Disclaimer: this entry juts dangerously into the roaring sea of speculative fiction. In this fabulous smörgåsbord of an entry I'm going to hit overpopulation, space travel, transhumanism, millennial eschatology, the American two-party political system and more, all the while maintaining a uniform direction in argument. Not only that, it's going to flow so smoothly that you'll never question my decision to incorporate such a ridiculous number of facially divergent topics into one brilliantly executed essay. All will be clear by the end.

I promise.

And I apologize for the length, but please feel free to leave comments just as long. d^_^b

Prologue: Overpopulation and You

I frequent Slashdot, a news aggregate site for geeks. It skews left, but it also skews academic and (perhaps most importantly) it skews geek, so it covers topics of interest to me. A thread on overpopulation emerged and I got sucked in.

Naturally, as the second of nine children I've had my share of conversations about overpopulation. Unchecked, the argument goes, human population growth damages the environment, increases the consumption of natural resources, and in short hastens the demise of pretty much everything. This sounds like a quintessentially Bad Thing^tm, so anyone with half a brain will have one (or, at most, two) children, and the truly responsible will have no children, or adopt the children of others to satisfy their biological urge for offspring. This will prolong the human race, reduce global warming, preserve endangered species, ad infinitum.

The knee-jerk reaction from most people is coherent enough:

"Enjoy dying miserable and alone, you misanthropic humbug."

But this only riles the childless professionals, who condescendingly (and sarcastically) reply:

"Ah, fear of old age. An excellent reason to burden the planet with half a dozen replacement units for yourself and your spouse."

This can go on for quite some time. Fortunately there is a more effective response, and one I have come to prefer. Of anyone who hopes to save the world I merely ask, "Precisely who, or what, are you saving it for?"

Don't get me wrong--I'm not advocating rampant, shortsighted consumption. But the first major flaw I see in preserving resources for future generations by declining to reproduce is that you're saving the world for someone else's offspring! Second, the choice to forgo children is often made by educated, intelligent people--precisely the sort of people who have the resources (and genes, though we still seem to be arguing about what role those play) to raise educated, intelligent children. So not only are you saving the world for someone else's offspring, you're saving the world for children much less likely to care--for you or for the world you've given them. Third, the fight to save the planet is a losing battle; at some point, the sun will explode or implode or whatever. Then what?

In the final analysis, I think population control is an ideological and evolutionary dead-end. If you want draconian birth control measures a la countries with caps on family size, allowing your political adversaries to have more children than you is not going to help your cause. Maybe you think adoption is the answer; but then you're limiting the process of genetic expression to those who want to have babies but can't or don't want to raise them, and that seems like an evolutionary dead-end as well. Anyone truly worried about overpopulation should work instead to limit the benefits of having many children. In most countries, that means better health care (people often have 10 children hoping 2 will survive), better agriculture (having children to run the family farm can be a matter of life and death), and better access to birth control and greater protection of individual liberties (basically, some women have babies because the alternative is celibacy... or death at the hands of angry male relatives). In countries that cannot feed or educate their populaces, finding ways to limit population growth by increasing rather than decreasing liberty is laudable and desirable.

But while I see maximization of liberty as ideal in terms of long-term species survival, this still falls prey to the final problem: total global apocalypse. If we're going to take the future seriously, the first thing we need is a long-term plan against racial extinction.

Chapter One: Religious Disclaimers

If you haven't read The Last Question by Isaac Asimov, follow the link. You won't be sorry. He considered it his finest work and I'm prepared to agree. It's a short piece about the heat death of the universe with some fascinating theological overtones.

It's also an excellent introduction into my disclaimers. As a Latter-day Saint, I believe in God. As a philosopher, I can construct a proof of God as well, though proving God is relatively easy (it is the question of God's attributes over which polite society calmly goes about spreading hatred and murdering innocents, but that is not today's topic). God, it turns out, is a Pretty Big Deal^tm, and a lot of God's professed groupies believe that God is going to rain down thermonuclear judgment a good deal before the sun (which is, appropriately enough, our Judeo-Christian God's most bitter historic rival) gets its chance.

In other words, my duly religious friends and family--which pretty much covers all of my regular visitors--want to know why I'm carping about the end of the world (via global warming, global cooling, nuclear warfare, germ warfare, or the end of the solar system as we know it) when we all know Earth is 7,000 years old, Jesus Christ is coming next week (or sometime shortly thereafter), and besides what good Christian uses the word "evolution" seriously?

I would first respond as Galileo Galilei:

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."

A longer answer, perhaps? Good Christians everywhere smile at the parable of the man caught in a flood who, after taking refuge on his rooftop, prays for rescue. A boat comes by to offer rescue, and the man refuses: "God will save me." A helicopter flies near and lowers a ladder and again the man refuses: "God is on his way." Shortly he drowns and meets St. Peter at the gates; angrily, the man demands to know why God did not save him from the flood.

"Oh dear," St. Peter responds. "God will be very angry that the boat and helicopter He sent didn't get there on time."

Christians cannot be strangers to the vagaries of prophecy. The Jews had Isaiah, yet somehow they missed their Messiah; are we half so diligent in our reading of Revelation? I submit that "no man knoweth the hour" is Christ's gentle way of saying, "rely on the day of my return at your own peril, fleshbag."

If you are not religious, if you subscribe to secular notions of evolution, you should have no difficulty with the rest of this discussion. But since you probably are religious, do not take this as an attack on faith. We need not rely on the arm of the flesh for salvation, but when it comes to keeping the family fed and escaping the planet of our genesis in a gutsy bid for racial immortality, I say let's take what God gave us and put it to good use. There may be profit shorting stock in humanity, but long-term investors always win in the end.

