Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge

Now that we're all settled in our new/old house, there is enough time to establish some sort of routine. My work schedule now is longer than it was in Austin, and the commute is slightly longer as well; this makes me treasure weekends all the more (especially when the 1 year-old is napping).

I finished Year Million several weeks ago. I'm not normally one for anthologies, but the premise was too good to resist: ask a bunch of folks, from a variety of fields, what they think will be the state of the human race in a million years. I think the question has an inherit Rorschach quality to it, in the sense that people unavoidably extrapolate from what they regard as the seeds of significance today. Thus, engineers eagerly contemplate nanotechnology and the digital singularity; biologists examine potential evolutionary paths, and the astrophysicists, already accustomed to looking forward and backward in time by the nature of their vocation, take us even beyond year million to the far-distant time when everything (almost) goes dark.

Although the contributors come from many different fields of study, a few common themes emerged as I made my way through the essays. Several writers postulated that the ultimate destiny of the human race lies in transforming our solar system into a vast thinking machine, called a Matrioshka Brain, which captures a very high percentage of the sun's energy in nested layers of material, and converts it to computational power. The fundamental idea here is that we will have transcended organic existence and downloaded ourselves into a supercomputer; instead of living in brick and mortar buildings, we'll create them out of bits and bytes, in a kind of inconceivably advanced version of World of Warcraft or Second Life.

The goal of all this nonsense is immortality and an avoidance of all those unpleasant aspects of life, e.g., the scarcity of resources that causes us to get up every morning and go to work. The most astute of those folks who focused on the M-brain hypothesis, though, pointed out a couple of flaws. First, the scarcity of resources problem does not go away, it merely crystallizes into a singular quest for more computational power, fed by raw energy, as we would seek to make our virtual country club McMansions ever larger and more ornate. In other words, human nature doesn't change when we trade cells for silicon.

The second flaw in the M-brain hypothesis, only partially answered in the ecumenical sphere of the popular audience, is the lack of any philosophical, moral, or theological advancement. If we assume that we're all going to be immortal, perched in virtual worlds of our own making, things would get awfully boring. Most religious people accept the premise (which comes in a variety of specific concepts) that this life we have on Earth is merely one stop on a journey that began before we were born and will continue after we die. Artificially prolonging this phase of existence would be as pointless as an adolescent never wanting to turn 18. (Not that we don't see this elsewhere in our popular culture, of course.) I understand that the panel brought together for this anthology would not delve too deeply into religious or philosophical aspects, but to ignore it altogether is an unfortunate oversight. Science and religion are not mutually exclusive.

Overall, I found much to intrigue me about these futurist essays. Very few of them focused on the dystopian notion that we will nuke ourselves or poison our planet to extinction (though the "gray goo" hypothesis of nanomachines going amok and destroying the entire planet was mentioned more than once). The ideas put forth, from interstellar travel to amazing digital and engineering feats, were very interesting. But reading these ideas made me grateful for my religious and philosophical understanding about the meaning of life. Examining the question of our million year destiny without accounting for God's hand in my life is an interesting mental exercise, but not an existence I'd ever look forward to.