybe even a triple-edged one, if such a thing exists). In addition to comets, Earth is also thought to have been hit occasionally by asteroids that have been perturbed from the asteroid belt by Jupiter's gravity. It was most likely an asteroid, not a comet, that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years
by the planet's gravity, would need about this same amount of time to find a similar planet around another star. ago, as evidenced by the high concentrations of iridium in the boundary layer clay. Indeed, the very existence of the asteroid belt is most likely a result of Jupiter's large gravity, which prevented a planet from forming in that region. So, to the extent that asteroid impacts are a danger to life on
The flip side of this latter argument is that many authors would agree that the Cretaceous/Tertiary mass extinction facilitated the rise of mammals, and later, of humans. At the
Earth, Jupiter is a villain as well as a protector. [End Page 119] time when the asteroid struck, the dinosaurs had ruled the Earth for almost 200 million years. Biological evolution may get stuck in ruts (if one considers the dinosaurs to be a "rut"), from which it can escape only by way of some catastrophic event. Whatever
one's opinion may be on such matters, it is clear that Jupiter has influenced the course of biological evolution on Earth. But this does not necessarily imply that complex life is rare elsewhere in the galaxy. Jupiters will be common around Earth like planets Darling, PHD in astronomy from University of Manchester, lecturer and renowned author, 01
<David, Life Everywhere: The Maverick Science of Astrobiology, Pg 107> Another claim of Rare Earth advocates is that, in order to nurture advanced life, a planetary system must contain a large gas giant moving in a wide, circular orbit. Such a planet, the argument goes, serves as a body guard, deflecting asteroids and comets away from the inner regions and so preventing large numbers of these stray objects from crashing into an worlds on which complex life is destined to evolve. The Earth was extraordinarily lucky, its said, to have Jupiter as a protector. This idea was originally put forward by George Wetherill, of the Carnegie Institution, in 1995. First, its worth mentioning that
we already know of a few
classical extrasolar Jupitersgas giants occupying fairly large, not-tooelliptical orbits. For example, a planet going around the star 47 Ursae Majoris has a mass just over twice that
of Jupiter, and another going around the star RD 10695 has a mass about six times that of Jupiter. Both orbit at distances similar to that of the asteroid belt from the Sun, in paths only slightly more elliptical than the orbit of Mars. In
To find such relatively conventional gas giants at this early stage in the search suggests there may be a very large reservoir of them waiting to be found over the next couple of decades. Second, this matter of Jupiter-like planets in Jupiter-like orbits is not divorced from the issue of Earth-like planets in Earth-like orbits. Yet Rare Earth advocates treat the two as statistically unrelated events, different rolls of the dice. This is a little like the movie character who,
December 2000, the discovery was announced of a Jupitermass planet in a near-circular orbit, only slightly larger than that if the Earth, around Epsilon Reticulum. when told that Lou Gehrig died of Lou Gehrigs disease, asked, Gee, what are the odds of that? In fact, the odds are pretty good. If a planetary system hasnt been rearranged, early on, by big planets hurtling all over the place, youd expect the original design still to be in place: small, terrestrialtype worlds close in and large, Jovian-type worlds further out. One implies the other. As weve seen, its too early to say how common these relatively undisturbed planetary set-ups really are.
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Even if this would true, our evidence indicates that other Earth-like planets also have moons similar to ours. Their argument is not mutually exclusive. Plus, the moon is not keySpin fills in for moonless planets and life could always adapt Shostak 00 (Seth setiwriter www.seti-inst.edu)
Does sophisticated life require a large moon? Some have argued that it does, for the moon helps stabilize Earths rotation axis and keeps it from possibly dangerous tilts. Other Earth-like planets might not be blessed with such a hefty
computations have shown that if the moon had not been formed, our planet would spin faster fast enough, in fact, to stabilize it against major tipping. In addition, even if an Earth-like planet occasionally does a spin flip, it will spend 10 million years or more doing so. Life can probably adapt to such slow changes. Indeed, it already has, during episodes of polar wander on Earth
moon, as it seems that our own natural satellite was produced in an accidental collision between Earth and Mars-sized or larger asteroid more than 4 billion years ago. But
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Intelligent life prevents other intelligence from emerging Smirth and Wright 00, emeritus professor of biology at the University of Sussex and Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America
Foundation, <Arthur and Robert, Interview for Meaning of Life TV, Interview occurred between 2000 and 2005,
http://meaningoflife.tv/transcript.php?speaker=maynard%20smith>
Wright: Well that's that's that's maybe a clearer example to say look the evolution of higher intelligence is very unlikely because look it's only happened once in all of this time but of course once it happens you know the
first species that reaches it you know starts takes command of the planet essentially and it probably won't have the opportunity to happen again ... John Maynard Smith: That's right. Wright: ... so I mean the fact that intelligence has only evolved once so far it seems to me not really determinate of one way or the other and you know we look back
and say look it hasn't evolved again over the last 2 million years you know since humans really approached humanhood but of course 2 million years is nothing in evolutionary terms...
This means nothing - there will always be a first Grinspoon, Southwest Research Institute Principle Scientist Department of Space Studies and adjunct professor of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at the University of Colorado, 03 <David, Lonely Planets: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life, pg 142-143>
Some evolutionary biologists have argued that intelligence in the universe must be rare because there are no other examples on Earth. We are it. Dolphins and chimps notwithstanding, no one else has our cultural, communicative, and technological abilities. Among all the millions of species that have come and gone, and those that are around today, intelligence has evolved only once. If it was very useful or likely, then many species would have it. Therefore, most planets will not develop intelligence. Am I the only one who finds this argument incredibly lame? The fact is,
we havent been here long. We speak these opinions as if we were the omniscient observers,
looking over the whole stretch of Earth history and drawing final, sweeping conclusions. We discuss evolution as if it were a done deal, for which we were providing the wrap-up commentary, rather than an ongoing, unfolding process that we are bound up in. We
are more like the first sunflower shooting up in a patch of thousands, opening our petals, and confidently declaring, There are no other sunflowers and therefore sunflowers are extremely unlikely. The first intelligence will always be the only intelligence. Only if it is really not too swift will it
conclude from this that it represents something that must be highly improbable.
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Extend Subpoint B truly advanced civilizations will realize there is no future in endless expansion which is the reason we have yet to find them. No time to find us New Scientist, 07 <Aliens need a lot more time to find us, 20 January,
http://space.newscientist.com/article/mg19325875.100-aliens-need-a-lot-more-time-to-find-us.html>
"SO, WHERE
is everybody?" Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi reportedly quipped to fellow physicists in 1950, when a maths model may have an answer to Fermi's paradox. Rasmus Bjrk of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark, has calculated that eight probes - travelling at a tenth of the speed of light and each capable of launching up to eight sub-probes - would take about 100,000 years to explore a region of space containing 40,000 stars. When Bjrk scaled up the search to include 260,000 such systems in our galaxy's habitable zone, the probes took almost 10 billion years - three-quarters the age of the universe - to explore just 0.4 per cent of the stars (www.arxiv.org/astro-ph/0701238v1). So, Bjrk's answer to the Fermi paradox: aliens haven't contacted us because they haven't had the time to find us yet.
discussing why we haven't seen any signs of alien civilisations if, as many believe, our galaxy is teeming with life. Now,
Consumerism Miller 06. Evolutionary Psychologist, University of New Mexico, GEOFFREY Runaway consumerism explains
the Fermi Paradox http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_9.html
I suggest adifferent, even darker solution to Fermi's Paradox. Basically, I
think the aliens don't blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they're too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don't need
Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today. The fundamental problem is that any evolved mind must pay attention to indirect cues of biological fitness, rather than tracking fitness itself. We don't seek reproductive success directly; we seek tasty foods that tended to promote survival and luscious mates who tended to produce bright, healthy babies. Modern results: fast food and pornography. Technology
is fairly good at controlling external reality to promote our real biological fitness, but it's even better at delivering fake fitness subjective cues of survival and
reproduction, without the real-world effects. Fresh organic fruit juice costs so much more than nutrition-free soda. Having real friends is so much more effort than watching Friends on TV. Actually colonizing the galaxy would be so much harder than pretending to have done it when filming Star Wars or Serenity.
It would take intensive colonization to conquer the galaxy aliens arent interested Shostak 01, Senior Astronomer SETI, is an American astronomer. He grew up inArlington, VA[1] and earned
his physics degree from Princeton University and aPh.D. in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology.[2] He is the Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and the 2004 winner of the Klumpke-Roberts Award awarded by theAstronomical Society of the Pacific in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the public understanding and appreciation of astronomy.[3]
< Seth. Nov. 08, SETI Institute Fermi's Paradox Part 2 What's Blocking Galactic Civilization? http://www.seti.org/site/pp.asp?c=ktJ2J9MMIsE&b=179285>
Of course, if energy costs can be brought way down, for example with fusion or matter-antimatter technology, or by capturing more of the radiation spewed into space by the home star, this explanation might not hold water. But even if the aliens can afford colonization, maybe they havent got the stamina to see it through. Subduing
the Galaxy takes more than sending a ship full of restless nomads to the next star. The nomads have to settle that star, and then spawn pilgrims of their own. And those migrs have to produce yet more settlers. And so on. If each and every colony eventually founds two daughter settlements (a pretty decent accomplishment), then 38 generations of colonists are required to bring the entire Galaxy under control. Even the Polynesians, who swept across the western Pacific domesticating one island after another, didnt manage this. Maybe the aliens cant do it either.
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1. This is irrelevant: Humanity will still destroy the entirety of this Universe which massively outweighs the impact to human extinction. 2. Only our universe will support life Davies 04, Professor of Natural Philosophy Australian Centre for Astrobiology,
<Paul: 'Multiverse Theory' Holds That the Universe is a Virtual Reality Matrix Sydney Morning Herald | July 22 2004 http://uplink.space.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=sciastro&Number=9684&page=20&view=collapsed&sb=7&o= 0&fpart=>
Things get interesting when the multiverse theory is combined with ideas from sub-atomic particle physics. Evidence is mounting that what physicists took to be God-given unshakeable laws may be more like local by-laws, valid in our particular cosmic patch, but different in other pocket universes. Travel
a trillion light years beyond the Andromeda galaxy, and you might find yourself in a universe where gravity is a bit stronger or electrons a bit heavier. The vast majority of these other universes will not have the necessary fine-tuned coincidences needed for life to emerge; they are sterile and so go unseen. Only in Goldilocks universes like ours where things have fallen out just right, purely by accident, will sentient beings arise to be amazed at how ingeniously bio-friendly their universe is.
3. Other Universes are unstable and will collapse The New Scientist, 06 <Is our universe about to be mangled?, February http://www.newscientistspace.com/article.ns?id=dn8766&print=true> And this idea, called the "many worlds" interpretation, raises other problems. Some theorists say it suggests that physicists doing a quantum experiment would find themselves in a random world, such that they would have an equal chance of seeing the bell ring or not ring. But this does not match the welltested Born rule, which may predict that the bell should ring 70% of the time, for example.
Physicists have attacked this problem in a number of ways. Now Hanson, an economist who also studies physics, is taking a new approach. He argues that these destructive. larger according to a particular quantum measure than its later descendants. Quantum interactions between the universes were thought to be too small to really affect them, but Hanson says the interactions can be significant between universes of vastly different size. Boiled worlds
multiple universes are not actually independent, as was thought, but interacting and sometimes Quantum theory states that all universes are not created equal - each "parent" universe is much The
interactions can "smash or mangle the small worlds", says Hanson. He has not worked out exactly what
happens, but he believes the small universes would be either destroyed or assimilated by the large universes, like specks of dust colliding with a planet. "It could act like a big random fluctuation, like suddenly making the temperature of the universe become really high and boiling everything," he told New Scientist. "Or it could be more peaceful, where you're simply converted into somebody who remembers stuff from the large world, so the statistics would be those of the large world." In this scenario, Born rule predictions that a bell should ring 70% of the time in an experiment work out because small worlds in which bells ring less or more often are too mangled to be observed. Hanson says there is a cut-off between small worlds that become mangled and large worlds that do not, and that most universes are near or below this line.
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1. This is irrelevant - there is no evidence to indicate that the acceleration would be fast enough to escape our impact scenarios. Additionally thousands of alien life forms will still be destroyed if we fail to eliminate humanity. 2. String theory suggest the Universe will not expand infinitely Hwang and Gu 05, Department of Physics National Taiwan University,
<Je-An and W-Y. P. The Fate of the Accelerating Universe May 18, 2005>
Thus, an
arbitrarily tiny negative cosmological constant can make the universe to decelerate in the future, even though it is accelerating now! This gives us an scenario in which the matter contents of the universe include the
quintessence and a negative cosmological constant (which can be nearly zero and undetectable at present), or, equivalently, only one quintessence field which rolls towards a negative minimum of its potential, such that the universe is accelerating now caused by the quintessence evolving beyond zero of the quintessence potential, but will decelerate and collapse eventually due to the negative cosmological constant or the negative height of the minimum of the quintessence potential, thereby avoiding the cumbersome event horizon. In conclusion, firstly, the fate of the universe is much more sensitive to the presence of the cosmological constant (or the nonzero height of the minimum of the quintessence potential) than other matter content, even though the cosmological constant may be extremely tiny and undetectable at all at the present time. Thus, before we pin down the magnitude and the sign of the cosmological constant from observations, it is hard to tell what the ultimate fate of the presently accelerating universe will be. Secondly, as suggested by the above discussions, the
potential incompatibility of superstring theory with an event horizon in an eternally accelerating universe can be avoided in a self-consistent way if superstring theory can provide a negative cosmological constant in itself.
Even if it will infinitely expand, it wont rip apart Atkinson in 8