So, all of that said, the first thing you're going to think of when you start chapter two is, "He's advocating a technological Tower of Babel!" Stop it. I'm so not.

Chapter Two: The Road to Immortality

In considering overpopulation, in asking the question "What are we saving the world for," it becomes clear that we as human beings have the capacity and, sometimes, the desire to prepare for the future. This makes us special; this is not something anything else we have ever encountered does as often or as well as us. So what should we do with this wonderful ability? Because the main thing we already do with it is fret impotently.

The reason so many people are worried about overpopulation is straightforward: energy consumption tends to grow exponentially as technology advances, and when it comes to energy there simply isn't enough. They see a grim future; competition for resources leads quickly to war, and we as a race are armed well enough to wipe ourselves out. It seems like our options for extinction grow daily; if not deliberate nuclear winter, then accidental. If not some new specially-engineered plague, then an antibiotic-resistant variation on an old one. Global warming will destroy weather patterns, killing crops and starving us. We'll run out of natural resources and enter a technological decline as energy prices soar. Assuming we manage to survive for the next million years, maybe it will be an asteroid strike. A new ice age. A polar reversal. We don't even have to die out, necessarily; knock us back to the stone age a couple times and we'll no longer have enough time to build a society capable of fleeing before the sun burns out.

If we are serious about (say) preserving ecological diversity in the rainforest, we need to be equally serious about preserving the only species that might keep Earth's ecosystem around after the Earth is space-dust. Mostly, that means something like interstellar travel and colonization, but one important step down that road will be transhumanism, wherein we scientifically augment our bodies and our minds. Maybe this will take the form of cybernetic implants, or maybe we'll just have nanotechnology that stops us from aging, but whatever it is, we as humans are done taking evolutionary cues from the world around us. Though there will be many marvelous side-effects along the way, this isn't about making smarter, stronger, more chromed-out human beings. This is about finding ways to weather the rigors of space travel. I don't know whether we'll build colony ships packed with hibernation chambers or mechanical bodies into which we transfer our consciousnesses, but either way the first step to the stars is figuring out how to survive the trip.

Then we have to figure out how to make the trip! Space travel was once a glamorous way to flaunt national wealth, but lately the first world's interest in science has waned. It turns out there's nothing worth mining on the moon and no labor to exploit on Mars, so what's the point? The point, of course, is to not have all our eggs in one basket, and that goes for planets, solar systems, galaxies, even universes. If we can terraform and colonize another planet, we should do it. If we can get to another star system, we should, though the trip might take significantly longer. Another galaxy? Indeed! Another universe? If such a thing can be found. What about time travel? It seems scientifically unlikely, but if we can find a way to colonize the universe in the past, we should do that too.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, I don't know how we'll make it to the stars. I don't know what technology we'll employ or how it will change us as a species. I don't even know for certain that it is possible for our amazing but ultimately fragile species to escape our celestial cradle. I suspect it would take use hundreds or even thousands of years to even make measurable progress in the right direction.

Chapter Three: The Will to Progress

But progress in the right direction we must. Are you worried about global warming? Peak oil? Overpopulation? The environment? The economy? Really, if you are worried about anything more than your own comfort until the end of your days, you must worry about progress.

Don't get me wrong; I'm an existentialist with firm convictions on the significance of day-to-day living. The life and liberty of the individual is paramount, else this entire conversation would be moot. For are we not talking about the timeless preservation of that most glorious entity known as the human individual? But your every effort toward the preservation of something larger than yourself is little better than a stall tactic if we as a race are not simultaneously pursuing long-term survival.

Which brings us to the final piece of the puzzle. If we're going to have sufficient time and talent to dictate the next step in human evolution, the first thing we have to do is avoid wiping ourselves or our society out, either accidentally or in some armed conflict. The second thing is to figure out how to survive interstellar travel. The last thing we need to know is how to cross interstellar voids and, if necessary, terraform what we find when we get there.

This is not something I believe we can accomplish under the present system. Worse, I believe that American politics, at least, is directly antagonistic to the long-term survival of the human race.

We drive political discourse with flash-in-the-pan issues. We place massive significance on racial identity, private sexual practices, and the accumulation of wealth in the hands of an elite few, all the while downplaying the significance of meaningful discourse and ignoring any governmental pursuit that isn't relevant to the current election cycle. Neither party has a long-term plan. Indeed, the only plans either party really cares about is how to win "this time" and how to win "next time."

We need a political party with a long-term vision. Specifically, a political party that places its greatest emphasis on the peaceful resolution of international conflicts, the education of its populace (especially in math and science), and the support of research and development in areas that may or may not prove "economically viable." We need a political party that is more interested in the advancement of technology--and by extension, the human race--than in the definition of marriage or whether video games are psychologically damaging. We need a political party that addresses issues like global warming with the proper perspective--not as a "right wing" or "left wing" issue, but as one possible threat to human survival that must be taken seriously until it can be either conclusively disproven or conclusively eliminated. We need a political party that encourages intelligent, resourceful people to have lots of children--and to educate them well.

Individuals and even local governments are better than unwieldy federal governments at just about everything save one: overseeing massive, multi-generational projects no matter the state of popular opinion or the economy. This, I propose, should be the primary focus of the federal government: providing, over an extended period of time, the funding and atmosphere requisite to the eventual colonization of the stars and, hopefully, beyond. Everything else is day-to-day living, and frankly when it comes to day-to-day living we're probably better off without the federal government's interference anyway.

We need a technology party. I fear we'll not have one, and worse I fear most people too much enjoy the short-term, short-sighted world most first-world nations have adopted as their vision of success.

What do you think?