There is probably life somewhere within most solar systems. But not necessarily high consciousness life. If a mutant lion strain become significantly more intelligent than its prey, it would destroy itself. This is how the biosphere grows and maintains symbiosis.
The shark is far more evolutionarily advanced than the homo sapiens. Some people have a distorted perception that humans are at the top of an evolutionary hierarchy. We are not more physically gifted or evolved than any other animal and we are less so than many.
There have been 100 million species so far on this planet. And that was over a duration of one third the age of the universe. And with that vast collection of different DNA instances, only once did an animal become so far out of balance and freakishly intelligent than the rest of the biosphere. Once. A statistician will tell you that is a throwaway number. You cannot presume that our sophisticated level of abstraction and intelligence and ability to discover mathematics and the code by which the universe works and to project our consciousness forward and backwards in time and create story and intrigue is something that occurs approximately once out of every 100 million species on a given biosphere. In fact, because it has only occurred once and not twice or thrice, a statistician will explain to you that it probably never occurs at all other than that one time. Why didn’t the biosphere correct this imbalance, as it usually does? After all, we almost wiped out much of the biosphere including ourselves in a nuclear holocaust.
But we didn’t. We’ve been fortunate. Instead, for the last several decades, life expectancy has been increasing and violent crime globally has been decreasing year after year. Access to clean water and shelter has gone up every year. Infant mortality has plummeted. Pandemic diseases have all but disappeared. Access to information is skyrocketing. In the last 1/8000th of the time that life has been on this planet, a species evolved that had the ability of abstract thought.
Then, in 1961, one of those animals escaped the biosphere all together and made it into outer space. Since then, the information age has come upon us. Today, technology itself is a form of organized information combined with matter — evolving. And it is accelerating at an exponential clip. It is unprecedented and nobody knows where it is going.
But there is one thing we can say for sure about it. In our lifetimes, it will enable the human species to begin spreading our high consciousness and abstract thought and exponentially exploding high technology throughout the rest of the universe. I’m a shareholder in a company called Moon Express. We’re going to be mining the moon and are the first company to receive governmental permission to leave the atmosphere. There are other companies who are joining us — some of them are doing space tourism and others are mining asteroids. There was a short delay since we went to the moon in the 60s because technology needed to catch up with our desire to spread out beyond this planet. But now it is the eve before the morning of the human species going outwards.
What does that mean for the universe?
A tiny bit of math: doubling algorithms always halt after only a few iterations. For example, if the bacteria on an apple were to double more than just a few times, it would take over all the mass and energy in the universe. You can hit the x2 button 80 times on your iPhone calculator in 30 seconds. It doesn’t sound like a big deal for some bacteria to double 80 times. But if they did, that would be a number larger than every atom in every galaxy in the entire universe.
Why do doubling algorithms halt almost as soon as they start? Because of resource limitation. Humans will leave the biosphere en mass very soon. There will be no resource limitation until we have spread out to enjoy the rest of the energy in the universe. It is logically inevitable at this point. I was born in 1965 and grew up in the era of realistic expectation of nuclear war with Russia. There simply is no plausible scenario that is going to stop us from spreading beyond this planet. There’s a lot of awesome Hollywood stuff about apocalypses… aliens, zombies, viruses, nuclear and so on. And a lot of doomsayer writers make money off of it. But if you look at the hard data, the story is just not plausible. My friend Peter Diamandis wrote a great book about it called Abundance. It just lays out the hard statistical data and it is incontrovertible. The world is getting better in almost every way you can think of. And fast.
So, again, what does that mean for the universe? What does it mean for high consciousness to sequester all of the mass and energy in the entire universe?
Do we stay the same? Does our consciousness stay approximately like how it is now? Do we discover new physics and does our technology continue to exponentially double? And if it does, do we have the ability in the near future to hijack our own evolution? If we did, I wouldn’t mind being smarter. In fact I wouldn’t mind being able to have my consciousness divided into two and then up-regulated so that neither of the two is diluted. That way I can have an argument with my wife and a conversation with one of my colleagues at work at the same time. If that technology were available and it was not harmful would you try it out?
And if you could do something like that, wouldn’t it just be a matter of scale to do that in such a way that you could have a conversation with every person on the planet at the same time and then somehow remember all of it?
The point is that we are about to experience magnitudes of consciousness and forms of consciousness limited only by our imagination. We will move into an era where we are no longer limited by scientific and technological lack of understanding.
If there were a psychic technology or quantum technology of some sort that allowed you to participate in a collective consciousness with 10 of your best friends or with the whole human species would you give it a try?
I would.
If there was a technology that allowed you to be your wife for one day would you do it? And I don’t mean to just take over her body. I mean to actually be her. To think through the lens of her fears and her beliefs. And if you did, would your relationship with her be forever transformed for the better?
Generally, whatever is imaginable will eventually occur when the technology catches up. For those of you who read this, you have just imagined it. So it’s just a matter of time. I’m sure many of you have thought of these ideas before now.
I have a funny feeling that humans play a very special role in the universe self actualizing itself.
–Klee Irwin. Kathmandu, Nepal, September 21st, 2016 (attending the International Conference on Quasicrystals)