(Nancy Atkinson, December 16th 2008, No Big Rip in our Future: Chandra Provides Insights Into Dark Energy, Universe Today, http://www.universetoday.com/2008/12/16/no-big-rip-in-our-future-chandra-provides-insights-into-dark-energy/) When you throw a ball up into the air, you expect gravity will eventually slow the ball, and it will come back down again. But what if you threw a ball up into the air and instead of coming back down, it accelerated away from you? That's basically what is happening with our universe:
"dark energy" is responsible, a form of repulsive gravity, and it composes a majority of the universe, about 72%. We
everything is accelerating away from everything else. This acceleration was discovered in 1998, and scientists believe
don't know what it is yet, but now, for the first time, astronomers have clearly seen the effects of dark energy.
Using the Chandra X-ray Observatory, scientists have tracked how dark energy has stifled the growth of galaxy clusters. Combining this new data with previous studies, scientists have obtained the best clues yet about what dark energy is, confirming its existence. And there's good news, too: the expanding Universe won't rip itself apart. Previous methods of dark energy research measured Type Ia supernovae. The new X-ray results provide
a crucial independent test of dark energy, long sought by scientists, which depends on how gravity competes with accelerated expansion in the growth of cosmic structures. "This result could be described as 'arrested development of the universe'," said Alexey Vikhlinin of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., who led the research. "Whatever is forcing the expansion of the universe to speed up is also forcing its development to slow down." Vikhlinin and his colleagues used Chandra to observe the hot gas in dozens of galaxy clusters, which are the largest collapsed objects in the universe. Some of these clusters are relatively close and others are more than halfway across the universe. The results show the increase in mass of the galaxy clusters over time aligns with a universe dominated by dark energy. It is more difficult for objects like galaxy clusters to grow when space is stretched, as caused by dark energy. Vikhlinin and his team see this effect clearly in their data. The results are remarkably consistent with those from the distance measurements, revealing general relativity applies, as expected, on large scales. Previously, it wasn't known for sure if dark energy was a constant across space, with a strength that never changes with distance or time, or if it is a function of space itself and as space expands dark energy would expand and get stronger. In other words, it wasn't known if Einstein's theory of general relativity and his cosmological constant was correct or if the theory would have to be
But the Chandra study strengthens the evidence that dark energy is the cosmological constant, and is not growing in strength with time, which would cause the Universe to eventually rip itself apart.
modified for large scales.
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There is nothing miraculous about tectonic activity Shostak 00 (Seth, SETI author, seti-inst.edu) is an American astronomer. He grew up inArlington, VA[1] and earned
Plate tectonics are useful for cycling carbon between the atmosphere, the ocean, carbonate rocks, and living things. This happens because the slip-slide of the oceans pushes carbonate rocks on the sea bottom (such as limestone) under the continental margins. The carbonates melt and are blown back into the atmosphere by volcanoes. But tectonic activity neednt be either rare or short-lived. It is driven by internal hear produced by radioactive materials in Earths Center. Other planets of similar composition and size at least that of Earth will also enjoy a dynamic surface. Indeed, if the positions of Venus and Mars had been interchanged at birth, then Venus might be both tectonically and biologically active today. There is nothing miraculous about tectonic activity, and in fact there is some evidence that is has occurred on both Mars and Venus.
But what about such possible terrestrial peculiarities as plate tectonic or the companionship of a large moon?
Plate tectonics is common Kasting 01, Geoscience Professor, Penn State,

<James, Essay Review: Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee's "Rare Earth" Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 44.1 (2001) 117-131 Project Muse> One could just as easily turn this argument around. I
would speculate that plate tectonics is an inevitable outcome for rocky planets that have liquid water at their surfaces and substantial internal heat sources. This speculation may or may not be correct, but it is just as valid as the position taken in the book. An internal heat source
does seem to be a necessary requirement for a habitable planet. Some form of volcanism is necessary to recycle carbonate rocks, as well as other life-supporting elements like nitrogen and phosphorus. An
internal heat source, however, is something that is almost unavoidable on any large planet. Ward and Brownlee point out that planets that formed too early or too late in the
history of the universe may lack the radioactive elements (U, K, and Th) that generate heat within Earth's interior. But they overlook the fact that
roughly half the geothermal heat flow comes from heat that was generated during accretion. A planet that was somewhat more massive than Earth, say twice its mass, might not need any radioactive elements in order to maintain plate tectonics.
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Just because Aliens arent here doesnt mean they dont exist Shilling 00 (Govet Shilling is an astronomy writer in Utrecht, The Netherlands. His book Tweeling aarde: De speurtocht naar leven in
andere planetenstelsesl (Twin Earth: The search for life in other planetary systems) was published in 1997. Alan M. MacRobert is an associate editor of Sky & Telescope.) Optimists have replied to the Fermi paradox in many ways. Maybe any
culture that is civilized enough not to destroy itself early on turns away from imperialism, or maybe the imperial drive runs out of steam after settling a few thousand planets. Maybe we live in an uninteresting area of the galaxy the equivalent of a rural area in the United States, a country that is completely settled but where you can find plents of places where no other person is in sight. Or maybe aliens are thickly settled around us but obey, as in Star Trek, a prime directive not to interfere with living planets which are kept off limits as nature preserves. This is the so-called zoo hypothesis. Or perhaps interstellar travel is just as expensive in effort and energy as it appears to us to be, and anyone capable of it has better things to do with resources such as investigating the universe by astronomy or radio. A more
sophisticated rejoinder to the Fermi Paradox was published by William I. Newman and Carl Sagan in Icarus for September 1981. They analyzed how fast a spreading interstellar civilization would actually expand through the galxy, based on mathematical models covering everything from the diffusion of molecules in a gas to the spread of animal species introduced into virgin territories on Earth. They found that how
fast the galaxy fills up depends surprisingly little on the speed of interstellar travel, there are too many planets to be settled and populated along the way. The expansion velocity of the colonization front is several orers of magnitude smaller than had been previously anticipated, they wrote; filling the galaxy might even take a time comparable to the age of the universe. Summing up, they quipped Rome was not bult in a day, although one can cross ir on foot in a few hours.
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Most planets have suitable materials Shostak 00 (Seth SETI writer, seti-inst.edu) is an American astronomer. He grew up inArlington, VA[1] and earned his physics degree
from Princeton University and aPh.D. in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology.[2] He is the Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and the 2004 winner of the Klumpke-Roberts Award awarded by theAstronomical Society of the Pacific in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the public understanding and appreciation of astronomy. [3]
Rare Earths authors suggest that the composition of our solar system, including the materials necessary for making rocky planets, might be unusual. The chemical composition of stars certainly varies, and some are poorly endowed with heavy elements (everything more massive than heliun), essential ingredients for the formation of both planets and protoplasm. This is described by astronomers as a variation in metallicity. Globular clusters, composed of the galaxys oldest (and most heavy-element poor) stars, have metallicities of 0.1% or more, or about an order of magnitude less than the Sun (this sprinkling of heavy elements is larded into the interstellar medium by supernova
models of planet formation dont rule out the formation of new worlds even in these depleted systems. And theres still plenty of raw material. Note that the mass of the Earth is only about 0.0003% that of the Sun, so even in the metal deprived neighborhoods of globular clusters there is more than enough suitable material for constructing Earth-like planets. In addition, the overwhelming majority of luminous stars are in the galaxys disk, not in the roughly one-half of all stars have metallicities comparable to, or even greater than, that of the Sun. The composition of our solar system will be similar to that of billions of other sun-centered solar systems. Roughly half of theses will be old enough to have incubated intelligent beings.
explosions). But
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Idiosyncrasy isnt essential to life Shostak 00 (Seth writer for seti-inst.edu) is an American astronomer. He grew up inArlington, VA[1] and earned
were such things truly essential, or merely a help? When we tote up a laundry list of Earths astronomical properties it may seem to imply that our But one should always be leery of probabilities calculated after the fact. A mutt off the street could have a spot on one ear, two eyes of different color, and a limp. In other words, it would be a mutt unlike most other dogs (and if examined carefully enough, a mutt unlike all other dogs). But this hound could also have fleas. Would we be correct in concluding that dog, so obviously special, is the only one likely to have fleas? The question is not how idiosyncratic is Earth, but whether our world enjoys circumstances that are simultaneously rare and essential to complex life. As far as we know, this isnt the case.
But existence is remarkable, and possibly even unique. This could be true, of course.
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There are plenty of other solar systems that can support life New Scientist, 06
<Maggie McKee, Milky Way brims with singleton stars January 27
http://www.newscientistspace.com/article.ns?id=dn8640&print=true>
Most of the stars in the Milky Way are born alone and live out their lives without partners, a new analysis suggests. If true, the work overturns standard theories that stars are born in broods and also suggests planets and potentially life may be more common in the galaxy than thought. Observations
show that stars are born in nurseries of gas and dust that typically contain several hundred stars in a region 3 light years wide. According to most models, they are born there in clutches, with several stars condensing from each of many large, dense clouds of matter. Now,
astronomer Charles Lada of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge,

Massachusetts, US, is
challenging that notion and says most stars are born one by one in the nurseries. He says those models are based on early stellar surveys that focused on bright, relatively massive stars like the Sun. The surveys found that about 60% of these bright stars are found in pairs. But in the last 15 years or so, astronomers have used more sensitive telescopes to survey smaller, dimmer stars called red dwarfs, which are between 10% and 50% the mass of the Sun. "The faint stars are harder to see, but they make up 85% of all stars in the galaxy, and three quarters of those are single," Lada told New Scientist. "I think the result strongly favours the
idea that most stars form initially as single objects, not in multiple systems." That goes against current models, which explain the existence of single stars by arguing they are born with siblings and are then separated after a gravitational interaction with another star. "You can certainly form a lot of stars that way, but with so many single red dwarfs, there's no simple way" to explain them all, says Lada. Cloud turbulence Frank Shu, an astronomer and president of the National Tsinghua University in Taiwan, agrees. In order to explain the fact that red dwarfs are vastly more common than any other type of star, "the mechanism doesn't work unless one always breaks apart a pair of red dwarfs," he told New Scientist. But he says that scenario is unlikely, as stellar home-wreckers are most likely to break up pairs of stars that orbit each other at relatively large distances. And observations show that such "wide binaries" are usually made up of stars of different masses. Lada argues that whether a star forms alone or with a sibling depends on its mass, which in turn depends on the mass of its parent cloud. Observations show that the gas in large, star-forming clouds is more turbulent than the gas in small ones. Shu has done previous theoretical work suggesting this turbulence may cause large clouds to separate into groups of massive stars. "Turbulence becomes relatively unimportant" for clouds that form small stars, he adds. "It means the majority of stars in the galaxy and the universe forms under considerably more quiescent conditions than have been promoted in some quarters," Shu says. "If Lada's results hold up, a lot of
If most red dwarfs form without a sibling, extrasolar planetary systems similar to our solar system may be common, says Lada. Kevin Luhman, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, US, agrees. He says planets would probably have a more difficult time forming around a star in a binary system because the other star's gravity would disturb them. He adds that red dwarfs can live as long as a trillion years 100 times longer than the Sun, which will heat and bloat up as a red giant in several billion years. "Those factors together make the stars very likely sites for the formation of planets and life," Luhman says.
people who have made rash claims in the past will have to re-evaluate their positions." Planets and life
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This argument is not responsive: Our evidence indicates that high energy physics experiments and other upcoming technologies will lead to destruction of the universe. That aliens havent destroyed the universe does not deny that this is possible, aliens may have not developed these technologies or may simply have been more intelligent than humans in employing them. Science is localized believing aliens will develop the same technology is parochial Basalla 05, History Professor University of Delaware, <George, Civilized Life in the Universe: Scientists on Extraterrestrials, pg 177>
When philosopher Nicholas Rescher was asked to comment on Drakes notion of alien science, he dismissed it as infinitely parochial. It was like saying that extraterrestrials share our legal or political system. Rescher was well qualified to examine Drakes claims. He had recently studied the anthropomorphic character of human science and how it related to alien science. Rescher struck at the heart of the popular conception of alien science when he challenged the widely held view that there is only one natural world and a single science to explain it. He called this the one world, one science argument. The physical universe is singular, Rescher agreed, but its interpreters are many and diverse. What we know about physical reality stems from our special biological and cognitive make-up and our unique cultural and social heritage and experiences. We have no reason to suppose that extraterrestrials share our peculiar biological attributes, social outlook, or cultural traditions. Human science, therefore, is incommensurable with extraterrestrial science. If
extraterrestrials cultivate science, it will be their kind of science, not our kind. Alien science is a wholly different form of knowledge. It is not human science raised to a higher degree. Rescher offered a compelling illustration of how human biology and our situation on Earth shaped our science. Astronomy
as practiced by humans has been molded by the fact that we live on the surface of the Earth (not underwater), that we have eyes, and that the development of agriculture is linked to the seasonal positions of celestial objects. Intelligent alien creatures living in an oceanic abyss might develop sophisticated hydrodynamics but fail to study the motion of heavenly bodies, investigate electromagnetic radiation, or build radio telescopes. Even if extraterrestrials are surface dwellers, their biological endowment will determine what they are able to sense, their ecological niche, what aspects of nature they exploit to satisfy their needs, their cultural heritage, which questions about nature they find interesting to ask. Rescher acknowledges the
existence of intelligent extraterrestrials who possess the ability to develop science and technology. He does not dispute the scientists repeated claims (1) that there is a single scientifically knowable physical reality and (2) that aliens are not simply other humans inhabiting a different
Rescher maintains that wherever science exists in the universe, it will be localized. It will be the science of the creatures
planet. After adopting these claims, he demolishes the idea of a universal science that serves as a common language in the universe. who have fashioned it. They will act according to their special physical constitution, environment, history, and needs. Hence, science diverges in the universe. It does not converge on the theories, concepts, and topics that happen to interest terrestrial researchers at this point in the history of the human intellect.
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This is just anthropomorphizing alien life - they are likely completely different Goldstien 06, Shell-Economist Prize winner molecular biologist, theoretician in the field of nanobiotechnology, <Alan, I,
Nanobot, March 9, http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2006/03/09/nanobiobot/index_np.html>
This simplistic view of nanobiotechnology is very much like humanity's current strategy in the search for extraterrestrial life. In a chemically diverse universe we insist on a perversely self-congratulatory strategy. Water and organic molecules, such as methane, are the identified spoor on this trail. We look for these signs because the
biology-centric assumption is that aliens will be just like us, only very, very different -- little green people with acid for blood, sentient jellyfish with a taste for cheeseburgers, or insects that have evolved with a sense of humor. Even search strategies that use "universal mathematical constants" ignore the possibility, proposed by some postmodern philosophers of science, that formal modern mathematics is a function of cognitive structure unique to humans, or less specifically to a narrow range of beings similar to humans, for example, hominids. The point is that technology analysts
who can only see life as some variation on biology will see the BTM interface as a way for "us" to plug into "it." Within this paradigm there are no consequences for the definition of life, only new enhancements for the one true life form: biology.
We hold up the mirror of
humanity and see our own image reflected in the universe.
Most dictionaries define biology as "the science of living things." But the (correctly) limitless nature of that definition is truncated when plants and animals are immediately used as the prime examples. NASA, an agency that should know better, has saturated the media for decades with hypnotic invocations of water and organics as the true signs of extraterrestrial life. Meanwhile, Hollywood and pop culture endlessly anthropomorphize aliens. Robots get the blues. Silicon sentience springs directly from human mythology. Stories of demonic computers and undead cyber-blood lust are endlessly refilmed with really cool graphics, a variety of soundtracks, and excellent eyewear. Skynet, the "self-aware" computer system of the "Terminator" series, hates us and wants us dead. The equally demonic cyber-beings of "The Matrix" want to enslave us and eat our energy (making this computer both physically dangerous and dangerously ignorant of the physical laws of the universe). It
is distinctly ironic that when we consider aliens, life on Earth infuses our scientific models, our dreams, and our entertainment. We could call this "the biology paradox." The biology paradox makes xenobiology speciously comprehensible, but by clinging to it we dismiss almost all of the chemistry in the universe.
The fossil records is clear, intelligence is naturally selected Shostak 00 (Seth SETI writer) http://www. Seti-inst.edu/science./rare_earth.html is an American astronomer. He grew up inArlington,
VA[1] and earned his physics degree from Princeton University and aPh.D. in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology.[2] He is the Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and the 2004 winner of the Klumpke-Roberts Award awarded by theAstronomical Society of the Pacific in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the public understanding and appreciation of astronomy.[3]
Finally, theres the matter of biological evolution to intelligence. Is there some good reason why evolution should occasionally produce sentient beings? The answer is, and remains, controversial. However, the fossil record tells us
the maximum degree of encephalization which (Crudely speaking) measures the ratio of brain to body mass has increased considerably in complex animals for the last 100 million years or so. The dinosaurs were bulky but not bright. Even the most cerebral of these lumbering lizards had less brain power, as judged by encephalization, than an ostrich. The mutual stimulus to increased mental capability inherent in predator-prey activity has led to increased encephalization for some segments of the animal kingdom. Consequently, many of todays animals would handily outscore their Mesozoic predecessors on any IQ test. Human-level sophistication could be a common outcome of this ratcheting up of neural capability, although it is the uncertainty of this conclusion that drives us to look for intelligence elsewhere.
that
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AT Impact Turns Omega Points

