CopyRight @ 2007

Conclusion - The Minimum

03/07/07 -This is almost a place holder. It is the start of 3 parts. Another potential stable human ecology, a discussion of God and discussion of what religion may have to teach us about survival. This is not anywhere near complete. ... I'm working on it.....

Inherently this is about the future. It is to answer the question of how can humans again create a stable ecology that they can survive in. Historically, saying much about the future is a pretty chancy endevour. This is not to create a description of some possible technological or even agragarian vision of utopia. This is a description of the minimum adaptations that humans will have to achieve to survive in any context. To a large extent, it is about compensating for things that humans have already changed. As said at the start of this, the biggest change relates to the removal of natural selective effect and the increase in population, both of which increase the consequence of disease. Also as said early on, the most basic requirement for survival is going to use artificial selection. Natural selection is how species have always adapted to change, but that is not an option for humans. The change is too fast, the energetic cost would be too steep, the price would be too high to survive.

So after 35 years of trying to figure out what it would take for humans to find an ecology that they could survive in, what did I conclude? Just right now, global warming really sucks. That seems especially true because I have recently realized that there was even more potential from artificial selection than I had suspected. It appears that artificial selection could end racism and give everyone the best genetic potentials of humanity. It could remove sickness, want and ignorance. It could almost certainly lead to motivation for realistic population control. It could offer a philosophical value to the individual in terms of heredity that has been hidden because of the danger of racial conflict. It also offers a broad philosophical foundation for individuals actions and values based on survival. In my original time frame, artificial selection and a philosophy based on survival could allow humans to create a new ecology and adapt both genetically and behaviorally to survive in it indefinately. I realized though that there was even a greater portential and that that ecology I described might again be a transitory ecology on the path that starts with intelligent social behaviors and tools and leads invariably to artificial selection, if the specie survives. While artificial selection would lead to an increase in health, beauty and brains, there is an aspect of humanity that is a bit harder to describe, but in a way, more critical. That is emotional evolution. Emotions are just not well understood, but they do provide for communication, motivation and even understanding. Generally our social environment is more important to our survival than any other part of our ecology. It has been the driving force of human development for some time. Emotions are an important tool in our social environment. They are a form of intelleignce. The potentials of emotions are such that they will become far more important in the future. This topic will be addressed again further on after more of a foundation is put down.

Star Trek

This whole book was written to try to describe how humans could achieve another relitively stable ecology. We haven't had one since the time of the hunter gather ecology. All modern agricultural practices that have supported cities, except perhaps terrace farming, are depletive of the soil and so cannot be considered stable ecologies. Since humans started using agriculture, in biological terms, they have not had a stable ecology. This is a dangerous place for any specie. This analysis was based on looking for the minimum requirements for achieving a new ecology. Science fiction authors have covered thousands of possibilities of what humanity might be able to do in the future. This was to consider what they had to do in the context of what they were likely to want to do and had the potential to do.

I have considered thousands of possibilities. Some were concepts that others had written about as science of wildely speculatively based potentials. Some were prophetic. Some were very fanciful and seemingly quite unlikey, but they all illustrated humans desires and drives. Some of the concepts were projections I created based on genetic, psychological or historical drives trends and that seem likely to continue. Religion, philosophy and culture have been examined for human drives and desires. Religion is an expression of the ultimate in human values. Like most things in biology, there are many potentials, but most will come to little in the long run.

While the biggest factor in human evolution seems to be other humans, especially in a social context, another human factor seems to be coming to the fore as something to be considered. This is the first factor to be considered here, because it will likely raise the bar on what is the "minimum" that humans will have to adapt to achieve a stable ecology. That is Global Warming. Our current living arrangement will most likely change to higher density, as it has before already. We moved from small dispersed tribal groups to larger agricultural villages. That was an adaptation to environmental change as well. The recent move to cities was more of an economic responce as agriculture has become more concentrated and less labor intensive. With the harsh environment we may come to face, again we may have to come together even tighter to use cooperation for survival. We may very well make cities with their own environment, unexposed to the natural environment at all. Still, this is only a change in degree on the human path, not in kind. It will also exasperate the problem of disease that I ahve said will drive artificial selection.

