George Dyson asks:

Are we learning to manipulate life or is life learning to manipulate us?

A plausible scenario for how we arrived at life as we know it is that primitive organisms were infected by self-replicating parasites, learned to adopt those self-replicating processes, and became eukaryotic cells. Now, our still-primitive life-forms have again been invaded by self-replicating parasites (a network of code-consuming and code-spewing microprocessors) and life will, once again, adopt these self-replicating processes, on its own terms, for its own ends (with our help). Life (and evolution) as we know it will never be the same.

- Link to Constructive Biology

I live in nothing but awe of such concepts as these. Assuming that humankind survives the next couple of hundred years with our technological capacities intact, it would be naive to suggest that we are not now living the final evening of the homo sapien. The process of evolution is so over arching that once technology is factored into its mix the entire history of mankind becomes a mere homage to those first "primitive organisms ... infected by self-replicating parasites". But which way around is one best to view the dawn of this new (imagined) age?

Perhaps our anthropic arrogance is the only thing which can truly stop us from destroying ourselves. Perhaps it is not technology which has infected us - its parasite sustaining host - perhaps it is us who have infected the universe, manipulating fundamental evolutionary forces to our own ends. What too is to come of every ounce of our culture, our literature, our art, our historical knowledge, if in the final instance we will seem as if self-replicating amoeba to the hyperaware digital beings set to inherit 'our' universe?

What I suppose I am saying is... Can humanity assume any control over the future of its species; of all species? Will the rise of the next stage of life come at a cost to our heritage or is all our history merely an irrelevant shimmer on the surface of this reality?

I welcome the supersedence of organic life, and in doing so I beckon the destruction of everything it is I live for each day of this oxymoronic existence. How can we justify the continued emergence of complexity when its very being will leave us as nothing but evolutionary whale food?

Categories: Science, Life, Nature, Evolution, Ideas, Reality, Human, Future, Technology, Biology, Simulacrum, Universe, Utopia, Singularity

Archived Link