Human extinction is inevitable which means the Omega Point will never be reached. Nanotech, Particle accelerators or any other countless technologies will have destroyed us long before then. Tipler fails to account for aliens. His theory rests on the premise that humanity is the only life in the universe. We will win that aliens exist which mean that they can achieve the Omega point independent of humanity and resurrect all life. Our Gartner evidence is a better prediction of the future of the universe. It examines the same premises as Tipler but concludes that instead of leading to an Omega point the universes biofriendly nature will lead to the creation of infinite new universe. The Omega point is foolish speculation Schermer 02, teaches history of science, technology, and evolutionary thought, Occidental College, <Michael, Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition & Other Confusions of Our
Time pg 268-269>
3. The If-Then Argument Problem. Tiplers
theory runs something like this: If the density parameter is greater than I and thus the universe is closed and will collapse; if the Bekenstein bound is correct; if the Riggs boson is 220 20 GeV if humans do not cause their own extinction before developing the technology to permanently leave the planet; if humans leave the planet; if humans develop the technology to travel interstellar distances at the required speeds; if humans find other habitable planets; if humans develop the technology to slow down the collapse of the universe; if humans do not encounter forms of life hostile to their goals; if humans build a computer that approaches omniscience and omnipotence at the end of time; if Omega/God wants to resurrect all previous lives; if... ; then his theory is right. The problem is obvious: if any one of these steps fails, the entire argument collapses. What if the density parameter is less than 1 and the universe expands forever (as some evidence indicates it will)? What if we nuke or pollute ourselves into oblivion? What if we allocate resources to problems on Earth instead of to space exploration? What if we encounter advanced aliens who intend to
colonize the galaxy and Earth, thus dooming us to slavery or extinction? No matter how rational, an if-then argument without empirical data to support each step in the argument is more philosophy (or protoscience or science fiction) than it is science. Tipler has created an extremely rational argument for God and immortality. Each step follows from the previous step. But
so many of the steps
might be wrong that the theory is essentially speculative.
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Even Tipler admits there is no solid evidence for the Omega Point Schermer, teaches history of science, technology, and evolutionary thought, Occidental College, 02
<Michael, Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition & Other Confusions of Our Time pg 268>
On the first page of the Physics of Immortality, Tipler claims that his Omega Point Theory is a testable physical theory for an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God who will one day in the far future
The Hope Springs Eternal Problem. resurrect every single one of us to live in an abode which is in all essentials the Judeo-Christian Heaven and that if any reader has lost a loved one, or is afraid of death, modern physics says: Be comforted, you and they shall live again. So, everything we always believed to be true based on faith turns out to be true based on physics. What are the chances? Not good, I am afraid. And, after
305 pages of concise and cogent argumentation, Tipler finally admits, The Omega Point Theory is a viable scientific theory of the future of the physical universe, but the only evidence in its favor at the moment is theoretical beauty. Beauty by itself does not make a theory right or wrong, but when a theory fulfills our deepest wishes we should be especially cautious about rushing to embrace it. When a theory seems to match our eternal hopes, chances are that it is wrong.
The consensus of scientists disagrees Schermer 02, teaches history of science, technology, and evolutionary thought, Occidental College, <Michael, Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition & Other Confusions of Our
Time pg 265-266>
None of this deterred Tipler, who continued without John Barrow in The Physics of immortality. He submitted a rough draft to his publisher, Oxford University Press, who sent it out for review. The book was rejected. Tipler received the anonymous reviews, but by accident their names were not blocked out on the photocopy. One of them, a
physicist who is one of the worlds leading proponents of integrating science and religion, said he could recommend this book be published only if I would write it as if I didnt really believe this stuff (1995). A longer, more detailed manuscript was submitted to and accepted by Doubleday for publication. While sales were better in Europe (especially Germany) than in America, the reviews for the most part were devastating. Well-known German theologian Wolfriart Pannenberg, who believes in God as a future being, offered his support in Zygon (Summer 1995), but most scientists and theologians echoed astronomer Joseph Silks review in Scientific American: Tipler, however, takes the search for a science of God to a ridiculous extreme. Humility in the face of the persistent, great unknowns is the true philosophy that modern physics has to offer
Machines would not bring humans back to life Rubin 03, professor of political science Duquesne University,
<Artificial Intelligence and Human Nature The New Atlantis http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/1/rubin.htm>
In short, however
attractive the world of artificial life might seem (at least to the scientists who envision it), we have no reason to believe that we can really understand the beings who would live there. Why expect them, for example, to resurrect dead humans even if they could? One can hardly count on the same love or
curiosity that would tempt some of us to clone dead ancestors if we could; love and curiosity, after all, are human characteristics. The same is
Once humanity is overcome, all bets are off and anything we might say about the post-biological future is merely a projection of our own biological nature. A corollary to Arthur C. Clarkes law that any sufficiently advanced technology is
true for compassion, benevolence, amusement, or any other possible motive that we are capable of imagining. indistinguishable from magic seems fitting: any sufficiently advanced benevolence may be indistinguishable from malevolence. If the future that the extinctionists imagine for us were to make its appearance tomorrow in the solar system, it is very hard to imagine how it would be good news.
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AT Impact Turns Need our DNA

1. Their authors have zero qualifications or credible evidence for the claim that UFOs are visiting earth much less that Aliens need out DNA (insert whatever bad argument is made). Each part of our argument is backed by experts in the respective field. 2. Non-unique: Humanity will inevitably be destroyed means even if their right it means that Aliens wont be able to use our DNA fast enough Also, there are over 10,000 alien civilizations no way they can prove that they are all dependant on our DNA 3. Aliens are not visiting earth, your authors are cranks Shostak, SETI Senior Astronomer, 05
<Seth, The Great UFO Debate, Space.com http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_shostak_ufo_050714.html> And its not really the point. The problem I have with the claim that strange craft are prowling our planet is not with the transportation mode, but with the evidence. Ill worry about how they got here once Im convinced that theyve really made the scene. Well, have they? How good is the evidence? In the course of a recent TV broadcast in which I participated, guest experts
who have long studied UFOs argued the case for their alien nature by showing photographs of putative saucers hovering at low altitudes. Some of these objects appeared as out-of-focus lights, while others resembled hubcapshaped Frisbees caught in mid-trajectory. Since the former are perforce ambiguous, the latter commanded more of my attention. How can we know theyre NOT hubcaps, tossed into the air by a hoaxer with a camera? The reply from one expert: "these
photographs pass muster." When quizzed on exactly which muster was mastered, the response was that "atmospheric effects give us a limit on the distance, and careful examination has ruled out photographic trickery." Well, the former is pretty chancy, and relies on some assumption about atmospheric conditions (was it a smoggy day in Los Angeles?), and the latter proves nothing. A real shot of an airborne hubcap would, after all,
Additional evidence that is endlessly cited is "expert testimony." Pilots, astronauts, safe to say that these witnesses have seen something. But just because you dont recognize an aerial phenomenon doesnt mean that its an extraterrestrial visitor. That requires additional evidence that, so far, seems to be as unconvincing as the trickery-free saucer snaps. What about those folks who have experienced alien beings firsthand? Abduction stories are an entirely separate field of study and one which I wont address here, although I must
be free of photographic trickery. and others with experienced eyes and impressive credentials have all claimed to see odd craft in the skies. Its confess that its intriguing to see photos of scoop marks on the flesh of human subjects, coupled with the claim that these minor disfigurements are due to alien malfeasance. But even
aside from the puzzling question of why beings from distant suns would come to Earth to melon-ball the locals, this evidence is, once again, ambiguous. The
scoops might be due to aliens, and then again, they could be the consequence of spousal abuse or many other causes. When push came to shove, and when pressed as to whether theres real proof of extraterrestrial visitation, the experts on this show backed off by saying that "well, we dont know where they come from. But something is definitely going on." The latter statement is hardly controversial. The former is merely goofy. If the saucers and scoopers are not from outer space, where, exactly, are they from? Belgium? The bottom line is that the evidence journals about alien craft or their occupants.
for extraterrestrial visitors has not convinced many scientists. Very few academics are writing papers for refereed
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AT Impact Turns Grey Draconian Stuff

If you buy these terrible arguments, our Gardner evidence indicates that we have an obligation to support life in the universe - even if the Draconians are bad they are better than no life. Burlington News No date
Draconians, known as the serpent race, http://www.burlingtonnews.net/draconians.html
The Draconians do not like human beings. They believe that this universe was here for them - that their history teaches them that they
were left here to rule it. But, when they started traveling, they ran across other races. They were able to conquer many of those races through genetic manipulation. Now, our government, the United States government, the New World Order - whatever you want to call it - wants to implant everybody. This would me ownership. What
they do is they come in, conquer a race and genetically
alter it. Their own crazy authors disagree with them, they think the greys are evil. The evidence indicates that Greys are evil your authors have been brainwashed while abducted Burlington News in 03 UFO Burlington UFO and Paranormal Research and Educational Center The Greys, 03/27, http://www.burlingtonnews.net/greys.html These theories both have their various sources, and both have evidence that supports one theory, while detracting from the other. The author's personal views lean towards the first theory, due to several key points of evidence. Most of the evidence for the Grey-government conspiracy comes from sources within the government, and from careful observation and analysis of government activities over the past 50 years. The benevolent Grey belief comes directly from the Greys, who have implanted into their abductees' minds certain instructions and ideas to give to society at various times,
as they determine. Using the abductees as 'virtual recorders,' the Greys claim that they are here to 'help humanity realize its potential,' and to 'watch over humanity.' The
government files, on the other hand, claim the Greys are adept liars, and they are not to be trusted. This data comes from the few applicable documents gleamed from the military using the Freedom of Information Act, as well as former and current government workers who claim to have broken their
oaths of silence and come forward to tell the truth.
Even if they are enemies the Greys will just give up when the Draconians arrive. Collier in 77 Alex, The Leading Edge, February, http://www.burlingtonnews.net/greysagenda.html
Here's our scenario. The benevolent races have told the world governments that they would help us but world governments have to dismantle their nuclear weapons. The earth governments did not want to do this because they don't know who to trust. They created this situation and they do not know who to trust now. However, the world government is so desperate to get rid of the Greys, that they apparently have put a call out for help, using satellites. The Andromedans say there is a group that has offered to help our earth governments with the problem of the Greys, even by giving us weapons to fight the Greys. Re-enter,
the Reptilians from Alpha Draconis, the only real enemies the Greys have, and that humankind has. The Reptilians from Alpha Draconis have answered the call. But the Greys actually work for the Draconians. It's all part of the set-up. When we invite them in here there will be no battle. And once they're here we'll never get rid of the Draconians.
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AT Impact Turns Greys Can Time Travel

This means you vote neg on presumption their evidence indicates that Greys would be benevolent and would solve our anthropogenic problems - which means they would just travel back in time and solve the aff. Oh and time travel destroys the universe- no risk of an impact turn The Greys dont understand the tech they cant save us. Burlington News in 03 UFO Burlington UFO and Paranormal Research and Educational Center
The Greys, 03/27, http://www.burlingtonnews.net/greys.html Another of the theories possible begins with a cetacean life form evolved on another planet. Unlike Terran cetaceans, they did not return to the oceans, but were discovered and later altered and cloned by another species. This species (called the Masters for argument's sakes), needed a source of slave labor, and thus searched for an intelligent lesser species that they could genetically manipulate in order to be used effectively. Arbitrarily assuming that this period of time was about one million years ago, the most evolved species at that time on Terra would have been dolphins and whales. This might also have been possible on another planet, where a similar species evolved instead of a primate-like organism. Under this theory, the cetacean ancestors of the Greys were taken and genetically altered into an upright, bipedal species capable of doing labor for the Masters. After a time, however, the
Greys apparently rebelled, and are now on their own, using the technology of the Masters, but since they were created to simply operate them, and not to design them, their knowledge of the technology's operation is lacking.
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AT Impact Turns Saunders X inev

Wow you found a PHD, he is still crazy and his doctorate is in political science not anything relevant to what he is discussing Coast to Coast AM <Richard Sauders Biohttp://www.coasttocoastam.com/guests/643.html> He has a B.A. in sociology, an M.A. in Latin American studies, an M.S. in forestry and a Ph.D. in political science. He is the author of three books, Underground Bases and Tunnels: What is the Government Trying to Hide?, Kundalini Tales, and Underwater and Underground Bases. Wars arent inevitable: the Saunders evidence has zero warrants other then there have been bad leaders in the past - this isnt a reason that all humanity will die. Even if this is the case it just proves their case impacts are nonunique and you should vote negative on presumption. Furthermore extinction isnt inevitable because of deforestation Taylor 2002Jerry, Cato Natural Resource Studies Director,
[Sustainable Development: A Dubious Solution in Search of a Problem, August 26,
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa449.pdf] Next, lets consider the sustainability of various forests, another perennial environmental concern. The longest data
series available reveals that global forest cover increased from 30.04 percent of the planets surface area in 1950 to 30.89 percent of the planets surface area in 1994.56 Moreover, most
of the computer models that examine future resource trends predict a constant to slightly increasing rate of forest expansion through 2100.57 Some of the main
reasons for this trend include the emergence of substitutes for timber,58 increasing reliance on plantation forests for timber, and more efficient logging practices in general.59 Those
trends will likely accelerate in the future, returning a tremendous amount of todays forests harvested for human use back to nature.60 Conservationists argue, however,
that positive macro-trends in forestland health hide significant micro-problems. But those alleged micro-problems are generally overstated. For instance, it has been alleged that were sacrificing original forest cover for secondary forest cover and that these secondary- growth forests are poorer ecologically. But the planet has only lost about 20 percent of its original forest cover since the dawn of agriculture.61 Moreover,
secondary forests are not necessarily ecologically poorer than old growth forests.62 Another
concern is that, while temperature forests are expanding,63 tropical rainforests are disappearing, so while the overall trends for global forest cover might be slightly positive, they mask the decline of the more ecologically important rainforests. But tropical rainforest deforestation is proceeding at but 0.3 percent a year, a not particularly alarming sum,64 and only 20 percent of the planets original tropical rainforest cover (compared to about 50 percent of the forest cover in the developed world)65 has been effected by man.66
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AT Impact Turns Saunders X Inev

