I recently played Civilization: Beyond Earth. Although the gameplay was much less compared to Civilization V, it asked several deep questions on space exploration. One of them was particularly interesting:
Will the space change us?
In this opening cut scene, you can see the story began as only a selected few were sent to explore the new planets in the hope of finding the next home for humanity, after the earth became less and less inhabitable because of pollution.
Later on in the game, I was revealed that there were three affinities to choose from, when exploring the new planet. Harmony, Purity, and Supremacy.
HARMONY
Instead of changing an alien world to suit them, the followers of the Harmony affinity alter their own DNA with various traits from the local wildlife in order to be able to survive there.
PURITY
The Purity affinity desires to preserve and improve upon mankind as they are and seeks to convert the planet into a state similar to Old Earth before the Great Mistake, regardless of what happens to the local wildlife.
SUPREMACY
Supremacy focus on improving technology and improving themselves with cybernetics in order to be able to survive the harshest of environments on the new planet regardless of outside conditions.
You can see that in these three affinities, other than the Purity affinity, both the Harmony and the Supremacy affinity changed their humanity. In my first run of the game, I picked Purity because in the cut scene, the purpose of exploring this new planet in the game was to find a new home for people on the Old Earth.
One cannot forget one’s purpose no matter under what condition was one of my believes. However, as the game evolved, the Purity affinity changed the new planet to exactly like earth by killing alien animals and finally populated it with refugees from the Old Earth.
The Old Earth was destroyed by the same process, such as to populate the planet without keeping its natural balance. It is possible that this new planet will repeat the same path under the same treatment.
As for the Supremacy affinity, the story was much more tragic. Since they have changed themselves to be part human and mostly part machine, when they established contact with the Old Earth. Humans instantly regarded them as hostile, since they no longer looked like humans anymore.
This forced them to go on conquering the Old Earth by force.
As for the Harmony affinity, they forgot the Old Earth all together, and began a new life form on the planet emphasizing mutual understandings, but heavily lack of individuality, since they seem to become one life as a whole instead of individual humans.
Mid tier game play, but fascinating story concept.
I can’t help but to think of Interstellar, in which the story seem to be similar, where earth became inhabitable and we went on to find new planets.
In Interstellar, the biggest challenge of interstellar travel is time, as humans are not built for long time space travel and the different speed of time in relation to gravity created the dramatic effect of the father aging slower than the daughter.
Notice that in both Beyond Earth and Interstellar, the main purpose of venturing out of earth was to survive, therefore the adaptation of human bodies seems to be quite reasonable under such purpose.
What if space is much less useful for us to explore? Where we can reach somewhere, but far away from finding a planet to colonize. Well, it is pretty much the situation for now, since we have slowed our steps for space exploration for years.
However, the topic for today is will the space change us?
Walking down from the trees and leaving the forest have changed us more than 1.89 million years ago. It was a complex form of both physical and societal changes. They intertwined with each other to the point where we can’t tell exactly which was the cause.
We had a large society because we left the forest, but so were several other none forest primates. Our brain enlarged because of the society size, with the physical changes of our diet and our bipedalism as prerequisites.
Therefore, when we are looking into the problem of whether the space will change our evolutionary path, other than the physical changes of the environment, such as now we have to adapt to long time space travel and potentially a different habitable environment of the new planet. We have to look at the societal structural change that space may bring us.
What is the social structure that space travel may entail?
This reminds me of one of my favorite science fiction, the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov.
In Foundation, although it was much modeled after the Roman Empire, other than a realistic space empire, humans colonized the entire Milky Way Galaxy. So were the settings of many other science fictions, that we are able to set foot on many other habitable planets in the galaxy, without much changes to our social structure.
Let’s start with the simple question: what are the physical prerequisites for this social structure change.
Long term, or time difference enabled space travel
Endurance of space and different planetary environments
The ways to overcome these two difficulties can be for example, to manipulate time in the first case, or to shorten the time for space travel. If we can’t find a way to manipulate time, or to shorten the time for space travel, even if the machines replace us to explore the universe, they will run out of time.
The ways to compete with time can be to increase our computational capacity. For example, if you can see that humans are in fact machines made with organic materials, the current structure and material of human brains are one of the optimal machines we know. However, some new materials and structure may contribute to a faster brain.
Everything is simpler when the computational capacity increases. So that is the first problem we are to tackle.
Long time ago I thought we may only encounter other life forms in the universe, however, the truth is probably that we will change ourselves. We will lose parts of our humanity when transforming to these new life forms, and as a result, the rest of the humans won’t recognize us anymore. Humans who have transformed into other life forms may have wars with each other, and may have wars with the previous form of humans.
They will look different, speak different languages, and have very different ways of life.
Take men and women as an example. They are seen as two complete different types of animals (of course they are the same animal), even though they technically don’t have reproduction barrier. The reason why heterosexual reproduction was superior was because we have to lock some of our cells from none human genes such as the genes of the bacteria.
Suppose one life form humans evolve into are able to dominate other life forms. After years of war, other life forms are domesticated and kept as pets for aesthetic purpose.
Let’s get back to the social change factor first, before we come into evolution separation. The first thing we will encounter, is the increase of the number of people as we will simply have more resources and lands as we colonize the space (suppose that is possible). The modern state is able to run the modern state, but it is not able to run such a massive number of people, since one planet may consist of one nation state now.
Last time we encountered this, as groups of primate, we changed our brain size to adapt to the political struggles came with the increase number of people. However, our memory system is still operating on 130 names of human, and we have ever since out sourced our memory.
We will either have to reduce the number of people (of course not by killing them), by some sort of mind connectives in all types of science fictions, or to efficiently manage this number of people. I don’t like the first suggestion, so let’s focus on the second scenario.
The current most efficient way in running a nation state is by a republic structured oligarchy, originated from Machiavelli. The republic has a strong bureaucratic system controlled by the oligarchs, and the oligarchs pose themselves as tyrants, oligarchs and demogarchs.
Laws are the common ground set by the oligarchs to maintain this game of balance so far. There are many common grounds other than those in the form of law, but no matter in what form, they are still common grounds the oligarchs use as social terms.
Suppose the oligarchy does not change in its nature, and I don’t think they will, for oligarchs mean they are powerful in one way or another.
The change will come from new common grounds enabled by the space.
The first common ground that comes to my mind is “everything has a beginning and has an end”. This is the foundation we used to model everything in human society, especially in terms of how to pass on our legacies. Without the passing on of legacies such as knowledge, we wouldn’t go this far in science.
What if there is no beginning and no end?
How does something that has no beginning and no end record and manipulate information? (This is a bit too science fiction now…)
Something that has a beginning and no end is an infinite loop. Suppose we create the true AI, and suppose the AI does not die, and then it must keep updating itself. When updating, part of it dies. If we look at humans as a whole, not as individuals, part of us always die, but the machine group created by us still exist.
Things like these are closer to no beginning an no end:
Reading until now you may say what is the point of this entire article? I don’t know yet. I think in order to see where this is going, I will need to investigate into some paradoxes. Until next time.
