That is how we see matters at the moment. In the Year Million, though, I think the perspective will be precisely the reverse. Humor will be esteemed as the most universal aspect of culture. And number will have lost its transcendental reputation and be looked upon as a local artifact, like a computer operating system or an accounting scheme. If I am right, then SETI scientists should not be listening for primes but for something quite different.
Prime numbers—the numbers that can’t be split up into smaller factors and are thus the atoms of arithmetic—have an almost holy status today. What makes them seem transhuman to us now is their sheer orneriness. There are infinitely many of them, and they seem to crop up almost at random among the rest of the numbers. “There is no apparent reason why one number is prime and another not,” the mathematician Don Zagier declared in his inaugural lecture at Bonn University in 1975. “To the contrary, upon looking at these numbers, one has the feeling of being in the presence of one of the inexplicable secrets of creation.”
But the prime numbers are not really as transcendental as all that. They do obey a law. We just don’t grasp the law—yet. In 1859 the German mathematician Bernhard Riemann put forward what is now almost universally regarded as the greatest unsolved problem in mathematics: the Riemann hypothesis. This hypothesis holds the key to the primes’ true pattern, and once its truth or falsity is resolved, prime numbers will be rendered transparent to our understanding. How long must we wait? Mathematicians great and not so great have been trying to crack this nut ever since Riemann put it out there. “It will be another million years at least,” the late number theorist Paul Erdös pronounced, “before we understand the primes.”
The Copernican principle yields a rather different estimate. The Riemann conjecture has been open since it was first posed 149 years ago. That means we can be 95 percent certain that it will survive as an open problem for at least another four years or so (1/39 x 149) but that it will be dispatched within the next six millennia ?(39 x 149), well short of the Year Million. When it is solved, the prime numbers will finally be stripped of their cosmic otherness. We will realize that, like the rest of mathematics, they are man-made, a terrestrial artifact. They will seem about as trivial as a game of tic-tac-toe.
And how about laughter? Perhaps the best way to gauge future humor is to look at other primates: What do chimps find funny? The Central Washington University researcher Roger Fouts reported that Washoe, a chimpanzee who was taught sign language, once urinated on him while riding on his shoulders. The chimp snorted and made the sign for “funny.” Washoe was also observed playfully wielding a toothbrush as if it were a hairbrush. Moja, another of Fouts’s signing chimps, called a purse a “shoe” and wore it on her foot. A signing gorilla trained by another researcher appeared to derive amusement from offering rocks to people as “food.” Such supposed instances of simian humor (similar to the jokes of preschool children) involve the deliberate misnaming or misuse of things. They thus fit nicely under one of the three classic theories of humor, the incongruity theory, which holds that mirth results when two things normally kept in separate compartments of the mind are abruptly and surprisingly yanked together.
But why should the perception of incongruity cause a spasm of noisy chest-heaving? Laughter has long been viewed as a so-called luxury reflex, one that serves no obvious evolutionary purpose. In recent years, though, practitioners of the art of evolutionary psychology have been more imaginative in coming up with Darwinian rationales. One of the more seductive comes from the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran of the University of California at San Diego, who has advanced what might be called the false-alarm theory of laughter. A seemingly threatening situation presents itself; you go into fight-or-flight mode; the threat proves spurious; you alert your (genetically close-knit) social group to the absence of actual danger by emitting a stereotyped vocalization —one that is amplified as it passes contagiously from member to member.
Once the mechanism of laughter was set in place by evolution, the theory goes, it could be hijacked for other purposes: the expression of contempt for out-groups (as the superiority theory of humor claims) or the ventilation of forbidden sexual impulses (the relief theory of humor). But at the core of the original false-alarm mechanism of laughter is incongruity: the incongruity of a grave threat revealing itself to be trivial—or, as the philosopher Immanuel Kant (an advocate of the incongruity theory) put it, “the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing.” Incongruity is arguably the primeval kernel of laughter. And therefore, by the Copernican principle, it is likely to be the kernel of laughter in the Year Million.
That is why I think humor and mathematics will ultimately switch places, so to speak. The transcendence that numbers seem to possess arises from mere kinks in our local understanding, kinks that will eventually get straightened out. But the essence of humor is the dialectic between something and nothing, the most universal categories of all.
And what will jokes look like in the Year Million? We will laugh when incongruity is resolved in a clever way, when a strange-seeming something is exposed as a trivial nothing—when a proof of the Riemann hypothesis dissolves the Platonic otherness of the primes into obvious tautology, and what is today regarded as the hardest problem ever conceived by the human mind becomes a somewhat broad joke, fit for schoolchildren. We might laugh even harder at the thought that the end of the universe—its disappearance in a Big Crunch or expansion into dilute nothingness—itself has the logical form of a joke.
Adapted from Jim Holt’s essay, “The Laughter of Copernicus,” in Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge, edited by Damien Broderick (Atlas and Company, $16). Holt is also the author of Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes (W. W. Norton and Company).