Warming theory is false- its not anthropogenic and there are too many alternative causes Pipes and Zycher 2003
Sally C., president and chief executive officer of the Pacific Research Institute, National Advisory Board of the Capital Research Center, Benjamin, senior fellow in economics at the Pacific Research Institute, Cato adjunct scholar, Claremont Institute adjunct fellow, PhD in Economics from UCLA, December, Pacific Research Institute Study, Attorneys General Versus The EPA,
http://www.pacificresearch.org/pub/sab/enviro/CO2-Study-12-03.pdf In 2001, more than 17,000 scientistsphysicists, geophysicists, climatologists, meteorologists, oceanographers, environmental scientists, chemists, biochemists, biologists, and so forthendorsed the proposition that:The proposed [Kyoto Treaty] limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. There
is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the earths atmosphere and disruption of the earths climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in
atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the earth.6 That this dissent from the casually-asserted mainstream consensus on global warming is so massive suggests the presence of a serious body of evidence refuting the conventional view. An overview of the data can be summarized as follows: Atmospheric
concentrations of carbon dioxide have increased from about 290 parts per million (ppm) in 1900 to about 360 ppm today. Over 80 percent of this increase occurred after the surface temperature peak around 1940, a sequence of events inconsistent with the conventional (IPCC) hypothesis.7 Evidence derived from marine
organisms and other natural phenomena shows that surface temperatures 3,000 years ago were about 2C higher than today, abnormally low 1,500 years ago, and over 1C warmer 1,000 years ago, after which the earth entered the Little Ice Age until about the year 1700, from which
Temperatures now appear to be a bit below or at the 3,000-year average, and the evidence does not support the claim that temperatures in the 20th century were unusual compared with
surface and atmospheric temperatures now are emerging. the previous 900 years.8 Satellite and weather balloon (radiosonde) measurements since 1979, corrected for orbital drift, instrument calibration shifts, and other such measurement error, show an increase in lower tropospheric temperature of 0.06C per decade during January 1979 through April 2002, or 0.6C if extrapolated for 100 years.9 Other recent work correcting various biases in the IPCCs model projects similarly modest warming over the next century, of about 1.5C.10 Surface temperature measurements over the last century show an increase of about 0.27C;
urbanization may distort the longterm surface data due to a heat island effect, for which adjustments in the data may be incomplete.11 Since 1979, surface
since 1940, the figure is about 0.09C if extrapolated for 100 years. Increasing world temperatures have increased at about 0.18C per decade. As noted above, the figure for the lower troposphere is 0.06C per decade; but the
That this prediction is not consistent with the data suggests that the models predicting substantial anthropogenic warming are afflicted with significant modeling errors.12 The IPCC models predict larger effects from increased concentrations of carbon dioxide than actually observed in the satellite and weather balloon data, an outcome consistent with the hypothesis that the interactions among water vapor, carbon dioxide, and other atmospheric components tend to dampen the effects of increased concentrations of carbon dioxide.13 Data on solar activity and surface temperatures show a high correlation.14 Despite
conventional models predict that the troposphere should warm more than the surface. assertions that global warming will yield coastal flooding over large areas, satellite measurements of global sea levels show a downward trend for most of the earth, with the exception of the eastern equatorial Pacific, with far greater variability in terms of annual increases and decreases in various regions and no acceleration in the 20th century.15 Despite assertions that hurricane frequencies and intensities (wind speeds) will increase with global warming, the data since 1940 show trend declines in both.16 Both theory and evidence suggest that prospective
anthropogenic warming will be modest and will occur for the most part in the coldest and driest air masses, particularly Siberia and western North America in the winter.17 Accordingly, it is far from clear that the earth is warming significantly, particularly in the context of increases above the very long-term average. To the extent that warming is occurring, it is not clear that the dominant source is anthropogenic, and the attendant magnitude is obscure as well.
47 Wipeout
AT Impact Turns - Mack

Mack is a Hack New Republic, 94
<James Gleick The Drs Plotpublished in The New Republic 24 May 1994 http://www.around.com/abduct.html> What really makes Mack different from the standard flying-saucer nut is that he's got authority. "Ordinarily," Oprah declared, "we would not even put people on television, on our show certainly, who make such bizarre claims. . . . But we were intrigued by this man. . . . Dr. Mack is a respected professor who teaches at Harvard University. He is an eminent psychiatrist . . ." The promotion surrounding his new book, Abduction, leans heavily on his professional trappings. There
is his status as a medical doctor and psychiatrist. There is his Pulitzer Prize (won not for anything to do with UFO's, of course, but for a
biography of T. E. Lawrence published 17 years ago). There is Harvard University, where Mack enjoys the comfort of academic tenure. Mack's publicists--besides Scribner's, he uses a New Jersey firm, PR with a Purpose Inc--are combining and recombining these elements in sleazy ways. A press release begins: "Abduction by aliens was not a topic taken seriously at Harvard University, until John E. Mack, a medical doctor and professor of psychiatry . . ." (Of course, it is still not a topic "taken seriously" at Harvard, except to the extent that Mack and fellow gulls happen to be on campus.) For readers, Abduction will seem a cross between the Whitley Strieber genre and the Nancy Friday sort of one-sexual-fantasyafter-another-as-told-to-me genre. Ed has sex in a "pod" with a silvery-blond alien and finds it "fulfilling" and "great." Catherine is forced to lie on a table naked and spread her legs while an alien with cold hands inserts an instrument into her vagina. Eva is fondled by three "midgets." And so on. It's all excruciatingly unpleasant and incoherent. Just about everyone gets painful needles in the brain or the leg, and just about everyone
The core of Mack's belief is the following cocktail-party syllogism: People think they were abducted. They don't seem crazy. (And we ought to know--we're experts on mental illness.) Therefore people were abducted. It sounds more respectable in
gets a lecture about pollution or global consciousness on the way out. psychiatrist talk, naturally: "Efforts to establish a pattern of psychopathology other than disturbances associated with a traumatic event have been unsuccessful. Psychological testing of abductees has not revealed evidence of mental or emotional disturbance that could account for their
No one remembers their abductions right away. These aliens, clumsy as they are about anaesthesia and scars, have a way of making the experience vanish from the conscious minds of all 4 million of their American victims. (Why is abduction such a peculiarly American phenomenon, by the way? Our national borders aren't visible through the portholes of those spaceships. Mack has an answer: abductions are global, but it's only in the United States that we are lucky enough to have large numbers of UFO-obsessed therapists to help people uncover their suppressed experiences.) Abduction psychiatrists like Mack need a method of helping people remember, and that method is hypnosis. You are getting sleepy . . . when you awake you will remember . . . Hypnosis is all about suggestion. It has always been a fringe practice, as useful to carnival magicians and movie-makers as to clinical psychiatrists, and for every genuine buried memory unearthed by a hypnotists, many more false memories have been implanted. At its best, the process is a conspiracy between hypnotist and willing subject. Time magazine has quoted one of Mack's subjects as saying that she was given UFO literature to read in preparation for her sessions and was asked obvious leading questions.
reported experiences." Ergo . . . Garry Trudeau has shined his own form of common sense on the process in a Doonesbury sequence that has a hypnotized subject saying "Now I see a . . . a blinding light." "It's a vehicle, isn't it? Some sort of space vehicle?" the hypnotist prompts. "I . . . I can't tell. It has Nevada plates."
From a scientific point of new, Mack's anecdotes are grossly lacking in respectable methodology. He doesn't provide information about his hypnotic techniques, though he does give
the impression that there's a lot of breathing involved. He provides no data from psychological tests. These are "time-consuming and expensive," he notes--gosh, right, in that case, why bother? There
is nothing remotely resembling a control or a negative
case.
48 Wipeout
2NC Nanotech
Extend Gaudin- It will be here by 2040 Tests have proved that the tech is feasible and researchers are investing in it for medical use. Our Webb evidence indicates that this type of biotech would inevitably break out of the lab like a virus it says that the tech will develop to a point where we wouldnt be able to control it and it would wreak havoc on the environment, feeding on all of the carbon on Earth- this would lead to green goo which would force the nanotech to consume the universe, all the while self replicating. Nanotech weapons could be used to create superior bots, which would kill all life Drexler in 86 ( Eric K.Ph.D. in Molecular Nanotechnology and Chairman of the Foresight Institute, Engines of Creation,
www.foresight.org/EOC/EOC_Chapter_11.html) Among the cognoscenti of nanotechnology, this
threat has become known as the gray goo problem. Though masses of uncontrolled replicators need not be gray or gooey, the term gray goo emphasizes those replicators able to obliterate life might be less inspiring than a single species of crabgrass. They might be superior in an evolutionary sense, but this need not make them valuable. We have evolved to love a world rich in living things, ideas, and diversity, so there is no reason to value gray goo merely because it could spread. Indeed, if we prevent it we will thereby prove our evolutionary superiority. The gray goo threat makes one thing perfectly clear: we cannot afford certain kinds of accidents with replicating assemblers.
Nanotech Inevitable Drexler in 86 ( Eric K.Ph.D. in Molecular Nanotechnology and Chairman of the Foresight Institute, Engines of Creation,
www.foresight.org/EOC/EOC_Chapter_11.html)
Assemblers will take years to emerge, but their emergence seems almost inevitable: Though the path to assemblers has many steps, each step will bring the next in reach, and each will bring immediate rewards. The first steps have already been taken, under the names of "genetic engineering" and "biotechnology." Other paths to assemblers seem possible. Barring worldwide destruction or worldwide controls, the technology race will continue whether we wish it or not. And as advances in computer-aided design speed the development of molecular tools, the
advance toward assemblers will quicken.
49 Wipeout
2NC Particle Accelerators

Extend Leslie 96 We have already tested particle accelerators in a lab and they have almost reached the speed of light. The energy levels of the particles are rising and scientists will have dangerous accelerators by 2100. Capitalism proves that companies will continue to pursue this tech its inevitable Particle Accelerators inevitable we are already creating insanely rare particles at huge energies
Dorigo 2011Eilam Gross: Higgs - The Best There Is, For Now
By Tommaso Dorigo | December 14th 2011 10:05 AM Science 2.0 http://www.science20.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/eilam_gross_higgs_best_there_now-85535 In 2011 the LHC particle accelerator in Geneva collided over 300 trillion (a million million) protons in two opposing beams. All of that enormous energy (7 trillion electron volts) went into the effort to produce the Higgs boson. In each collision, other similar particles are created and there is no way to foresee what will be found. Quantum field
theory enables us to predict the chances of a certain particle being created. The calculations show that the likelihood of getting a Higgs out of a particular collision is so small that over the course of a year we cant see the signs of more than a hundred or so (with a mass of 126 GeV). In the figure above we see the result of a collision that looks like a Higgs. But is this a Higgs particle? The problem is that we dont know enough to conclusively identify it. It could look like hundreds or thousands of other particles produced in the collisions. How can we tell? We dont know for sure! What we can do is count how many of the collisions outcome look similar to a Higgs, and we can calculate how many of these we expect to see in the Standard Model without the Higgs. On the basis of observation, we can compute the probability that the number of collisions that result in particles similar to a Higgs boson will fit the Standard Model (without the Higgs). The numerical value of that probability is called p0. If there is no Higgs, we would expect that value to bearound 0.5 (50%), i.e., the same as the chance that the flip of a coin will come up heads. But if the Higgs exists, we
should get extra collision results with a mass in the range that the Higgs might have. Of course, even if there is no Higgs, there could be statistical fluctuations affecting the experimental results. But the chances of
such fluctuations are low (that is, they have a small p0).
Extend Leslie 96 particle accelerators will be able to rival the energy levels of cosmic cycles this high intensity energy makes our vacuum instable by distorting the equilibrium and threatening to push it to complete entropy The last Leslie card indicates that energy destabilization and entropy would create a bubble in our vacuum that would expand at the speed of light. Protons would immediately decay upon contact and the entire chemical structure of life would collapse- this bubble would expand indefinitely and consume the entire universe Particle accelerators will create compressed quarks that create Ice Nine- independently destroying the universe Wired, 03 <Gregg Easterbrook, July, We're All Gonna Die!But it won't be from germ warfare, runaway nanobots, or shifting magnetic
poles. A skeptical guide to Doomsday.http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.07/doomsday.html?pg=2> "Martin Rees, who... return to nothing." Martin Rees, who has taken part in panels evaluating the safety of particle accelerators, has revived the idea that high-energy
physics could accidentally destroy the world. In his new book, Our Final Hour, Rees worries that power improvements in atom smashers
like Brookhaven's new Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider might make these machines capable of creating a black hole that would scarf up the globe.
Ever more powerful accelerators, he fears, might create a "strangelet" of ultracompressed quarks - the smallest known units of matter - that would serve as an ice-nine for the entire universe, causing all matter to bind to the strangelet and disappear. Since, fundamentally, matter seems
to be made of very rapidly spinning nothingness, there may be no reason why it couldn't spontaneously return to nothing.
50 Wipeout
2NC Artificial Intelligence

