the persistent urge to be more than human

Science fiction and science fact keep blurring into each other for the last century. But maybe this symbiotic relationship can be used for good...

Let’s not sugarcoat it. Living in space sucks. Despite looking futuristic and sterile on a screen, space stations and spacecraft are actually disgusting. There’s also the lack of gravity which messes up circulatory systems, bones, and basic bodily functions. And radiation that scrambles the immune system and genes. Even the heartiest organisms on Earth can resist space in only short bursts, requiring the planet’s magnetic field for protection while just hibernating in orbit instead of melting into a puddle.

At the dawn of the Space Age, we didn’t know the full details, but we did know that it wouldn’t be easy to survive the hostile alien environments that would await us on the surfaces of Moon and Mars, or just in traveling through the vacuum of space. This is why in November of 1963, two doctors worked with Popular Science to create a new vision for humanity, that of cyborgs capable of handling the rigors of life beyond the creature comforts of our world.

Just one problem. It’s all technobabble. Atom chaser? Gamma ray repeller? What are those? Atomic batteries? Do they mean RTGs, the batteries which rely on the heat of radioactive decay? How do they self-regenerate and why are they so close to almost all of the vital organs? An electronic shaver? Why? Is a five o’clock shadow really such a concern in deep space? Buttons to pee, sweat, eat, or get instant therapy just ever so casually dotting the right arm? Well, that leaves way more questions than gives us answers, although the pranks you could pull with those would be epic.

Yet, this is probably the best they could do given what science and medicine knew at the time, with a healthy dollop of sci-fi wordplay to cover all the question marks since this is a magazine for the general public and not a peer reviewed journal. It’s also very much in line with the then novel idea of transhumanism: to enhance humanity, to take the reigns of evolution, and do what our fragile, meat-based nature doesn’t let us.

It’s this idea that grew over the past 70 years into what drives our Big Tech wanna-be overlords and fuels their obsession with all things AI, whether it works the way they’re hoping or not. After pursing decades of literature painting transhumanism as the only possible fate for humanity, they’re now dreaming of becoming literal digital gods, and demand absolute power over our future, including the ability to compel us to produce enough new humans to dutifully fulfill their ever more grandiose plans, all while loudly and viciously sabotaging those very plans with what they choose to back.

technically correct, the worst kind of correct

When I talk about the general direction of our looming cyberpunk dystopia motivated by the aforementioned tech oligarchs high on their own supply of hype, I tend to get a lot of interest from those who want to learn about transhumanism or the history of the Technological Singularity, and how they influence the accelerationism that’s now ever so casually pitched on social media as a solution to all our ills both politically and as a species in general.

Hundreds of thousands of viewers with hundreds of curious comments asking me to say more, and even when I warn that to properly cover all the ideas and concepts in question would make for a six hour long presentation, minimum, dozens of brave and enthusiastic souls say “hit us with it!” in the replies and DMs while genuinely seeming to mean it. And yet, when I do even a relatively short, shallow dive into one topic, just eight minutes, the views go down by an order of magnitude or two.

Which makes sense. Partially, it’s the algorithm not really wanting to serve up longer, content dense videos because that limits how many ads people see. Partially, it’s just difficult to get a good hook going and the subject itself is heavy on nerd terminology that lands with all the grace and levity of an angry hippo. This is especially true when you’ve been talking about this since 2009 and it’s hard to know what’s still niche, and what’s finally became part of general public knowledge.

And believe it or not, it’s the same thing with our aforementioned Big Tech wanna-be overlords of humanity’s future. You can sum up their entire so-called ideology of Dark Enlightenment as simply plagiarizing cyberpunk sci-fi and refusing to understand the messages of what they were reading in the first place. The reason they communicate almost exclusively in technobabble is because that is, in fact, all they know about the future they say they want to implement.

In other words, they’re pitching the dream rather than bothering with the details, even though that’s where we’re taught the Devil usually lives. And you know what? I get it. I do. Just being able to pitch dreams is nice. Not going into what is most certainly mind-numbing minutiae for 99.9% of your potential audience is great. On too of that, all my ventures into longer form video essays — that is, about 15 minutes or so — taught me that I really don’t like to talk for that long unless it’s absolutely necessary.

it’s never too late to think about the future

Now, at this point, a thought occurs. Why do I have to tell instead of show? Why can’t I just use the same creative medium from which our tech oligarchs yoinked their ideas to explore some of these topics? Not to teach a lesson, not to weave a heavy-handed parable, but as a thought experiment of what happens if we decide to spend our time on implementing as many transhumanist ideas as possible, with an appropriate touch of reality, of course.

Using a well received short story from my WoWT days as a springboard for a bigger fictional universe, I’ve been working on something very much along this path without even realizing it until relatively recently, and the setting as it weaved turned out to be a cross between a space opera and a cyberpunk adventure. But that makes sense if we consider that we’re being asked to both colonize space, fall in line with ever more weaponized nostalgia, and sign up for life as a service all at the same time.

Following that thread, I’ve ended up with a scenario that sees both epic space battles and people trying to escape their past in a vast and infinitely ambitious system which couldn’t care about them unless given no other choice. Amazing utopian technology that comes with costs it’s best not to think about too hard. All the messy politics of a society that doesn’t know what it is or what it wants to be, only how much each path costs, yet at the same time yearns for something more, something better.

It’s a scenario that’s not universally good or bad, but just is, and it all depends on who you are and where you are to conclude whether you like it or not, because that’s how the world works. Even the worst dystopias have winners who lucked out and love the lives they lead, and the most prosperous utopias have angry discontents who feel like caged animals without purpose or a real challenge to motivate them. To be honest, we need to see both sides of this coin.

So, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to show instead of tell by enlisting the help of my friend and editor to publish this as a weekly serialized narrative you can follow along as it comes together from draft to a somewhat more polished form. Hopefully, along the way, we can use it as a way to think of what the humans of tomorrow may be like, what kinds of challenges, discoveries, limitations, and promises could await them, and how we think about the future. And I hope you join me on this experiment.