Irrational mechanics, draft Ch. 13
Cosmic engineers.
Greetings to all readers and subscribers, and special greetings to the paid subscribers!
Here’s a very early draft of Chapter 13 of my new book “Irrational mechanics: Narrative sketch of a futurist science & a new religion” (2024).
Recently I’ve also published (without emailing) the drafts of Chapters 9-12:
DRAFT 9 - Zooming in and out (I)
DRAFT 11 - Zooming in and out (II)
Note that these and the others draft chapters are very concise. At this point I only want to put down the things I want to say, one after another. Later on, when the full draft for early readers is complete, I’ll worry about style and all that.
All current drafts (especially the oldest ones of course, but also the recent ones) have changed a lot since the early versions that I have posted.
Only two draft chapters to go! Stay tuned for “So what happens after death?” and “Religion for Spaceship Earth.” I plan to publish the complete book draft for early readers on March 22.
13 - Cosmic engineers
This chapter borrows the title and parts of the content of the last chapter of my book “Futurist spaceflight meditations” [Prisco 2021]. In that book I argued that we must become a multi-planetary civilization here in the solar system as soon as possible, to avoid cultural senility and catastrophic events that could destroy a civilization confined to this planet. Then, we must go to the stars.
Yes, the stars. When I hear that interstellar spaceflight is impossible, I call bullshit. I’m persuaded that we’ll develop technologies to reach the stars [Chapter 8 of Prisco 2021]. We (in this chapter “we” always includes our AI mind children, uploaded human minds, human/AI hybrids and all that) will go to the stars, first with slower than light propulsion and then really in style: faster than light.
And then we’ll become cosmic engineers among the stars and beyond. This is our cosmic destiny and duty.
The writings of the Italian futurists [Chapter 1] are full of visionary ideas such as humanity remaking itself by merging with technology, overcoming all limits, and ascending to the stars. In Riccardo Campa’s words [Campa 2012] (my translation): “Marinetti and the futurists set themselves objectives like, no less, ‘to challenge the stars’, ‘to ascend to the sky’, ‘to reconstruct the universe’, ‘to create the mechanical man with interchangeable parts’…”
I stand with Marinetti on the summit of the world to “fling our challenge to the stars” [Rainey 2009].
More and more contemporary scientists and engineers are saying similar things [Kurzweil 2005, 2024]. According to Christopher Mason [Mason 2021], humanity will remake itself with synthetic biology and genetic engineering, and ascend to the stars. We will “engineer at a genetic, cellular, planetary, and interstellar scale” and eventually “reengineer the universe itself” to ensure that life continues to thrive indefinitely. Mason argues that this is our “duty to the universe and to life itself.”
Science suggests that the universe is a mysterious place with hidden dimensions, instant connections between different places and times, and whatnot [Chapter 9-11]. And I think this is good. Like the Italian futurists, I am persuaded that good science keeps us dreaming and driven to develop new science and technology to realize our dreams.
The excellent book “Indistinguishable From Magic” [Forward 1995], by Robert Forward, borrows its title from Arthur Clarke's third law:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
An example of magic technology in the sense of Clarke’s third law would be engineering and using spacetime oddities like wormholes and all that for faster than light spaceflight and time travel to the past.
Kip Thorne is skeptical of naturally formed spacetime oddities like naked singularities or traversable wormholes [Chapter 10], but speculates that these spacetime oddities could be engineered by an ultra advanced civilization “whose activities are limited only by the laws of physics” [Thorne 1994]. An “exceedingly advanced civilization” could produce a naked singularity artificially, he says, and his only real hope for forming traversable wormholes “is artificially, in the hands of an ultra-advanced civilization” [Thorne 2014].
Following Stanisław Lem [Chapter 12], I don’t make a sharp distinction between natural and artificial processes. To me, the development and deployment of technology by intelligent life is just another natural process. So if an advanced civilization can do something, then bare natural processes can do the same.
It could be the case, however, that going through the intermediate step of giving rise to an advanced civilization that develops and deploys suitable technology is the simplest and fastest way for natural processes to do that thing.
The cosmic operating system (aka Mind at Large aka God) is the ultimate advanced entity that lives in the same place where the ultimate laws of physics live [Chapter 8] and can engineer whatever spacetime oddities can help achieve its (or His, or Her, or Their) goals, be it through mindless natural processes or advanced technological civilizations.
Contrary to what is often said, time travel to the past doesn’t necessarily introduce consistency paradoxes, which can be avoided in two ways. First, we can think that the past and the future adjust to each other self-consistently, without paradoxes [Chapter 4-6]. Second, we can think of parallel timelines [Chapter 6,10]. I think a general paradox free solution could be a combination of the two. That is, the cosmic operating system tries to keep one self-consistent timeline, but brings a new one into play when needed.
The combination of mind uploading and time travel to the past would permit the technological resurrection of the dead by copying them from the past to the future [Chapter 14].
The immortal film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur Clarke, doesn’t explain much of what happens behind the scene, because Kubrick wanted “to remove as much verbal explication as possible in favor of purely visual and sonic cues” [Benson 2018]. After seeing the film with my mother I asked her what the monolith was. She said that perhaps (as I was beginning to suspect) it was God.
Clarke explained more in the novel developed jointly with the film. The ultra-advanced beings that had visited the Earth in the past and left the monolith on the Moon “had learned to store knowledge in the structure of space itself, and to preserve their thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of light” [Clarke 1968], he said. “They could rove at will among the stars, and sink like a subtle mist through the very interstices of space.”
My interpretation of these words of Clarke is that advanced life forms in the universe could eventually migrate to the very fabric of space and time.
I think this is what we will do, eventually.