There are two technological driven factors that must be considered here, automation and virtual reality. It's hard to say what the potentials of automation are, expecially if that includes artificial intelligence. Obviously our society already relies on high degrees of automation for the majority of the resources it uses. It's a question of how more effective will automation be at production than humans. Isaac Asimov explored this question in his stories of the robots. He and other authors pointed out the dangers this might pose to humans by making them lazy and divorced from the needs of life. Or perhaps machines may offer the resources and abilities for humans to make some of the greatest things that are parts of the human future. If we expand to the stars, machines are likely to be an important component of that. Still, machines are machines and my study is of humanity. I don't spend a lot of time studying machines, because automation is not a major component of the thread of the human future I follow. On the other hand, virtual reality is an much of that will be supported by machines. Of all the trends in humanity, one of the most noticable is the desire for virtual reality. Call it what you want, but entertainment, books, movies, music and all the other distractions from bordom, monotony or normalacy of life are an overwhelmiing factor to be considered. Virtual reality will end up becoming a major extension of our ecology, especially if the Earth does become a harsher place. There is another reason as old as the pyramids that virtual reality will become of great importance to humanity. Virtual reality is going to offer a kind of immortality to people. It has been proven to be impossible, but things like that change. Before that long we will be able to project our senses into virtual reality. After that, it will only be a matter of time before the technology will exist for humans to move their minds into the machines that make virtual reality. The computing power available may let a scientist do their best work after they are dead. The dead will be the ones that make VR most lifelike. They will make it better than life. Only humans most basic and highly developed survival instincts will be able to protect them from the seductiveness of virtual reality. Only great advances in the science of longevity will offset the attraction of virtual immortality. Still, biological immortality will be hard pressed to compete with virtual immortality, especially when biological mortality approaches. The implications are boggling and are considered more extensively elsewhere.

So... Most of my analysis describes an ecology where the genetic factors of artificial selection removes fear, want and ignorance as well as providing a basis for population control that with a bit of technology and philosophical wisdom ,can offer a very pleasant world we can survive in indefinately. It reminds me of Star Trek that showed a very optimistic world of advanced technology that offered people fulfilling lives and a healthy world ecology. Their depiction of continued ethnic identities seemed very unlikely, but the rest of their view of our world looked very like the stable ecology I am looking for. Star Trek never discussed much about artificial selection though, so there would be some differences. Also, a friend of mine persuaded me to look beyond that, beyond my goal of the next stable ecology. What I saw was beyond amazing. It is true that evolution is always from something, never too something, but once started down a path, the destination may be predictable. There are niches in nature. Some are occupied, some are not, but they exist as potentials whether a species exists to occupy them or not. Whether dinosaur, mammal, marine, marsupial or other, there are always climax herbivores to graze the plants and there are always predators to prey on them. The question is what natural niches are available to humans.

If humans don't go extinct, they at some point they will almost certainly occupy a niche that looks like what was shown in Star Trek or perhaps it would be more correct to say the Jetsons because the Jetsons did not describe alien species and forays into space. Perhaps we will expand into space beyond our solar system. If we cannot physically travel at the speed of light or faster, then it will not greatly effect our current environment. If we do learn to physically travel faster than light, then it's effect on the future will not be predictable. Still, according to the conclusions of this work, we are very unlikely to meet any alien life forms anything like we have generally envisioned up to now. They too will be under the same evolutionary constraints as humans are and so are not going to occupy a niche that we currently know about.

It took some years to figure this out and a lot of work figuring out how to describe it in any reasonable fashion. In ways I am starting at the start, going to the end and then starting agin in the middle of the process I followed. I hope it communicates what I came up with. It's pretty unusual. Note that this description, like most of this book, is a sumamry of ideas considered at much greater length and depth elsewhere.

