Eclipse of Man. Charles T. Rubin
a grand narrative of free human creativity becomes possible. Our conquest of nature is no longer a local affair but takes on a cosmic significance. For Reade, Fedorov, or Haldane’s Venusians, the creation of new forms of life, the enlivening of the cosmos, is the goal of goals, the highest good. We transform the universe by transforming ourselves.
Flammarion may be the superior Darwinian here, thinking that it is at least short-sighted and at worst completely inconsistent to think that all this marvelous development of matter into life and life into intelligence should be a process confined to one planet alone. Yet he does not highlight the tougher Darwinian consequences of this line of thought. What if the cosmos is not ours to do whatever we want with, because other forms of life have already staked a claim? Haldane seems to understand the situation best of all our thinkers: he extends the realm of competition beyond our world, with the expected consequences of extraterrestrial winners (the Martians in Haldane’s tale) and losers (the aboriginal Venusians). At some point, the Martians, victorious over mere human beings, will have to deal with the greater abilities of the human-created Venusians, or vice versa. Still, even if it’s a harsh universe, we come to the same kind of conclusion about the imperative of creative, self-directed evolution. For we had best be prepared to meet it coming from “out there,” or else (as Haldane might say) suffer the fate of the first Venusians, or indeed of earthly human life, for our folly.
Flammarion presents what is probably just the prettier side of the same coin. One might have thought that to the scientific mind any life beyond Earth would be interesting enough—surely any intelligent life. But the alien forms Flammarion imagines all have some wonderful advantage over mere human beings, so wonderful as to make us look pretty grubby by comparison, “like coarse animals . . . nailed to the soil like any vulgar caterpillar.”147 Should we not then aspire to be more like those superior alien beings? Such evolutionary fitness as human beings might exhibit is relative only to the conditions of our place and time, and perhaps (as Haldane would suggest) we are not suited well enough even for that. We should not expect to persist into the far future, or on worlds beyond our own, without becoming alien to what we are now. But here again the key point is that this change counts as progress. Haldane’s Venusians are clearly presented as superior to the humans who created them, and against all squeamishness about crustaceans, Bernal would in effect have us will to become Flammarion’s aliens “gifted with multiple sensibilities, luminous at will, incombustible as asbestos, perhaps immortal.”148
The grand narrative of material progress and self-overcoming has one final twist that again links the materialist-minded Bernal with Fedorov’s faith and Flammarion’s spiritualism: material progress is itself something to be overcome. Bernal imagines that the ultimate destiny of intelligence may be to resolve itself into light. Whatever that might mean, how different is it from imagining spirits that might be communicated with or resurrected into bodies? Matter can be raised up into life and life raised up into intelligence; why should there not be further extensions of the sequence, however beyond our comprehension they might be? The progress of dehumanization runs from vile bodies to healthy bodies to redesigned bodies to no bodies at all.
THE PARADOX OF PROGRESS
This last transformation into the luminous, if not the numinous, raises in the most acute form a problem has become increasingly obvious as we have proceeded through these lines of thought. In the lead-up to one of his most widely quoted aphorisms, philosopher George Santayana says,
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement; and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.149
As Santayana suggested, the kind of “absolute” change in the human being imagined by Bernal and Haldane, along with today’s transhumanists, really precludes the use of the term “progress.” It becomes harder and harder for our authors to imagine what will be retained, hence where change will start from. And if the rate of change is accelerating, that simply means we are headed the more rapidly from one unknown to another, while the recognizable old standards for judging whether the changes are progressive are overthrown along with our humanity.
In today’s world, a vision of progress like that laid out by Condorcet remains very much alive. The easing of human life through universal education, reduction in disease, increased sanitation, improved agricultural productivity, and a rising material standard of living is an established fact for much of the world, and the main questions involve how most rapidly and “sustainably” to extend these benefits more widely and how to improve upon what we already have. Likewise, we take increased life expectancy for granted, and worry only about continuing a well-established trend.
Beyond that, even though the thinkers we have examined did not anticipate some of the technological advances that today’s transhumanists hang their hopes on—none foresaw the rise of digital computing, for example—some elements of the dehumanization they envisioned are already in place around us. Genetic engineering means that we would not necessarily require generations of careful breeding to create our Venusians. The “conquest of space” is in principle at least an established fact, and if the prospects for space colonies, planetary exploration, and interstellar travel still seem distant, that is less because of what we don’t know or can’t do than because of how we choose to arrange our funding priorities. Increasingly sophisticated and intimate man-machine interfaces are being developed; we are seeing impressive, if admittedly still early, advances in artificial ears, eyes, and limbs.150 We may not yet have the organ that Bernal imagined for detecting radio waves, but we do have t-shirts that can display the presence of wi-fi signals.151
It is not just what we do that links us with the authors we have looked at, but what we expect. We don’t yet know there is alien life, let alone intelligence, but the idea is widely accepted by scientist and layman alike—if not always for the same reasons. It is likewise a commonplace that we live in a world with an accelerating rate of change.
We might not yet normally place these ideas and achievements within a framework of efforts to overcome the merely human—but they are there to be placed. The eclipse of man is underway. However amazing our present might look from the perspective of a not-so-distant past, there remain those who look down on the human because they can imagine something far better, whether it involves immortality or resurrection of the dead or brains transplanted into machines.152 Even if, as Bernal warns, we should also be wary of thinking that the future is going to work out just as we envision it today, it would certainly be the height of folly to assume whatever in these visions has not yet happened could never happen. Some (like Malthus) would have said that what we have today is impossible.
The main home for the hopes and fears that define the eclipse of man as we have examined it from the past may be transhumanism, but as we will see in the chapters that follow they are also at work elsewhere—including in the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence, to which we turn next. The general public is fascinated by hostile alien invaders. The scientists who look for extraterrestrials are fascinated by contact with advanced, benevolent intelligence. Some transhumanists would be surprised if there are any aliens at all. All these prospects are working out the consequences of ideas about human-alien relations that we have seen in this chapter. The differences among them are not so great as they might first appear.
PROLOGUE: ONLY CONNECT
WHEN SHE accepted a postdoc position to be part of the team decoding the first message ever received from extraterrestrials, Camille never expected that the effort would occupy the better part of her career—would really be her career. That was actually the third surprise about the message. The first was that it