by
June 24, 2016
Humanity exists in a curious place right now,
suspended between past sci-fi dreams of human-oriented space exploration and
the threshold of technological singularity and virtual worlds. How will
flesh-and-blood human space travel fit into the grand picture?
Interestingly enough, I keep coming back to the
1960 paper "Cyborgs
and Space" by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline — a pivotal work
of futurism that coined the word "cyborg" and explored the necessary
transformation of Homo sapiens for
life beyond Earth. While space agencies have largely bypassed the paper's
vision of space-ready, augmented humans, the concept continues to resonate
through our culture.
From our smartphones
to cutting-edge biotechnology, the human experience grows increasingly interwoven
with technology. In keeping with Donna J. Haraway's 1985 essay "A
Cyborg Manifesto," more and more of us express an openness to ideological cyborg identity: the
realization that personal identity can itself be an intentional, hybrid status
unbound by the didactic expectations of the past.
On the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast, we've
been exploring some of these themes in episodes from "When
We Think About Cyborgs" to "The
Forbidden Void: Cases Against Space." But let's take things a step
further.
Come with me as we engage in a thought experiment — a creative
simulation of what an interplanetary human race might evolve to be.
Silba Dreams of Earth
Silba gazes up at the stars from the ice plains
of Jupiter's moon Europa.
She limits her ocular vision to a near-human spectrum.
As if entering deep meditation, she dims her awareness until everything beyond
her physical body is but a whisper: patrol drones sailing over the frost
plains, submarines within the darkness of the moon's ice-locked oceans. Even
the perfect spirals of orbiting satellites fade to ghostly tingles along some
distant, second skin.
Silba becomes a single mind within a single
body, a practice she has rehearsed in anticipation of the inbound guest.
She tenses her gazelle-like spike appendages
on the ice. She stands within a 100-meter clearing of her own making — this in
turn surrounded by a vast forest of naturally occurring ice monoliths. It was
easy work for this robotic body, designed as it was for excavation and modular
assembly.
Yet even with her senses dulled, she can't
help but sense the incoming spacecraft's trajectory. She peeks at the manifest
data: four cybernetic humans and, most amazingly, a pure-flesh human. The first
to ever venture beyond Mars.
Europa's occupation is typical. Mere probes
arrived in the early days, with more enlightened robotic avatars arriving
thereafter. Distant human minds and artificial intelligences empowered the
first such colonists, but cybernetic mind states like her own came to dominate
the work: a graceful fusion of the organic and the artificial.
She gazes East to where Jupiter swells on the
horizon, a most impossible world when she contemplates it. Substantiated by
storms and orbited by dozens upon dozens of hostile moons, this region of the
solar system offered only desolation and cataclysm to early humans. For all the
might of their technology, they were a fragile species. The poles and mountains
of their own planet were death realms; the void even less forgiving. So they
deployed mechanical myrmidons and programmed minds. They embraced a cybernetic
existence.
Such a strange journey to this point.
Over the course of centuries, humans became
unfixed from the physical — unmoored from the limits of physical existence,
cultural expectations, sex and gender. Religion and nationality melted from the
underlying form. They broke free, too, from chain-link servitude of genetic
expectation. There was a cost, of course — one paid in blood and misery. The inevitable
seismic horrors of vast cultural transformation shook the species, risked
everything it had accomplished, until the wars finally withered and social
unrest assumed its resting decay state.
The survivors became something beyond human,
yet irrecoverably tied to the origin of their accession. An interplanetary
civilization grown from the seedpod of a planetary species.
Silba has processed all the literature on the
topic. She holds one of her silvery, lance-like appendages up to the lights of
Jupiter and the sun. She splits the spike into five separate digits and bends
them to mimic, albeit imperfectly, a human hand.
This too is life: a self-organizing principle
emergent from the data that came before.
"I am the primate and the crab. I am the
bacterium and the circuit."
Before this mission, the necropolis of Mars
stood as testament to the lost dream of human space exploration and
colonization, pyramids for another dead cosmology. Even as probes reached the
Ran system and beyond, un-augmented humans remained confined to their home
world. The most influential mind states campaigned intensely for a beyond-Earth
human presence. Every moon or planet in human space must know the touch of its
unmodified origin.
Silba knows there is a vanity in such
aspirations, but also a nostalgic pride. This is what we arose from. The least
we can do is bring life to the old dreams, no matter how symbolic the gesture.
And so Silba gazes up from the frigid ice. The
landing module appears, at last, visible against the stars. It takes all of her
resolve to contain her consciousness to this single body, to will herself into
a shape individual, female and humanoid.
But as the capsule grows closer, she can't help
but expand her awareness. She reaches out to touch the onboard life-support
systems. She ignores the four augmented mind-bodies aboard, each hardened and
engineered to thrive beyond Earth. She focuses instead on the module's core: a
single human, hermaphroditic and ambi-racial and all-encompassing of the human
experience. A perfect ambassador.
She feels the pulsations of its heartbeat and
glimpses the florid patterns of its shifting brain waves. She could read them
if she wanted, but this is sacred. The great, pear-shaped module descends
through Europa's thin atmosphere in a swirling birth caul of molecular oxygen.
The heartbeat quickens.
The landing invokes a vicious storm of ice,
but Silba stands against the blast. The crystals shred away some of her body's more
delicate sensors, but these she can repair later. Certain probe sensations
flicker and die, but all she needs is the here and now.
When the modules' doors finally open, five
figures stand at the threshold in identical space suits, but the middle figure
alone radiates an importance she can scarcely define.
The visitor is both ancestor spirit and
contemporary heart.
She raises her shining, metal hand in
greeting.
http://now.howstuffworks.com/2016/06/24/thought-experiment-whats-our-transhuman-path-beyond-earth
