Think About The Future

(Week 21: Write a speech for an intended audience.)

          There’s something I want to talk to all of you about today, and it’s the future. When you chart the progress of humanity, the highs and the lows, when you chart the direction life has been moving in this whole time, it becomes clear that we stand today at the precipice of two paths, if I may mix metaphors: total death or eternal life. Total death would mean the extinction of all humans and the devastation of the biosphere to the point where intelligent life cannot redevelop in the time left before the sun blows up. Eternal life would entail humanity transcending their physical location and physical selves, to grow and to become gods.
          If this sounds to you like rehashed rhetoric from the Old-Time Religions, you are not far off – this conflict, this crisis of choice, has been standing before us since before we were even humans. But it is only now, as humans, that we have the knowledge, the numbers, the technology, to bring about total death or eternal life. Today I’d like to talk more about the latter.
          What do we need to do to achieve eternal life? Well, the Old-Time Religions say all you have to do is live a virtuous life and obey God and you’re set. The Eastern Philosophers imply that all life is already eternal, already one, already timeless. The Techno-Futurists say we need to work on Life Extension. They’re all right, but I would like to suggest some practical baby steps to help achieve this goal a little faster, to immanentize the eschaton such as it were.
          First, I think it is crucially important that we get off this planet. For starters, one day the sun is going to blow up. So even if we have achieved some sort of physical immortality and developed a society that will never self-destruct, as long as we are here and only here we have all our eggs in one basket. Now, that is five billion years from now, I admit, but you don’t need to cite Unicron or Galactus to imagine the possibility of a cosmic-level threat demolishing the Earth well before the sun goes. In fact, I just read on Wikipedia this morning that we only have about a billion years before the sun heats up enough to boil off all liquid water. One billion years. To put it in perspective, life itself has only existed for about four billion years. So when you look at it that way, the Earth’s biosphere is about 80% of the way through its life cycle. We can’t stay here forever.
          Once we get off the planet it will be time to start working more on inventing the Life Extension techniques the Techno-Futurists are so enamored of. The end goal of course being physical immortality or some way of preserving coherent consciousness beyond the death of the body. Why do I say wait until we are off the Earth? Because the Earth is a finite and limited space, it is a bad place for an immortal species to be reproducing. See how bad we’ve wrecked stuff up with a life expectancy of 50-80 years? Imagine how much more catastrophic it would be to the planet if we stopped dying altogether!
          Now so far I have only spoken about technological solutions for thriving in the external world. This is very important. But just as important is the development of our inner spiritual selves. Because of some quirk of our nature, or for all I know any intelligent life develops along the same lines, our technological development is chiefly driven by war, by military means. So destructive technology is always at the crest of the wave. Technology to heal, to build, to create – they are usually reverse-engineered from war toys. Study your history. But now is different, the last sixty years or so I should say. Today we have the technology to wipe out all life on Earth a hundred times over. How did it come to this? It’s not a relevant question. The question is, how do we not use it? How do we learn to connect with one another on a more organic level and leave aside the violent tendencies we inherited from our animal forebears? Remember, the world was a dangerous place for us once. Even during our early days as humans it wasn’t safe at night away from the fire, there were giant cats and other predators lurking around all the time. Eventually we consumed the wilderness, tamed or exterminated the worst of the dangerous animals, paved paradise and put up a parking lot. Today the only real threat to the average human being is other human beings. Not forces of nature we cannot control. Not wild beasts we cannot overpower. Us. Only us. And so it is up to us, as a whole people, to come together. The Hippies knew it. Jesus knew it.
          How do we do this? How do we learn to love each other, to escape the Earth that birthed us and to live forever as Gods of the Cosmos? I have no idea. I only have some small pieces of the puzzle, and barely the dimmest outline of its final shape. I don’t consider this a failure; at this point in the tail-end of the Dark Ages it is necessary to talk about the changes that are necessary even if you cannot effect them yourself, to remind people that it doesn't always have to be like this, that there are greater stakes for us than financial security or social status or any other artifact of human-created society. That’s all they are, you know. Money, fame, the approval of others – none have any intrinsic worth of themselves and only have value as long as there are human minds to create them, to appreciate them, to strive for them.
          Anyway, I think I’ve said all I meant to say, except that the first step towards positive change is believing that it is possible. We have to believe that we can become gods or we are doomed to extinction. We have to rise above it all, or drown in our own shit.