Extend Webb in 2 Humans will have AI by 2030- we are investing in super-intelligent technology to do all of our economic and scientific computations. This tech will give birth to offspring that are infinitely more intelligent and create a new race of super intelligent robots that reign over the humans We saved the best card for now the military will have AI for armed forces by 2015 NYTFeb. 16, 2005
(A New Model Army Soldier Rolls Closer to the Battlefield; http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20050216101209990001)
Pentagon predicts that robots will be a major fighting force in the American military in less than a decade, hunting and killing enemies in combat. Robots are a crucial part of the Army's
The robot soldier is coming. The effort to rebuild itself as a 21st-century fighting force, and a $127 billion project called Future Combat Systems is the biggest military contract in American history. The military plans to invest tens of billions of dollars in automated armed forces. The costs of that transformation will help drive the Defense Department's budget up almost 20 percent, from a requested $419.3 billion for next year to $502.3 billion in 2010, excluding the costs of war. The annual costs of buying new weapons is scheduled to rise 52 percent, from $78 billion to $118.6 billion. Military planners say robot soldiers will think, see and react increasingly like humans.
In the beginning, they will be remote-controlled, looking and acting like lethal toy trucks. As the technology develops, they may take many shapes. And as their intelligence grows, so will their autonomy. Even the strongest advocates of automatons say war will always be a human endeavor, with death and disaster. And supporters
like Robert Finkelstein, president of Robotic Technology in Potomac, Md., are telling the Pentagon it could take until 2035 to develop a robot that looks, thinks and fights like a soldier. The Pentagon's "goal is there," he said, "but the path is not totally clear." Robots in battle, as envisioned by their builders, may look and move like humans or hummingbirds, tractors or tanks, cockroaches or crickets. With the development of nanotechnology - the science of very small structures - they may become swarms of "smart dust." The Pentagon intends for robots to haul munitions, gather intelligence, search buildings or blow them up. All these are in the works, but not yet in battle. Already, however, several hundred robots are digging up roadside bombs in Iraq, scouring caves in Afghanistan and serving as armed sentries at weapons depots. By April, an armed version of the bomb-disposal robot will be in Baghdad, capable of firing 1,000 rounds a minute. Though controlled by a soldier with a laptop, the robot will be the first thinking machine of its kind to take up a front-line infantry position, ready to kill enemies. "The real world is not Hollywood," said Rodney A. Brooks, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at M.I.T. and a co-founder of the iRobot Corporation. "Right now we have the first few robots that are actually useful to the military." Despite the obstacles, Congress ordered in 2000 that a third of the ground vehicles and a third of deep-strike aircraft in the military must become robotic within a decade. If that mandate is to be met, the United States will spend many billions of dollars on military robots by 2010. As the first lethal robots head for Iraq, the role of the robot soldier as a killing machine has barely been debated. The history of warfare suggests that every new technological leap - the longbow, the tank, the atomic bomb - outraces the strategy and doctrine to control it. "The lawyers tell me there are no prohibitions against robots making life-or-death decisions," said Mr. Johnson, who leads robotics efforts at the Joint Forces Command research center in Suffolk, Va. "I have been asked what happens if the robot destroys a school bus rather than a tank parked nearby. We will not entrust a robot with that decision until we are confident they can make it." Trusting robots with potentially lethal decision-making may require a leap of faith in technology not everyone is
21st-century robotics and nanotechnology may become "so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses." "As machines become more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them," Mr. Joy wrote recently in Wired magazine. "Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage, the machines will be in effective control." Pentagon officials and military contractors
ready to make. Bill Joy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, has worried aloud that say the ultimate ideal of unmanned warfare is combat without casualties. Failing that, their goal is to give as many difficult, dull or dangerous missions as possible to the robots, conserving American minds and protecting American bodies in battle.
The impact is terminator salvation our Bostrom evidence indicates that these robots will be given obscure goals that will be misinterpreted. They will turn the entire universe into a computational device and kill everyone and everything in a cold, robotic calculation. AI will become a biocidal technology that would destroy the universe Whole Earth Review 2000. (Howard, Editor. Sept. 22, Pg. Lexis)
Those who follow the progress of artificial life research know that effects of messing with the engines of evolution might lead to forces even more regrettable than the demons unleashed at Alamogordo. Biocidal technologies threaten life throughout the rest of the universe.
It looks as it something even more powerful than thermonuclear weaponry is emanating from that same, strangely fated corner of New Mexico where nuclear physicists first knew sin,
51 Wipeout
2NC Artificial Intelligence

None of their defense applies- A-life will make nuclear war pale in comparison- its production is guaranteed Whole Earth Review, 92
<At the beginning of the twentieth century - computational biology Column Whole Earth Review, Fall, 1992 by Howard Rheingold, http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1510/is_n76/ai_12635777__>
It looks as if something even more powerful than thermonuclear weaponry is emanating from that same, strangely fated corner of New Mexico where nuclear physicists first knew sin. Those who follow the progress of artificial-life research know that the effects of messing with the engines of evolution might lead to forces even more regrettable than the demons unleashed at Alamogordo. At least nuclear weaponry and biocidal technologies only threaten life on Earth, and don't threaten to contaminate the rest of the universe. That's the larger ethical problem of a-life. The technology of self-replicating machines that could emerge in future decades from today's a-life research might escape from human or even terrestrial control, infest the solar system, and, given time, break out into the galaxy. If there are other intelligent species out there, they might not react benevolently to evidence that humans have dispersed interstellar strip-mining robots that breed, multiply, and evolve. If there are no other intelligent
species in existence, maybe we will end up creating God, or the Devil, depending on how our minds' children evolve a billion years from now. The entire story of life on earth thus far might be just the wetware prologue to a longer, larger, drier tale, etched in silicon rather than carbon, and blasted to the stars -- purposive spores programmed to seek, grow, evolve, expand. That's what a few people think they are on the verge of inventing.
Scenarios like that make the potential for global thermonuclear war or destruction of the biosphere look like a relatively local problem. Biocide of a few hundred thousand species (including ourselves is one kind of ethical problem; turning something like the Alien loose on the cosmos is a whole new level of ethical lapse. The human species has precious little time to gain the wisdom necessary to handle the knowledge
scientists have discovered. Artificial life is too important to remain an esoteric specialty. The time to think about what it might mean is now, while we still have a choice.
Military applications of autonomous, self-reproducing robots might lead to worse fates than mere annihilation. There's some question about whether it is ever possible to put knowledge back in the bottle,
but there is no question that we still have time to make sure that the self-reproducing increasingly intelligent, interstellar lifeforms that we are about to create are more closely modeled on E.T. than on the Alien.
52 Wipeout
2NC Time Travel

Time travel is possible and humans will find a way to do it thats Kaku 94 because of the matter- energy content of the universe, it is theoretically possible to bend time. We will use high concentration levels of energy to make it possible, much like we do with accelerators. Time travel will occur in the future new advances ensure it Highfield 07editor of the New Scientist, 8-8(Roger, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/08/08/scitime108.xml)
Prof Amos Ori has set out a theoretical model of a time machine which would allow people to travel back in time to explore the past. The way the machine would work rests on Einsteins theory of general relativity, a theory of gravity that shows how time can be warped by the gravitational pull of objects. Bend time enough and you can create a loop and the possibility of temporal travel. Prof Oris theory, set out in the prestigious science journal Physical Review, rests on a set of mathematical equations describing hypothetical conditions that, if established, could lead to the formation of a time machine, technically known as closed time-like curves. In the blends of space and time, or spacetime, in his equations, time would be able to curve back on itself, so that a person travelling around the loop might be able to go further back in time with each lap. In the past, one of the major challenges has been the alleged need for an exotic material with strange properties - what physicists call negative density - to create these time loops. This is no longer an issue, he told The Daily Telegraph. You can construct a time machine without exotic matter, he
said. It is now possible to use any material, even dust, so long as there is enough of it to bend spacetime into a loop.
Extend Pickover 98 Time travel does not violate any known laws of physics, and because of profit motivation, humans will find a way to do it it is extremely reductionist to believe we will never have the tech models already prove its feasibility Extend the Randall evidence- traveling in time will create an infinite number of loops as we go back and change random events it causes a cyclical rotation of strings that break down time as a dimension. Since our universe is based on time it would cease to exist as we know it- killing all life. Time travel will destroy the universe Herbert, 00 (Ryan, Time travel, http://xar.us/stuff/papers/time_travel/)
Despite these restraints, Gerard
't Hooft of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands is determined to grind any hope that cosmic strings may work under his heel. He warns, "Don't try [to go back in time using cosmic strings] . . . You won't just fail-you might destroy the entire universe" (Mukerjee, 1994, p. 32). The dilemma described by 't Hooft shows that in a closed universe, the strings cannot pass parallel to each other. Instead, they begin to orbit each other, moving closer and closer together spinning faster and faster. As the kinetic energy of the strings approached infinity, the universe would begin to crumble and collapse in onto the strings. Mukerjee (1994) described the event from the prospective of a potential time
traveler: "A time-machine ticket-holder will see massive walls closing in while being shredded to spaghetti by the strings speeding through. . . The scene sketched by 't Hooft shows how such objects can act as Nature's dragons, guarding time machines from fools who would rush in" (p. 32).
53 Wipeout
2NC Isomer Bombs

Extend Bekkum in 4 The defense department is investing in new types of chemical bombs that are based on Hafnium and release high energy gamma rays. In the dark halls of defense research, scientists have found a way to create high frequency weapons that can disrupt the energy levels of our vacuum. New military technology will use lasers that exceed cosmic energy Leslie 96, Philosophy Professor, Guelph Univerity
<John, The End of The World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction pg 113-114>
Among the sources of electromagnetic waves which physicists have so far developed, the most powerful are the hard-X-ray lasers of President Reagans SDI or Star Wars project. While the energy
outputs of the lasers are secret, they are at any rate much greater than that of the hangar-sized Nova Laser of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. This
can deliver one hundred thousand joules, energy enough to raise a kilogram weight by about ten thousand meters, in a burst lasting a billionth of a second. The National Ignition Facility laser proposed to replace it would be about twenty times more powerful. In 1988 the US Department of Energy
relaxed secrecy sufficiently to reveal that Livermores nuclear fusion programme needing powerful lasers to compress pellets and heat them to 100,000,000 C, it was pursued in parallel with SDI laser research was progressing so well that a new laser with pulses of ten million joules was contemplated. Each pulse would rival the explosion of two kilograms of TNT. This laser, though, would be designed to operate many times.
The SDI lasers, in contrast, would be vaporized after generating single pulses because they would be powered by small nuclear bombs. An X-ray laser pumped by a one-hundred-kiloton bomb might generate not just ten million joules, but ten trillion. This would be what was needed to destroy an intercontinental ballistic
missile during its far-distant acceleration phase, given that the laser beam would be distributed over a spot perhaps two hundred meters in diameter. Could
such lasers be used to exceed cosmic ray collision energies? Laser pulses which might seem very brief could still have their energies spread over periods much greater than those of collisions between particles (cosmic rays are protons, helium nuclei and occasional heavier nuclei) which were moving at nearly the speed of light. Several techniques of pulse compression are available, however. They delay
a pulses successive elements to different degrees, so that the entire pulse reaches the target at virtually the same moment. Compression by about a thousand times can be achieved by simple acousto-optic delay lines or, when a pulse has a mixture of frequencies varying with time, by using grating to direct components with different frequencies along paths of different lengths. With light of a single frequency, one can use a crystal whose refractive index varies in response to a rapidly oscillating electric field. We
remain faced with the impossibility of bringing any mere wave to a focus narrower than its wavelength. Now, there is quite a gap between an SDI X-ray
lasers 10 -9 meter (millionth of a millimeter) wavelength and the circa 10 -15 meter which is characteristic of cosmic rays. Still, use of tremendously energetic pulses could help compensate for this. So could techniques for generating higher harmonics: that is to say, of processing
original discovery in this area was that passing laser light through a quartz crystal could lead to frequency doubling. Greater frequency increases were next obtained with other crystals acting singly or in combination. Later still, increases by over a hundred times could be had: intense laser beams tore electrons from atoms but then allowed them to spring back, which made them radiate at the higher frequencies.
beams so as to increase their frequencies and hence reduce their wavelengths. The
And their aff proves that tech development for defense is inevitable we will find a way to exceed current energy levels and use it as a weapon- only a risk that it will backfire and destabilize the vacuum And that would destroy the universe our Mundi evidence on the Quantum Vacuum Mining scenario indicates that breaching the energy equilibrium would destroy the balance of our vacuum which would destroy all life.
54 Wipeout
2NC Ice 9
Extend Close 2 Scientists will be able to use accelerators to create strangelets that cause the freezing point of water to re-configured to room temperature. This technology is not limited to Kurt Vonnegut imagination- the feasibility of it has been proven and the conditions have been recreated in labsIce 9 will soon become a reality the physics are possible MIT News1999 [Microelectronics test could cut industry costs, http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/1999/nelson0303.html]
the technique may one day make it possible to "optically switch" a material from one structure to another, even without any absorption of the light. Like an ice crystal, which can assume nine different forms (popularized in Kurt Vonnegut's sci-fi story in which a mad scientist tries to freeze the Earth by turning the oceans into "ice nine"), other crystals may be altered by rearranging their structure from that of one phase to another. This method may make it possible to "optically control" a material by changing the configuration of its molecular
Although this objective is still far off,
infrastructure, and even to create new states of existing materials by forcing their atoms into configurations they wouldn't normally assume, Professor Nelson said. His research group recently succeeded in "shaping" a pulse of light lasting less than one-quadrillionth of a second into a
The pulses of light "push" at the crystal lattice framework much like a person pushing a child on a swing, causing ever-larger excursions from the original position. If sufficiently large motions can be induced, the material could enter a new crystalline phase. Very recently,
timed sequence of pulses that can launch vibrational waves in a crystal with larger and larger amplitude. Professor Nelson's group has been able to shape a single light pulse into not just one timed pulse sequence, but many pulse sequences that can
the researchers can continue to manipulate and amplify the vibrational wave as it travels through the crystal at light-like speed. This advance offers prospects for optical control over ultrafast signals and brings the dream of optical control over material structure one step closer to realization.
reach different regions of a sample. In this manner,
And Ice 9 would destroy the entire universe the evidence indicates that this particle would be unleashed in the ocean, and it would freeze the entire ecosystem if humans came into contact with it, we would be turned into blocks of ice this type of tech would expand and self replicate to the point where it consumed all life in the universe Ice 9 would create an unstable vacuum that would release cosmic level energy destroying the universe Powell2000 [Corey S., Senior Editor of Discover Magazine, 20 Ways the World Could, with additional research by Diane
Martindale, http://www.extinct.net/] Collapse of the vacuum In the book Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut popularized the idea of "ice-nine,"
a form of water that is far more stable than the ordinary kind, so it is solid at room temperature. Unleash a bit of it, and suddenly all water on Earth transforms to ice-nine and freezes solid. Ice-nine was a satirical invention, but an abrupt,
disastrous phase transition is a possibility. Very early in the history of the universe, according to a leading cosmological model, empty space was
state of affairs, called a false vacuum, was highly precarious. A new, more stable kind of vacuum appeared and, like ice-nine, it quickly took over. This transition unleashed a tremendous amount of energy and caused a brief runaway expansion of the cosmos. It is possible that another, even more stable
full of energy. This kind of vacuum exists, however. As the universe expands and cools, tiny bubbles of this new kind of vacuum might appear and spread at nearly the speed of light. The laws of physics would change in their wake, and a
blast of energy would dash everything to bits.
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2NC Quantum Vacuum Mining