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I went to the edge.
Yah I stood and looked down.
Then I jumped.


It is time to consider the fourth forbidden question in science. What can science say about God? I wasn't looking for that, but this is what I found. I primarily used reason as a tool and progressed through four points.

I repeat, I just wanted to find how humans could create another stable ecology. I started with genetics, because that is what I am good with. My main conclusion was that we would need to use artificial selection to survive. Survival though, is the essence of morality. The mark of a human is that we use learned survival strategies as opposed to instincts. The strategies or moralities, are absolutely critical to human survival. It was after about 25 years of studying genetics that I really started looking at moralities. It is considered fundamental that human survival is based upon cooperation. It seemed sensible to look at what methods humans use to cooperate. The contract seemed like a good candidate. It is a formal agreement between two or more people. It includes law, marriage, social structure and many other things that are critical to human survival. Still, there going to be more to it than that, things that are more fundamental and so basic that they are almost invisible. What systems can most effectively promote cooperation? Many social systems have been based upon loyalty to the group, but that does not inherently promote cooperation. Many societies have been based upon military or social domination. They may be a well organized, but they have great internal competition. Examining all of the systems that humans use, one with different philosophy that has been historically very successful, comes to mind. That is the philosophy of Christianity that is based upon love. Rationally speaking, what could be more cooperative than a society where all people love each other?

Since this essay becomes a discussion of religion, another point will be added here. That is faith. In animals we talk about survival instinct. In humans it does still exist, but it has become much more complicated. What illustrates the importance of moral systems that people are willing to fight to the death over them. In humans, faith has become tied to intelligence. Intelligence is used to learn and understand the moral systems that are human survival strategies. It is faith, basic survival instinct, that makes humans seek out, follow, protect and husband moral systems. More than any irrational belief in some supernatural deity, religion and faith are about very rational beliefs in the associated survival strategies and communities of the religion. Almost all religions have as their most fundamental point, the importance of faith.

Examining current moralities for their survival characteristics, one has to take notice when the beliefs of major religions coincide with the most important of biological survival strategies. Then again, it can be hard to recognize what is important about religion in among their dogma and all the emotional associations. If you want understanding, be rationally aware of the emotional associations, but do not exercise them without thought.

At the time, that (love and faith) was about as far as I took my examination of morality and religion. I started on the section I referred to as the Morality Monographs. These were examinations of individual topics of moral and ethical issues such as war, marriage, education, resources, social habits, etc. Then a friend of mine convinced me to look at a topic I had not closely examined, religion. He was very angry in that he felt that religion had been politically manipulated. I think he was clearly right. He wanted religion to cease to exist. I thought it had some important functions such as the moral education it promotes. He did not see it that way. He wanted to cure the world of religion, one person in a time, preferably starting with me. That seemed a bit odd to me, because though I had been raised as a Catholic, I have never been particularly religious. I am like many people, comfortable with their early religious training, but not inclined to examine it extremely closely. I felt no need to. My friend though, can be rather pushy, so he got me to examine it some. All I really had to work with were the tools of analysis and reason I had been taught to use when examining biology. What I found, amazed me. Especially, because the answer lay in the genetics I had been studying all along. I have mentioned the three forbidden questions of science that C. D. Darlington discussed. The fourth forbidden question of science is whether science can describe God. Let me explain. My friend and I "discussed" the issue for 2 1/2 years before I reached a conclusion. It has been over a year since then and I will now try to describe the reasoning of that conclusion and its meaning. It's a little complicated, but then again, it is simple reasoning based on the facts. It is important to humans and even human survival.

----

God is an alien. Well, God is certainly not a human and so must be an alien. The question is who or what is God and what is God's intent. Then how does that matter to humans. The first question though, must be what or who is God.

