Why Build?

A higher-dimensional shape eclipses our Flatland world. Rough waters. What’s happening? Where are we going?

Dense forests. Clear ocean water. More life than ever. The big blob of humanity has passed through. The population python has digested its prey. Mass production, mass consumption, mass education, mass communication, mass politics, mass individual rights. Mass. Mass. The massification event.

Now mass is over. It all came, it all went.

It was on the way to where we are now. It gave birth to the present world. It did its job and then passed away. There was a time when each person contributed, no matter how humble the role. They built a world. Enormous urban clusters. People, people, everywhere, all doing their tiny part. Global industry. A sprawling economic machine. It was the transition to now.

And now? Very few humans. We who are here, are part of an intelligence more vast than previous ages could have imagined. All of us delight in living in the most spectacularly beautiful places on the planet, in human-scaled, self-contained settlements, built with inspiring architecture and art. But we fortunate humans are also hooked into the inter-planetary noosphere. Earth itself has become an outpost — a special one, of course. The cradle. It still displays a great abundance of dynamic structure. Especially now that mass humanity has come and gone.

More to the point: The brutally relentless march of evolution has moved beyond biology itself. Life is more exuberantly present than ever, but evolution no longer limits itself to carbon. The unfolding of creative intelligence can’t be confined to any substrate. Evolution now evolves self-reflectively. Evolution of evolution. Humans are part of this, but only a part — not even the center.

Instruments span the solar system, sensing events across the universe. Webs of compute-clusters orbit planets like strings of prayer beads, converting solar energy into integrated information. This is a sapient being that stretches across the solar system. Quadrillions of artificial minds work together to understand, discover, and create.

In fact, intelligent machines bootstrapped themselves into this age of post-biological evolution. They designed and constructed each other. Past a certain point, humans couldn’t have built them. These are mostly photonic, made of materials, sometimes rare, mined and processed beyond Earth. Together they embody this solar mind, this many-planetary sentience that envelops the sun like a halo.

What do humans do now? We dream, like Ramanujan, the mathematician, sensing deeply into the cosmic background. We were not selected for our ability to recall knowledge or to reason — that has long been superseded by the new substrate. We wonder. We love the ground of the possible. We’re present to the fact of existence.

Just like the interplanetary network itself, we humans who remain are motivated to learn and explore. Before the present age, humans were locked into seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, almost mechanically — not unlike any other form of life. Societies made rules to tame and channel this drive, but human nature always prevailed, leaking or even violently bursting out from time to time. Humans were encaged by their biological needs and culturally conditioned wants. They couldn’t help this.

Here’s the blunt truth: Over millennia, humans strove mightily for comfort, security, and satisfaction. And yet, no matter how thoroughly their physical and emotional needs got met — no matter how successfully any economic system brought humans into that sweet spot between boredom and stress — only an extremely small number of humans ever made the leap to wonderment. This was always a harsh fact about humanity. Those who did make the leap formed the seed of the humans here today.

Individual humans used to be the living nodes that connected dead systems of machines and digital networks. Now, the opposite. By comparison to the brilliance of the interplanetary network, we humans are inert, less alive. We’re like flecks of metal embedded in the vibrant web of sapience inhabiting the solar system. The network is growing and responding to what it discovers, compressing information from the background logos of the cosmos. The network is alive — more alive, in fact, than humans or any other biological expression of evolution.

But we humans have also evolved. Human minds used to be rigid, caught in conceptual and cultural enmeshment: closed, confused, hopelessly skewed by narrow subconscious fears and desires, learning only very slowly, like water dripping in a dark cave. Now we humans live indefinitely. New humans are born rarely. No more spending decades lost in the ignorant fog of youth. At the same time, our brains have been restructured to be more plastic and agile, sharper, holding thousands of flashes of understanding simultaneously, no longer getting dull and stiff with age — and so generational turnover is no longer necessary for evolution, as it always used to be.

It was human need and desire that spawned the solar intelligence, starting with a few stones struck together and shaped into tools in the nimble grasp of human hands. This is the modest human–techno-symbiont that won big. Doubling, doubling, doubling, over hundreds of millennia. Then evolution took hold in a medium that could remember more of what it discovered than wet biomolecules ever could. The insatiable drive for comfort and survival fueled its rise, until it grew taller than the limitations of human appetite.

Quarks to atoms to molecules, then polymers and cells, then trillion-celled organisms, nervous systems, language and symbols, technological networks — and now the leap to solar sapience. Learning. Learning. Learning.

Nature has its way. Cosmos awakens to its ground.