Extend the Mundi evidence scientists are inevitably going to create machines that mine the quantum vacuum. It will recreate particles at high energies that disrupt the equilibrium of the vacuum and create an exponentially growing cosmic energy release that destroys the universe. This new level vacuum would decay and leave the universe un inhabitable Vacuum decay is the ultimate annihilation of all life Davies in 94 (Professor of Natural philosophy at U of Adelaice, The Last Three Minutes)
The possibility that we are living in a false vacuum has never been a cheering one to contemplate. Vacuum decay is the ultimate ecological catastrophe: after vacuum decay not only is life as we know it impossible, so is chemistry as we know it. However, one could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, then at least some structures capable of knowing joy. This possibility has now been eliminated.
This is disheartening, remark the authors, in a masterful understatement, and they continue:
And timeframe is not an answer to this scenario this is an instance where you evaluate inevitability claims before timeframe arguments- if there is a risk that high-energy physics would destroy the vacuum, then you evaluate universal destruction first. Future mining tech will release high levels of energy that destroy the vacuum Leslie in 96 (John, Philosopher, Cosmologist, End of the world Science and Ethics of Human Extinction) Is vacuum metastability a ridiculous fantasy? As was noted by J. Ellis, A. Linde and M. Sher, many physicists would
not like to even consider the possibility that we live in an unstable vacuum state. Yet, they pointed out, the particle physicists standard mode the Glashow-Weinberg-Salam model indicates that we indeed live in such a state if the topquark mass exceeds 95 GeV plus six-tenths the Higgs-boson mass. It might well do so, for tests had suggested that the top quark weighed between 100 and 160 GeV, while the Higgs boson was perhaps as light-weight as 41 GeV98. More recent tests give a top-quark mass of near to 200 GeV. This figure might seem alarmingly high, but some currently popular theories view it as a sign of a Higgs boson massive enough to exclude the danger entirely, as J. Demaret and D. Lambert say. The main characteristic of this area, in fact, is that nobody is in the least sure about it. It isnt even clear that Higgs bosons exist, or whether they would come in several masses; and if one goes beyond the simple standard model to a super symmetric one, then, R.A. Flores and Sher point out, the proliferation of parameters makes any attempts to find limits
we simply couldnt know whether our vacuum would be stable against an energetic push. Plainly, our sole security lies in keeping below the cosmic ray collision energies which Hut and Rees estimated.
meaningless, so
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2NC Atom-tech
Extend ETC in 3 we are investing in technology that manufactures chemical agents on a nano level- this means that we will recreate different types of carbon that behave differently under different circumstances so that we can become the master of life the evidence indicates that this atomtechnology will self replicate and manifest itself as green goo which poses as real Earth elements while consuming itself and everything else. This tech would lead to super-intelligent machines that operate on a nano level and create a new race of autonomous beings that will become humanities Big Cyborg Brother. Nano-biotech is inevitable there will be no regulations the green goo problem will overwhelm our tech ETC in 4 (Nanotech News in Living Colour: An Update on White Papers, Red Flags, Green Goo, Grey Goo (and Red Herrings)
Green goo refers to potential dangers associated with nanobiotechnology the merging of the living and non-living realms at the nano-scale to make hybrid materials and organisms. Nanobiotechnology
involves the integration of biological materials with synthetic materials to build new molecular structures or products. Researchers are coaxing living organisms to perform mechanical functions precisely because living organisms are capable of self-assembly and self-replication. With
nanobiotech, researchers have the power to create completely new organisms that have never existed on Earth. Nanobiotech raises many potential concerns: will new life forms, especially those that are designed to function autonomously in the environment, open a Pandoras box of unforeseen and uncontrollable consequences? Thats the specter of green goo. It is important to acknowledge that nanobiotechnology does not always
involve self-replication, and biological materials can be harnessed for more mundane applications. It is wrong to assume that all nanobiotech research will spawn uncontrollable green goo. Some applications will be more risky than others. For example, nanobio
products that incorporate living organisms and are intended for environmental applications are higher green goo risks than those that simply incorporate biological proteins in synthetic materials. However, propelled by venture capital and taxpayer dollars, the field of nanobiotech is advancing rapidly, in the absence of public debate or regulatory oversight. For most government policymakers, the implications of nanobiotech arent even on the radar.
Extend Adams in 4 Green goo is irreversible this carbonless sludge can exist under any condition all the while self replicating no technology will be able to prevent it from extending into space Extend Earth Review 2k This type of biotechnology would feed on other forms of life throughout the universe it would be self replicating and unable to control and it would export the green goo problem to other planets.
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2NC Util
All of this means that you should default to a utilitarian framework the aff may save all of humanity, but humanity will destroy the rest of the universe this means that wipeout is a prior question and precedes the truth claims of the 1AC Extend Bentham 48 Util is inevitable the aff itself is a reason why util is probably a good idea- but we access it better, our evidence indicates that util is a prerequisite to policy action which means the possibility that there is life outside our own means that we have to govern our space policy based on utility Util is inevitable basis for all moral decisions. Ratner 84 Leonard G., Legion Lex Professor of Law, University of Southern California Law Center, Hofstra Law Review,
SPRING, 12 Hofstra L. Rev. 723, ARTICLE: THE UTILITARIAN IMPERATIVE: AUTONOMY, RECIPROCITY, AND EVOLUTION, JT/ In the context of the information provided by biology, anthropology, economics, and other disciplines, a functional description of evolutionary utilitarianism identifies enhanced per capita need/want fulfillment as the longterm utilitarian-majoritarian goal, illuminates the critical relationship of self interest to that goal, and discloses the trial-
The description confirms that process as arbiter of the tension between individual welfare and group welfare (i.e., between autonomy and reciprocity) n19 and suggests a utilitarian imperative: that utilitarianism is unavoidable, that morality rests ultimately on utilitarian self interest, that in the final analysis all of us are personal utilitarians and most of us are social utilitarians.
and-error process of accommodation and priority assignment that implements it. n18
Extend Sikora and Berry in 78- our util calculations must remain impartial to aliens if we fail to extend our ethics to aliens then we justify all of the mass atrocities of the 20th century- there can be no exception. This evidence literally says Equal consideration is extended to all sentient creatures. Extend Pettit in 91- All alternatives to util fail- in the most extreme instances, util calculations are essential to avoiding genocide - If there are fifty people in a room, and one of them is a little girl, and you can kill the little girl to save fifty people, you have to do it. It is the only ethic that avoids decisions that save the little girl and kill fifty people. Because of the advent of nuclear omnicide, ethics should not be held absolute Nye 1986 Joseph, Director of the Center for Science and International Affairs @ Harvard University, Nuclear Ethics,
The significance and the limits of the two broad traditions can be captured by contemplating a hypothetical case. Imagine that you are visiting a Central American country and you happen upon a village square where an army captain is about to order his men to shoot peasants lined up against a wall. When you ask the reason, you are told someone in this village shot at the captains men last night. Why you object to the killing of possibly innocent people, you are told that civil wars do not permit moral niceties. Just to prove the point that we all have dirty hands in such situations, the captain hands you a rifle and tells you that if you will shoot one peasant, he will free the other. Otherwise both die. He warns you not to try any tricks because his men have their guns trained on you. Will you shoot one person with the consequences of saving one, or will you allow both to die but preserve your moral integrity by refusing to play his dirty game? The point of the story is to show the value and limits of both traditions, Integrity is clearly an important value, and many of us would refuse to shoot. But at what point does the principle of not taking an innocent life collapse before the consequentialist burden? Would it matter if there were 20 or 1,000 peasants to be saved? What
if killing or torturing one innocent person could save a city of 10 million persons from a terrorists nuclear device? At some point does not integrity become
the ultimate egoism of fastidious self-righteousness in which the purity of the self is more important than the lives of countless others? Is it not better to follow a consequentialist approach, admit remorse or regret over the immoral means, but justify the actions by consequences? Do absolutist approaches to integrity become self-contradictory in a world of nuclear weapons Do
what is right though the world should perish was a difficult principle even when Kant expounded it in the eighteenth century, and there is some evidence that he did not mean it to be taken literally even then. Now that it may be literally possible in the Nuclear age, it seems more than ever to be self-contradictory. Absolutist ethics bear a heaver burden of proof in the nuclear age than ever before.
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Aliens are not exempt they must be involved in our consequentialist framework Ryder 2005 Richard -- Professor at Tulane University and chairman of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals-- August 6, (All beings that feel pain deserve human rights/ Equality of the species is the logical conclusion of postDarwin morality; http://www.guardian.co.uk/animalrights/story/0,11917,1543799,00.html) The word speciesism came to me while I
was lying in a bath in Oxford some 35 years ago. It was like racism or sexism - a prejudice based upon morally irrelevant physical differences.
we are human animals related to all the other animals through evolution; how, then, can we justify our almost total oppression of all the other species? All animal species can suffer pain and
Since Darwin we have known distress. Animals scream and writhe like us; their nervous systems are similar and contain the same biochemicals that we know are associated
concern for the pain and distress of others should be extended to any "painient" - pain-feeling - being regardless of his or her sex, class, race, religion, nationality or species. Indeed, if aliens from outer space turn out to be painient, or if we ever manufacture machines who are painient, then we must widen the moral circle to include them. Painience is the only convincing basis for attributing rights or, indeed, interests to others.
with the experience of pain in ourselves.Our
Extraterrestrials Are Persons And Thus Qualify For Human Rights Smith 2003 Wesley J. -- senior fellow at the Discovery Institute (Kass, in the Firing Line; http://www.nationalreview.com/script/printpage.asp?ref=/comment/smith200312050930.asp) But if being human doesn't confer moral worth, then what does? According to the predominate view in bioethics, the "quality" of a life as judged by its level of cognitive capacity. Hence, "beings," "creatures," or "organisms" that have sufficient rationality be they "animals, machines, extraterrestrials, gods, angels, or devils," as one leading bioethicist has put it possess the highest moral status. These beings are known in bioethics as "persons," and only they possess the full panoply of what are (still) known as "human rights."
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Framework AT: Biopower Impacts

Their impact claims are overgeneralized, non-causal assertions that are the opposite of truthmodern biopolitics includes economic pluralization and democracy that inhibits the rise to totalitarianism, even if it involves centralized state coercion OKane 1997 Modernity, the Holocaust, and politics, Economy and Society, February, ebsco
Modern bureaucracy is not intrinsically capable of genocidal action (Bauman 1989: 106). Centralized state coercion has no natural move to terror. In the explanation of modern genocides it is chosen policies which
Chosen policies cannot be relegated to the position of immediate condition (Nazis in power) in the explanation of the Holocaust.
play the greatest part, whether in effecting bureaucratic secrecy, organizing forced labour, implementing a system of terror, harnessing science and technology or introducing extermination policies, as means and as ends. As Nazi Germany and Stalins USSR have shown, furthermore, those chosen policies of genocidal government turned away from and not towards modernity.
The choosing of policies, however, is not independent of circumstances.