If some big shiney (or maybe transparent) space ship landed next to you and some aliens popped out, you would undoubtedly be impressed. Well, I would be anyway. If they told you that they had been here billions of years ago and left some bacteria that was tailored to evolve into humans, that would make them the creators of humans. Still, that's not what we think of as a God. Humans have beliefs about what and who God is. Now if they said that they also had been watching and knew that humans would be reaching a dangerous crisis soon which they would help lead humans through, then that's a bit more like a God, but not completely. If you examine what people say and what history tells us, God is more an emotional experience than a physical or personal experience. It's a little hard to describe, but it is so. Look into it for yourself. Notably from history, we have descriptions such of Paul's encounter on the road to Damascus where he met God and was struck blind by the intensity of the encounter. There are a lot of obscure and mainstream descriptions of this being God's nature, but more importantly it is how humans think.

----

My friend made the issue rather nebulous. He hadn't thought the question through. Actually, just by the nature of negative arguements, proving that something doesn't exist is harder than proving something exists. I didn't have a lot to work with, so I looked at the MCGC, the Medieval Catholic God Concept. This is something everyone is familiar with and was basically what my friend was thinking about. The immortal, all knowing, all powerful, all loving, all forgiving, all just, infinite, King of Kings, All of All, Universe Creator God. This is the irrational "impossible God" created in responce to threat posed by the science of Copernicas and Galaleo, then reaffirmed in responce to Darwin and Huxley. But could science say anything about this God? This is the God that is described in the Bible.

---One thing the study of ancient stories has shown is that they generally contain a core of truth that doesn't greatly change much over time. In terms of the Bible, what are we looking at here? The Bible generally breaks up into three parts. Working backwards, the New Testement was about what Jesus said. Before that was the history of the ancient Jews back to the time of Moses. Much of that story was about their history, not about God, but it was a time when men talked with God. Before that was the story of Genisis as told by the Judges. No one can verify that story, but it certainly is an interesting story of the development of a planetary biosphere.

What truth can be found in that story or the other stories of creation and God from other cultures and religions? The most basic Christian description of God has a lot to do with power, rules, kingdoms and such. The story of Jesus is very different actually. It is about peoples and love. He little mentions power, even in terms of his Father.

Well, the truth is what there is in any of the ancient stories, except for one thing. The tradition that is the Bible was intentionally and systematically broken at the time of Constantine. He did it for reasons of very Earthly power, something that is very pervasive in the MCGC. If you want a description of what the Bible said, you have to look at how it was interpreted before Constantine. (Actually, further examination proved this to be largely false. The Gospels of Jesus do not seem significantly altered. Also, the "King of Kings" concept is far older than Constantine, though it looks like the kind of thing he would have added. Overall, my analysis to this point suggests that Constantine did not cause great changes to the story.) Still, what does it matter? It's all hooey anyway. Stories made up by old men and women to explain the unknown and to give hope where it was needed. Well, that's the most sensible explanation. How could this impossible God possibly exist? There is no rational possibility of souls, heaven and superior beings that look like what those stories describe. Wouldn't we know by now? Would any God make things the nasty, harsh way this world is? Especially a God known for his love. Still, it is amazing how some of the things in the Bible echo down through history so clearly, like the covenant God made with humans. It's funny though. Long before the Bible was written, the ancient Egyptians described the soul as a recorder of a person's life that was read when they died and it gave honest testimony of the person's life so that they could be judged.

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Well, I had been challenged. As I said, it is harder to support a negative arguement like Brent's that said God cannot exist. Still, is there anything in science or reason that would suggest that such a Being could or does exist? I thought about it for a couple years. I never am real fast to reach conclusions. Much to my surprise though, there is a very compelling logical arguement that God does exist. To explain this, I will offer the same train of logic I followed to reach this conclusion. The amazing thing is that it is based on the same genetic theory that is the foundation of this entire book.

