Recently, I have been reading physicist Alan Lightman’s Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine, which is lovely and thought-provoking and perhaps a wee bit pretentious. However, in the latest chapter I read, things took a turn. Lightman posed the following situation, which he refers to as the Smart Ant Conundrum:
Imagine a colony of highly intelligent ants. Suppose further that this ant colony lasts for a hundred years. Normal ant colonies last only 20 years or so, when the queen flies off to spawn another colony, but let’s assume that a long dynasty of queens have followed each other to replenish this particular colony. Each individual ant lives only a year, so there have been many generations of ants in this colony. This is an old colony. Over the century, these brainy ants create a great civilization. They build advanced structures underground. They compose music. They create paintings and theater. They write books and record histories of their society. They develop science and make theories about the cosmos, both inside the ant hill and beyond. They have emotions and intimate relationships. Then one day, a flood comes and totally destroys the ant colony. Totally. There is nothing left – no ants, no ant books, no ant paintings, no remnants. Nothing. Everything is completely destroyed. There’s no trace left in the universe of this magnificent ant colony. The question I ask myself: Did the ant colony have any meaning? And now, after the colony is gone, with no record of its existence, does it have meaning?
Yikes. I mean, geez dude, I’m just trying to make it to the weekend so I can sleep in for an extra 45 minutes before the cat starts attacking me and demanding his breakfast. I wasn’t prepared for a thought experiment about the meaningfulness of my existence, or lack thereof. This will require another cup of coffee.
One point to consider is that clearly this genius ant colony has never heard of using the cloud for data storage. If the colony of Pennsylvania is ever wiped off the map by a massive flood (thanks for nothing, New Jersey), Scott and I can take solace in that the meaningfulness of our existence is as secure as the structural integrity of whatever building houses the back-up servers on which the CMEpalooza archive resides. Our legacy will live on!
Speaking of CMEpalooza, the agenda for CMEpalooza Fall (Wednesday, October 18, write it down) will be coming out soon, hopefully by the end of the month. Scott would like everyone to know that his sessions are ready to be announced and I am the one holding up the works, which, while annoying, is also accurate. I wonder if any of those brainiac ants knows anything about ChatGPT…
CMEPALOOZA 