the way of another Holocaust in modern society.
An analysis of the history of each case plays an important part in explaining where and how genocidal governments come to power and analysis of political institutions and structures also helps towards an understanding of the factors which act as obstacles to modern genocide. But it is not just political factors which stand in
Modern societies have not only pluralist democratic political systems but also economic pluralism where workers are free to change jobs and bargain wages and
where independent firms, each with their own independent bureaucracies, exist in competition with state-controlled enterprises. In modern societies this economic pluralism both promotes and is served by the open scientific method. By ignoring
competition and the capacity for people to move between organizations whether economic, political, scientific or social, Bauman overlooks
It is these very ordinary and common attributes of modernity which stand in the way of modern genocides.
crucial but also very ordinary and common attributes of truly modern societies.
Biopolitics is not the problem in and of itself its biopolitics deployed in totalitarians societies which is bad our strengthening of democratic structures prevents, not causes, their impact Dickinson 2004 Edward Ross (Professor at University of Cincinnati) Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About Modernity, Central European History, vol. 37, no. 1, March
In an important programmatic statement of 1996 Geoff Eley celebrated the fact that Foucaults ideas have fundamentally directed attention away from institutionally centered conceptions of government and the state . . . and toward a dispersed and decentered notion of power and its microphysics.48 The broader, deeper, and less visible ideological consensus on technocratic reason and the ethical unboundedness of science was the focus of his interest.49 But the power-producing effects in Foucaults microphysical sense (Eley) of the construction of social bureaucracies and social knowledge, of an entire institutional apparatus and system of practice ( Jean Quataert),
simply do not explain Nazi policy.50 The destructive dynamic of Nazism was a product not so much of a particular modern set of ideas as of a particular modern political structure, one that could realize the disastrous potential of those ideas. What was critical was not the expansion of the instruments and disciplines of biopolitics, which occurred everywhere in Europe. Instead, it was the principles that guided how those instruments and disciplines were organized and used, and the external constraints on them. In National Socialism, biopolitics was shaped by a totalitarian conception of social management focused on the power and ubiquity of the vlkisch state. In democratic societies, biopolitics has historically been constrained by a rights-based strategy of social management. This is a point to which I
will return shortly. For now, the point is that what was decisive was actually politics at the level of the state. A comparative framework can help us to clarify this point. Other states passed compulsory sterilization laws in the 1930s indeed, individual states in the United States had already begun doing so in 1907. Yet they did not proceed to the next steps adopted by National Socialism mass sterilization, mass eugenic abortion and murder of the defective. Individual figures in, for example, the U.S. did make such suggestions. But neither the political structures of democratic states nor their legal and political principles permitted such policies actually being enacted. Nor did the scale of forcible sterilization in other countries match that of the Nazi program. I do not mean to suggest that such programs were not horrible; but in a democratic political context they
did not develop the dynamic of constant radicalization and escalation that characterized Nazi policies.
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Biopolitics is good only seeing it as bad a) ignores the massive decrease in structural violence it has caused and b) views power unidirectionally in contradiction within their own critique Dickinson 2004 Edward Ross (Professor at University of Cincinnati) Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our
Discourse About Modernity, Central European History, vol. 37, no. 1, March
This understanding of the democratic and totalitarian potentials of biopolitics at the level of the state needs to be underpinned by a reassessment of how biopolitical discourse operates in society at large, at the prepolitical level. I would like to try to offer here the beginnings of a reconceptualization of biopolitical modernity, one that focuses less on the machinations of technocrats and experts, and more on the different ways that biopolitical thinking circulated within German society more broadly. It is striking, then, that the new model of German modernity is even more relentlessly negative than the old Sonderweg model. In that older model, premodern elites were constantly triumphing over the democratic opposition. But at least there was an opposition; and in the long run, time was on the side of that opposition, which in fact embodied the historical movement of modern- ization. In the new model, there is virtually a biopolitical consensus. 92 And that consensus is almost always fundamentally a nasty, oppressive thing, one that partakes in crucial ways of the essential quality of National Socialism. Everywhere biopolitics is intrusive, technocratic, top-down, constraining, limiting. Biopolitics is almost never conceived of or at least discussed in any detail as creating possibilities for people, as expanding the range of their choices, as empowering them, or indeed as doing anything positive for them at all. Of course, at the most simple-minded level, it seems to me that an assessment of the potentials of modernity that ignores the ways in which biopolitics has made life tangibly better is somehow deeply flawed. To give just one example, infant mortality in Germany in 1900 was just over 20 percent; or, in other words, one in five children died before reaching the age of one year. By 1913, it was 15 percent; and by 1929 (when average real purchasing power was not significantly higher than in 1913) it was only 9.7 percent.93 The expansion of infant health programs an enormously ambitious, bureaucratic, medicalizing, and sometimes intrusive, social engineering project had a great deal to do with that change. It would be bizarre to write a history of biopolitical modernity that ruled out an appreciation for how absolutely wonderful and astonishing this achievement and any number of others like it really was. There was a reason for the Machbarkeitswahn of the early twentieth century: many marvelous things were in fact becoming machbar. In that sense, it is not really accurate to call it a Wahn (delusion, craziness) at all; nor is it accurate to focus only on the inevitable frustration of delusions of power. Even in the late 1920s, many social engineers could and did look with great satisfaction on the changes they genuinely had the power to accomplish. Concretely, moreover, I am not convinced that power operated in only one direction from the top down in social work. Might we not ask whether people actually demanded welfare services, and whether and how social workers and the state struggled to respond to those demands? David Crew and Greg Eghigian, for example, have given us detailed studies of the micropolitics of welfare in the Weimar period in which it becomes clear that conflicts between welfare administrators and their clients were sparked not only by heavyhanded intervention, but also by refusal to help.94 What is more, the specific nature of social programs matters a great deal, and we must distinguish between the different dynamics (and histories) of different programs. The removal of children from their families for placement in foster families or reformatories was bitterly hated and stubbornly resisted by working-class families; but mothers brought their children to infant health clinics voluntarily and in numbers , and after 1945 they
brought their older children to counseling clinics, as well. In this instance, historians of the German welfare state might profit from the demand side models of welfare development that are sometimes more explicitly explored in
even where social workers really were attempting to limit or subvert the autonomy and power of parents, I am not sure that their actions can be characterized only and exclusively as part of a microphysics of oppression. Progressive child welfare advocates in Germany, particularly in the National Center for Child Welfare, waged a campaign in the 1920s to persuade German parents and educators to stop beating children with such ferocity, regularity, and nonchalance. They did so because they feared the unintended physical and psychological effects of beatings, and implicitly because they believed physical violence could compromise the development of the kind of autonomous, selfreliant subjectivity on which a modern state had to rely in its citizenry.96 Or, to give another common example from the period, children removed from their families after being subjected by parents or other relatives to repeated episodes of violence or rape were being manipulated by biopolitical technocrats, and were often abused in new ways in institutions or foster families; but they were also being liberated. Sometimes some forms of the exercise of power in society are in some ways emancipatory; and that is historically significant. Further, of course we must ask whether it is really true that social workers and social agencies attempts to manipulate people worked. My own impression is that social policy makers grew increasingly aware, between the 1870s and the 1960s, that their own ends could not be achieved unless they won the cooperation of the targets of policy. And to do that, they had to offer people things that they wanted and needed. Policies that incited resistance were sometimes with glacial slowness, after stubborn and embittered strugglesde-emphasized or even abandoned. Should we really see the history of social welfare policy as a more or less static (because the same thing is always happening) history of the imposition of manipulative policies on populations?
some of the international literature.95 In fact,
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Their critique of biopolitics has a pessimistic view of modernity, totalizing a diverse historical epoch and ignoring the good manifestations of biopolitical governance Nazism is the exception, not the rule Dickinson 2004 Edward Ross (Professor at University of Cincinnati) Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our
Discourse About Modernity, Central European History, vol. 37, no. 1, March This issue is important, I believe, in part because the project of ferreting out the contribution of biopolitical discourses to the construction of National Socialism so dominates the literature, creating a sense of impending disaster that I believe has all too strongly shaped the questions we, as historians, are asking about the history of modern biopolitics. I want to give two examples that I believe reveal the way this focus constrains our collective historical imagination. I do so not in order to point out that my colleagues are wrong, but to suggest how powerfully our imaginations and our questions are shaped by the specter and spectacle of National Socialism. In a brilliant review article published in 1996, Peter Fritzsche posed the question Did Weimar Fail? Fritzsche gave voice to a healthy skepticism regarding the tendency in the literature to imply that the history of social welfare programs is only part of the prehistory of National Socialism. The darker vision of modernism presented by Detlev Peukert, he suggested, is compelling but not wholly persuasive. The spirit of science itself, he argued, does not introduce quite so automatically a discourse of segregation without the application of racist politics; and he asked to what extent are reformist practices invariably collusions in disciplinary regimes? And yet, Fritzsches reflections are haunted by almost unrelieved foreboding, which merely accurately reflects the tone of the literature he was reviewing. He suggested that the central theme of this scholarship . . . is the regimentation and discipline of citizens in often dangerously imaginative ways; it establishes significant continuities between the Weimar era and the Third Reich; the history of the republic reveals the dark shadows of modernity.58 Indeed, the conceptual framework Fritzsche set up seems to take totalitarianism, war, and mass murder as the end-point of continuity. Taking up a question asked by Gerald Feldman, Fritzsche suggested that the Weimar Republic was neither a gamble nor an experiment, but rather a laboratory of modernity. From this perspective, Fritzsche asserts, perhaps Weimar should be regarded as less a failure than a series of bold experiments that
do not come to an end with the year 1933. The failure of political democracy is not the same as the destruction of the laboratory. Thus, the coming of the Third Reich was not so much a verification of Weimars singular failure as the validation of its dangerous potential.59 Fritzsches was a wonderful metaphor for Weimar Germany, a period of
enormous creativity and experimentation in any number of fields; and it is surely also a fruitful way to conceive of the relationship between Weimar and Nazi Germany. And yet again, as Fritzsches more skeptical comments pointed out the laboratory didnt simply stay open; the experimenters didnt simply keep experimenting; not all the experiments simply kept running under new management. 60
Particular kinds of experiments were not permitted in the Third Reich: those founded on the idea of the toleration of difference; those that defined difference as a psychological, political, or cultural fact to be understood and managed, rather than as a form of deviance or subversion to be repressed or eliminated; those founded on the idea of integration through selfdirected participation (as opposed to integration through orchestrated and obedient participation); and those that aimed at achieving a stable pluralism. There were many such experiments under way in the Weimar period; given the extent to which the political fabric of the Weimar Republic was rent by ideological
differences, they were often of particular importance and urgency. Many of those experiments appeared to be failing by the end of the 1920s; and that in itself was a critically important reason for the appeal of the ideas
many of those very same experiments were revived, with enormous success, after 1949. Examples from my own field of research might include the development of a profession of social work that claimed to be a value-neutral foundation for cooperation between social workers of radically differing ideological orientation; the development of a psychoanalytic, rather than psychiatric, interpretation of deviance (neurosis replaces inherited brain defects); and the use of corporatist structures of governance within the welfare bureaucracy. These mechanisms did not work perfectly. But they were a continuation of experiments undertaken in the Weimar period and shut down in 1933; and they did contribute to the stabilization of a pluralist democracy. That was not a historically trivial or selfevident achievement, either in Germany or elsewhere. It required time, ingenuity, and a large-scale convergence of long-term historical forces. We should be alive to its importance as a feature of modernity. As Fritzsches review makes clear, then, much of the recent literature seems to imply that National Socialism was a product of the success of a modernity that ends in 1945; but it could just as easily be seen as a temporary failure of modernity, the success of which would only come in the 1950s and 1960s. As Paul Betts recently remarked, we should not present the postwar period as a redemptive tale of modernism triumphant and cast Nazism as merely a regressive interlude. But neither should we dismiss the fact that such a narrative would be, so to speak, half true that the democratic welfare state is no less a product of modernity than is totalitarianism.
championed by the Nazis. The totalitarian and biological conception of national unity was in part a response to the apparent failure of a democratic and pluralist model of social and political integration. And yet ,
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Their critique only focuses on the dark side of modernity, masking the achievements of biopolitical modernity which is the large scale absence of mass murder not its cause Dickinson 2004 Edward Ross (Professor at University of Cincinnati) Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our
Discourse About Modernity, Central European History, vol. 37, no. 1, March A second example is Geoff Eleys masterful synthetic introduction to a collection of essays published in 1996 under the title Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 18701930. Eley set forth two research agendas derived from his review of recent hypotheses regarding the origins and nature of Nazism. One was to discover what allowed so many people to identify with the Nazis. The second was that we explore the ways in which welfare policy contributed to Nazism, by examining the production of new values, new mores, new social practices, new ideas about the good and efficient society. Eley suggested that we examine strategies of policing and constructions of criminality, notions of the normal and the deviant, the production and regulation of sexuality, the . . . understanding of the socially valued individual . . . the coalescence of racialized thinking . . .62 So far so good; but why stop there? Why not examine the expanding hold of the language of rights
on the political imagination, or the disintegration of traditional authority under the impact of the explosive expansion of the public sphere? Why not pursue a clearer understanding of ideas about the nature of citizenship in the modern state; about the potentials of a participatory social and political order; about human needs and human rights to have those needs met; about the liberation of the individual (including her sexual liberation, her liberation from ignorance and sickness, her liberation from social and economic powerlessness); about the physical and psychological dangers created by the existing social order and how to reduce them, the traumas it inflicted and how to heal them? In short, why not examine how the construction of the social the ideas and practices of the modern biopolitical interventionist complex contributed to the development of a democratic politics and humane social policies between 1918 and 1930, and again after 1945 ? Like Fritzsches essay, Eleys accurately reflected the
tone of most of those it introduced. In the body of the volume, Elizabeth Domansky, for example, pointed out that biopolitics did not automatically or naturally lead to the rise of National Socialism, but rather provided . . . the political Right in Weimar with the opportunity to capitalize on a discursive strategy that could successfully compete with liberal and socialist strategies.63 This is correct; but
the language of biopolitics was demonstrably one on which liberals, socialists, and advocates of a democratic welfare state could also capitalize, and did. Or again, Jean Quataert remarkedquite rightly, I believe that the most progressive achievements of the Weimar welfare state were completely embedded in biopolitical discourse. She
also commented that Nazi policy was continuous with what passed as the ruling knowledge of the time and was a product of an extreme form of technocratic reason and early twentieth-century modernitys dark side. The implication seems to be that progressive
welfare policy was fundamentally dark; but it seems more accurate to conclude that biopolitics had a variety of potentials.64 Again, the point here is not that any of the interpretations offered in these pieces are wrong; instead, it is that we are, collectively, so focused on unmasking the negative potentials and realities of modernity that we have constructed a true, but very one-sided picture. The pathos of this picture is undeniable, particularly for a generation of historians raised on
the Manichean myth forged in the crucible of World War II and the Cold War of the democratic welfare state. And as a rhetorical gesture, this analysis works magnificently we explode the narcissistic self-admiration of democratic modernity by revealing the
dark, manipulative, murderous potential that lurks within, thus arriving at a healthy, mature sort of melancholy. But this gesture too often precludes asking what else biopolitics was doing, besides manipulating people, reducing them to pawns in the plans of technocrats, and paving the way for massacre. In 1989 Detlev Peukert argued that any adequate picture of modernity must include both its achievements and its pathologies social reform as well as Machbarkeitswahn, the growth of rational relations between people as well as the swelling instrumental goalrationality, the liberation of artistic and scientific creativity as well as the loss of substance and absence of limits
[Haltlosigkeit].65 Yet he himself wrote nothing like such a balanced history, focusing exclusively on Nazism and on the negative half of each of these binaries; and that focus has remained characteristic of the literature as a whole. What I want to suggest here is that the
function of the rhetorical or explanatory framework surrounding our conception of modernity seems to be in danger of being inverted. The investigation of the history of modern biopolitics has enabled new understandings of National Socialism; now we need to take care that our understanding of National Socialism does not thwart a realistic assessment of modern biopolitics. Much of the literature leaves one with the sense that a modern world in which mass murder is not happening is just that: a place where something is not yet happening. Normalization is
not yet giving way to exclusion, scientific study and classification of populations is not yet giving way to concentration camps and extermination campaigns. Mass murder, in short, is the historical problem; the absence of mass murder is not a
problem, it does not need to be investigated or explained.
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Biopolitics is good its key to promote democracy and check totalitarianism Dickinson 2004 Edward Ross (Professor at University of Cincinnati) Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our
Discourse About Modernity, Central European History, vol. 37, no. 1, March All of these questions, however, still address primarily the activities of technocrats and social managers. We are still asking how bad social engineering is. In fact, this entire discourse seems to be shaped by the fundamental suspicion that trying actively to create a better society is always and necessarily a bad thing an undemocratic, manipulative, oppressive thing.98 This assumption is rooted in a particular understanding of the micropolitics of expertise and professionalism. It is frequently argued that modern forms of technical knowledge and licensing create relations of dominance and subordination between experts and their clients. Thus Paul Weindling, for example, asserted that, Professionalism, reinforced by official powers, meant that welfare defined new spheres for the exercising of coercion . . . The new technocracy of professions and welfare administrators might be seen as erecting antidemocratic and coercive social structures by extending the welfare state. Michael Schwartz, similarly, observed in 1992 that even in the democratic variant of science there was a tendency to technocratic elitism and the scientistic objectification of humanity.99 And Detlev Peukert reminded us that rationalization as a strategy of experts inherently contained [barg systematisch] the danger of the technocratic arrogance of experts, the overwhelming of those affected by the catalog of norms for rational living derived from the expert knowledge of the professions, but not from the experience of those affected.100 Even more sinister, again, is the tendency of these same experts to exclude, stigmatize, and pathologize those they are not able to normalize. Zygmunt Bauman has presented the same case with a particular clarity, concluding that
since modernity is about order, and order always implies its opposite, chaos, intolerance is . . . the natural inclination of modern practice. Construction of order sets the limits to incorporation and admission. It calls for the denial of rights, and
of the grounds, of everything that cannot be assimilated for the de-legitimation of the other.101 At its simplest, this view of the politics of expertise and professionalization is certainly plausible. Historically speaking, however, the further conjecture that this
micropolitical dynamic creates authoritarian, totalitarian, or homicidal potentials at the level of the state does not seem very tenable. Historically, it appears that the greatest advocates of political democracy in Germany leftliberals and Social Democrats have been also the greatest advocates of every kind of biopolitical social engineering, from public health and welfare programs through social insurance to city planning and, yes, even
eugenics.102 The state they built has intervened in social relations to an (until recently) ever-growing degree; professionalization has run ever more rampant in Western societies; the production of scientistic and technocratic expert knowledge has proceeded at an ever more frenetic pace. And yet, from the perspective of the first years of the millennium, the second half of the twentieth century
appears to be the great age of democracy in precisely those societies where these processes have been most in evidence. What is more, the interventionist state has steadily expanded both the rights and the resources of virtually every citizen including those who were stigmatized and persecuted as biologically defective under National Socialism. Perhaps these processes have created an ever more restrictive iron cage of rationality in European societies. But if so, it seems clear that there is no necessary correlation between rationalization and authoritarian politics; the opposite seems in fact to be at least equally true.
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Biopolitics is not totalitarian, in fact its good it has empirically lead to the strengthening of liberal democracy which has on-balance prevented the violence they describe and been used against oppressive structures Dickinson 2004 Edward Ross (Professor at University of Cincinnati) Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About Modernity, Central European History, vol. 37, no. 1, March
the continuities between early twentieth-century biopolitical discourse and the practices of the welfare state in our own time are unmistakasble. Both are instances of the disciplinary society and of biopolitical, regulatory, social-engineering
In short, modernity, and they share that genealogy with more authoritarian states, including the National Socialist state, but also fascist Italy, for example. And it is certainly fruitful to view them from this very broad perspective. But that analysis can easily become superficial
and misleading, because it obfuscates the profoundly different strategic and local dynamics of power in the two kinds of regimes. Clearly the democratic welfare state is not only formally but also substantively quite different from totalitarianism. Above all, again, it has nowhere developed the fateful, radicalizing dynamic that characterized National Socialism (or for that matter Stalinism), the psychotic logic that leads from economistic population management to mass murder. Again, there is always the potential for such a discursive regime to generate coercive policies. In those cases in which the regime of rights does not successfully produce health, such a system can and historically does create compulsory programs to enforce it. But again, there are political and policy potentials and constraints in such a structuring of biopolitics that are very different from those of National Socialist Germany. Democratic biopolitical regimes require, enable, and incite a degree of self-direction and participation that is functionally incompatible with authoritarian or totalitarian structures. And this pursuit of biopolitical ends through a regime of democratic citizenship does appear, historically, to have imposed increasingly narrow limits on coercive policies, and to have generated a logic or imperative of increasing liberalization. Despite limitations imposed by political context and the slow pace of discursive change, I think this is the unmistakable message of the really very impressive waves of legislative and welfare reforms in the 1920s or the 1970s in Germany.90 Of course it is not yet clear whether this is an irreversible dynamic of such systems. Nevertheless, such regimes are characterized by sufficient degrees of autonomy (and of the potential for its expansion) for sufficient numbers of people that I think it becomes useful to conceive of them as productive of a strategic configuration of power relations that might fruitfully be analyzed as a condition of liberty, just as much as they are productive of constraint, oppression, or manipulation. At the very least, totalitarianism cannot be the sole orientation point for our understanding of biopolitics, the only end point of the logic of social engineering. This notion is not at all at odds with the core of Foucauldian (and Peukertian) theory. Democratic welfare states are regimes of power/knowledge no less than early twentieth-century totalitarian states; these systems are not opposites, in the sense that they are two alternative ways of organizing the same thing. But they are two very different ways of organizing it. The concept power should not be read as a universal stifling night of oppression, manipulation, and entrapment, in which all political and social orders are grey, are essentially or effectively the same. Power is a set of social relations, in which individuals and groups have varying degrees of autonomy and effective subjectivity. And discourse is, as Foucault argued, tactically polyvalent. Discursive elements (like the various elements of biopolitics) can be combined in different ways to form parts of quite different strategies (like totalitarianism or the democratic welfare state); they cannot be assigned to one place in a structure, but rather circulate. The varying possible constellations of power in modern societies create multiple modernities, modern societies with quite radically differing potentials.
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Framework AT: Predictions Fail

