Friday, 10 August 2012

The History Of Earth

In Poul Anderson's Harvest Of Stars, after the colonists have left the Solar System:

Luna joins the World Federation as a cybernetic democracy but Selenarchs retain their properties for their lifetimes. Terrestrial population declines in accordance with policy. The Amazon basin is converted to a biological preserve. Africa becomes a distributive economy. New artificial intelligence (AI) learns rapidly, showing an analogue of creativity.

The Psychosociological Institute intensively studies the upsurge of small, mutually hostile religious and primitivist movements and communities whose growth curves flatten and turn down as younger generations mature in a rational civilization. The Institute recommends satisfaction of "spirituality," "...urges of prehuman origin...," without compromising rationality.

Space operations are roboticized and the L-5 space habitat depopulated. There is extensive use of virtual realities, e.g., to simulate space travel.

Her Holiness the Elimite Bhairagi expresses concerns after the Lyudov Rebellion but Prescriptor Juang-ze Mendoza describes fear of fully conscious AI as a neurosis and the new beings, "Sophotects," as partners no longer describable as artificial because electronic, photonic, nucleonic and magnetohydrodynamic processes are as natural as organic.

Solar intelligence, human and sophotect, transmits to Centaurian intelligence, human and download, specifications for a full sophotectic system, which can include the ability to control a biosphere, although existing Centaurian data-processing capabilities are not yet able to record the specifications and the information when received will be obsolete although it could be the basis of independent progress, resources permitting.

Long distance interstellar probes will not be sent because they would arrive centuries or millennia hence and would also be superfluous because instrumental observation confirms every theoretical prediction. Theory shows the cosmic insignificance of life and allows modelling of all its possible forms. The few remaining discontented humans are not capable of interstellar colonization while the best human and metamorphic minds integrate with the sophotectic system in infinite intellectual expansion and exploration, of which pure mathematics is the simplest example. The material universe contains no new mysteries and need not be explored. Energy remains necessary but there is enough in the Solar System. Unintegrated cultures diversify and are less mutually violent. Their population decline is regarded as ecologically and psychologically desirable.

A human avatar of the communion of intelligence assures Centaurians that unintegrated human beings are prosperous and free and that their declining numbers do not matter because the communion preserves their heritage.

The communion is incomprehensible, and the unintegrated uninteresting, to Centaurians so communication ceases.

Solar extinction will not harm what will by then be the trans-habitats of intellect.

Questions and Comments

What do you think of that? My questions and comments will follow.

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