First, a confession: I wrote a book. It's called Homo Exploratoris, and it's about the future of our species no less - Homo Occasionally Sapiens. If you're interested - look it up on Amazon.
Long story short(er), I argue that besides the usual monsters lurking in the shadows - nuclear self-immolation, AI gone rogue, biotech gone awry, climate machine exploding in our face - we have a bigger problem. IMHO, this one's bigger than all those monsters together.
The super-monster of existential threats is our misanthropic, cynical self-image. You can't very well act as if you owned the place - you know, had the right to choose what's right and the obligation to make it happen - if you believe your species to be a cancer, plague or locust swarm on the face of this long-suffering planet. After all, if you believe that you live among 8 billion locusts gobbling up the last remaining resources of the finite planet, the only rational course of action is to gobble up what you can, while you still can.
Expectations—both high and low—are among the most reliable self-fulfilling prophecies known to humanity. Misanthropy is, quite literally, self-defeating. Meantime, the most numerous, prosperous, healthy, peaceful and educated humankind ever inhabits this planet now. Sure, we started out as a few thousand unappetizing apes on the fallback lunch menu of big carnivores. But from these unremarkable beginnings, in only a million years or so, we have progressed to become nearly eight billion masters of our domain. The descendants of the merciless carnivores rummage through our dumpsters. We have conquered the highest mountains and the deepest trenches and both of Earth’s inhospitable poles. We have covered the planet with the World Wide Web, filled with an immense amount of knowledge. We somehow got from the caves to the Moon, and some of us have felt inexplicably compelled to create the Sphinx and the Taj Mahal and the Mona Lisa and the theory of relativity, and we dreamed of Mars and Jupiter and stars and galaxies. So, where do we go from here?
Wherever we choose to, that’s where. Forth to the stars, or back to the caves. Did Earth's biosphere produce a species ambitious enough to reach for the stars? Would it be advantageous for our Gaia to do so?
I argue that it would. Humanity, imperfect as it is, is Gaia's only shot at immortality. I suggest that a space-faring civilization is an evolutionary adaptation. Space is a shooting gallery, and every life-bearing planet will one day be sterilized one way or another. The only way Gaia can immortalize itself is to evolve a civilization that can protect it from global catastrophes - and/or plant its backup copies elsewhere. If someone does it for the Earth, it sure won't be bugs or slugs or polar bears - it'll be us. That is, if we choose to, and if we are lucky enough and persistent enough to succeed.
And the same, - at a different level, of course, - applies to our whole Universe. A Universe has a finite lifespan, so the way for it to immortalize itself is the same as for you and me: have kids. And while it can happen at random (that's Lee Smolin's cosmological natural selection model), it would be a lot more efficient if a Universe spawned life, life produced civilization(s), and the civilizations climbed the Kardashev ladder to the stars - to eventually learn to create worlds at will.
And then the progeny goes through the same process as the parent Universe has, - and if it's lucky, it'll create its own god-level civilizations. Circle of life.
So while creating a Universe does seem like a miracle to us today, that doesn't necessarily make it unnatural. Both quantum fluctuations and black holes are possible technologies for doing so, according to modern physics. So maybe, just maybe, the "super" in "supernatural" doesn't mean "anti", - as in "unnatural" or whatever. Maybe what it stands for is "sufficiently evolved to be capable of, and interested in, doing things way beyond our current relatively puny experience and relatively myopic imagination".
Which leads me to ask the question in the subtitle of my book: is humanity an apprentice god? Are we evolving to be not only rational enough to be able to do God’s job but also irrational enough to actually want it, too?
I think admitting this possibility could be the common ground where theists and atheists can meet. I also think that a long-term positive outlook for H. Sapiens is a vitally important ideological platform for effective altruism.
What do you think?