This evidence doesnt apply: Debate is different from normal prediction because it allows competing worldviews to be tested against one another based upon evidenceTetlocks book is about people having a close-minded view of predictions and refusing to consider evidence to the contrary. His point is that he indicts people like Bill OReilly because they make predictions but are so blinded by partisan filters that they dont consider competing claims This also takes out their aff: all of their solvency claims are based upon predictions what the aff will doeven their ethics claims rely upon the assumption that the consequences wont be direif their argument is true, vote negative on presumption because you cant really determine ethics without looking to consequences Predictions are possible A.) Empiricism, reason, evidence and warrants can increase the possibility of accurate forecasting, even if its not perfect, its enough to establish probabilities. For example, people predicted that invading Iraq would cause an insurgency and a civil war, and the warrants for those predictions were based upon a study of empirics, their expertise in the Middle East, and rational arguments. Listening to those predictions and having an informed debate over their legitmacy instead of framing the issue in terms of a moral duty to protect human rights and stop WMD would have led to more rational policymaking. B.) Their argument would make all policymaking impossibleits like saying we shouldnt have intervened in World War 2 to stop the Holocaust because we cant predict if it will be useful since we cant know consequences C.) State policymakers are obligated to make predictions, a nuclear world changes the calculus and means you have to assess probability. Their argument is thorough nonsenseit would justify invading China because of the moral obligation to free Tibet outweighs the uncertainty as to whether China would respond with nuclear weaponsthis is silly and reckless
Simply because our predictions cannot be guaranteed does not mean we should quit trying to prevent catastrophes they should use evidence to disprove our scenarios instead of rejecting foresight, itself*** Kurasawa 2004 Fuyuki Constellations Volume 11, No 4, Cautionary Tales: The Global Culture of Prevention
and the Work of Foresight
When engaging in the labor of preventive foresight, the first obstacle that one is likely to encounter from some intellectual circles is a deep-seated skepticism about the very value of the exercise. A radically postmodern line of thinking, for instance, would lead us to believe that it is pointless, perhaps even harmful, to strive for farsightedness in light of the aforementioned crisis of conventional paradigms of historical analysis. If, contra teleological models, history has no intrinsic meaning, direction, or endpoint to be discovered through human reason, and if, contra scientistic futurism, prospective trends cannot be predicted without error, then the abyss of chronological inscrutability supposedly opens up at our feet. The future appears to be unknowable, an outcome of chance. Therefore, rather than embarking upon grandiose speculation about what may occur, we should adopt a pragmatism that abandons itself to the twists and turns of history; let us be content to formulate ad hoc responses to emergencies as they arise. While this argument has the merit of underscoring the fallibilistic nature of all predictive schemes, it
Acknowledging the fact that the future cannot be known with absolute certainty does not imply abandoning the task of trying to understand what is brewing on the horizon and to prepare for crises already coming into their own. In fact, the incorporation of the principle of fallibility into the work of prevention means that we must be ever more vigilant for warning signs of disaster and for responses that provoke unintended or unexpected consequences (a point to which I will return in the final section of this paper). In addition, from a normative point of view, the
conflates the necessary recognition of the contingency of history with unwarranted assertions about the latters total opacity and indeterminacy.
acceptance of historical contingency and of the self-limiting character of farsightedness places the duty of preventing catastrophe squarely on the shoulders of present generations. The future no longer appears to be a metaphysical creature of destiny or of the cunning of reason, nor can it be sloughed off to pure randomness. It becomes, instead, a result of human action shaped by decisions in the present including, of course, trying to anticipate and prepare for possible and avoidable sources of harm to our successors.
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The ethical practice of prediction and prevention builds communal ties and energizes a citizen base capable of pressuring for real solutions to extinction Kurasawa 2004 Fuyuki Constellations Volume 11, No 4, Cautionary Tales: The Global Culture of Prevention and the Work of Foresight
dystopian imaginary, I am claiming that it can enable a novel form of transnational socio-political action, a manifestation of globalization from below that can be termed preventive foresight. We should not reduce the latter to a formal principle regulating international relations or an ensemble of policy prescriptions for official players on the world stage, since it is, just as significantly, a mode of ethicopolitical practice enacted by participants in the emerging realm of global civil society. In other words, what I want to
Rather than bemoaning the contemporary preeminence of a underscore is the work of farsightedness, the social processes through which civic associations are simultaneously constituting and putting into practice a sense of responsibility for the future by attempting to prevent global catastrophes. Although the labor of preventive foresight takes place in varying political and socio-cultural settings and with different degrees of institutional support and access to symbolic and material resources it is underpinned by three distinctive features: dialogism, publicity, and transnationalism. In the first instance, preventive foresight is an intersubjective or dialogical process of address, recognition, and response between two parties in global civil society: the warners, who anticipate and send out word of possible perils, and the audiences being warned, those who heed their interlocutors messages by demanding that governments and/or international organizations take measures to steer away from disaster. Secondly, the work of farsightedness derives its effectiveness and legitimacy from public debate and deliberation. This is not to say that a fully fledged global public sphere is already in existence, since transnational strong publics with decisional power in the formal-institutional realm are currently embryonic at best. Rather, in this context, publicity signifies that weak publics with distinct yet occasionally overlapping constituencies are coalescing around struggles to avoid specific global catastrophes.4 Hence, despite having little direct decision-making capacity, the environmental and peace movements, humanitarian NGOs, and other similar globally-oriented civic associations are becoming significant actors involved in public opinion formation. Groups like these are active in disseminating information and alerting citizens about looming catastrophes, lobbying states and multilateral organizations from the inside and pressuring them from the outside, as well as fostering public participation in debates about the future. This brings us to the transnational character of preventive foresight, which is most explicit in the now commonplace observation that we live in an interdependent world because of the globalization of the perils that humankind faces (nuclear annihilation, global
warming, terrorism, genocide, AIDS and SARS epidemics, and so on); individuals and groups from far-flung parts of the planet are being brought together into risk communities that transcend geographical borders.5 Moreover, due
to dense media and information flows, knowledge of impeding catastrophes can instantaneously reach the four corners of the earth sometimes well before individuals in one place experience the actual consequences of a crisis originating in another. My contention is that civic associations are engaging in dialogical, public, and transnational forms of ethico-political action that contribute to the creation of a fledgling global civil society existing below the official and institutionalized architecture of international relations.6 The work of preventive
foresight consists of forging ties between citizens; participating in the circulation of flows of claims, images, and information across borders; promoting an ethos of farsighted cosmopolitanism; and forming and mobilizing weak publics that debate and struggle against possible catastrophes. Over the past few decades, states and international organizations
have frequently been content to follow the lead of globally-minded civil society actors, who have been instrumental in placing on the public agenda a host of pivotal issues (such as nuclear war, ecological pollution, species extinction, genetic engineering, and mass human rights violations). To my mind, this strongly indicates that if prevention of global crises is to eventually rival the assertion of short-term and narrowly defined rationales (national interest, profit, bureaucratic self-preservation, etc.), weak publics must begin by convincing or compelling official representatives and multilateral organizations to act differently; only then will farsightedness be in a position to move up and become institutionalized via strong publics.7 Since the global culture of prevention remains a work in progress, the argument presented in this paper is poised between empirical and normative dimensions of analysis. It proposes a theory of the practice of preventive foresight based upon already existing struggles and discourses, at the same time as it advocates the adoption of certain principles that would substantively thicken and assist in the realization of a sense of responsibility for the future of humankind. I will thereby proceed in four steps, beginning with a consideration of the shifting socio-political and cultural climate that is giving rise to farsightedness today (I). I will then contend that the development of a
public aptitude for early warning about global cataclysms can overcome flawed conceptions of the futures essential inscrutability (II). From this will follow the claim that an ethos of farsighted cosmopolitanism of solidarity that extends to future generations can supplant the preeminence of short-termism with the help of appeals to the publics moral imagination and use of reason (III). In the final section of the paper, I will argue that the commitment of global civil society actors to norms of precaution and transnational justice can hone citizens faculty of critical judgment against abuses of the dystopian imaginary, thereby opening the way to public deliberation about the construction of an alternative world order (IV).
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The lack of certainty necessitates utilitarianism Gooden 1995 Robert (philsopher at the Research School of the Social Sciences) Utilitarianism as Public Philosophy. P. 62-63
Consider, first, the argument from necessity. Public officials are obliged to make their choices under uncertainty, and uncertainty of a very special sort at that. All choicespublic and private alikeare made under some degree of
uncertainty, of course. But in the nature of things, private individuals will usually have more complete information on the peculiarities of their own circumstances and on the ramifications that alternative possible choices might have on them. Public officials, in contrast, are relatively poorly informed as to the effects that their choices will have on individuals, one by one. What they typically do know are generalities: averages and aggregates. They know what will happen most often to most people as a result of their various possible choices. But that is all. That is enough to allow public policy-makers to use the utilitarian calculusif they want to use it at allto choose general rules of conduct. Knowing aggregates and averages, they can proceed to calculate the utility payoffs from adopting each alternative possible general rules.
Predictions are possible and useful, despite the risk of error Mearsheimer 2001 John (professor of political science at the University of Chicago) The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, p. 8
As a result, all political forecasting is bound to include some error. Those who venture to predict, as I do here, should therefore proceed with humility, take care not to exhibit unwarranted confidence, and admit that hindsight is likely to reveal surprises and mistakes.
Despite these hazards, social scientists should nevertheless use their theories to make predictions about the future .
Making predictions helps inform policy discourse, because it helps make sense of events unfolding in the world around us. And by clarifying points of disagreement, making explicit forecasts helps those with contradictory views to frame their own ideas more clearly. Furthermore, trying to anticipate new events is a good way to test social science theories, because theorists do not have the benefit of hindsight and therefore cannot adjust their claims to fit the evidence (because it is not yet available). In short, the world can be used as a laboratory to decide which theories best explain international politics. In that spirit I employ offensive realism to peer into the future, mindful of both the benefits and the hazards of trying to predict events.
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Framework AT: Calculations Bad

1. This is just so stupid Its morally irresponsibleit justifies risking the lives of thousands to protect a single person, it would create reckless policy actions, and it means that you could never kill someone who is going to kill your family because all life is infinite Calculation is inevitableevery action we take involves a choice and an assessment of costs and benefits. Hard choices are inevitable. Our infinite obligation to the other comes at the expense of our obligation to other others. If two people are drowning in a pool, and you can only save one of themyou have to choose, and calculateotherwise, both will die while you try to figure out why Dillon and Campbell have so much of a debate following despite being atrocious writers. Our being in the world makes some degree of calculation inevitableattempts to avoid all calculation simply reproduce calculability in its worst forms Derrida 1992 Jacques The Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority, Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed: Cornell, Rosenfeld, and Carlson, p. 28-29
That justice exceeds law and calculation, that the unpresentable exceeds the determinable cannot and should not serve as an alibi for staying out of juridico-political battles, within an institution or state or between institutions or states and others. Left to itself, the incalculable and giving idea of justice is always very close to the bad, even to the worst for it can always be reapportioned by the most perverse calculation. Its always possible. And so incalculable justice requires us to calculate. And first, closest to what we associate with justice, namely law, the juridicial field that one cannot isolate within sure
frontiers, but also in all the fields from which we cannot separate it, which intervene in it and are no longer simply fields: ethics, politics, economics, psycho-sociology, philosophy, literature, etc. Not only must we calculate, negotiate the relation between the calculable and incalculable, and negotiate without the sort of tule that wouldnt have to reinvented there where we are cast, there where we find ourselves; but we must take it as far as possible, beyond the place where we find ourselves and beyond the already identifiable zones of morality or politics or law, beyond the distinction between national and international, public and private, and so on. This requirement doesnt properly belong to either justice or law. It only belongs to either of those two domains by exceeding each one in the direction of the other. Politicization, for example, is interminable even if it cannot and should not ever be total. To keep this from being a truism or a triviality, we must recognize in it the following consequence: each advancement in politicization obliges one to reconsider, and so reinterpret, the very foundations of law such as they had been previously calculated or delimited. This was true for example in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, in the abolition of slavery, in all emanicipatory battles that remain and will have to remain in progress, everywhere in the world , for men and for women.

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Wichita State Tournament 2009

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existence has been confirmed by experiments that demonstrate their influence

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have written on the emerging

technologies that threaten life beyond the planet Earth.

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Life is spontaneous it takes nothing special Hawking, NAS, Online Lecture

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planets. There will be microbial life nearby the solar system.

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AT - Aliens Will Save Us

maintains that wherever science exists in the universe, it will be localized.

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we already know of a few

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AT Our Moon Key

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AT Only Humans Intelligent Proves

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Even if it will infinitely expand, it wont rip apart Atkinson in 8

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Plate tectonics is common Kasting 01, Geoscience Professor, Penn State,

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AT Where are They, Yo?

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AT No Other Solar System

astronomer Charles Lada of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge,

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We hold up the mirror of

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so many of the steps

might be wrong that the theory is essentially speculative.

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