Wednesday, December 4, 2013
Post-Alien
I found the concept of transhumanism to be quick fascinating. I happen to think that it is not the most useful endeavour humanity could be working on right now, but I imagine it is only a matter of time until we take a more active role in our genetic future. For my creative material in the previous paper I tried to imagine what it would be like to be posthuman by considering an extraterrestrial species who went through the trans and post processes. They were the squidborgs, cybernetic organisms whose ancestors were squid-like. After conquering death, they end up traveling the stars and eventually make contact with Earth. My question is whether it is necessary that we become posthuman, if we would like to eventually leave the planet? Also, why is it that it is often assumed that we should leave the planet? Perhaps it's an extension of our desire to explore, but it also feels like a cop out to me. Is it worth extending human life and colonizing other planets when we, as a species, have yet to figure out how to live on this planet together in peace during the time we currently have?
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Jacob, I would like to read your creative supplement about the squidborgs. I wrote something similar for my last discovery paper that delved into the future interaction of our autonomous robots when we humans were a distant memory. My story took places centuries from now on a spaceship that was heading toward a solar system called Bliss with four hospitable planets. The story is a dialogue through mission updates between two autonomous robots, one who was created by humans, and the other on the spaceship was created by another autonomous robot. In this story, Earth had been invaded by an alien race and all living humans had been destroyed. However, this one ship and its autonomous pilot, Roger, carried the very last frozen human eggs and sperm in the universe, and it was his mission to artificially inseminate a womb-like machine in order to regrow and raise the human race. The story ends with some pretty cool dialogue between the robots as they realize that the humans they created are a very fragile, pretty much subordinate form of life. The robots begin questioning whether it is even worth their time and resources to go along with their initial mission of restarting the human race, when the new human colonies in Bliss will likely just be destroyed again in the future.
ReplyDeleteMy story delved a lot into artificial intelligence and what levels of consciousness it may or may not be able to attain. Mainly I thought it was an imaginative example of one reason that humans may have to leave earth and travel long-term in space. If that were the case, we pretty much have two options: Modify ourselves to be able to survive for the amount of years necessary for interstellar travel (thus become post human), or remain virtually the same, relying on our autonomous machines to carry out the long-term goals of the human race as our generations live out their single centuries aboard spaceships. In my story, the posthuman thing didn't happen because I hinted that the biotechnology really just didn't work out - humans reached an upper limit of living about 200 years.
Whether or not we think that we will someday have to leave our planet is of course speculation. In my discovery paper I gave many statistics of problems our planet faces currently, such as overpopulation, pollution, and habitat degradation. These problems might not ever reach levels so high that we would not be able to survive on Earth - however, they definitely do cause problems, especially if we think not just about the survival of humans, but the continued survival of all living species on earth, many of which go extinct yearly due to human factors associated with pollution and habitat degradation. So, I proposed that perhaps space exploration in pursuit of new resources, new land on which people and other living species could live and reproduce, and new knowledge to help us solve our problems on Earth and maintain its beauty. I do not see space exploration as a cop out to ditch the problems we created on Earth and try to find a new home. Rather, I see space exploration as an alternative solution to delay the harm we are doing to our planet, and more quickly be able to alleviate or altogether solve those problems so they do not plague our future ancestors.