***

Up to this point, I have tried to lay a foundation of the human future according to what is commonly understood. In any case, in most projections of the future, the need for artificial selection is not included. If that is included you come to a very unusual, but at the same time common, conclusion. The familiarty is the scary part. So at this point, I leave science. I offer a single point of speculation. That is emotion. I know that using artificial selection, the potentials for human health, beauty and intelligence are quite amazing. Particularly intelligence offers intellectual potentials that are far beyond what is common currently. We will be able to commonly have the problem solving capability of current computers. We can develop intuition and insight that will be beyond the capacity of the greatest intellects of the ages. There is another potential that is more important though. That is the potential of emotions. I will not claim to understand this completely, but I do know that emotion offers potentials of problem solving and communication that we cannot presently even speculate about. knowledge is so limited that we can only call it a power. Haven't you met people so emotionally powerful that they overwhelmed you? Humans are at a very primitive stage in so may ways, genetically, physically intellectually and philosophically. We will grow and develop in all these ways, but the greatest potentials will come from emotional development. If you met a person from 100,000 years in the future that had undergone artificial selection, you might notice their beauty and health, you might be awed by their intellectual abilities, but you would be overwhelmed by their emotional presence. No intellectual presence or ability you have could cope with their emotional power. It is not something that can be intellectually understood or responded to. Emotions naturally communicate, like screaming "fire". People just respond to them. This is universal. This will apply to any intelligent life form that exists. The question is what does this mean to humans. To understand the meaning of this, one must make a difficult intellectual leap based on the items presented so far. At the same time, it is not so difficult, because it is very familiar. It is a description of a beautiful, powerful, wise being with an overwhelming emotional presence that has a strong enough survival instinct called faith, to be able to survive the seductive dangers of a virtual reality. In ways it is like humans, because it is a specie that is caring and would like to share what it has achieved with others. If you met this being, it's emotional presence would be so overwhelming that no matter what any intellectional or rational responce you had, your emotions would tell you that this was a God. If they told you about their world, particularly their virtual reality, you would recognise it as heaven. The language they would speak would be memes with a voice of emotion.

In a way, that is enough conjecture. I really don't like to speculate that much and by most standards, this is far beyond the stable ecology I was looking to describe. Still, a world like Star Trek or the Jetsons is likely to be as transitory as is our own ecology. So while I won't speculate a great deal on this subject, but it is fascinating and offers a fantastic ending for my project. Really, very much speculation about Gods that may be billions of years old would be similar to an ant speculating about nuclear power plants and has been the source of so much fallacy by religions.

A final question to ask, is did these advanced beings talk to humans and are they responsible for the moral lessons that are known as religious teachings? Speculating about what the Gods have to teach us is another matter. So lets get Biblical later.

***

This is the fundemental core of the reasoning I came up with. Everything else builds on that, though this was written after almost everything else.

1. If you met a human that had was descended from a society that had used artificial selection for say 1,000,000 years (an arbitrary, nice round number, though short even in terms of biology), your emotional responce to them would that they were a God. You would experience what has been called a "peak emotional experience". Your rational mind could no more prevent that than you can prevent anger, love, joy or fear of death. Now if you know anything about religion, you know that experiencing God is an emotional experience.

1a. Humans will be able to achieve some degree of biological immortality using genetic and other technologies. It won't be a real immortality for a couple of reasons, including technical limitations, the inevitability of accidents over time and simply that humans are not psychologically designed for it. Still it will be relitive immortality. Not sure where this fits in to this, but it ultimately does.

2. Humans have already created virtual realities of great beauty, where almost anything is possible. Heck, they already have, even in the infancy of VR. Try Secondlife.com. I predict that within a relitively short time, perhaps 100 years, probably less, humans will be able to interact with with this VR with all their senses to a degree that they won't be able to distinguish it from RL (as they call it in SL) other than there will be for more potentials than RL. Further I predict that eventually people will be able to survive in VR when their biological bodies die. Like current VR, it will have sex, war, art, science and, I have come to learn, casinos and dance clubs. They will inhabit something that has traditionally been called Heaven or Nirvana or Valhalla or whatever.

