By the last decades of the 21st century,
church worship will still take the form of reading passages
of traditional texts -the Bible, the Koran, the Rig Veda -
but physicist-priests will preside over the ceremonies. They
will show worshipers how the Word echoes the greatest
discovery of physical cosmology: that the laws of physics
require the existence of God, Heaven, resurrection, and
eternal life. Technically, the churchgoers will be scientific
rationalists because theology will be a branch of science.
Scientists are required to be skeptical, but in fact, belief
in God 100 years from now will be like belief in the theory
of evolution today: All educated people will accept God as
fact.
What these educated future faithful will find hard to
believe, however, is the old 20th-century idea of a soul. It
will be perfectly obvious to them that what we regard as the
metaphysical and transcendent human essence is nothing more
than a particular (and very complicated) computer program run
on a computing machine called the brain. Today, everyone
knows the Earth is round because we can travel around it.
Future generations will know there's nothing mystical about
wetware because by 2100, Moore's law will have given us tiny
quantum computers powerful enough to upload a human soul.
God-fearing churchgoers at the turn of the next century will,
in fact, rejoice at in silico life. It is a necessary step in
carrying out God's plan - to go forth and multiply throughout
the universe.
There is only one practical method of interstellar
colonization: spaceships small enough to accelerate
efficiently to near light speed. Quantum computers could code
an entire simulated city containing thousands of humans in
only a few grams. Nanoscale von Neumann machines - capable of
making any other machine -will round out the payload. Powered
by matter-antimatter annihilation, a 1-kilogram spaceship
could reach Proxima Centauri, the nearest star, in only five
years. Acceleration will be very fast because virtual humans
need experience only the usual 1-gravity acceleration in
their virtual environment. Adjusting the spaceship-computer's
clock speed could make travel time seem as short as the blink
of an eye. Human uploads have such a natural advantage over
present-day people in the environment of space, it's
exceedingly unlikely flesh-and-blood beings will ever engage
in interstellar travel.
The von Neumann machines will take advantage of the huge
amount of material - meteors, asteroids, planets - present in
all star systems to construct more von Neumann machines. If
the spacecraft makes two copies of itself in Proxima Centauri
to send to nearby Tau Ceti and Sirius, and those probes in
turn make copies of themselves to send to still other star
systems, the entire Milky Way will be explored and colonized
in less than 1 million years. In another 10 million years,
the Local Group of galaxies will be explored and colonized.
In another 100 million years, the Virgo cluster of galaxies
will be completely colonized. Earth will be entirely
dismantled to provide the raw material for the expanding
bio-sphere long before its scheduled rendezvous with the
expanding sun 5 billion years out. The beauty of the
colonization process is that it's exponential, completely
engulfing the universe with computer-borne human life 10
million trillion years from now.
The physicist-priests of 2100 will be alive to witness the
beginnings of this process and will preach that near the end
of time our progeny will have turned every last atom in the
universe into computing machinery. Furthermore, this
computer-cum-universe will be able to guide the manner of the
universe's collapse in a way that maximizes its computational
power - to infinity. By the very end of time, this Universal
Computer will know everything it's possible to know. If our
descendants who live in it are anything like ourselves - a
safe assumption - one of the first things they'll do with
this processing power is simulate everything in the past. The
first human-to-computer uploads of 2100 will prove that a
perfect simulation is the thing being simulated - that a
silicon soul doesn't need a physical body to inhabit. So
eventually everybody who ever lived will be resurrected
inside a living machine indistinguishable from God. Isn't it
amazing what you can do with unlimited hard-disk space? Amen.