I was walking around town, listening to Plutarch describing Lycurgus on MP3, and heard this wonderful quote, not merely in its own right but also in the pathways it stirred my mind down. It's what I hope for the youth of today, that they'll be better than I. And that led me to thought of the future, of a better world, of better worlds.
That's what we all want for our children, for the future, right? That's not just a gadget-rich environment, and not just one where people are no longer hungry, right? So what would be a better world? Hopefully not the dead dystopia inside Joss Whedon's wonderful "Serenity", that was cinema, entertainment. But what qualities would be desirable?
I suspect that there are as many answers as humans. Just as we're different, and have different desires, we would see different futures. How boring would life be if everyone though as I do. :) Here are my three suggestions, my three wishes:
- Education not merely universal but also much, much more profound. I find that I'm only now learning how to live, learning what it's all about. Wisdom was hardfought, I'll never stop learning, but soon I'll stop. "Smarts" was a long time a'comin'; suppose I'd better understood life and myself twenty years ago? Or forty?
What I mean by "profound" is something akin to what Greg Bear leaves hazily defined in his Queen of Angels when he refers to the therapied. I understand such to have undergone a process that breaks down some of the barriers between the conscious ego and the vastly more powerful wellspring of the subconscious. Such people will have the same desires, the same weaknesses and strengths as the rest of us, but they will not act out of control, they will know what they want, and will act with a sense of purpose.
I know myself better now than I ever had. I'm not absent from flaws, from weaknesses; I know where the stress fractures lie. But these days I'm more likely to bend those weaknesses to my own purposes than to be used by them. But I'm only an amateur at self-learning. There are undoubtedly three hundred better than myself, and that's a good thing.
- I'd also like to see the definition of humanity considerably enlarged. What troubles have we had for thousands of years over the pitiful differences between ourselves? I speak of such evils as discrimination over race, religion, & sex (both biological and that of partner preference).
Will we have those kinds of difficulties with the other when we meet someone really different? I tend to borrow Gene Roddenberry's IDIC philosophy, and think that we will be enriched when we meet others. Some will be dangerous, no doubt, but some will be our friends. And all will be different. And where might these come from? I suggest:
- We meet them "out there".
- We discover them right here.
- We invent them.
- We become them.
And are there any others out there? That seems one of the most ludicrous questions I know. Looking upward at night shows these points of light; stories can be played out in their patterns, but there's little hint of the real grandeur. Get a small telescope, and suddenly there's no end to the lights in the sky, they're beyond description, beyond complexity, strange and hopefully wonderful, but you need some of the knowledge that others have spent lifetimes on, in order to know what you then see.
Luckily, we have access to really big telescopes these days, and can see much more of what's up there. Can anyone really look at the approximately ten thousand galaxies of the Hubble UDF and say that we're the only intelligent life in the universe? We strut and fret our hour upon a stage of size incomprehensible. It's inconceivable that we're the only players.
The second, well think, how do you know that we're the only intelligent species here? Whales have brains bigger than we do, sing symphonies we cannot understand. Crows and octopi both use tools. Gray parrots and great apes can, I believe, run computers. Perhaps we'll engage in an Uplift one day, as David Brin imagines over several books, and we'll raise one of our fellow species up to obvious equality.
The third, is perhaps the most problematic, on several levels. The thinking machine has been a staple of sci-fi for generations, but is it possible? I tend to hope so. But controversy abounds. Perhaps anything that can be constrained by logic, by rules that humans can comprehend, perhaps the constraint itself denies intelligence, denies ego, denies self. And let us hypothesize that we do succeed in inventing the other one day. There will be ethical questions. Is it murder to reboot it? Is keeping it "captive" a slavery? At what point will it be an equal citizen?
And that last point comes from the wondrous space-opera Orphans trilogy of Sean Williams and Shane Dix, and is at the heart of my "definition of humanity". "Engrams", personality copies of originals long since died, go to the stars in tiny spacecraft as processes running on computers; there's no inside to the craft but for devices, no biology there. To the crew members inside, it's a totally real and very malleable experience. You want the bridge of NCC-1701D? Piece of cake, it merely becomes part of the shared illusion that the virtual crew experience.
But sci-fi aside, the point of "Echoes" for me is that, contrary to what you've heard, humans don't come in all sizes and shapes. None of us are suitable to go to the stars in a few cubic meters of technology, and none of us can be yet cast into unfamiliar biological packages in order to better live immersively on other planets close to home. We don't even come in green & blue (I'd like to be teal, myself :).
- And I want us out there, out among the stars, so that we're not subject to a "single-point failure". We already and only live on the best of all possible worlds. But Konstantin Tsiolkovsky said it first, "Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot remain in the cradle forever."
This is a nice planet, but we don't want to be resident only here, we need to spread out among the stars. Suppose a really big rock falls on us, or some other natural phenomenon sterilizes the surface of the earth (there's suspicion that the mass extinction of 439_Myr ago was caused by a very, very high-energy pulse that cooked off the ozone layer, then let the sun's UV sterilize everything on land and in the upper layers of the ocean). Or suppose we just foul our own planetary nest.
I like humanity (some important names for me: Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, Claude-Achille Debussy, Dan Simmons, Gautam Siddhartha, Gene Roddenberry, Greg Bear, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Jesus, John Varley, Joseph Michael Straczynski, Linda Nagata, Ludwig van Beethoven, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Patrick O'Hearn, Philip Glass, Roger Zelazny, Tony Hillerman, William Shakespeare, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart). We're a good species in many ways. I believe we can accomplish great things in the trillions of years left in the Stellar Era. But we need to survive, to not go extinct. We need to be out there, and when we go, we won't all look like we do now. When will we dump stupid prejudices based upon mere appearance? When will we learn to rejoice in the other?