3. While I have always loved reading SciFi, I have rarely written any. It is also referred to as speculative fiction, for good reason. It is speculations about the consequences and possibilities of science and various forms of technnology. Considering the age and size of this universe, it seems very highly probable that a specie very like our own did both these things I've predicted humans will do. Sure, some intelligent species have risen to use technology and then failed and gone extinct or back to using just primitive technology such as others before humans have. Making the ecological transition is likely to be hard and dangerous. Just look at humans. Still, some will make it. They will develop genetically and emotionally as I have described that humans will if they make the transition. They will have developed technologies that we haven't ever speculated about. They will be able to move their conciousness around without the physical limitations we understand. Some will become permanant eddies in the stream of entropy. They may be species that exist far longer than any species on Earth and that is already near half a billion years when you think of sharks. It seems pretty probable that they will explore beyond their planet and probably beyond their galaxy. Perhaps beyond their universe. If SL is any indication, they will create things that are simply amazing. It wouldn't be at all surprsiing if they created complex life forms that never existed before, perhaps even machine based. Perhaps they will even understand what life is.

4. My guess is that they would likely find it fascinating whenever they encountered natural life that was following the evolutionary path that they had followed so long ago. Considering human nature at least, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they decided to try to help species with the potential make the transition they made so long ago. The idea of minimal or non-interference, though makes sense for many reasons. Only clods don't understand the value of subtlty. Also, considering their emotional nature, it would be dangerous for intelligent races that were the product of natural selection to encounter them. They would be overwhelming in many ways, especially dangerously would be emotions and Virtual reality. Still, they very well might want to help them. (oh, all of this has been speculated in SciFi already, so it's not that special to me except for a couple details like genetic load) Still, for a number of reasons, I can see why they would want the "natives" to know about them to some degree. Partly it would be to offer a template for survival strategies to work with. Partly, why not? Who says that they would be immune to ego and not tell stories of their power and the beauty of the VR they lived in, though that too might be very calculated. They might be offering the natives a future that they had found, that was a stable ecology that they could survive in. Obviously there would be no point in describing the technical details, but they wouldn't be necessary in a story told to ... natives.

Anyway, those are the basic ideas I developed when trying to see if I could disprove Gods and religion. I was fascinated that the first two points seem almost unavoidable if humans retain technology. They also tie in perfectly with my main study of three decades, genetics and survival. The third point is as valid as asking if there is intelligent alien life out there. I think the probability of the third point is way over 50 - 50. Now the fourth point. That's more difficult. Certainly the SciFi writers (or readers) don't consider it that far fetched. I dunno, there is evidence it is true and evidence that it is not. I could only wildly guess the probability. I'd say under 50%, but greater than what? I don't know for sure. That only concerns me peripherally. Like any specie, I have to primarily concern myself with survival now. I certainly could not disprove religion though and found strong reasoning, based on my primary study, that Gods were very possible.

My speculations on this, to get an idea of whether a God was likely to exist and what that would mean, are at the Fourth Forbidden question. This is formed around the concepts that were more highly developed in that and if you are interested in this, then I highly recommend that you look through that. It basically says that if humans use artificial selection and virtual reality, they will come to look just like the Gods in the Bible. Because of the unavoidable need for artificial selection in technology using species, all alien species are likely to be like this. So either Gods exist or at very least, it would be an excellent description of an ecology that humans can potentially attain by themselves. If Gods exist, then they are very likely billions of years old at least, may well have created this universe to be good for life, may well be independant of time and may very well also help races like humans achieve what they have already done. Amazingly, they would also quite possibly fit the description of the Impossible God of the MCGC.

All this seems very possible and would explain the ancient stories from the time of the Pyramids. Just how did those ancient folks come up with such a cool description of my first two points, including the predictable lack of technical detail?

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