The Practical Guide to Conquering the Universe

By Jon Beach

Jon Beach, a biologist and entrepreneur has combined the two fields to write a truly mind-boggling book about what our future could be that is both optimistic and disturbingly apocalyptic. In an easily accessible style, Beach outlines the beginning of a revolution that will forever change the way that life on earth is organized. Many futurists have promoted the idea that we are reaching the “singularity” or a radical break with the past. But none have presented such a detailed and comprehensive blueprint for this event backed up by such a convincing array of facts. Find out such things as: • Why we are fundamentally different from all other life on earth. • What forces have driven evolution in the past and will compel future changes. • How the next tech revolution will have an even bigger impact than computers. • Why we are the species that will eventually populate the entire galaxy...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Dec 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483454061

Book preview

BEACH

Copyright © 2016 Jon Beach.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-5407-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-5406-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016910077

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 9/26/2016

Contents

Preface

Introduction

What is Life?

Life is a process

Thermodynamics helps us understand how life operates

The force behind increasing complexity is increasing randomness

What is information?

Life creates information, and information creates life

The energy accessible to power symbolic life is enormous

Life and Consciousness

Can we consciously control our future?

The path to power

The wealth of nations

Living with Leviathan

Information and energy make us what we are

The Dawn of Symbolic Life

A brief history of life

Events of the past are a guide to the future

Our lives already depend on our techno-economic host organizations

Resistance is futile

Cooperation with symbolic life is the key to conquering the universe

Our fatal flaw

As the World Turns

Reincarnation is close to being the truth

Religion can be as true as science

The evidence indicates that we are alone

The rise of the machines

Adversity makes us stronger

The traveler in the machine

Some Conclusions

Epilogue

References

Preface

Then, sitting in the library, staring at endless rows of bookshelves containing more knowledge than any person could ever assimilate, I had my eureka moment! I suddenly realized that I was sitting in the middle of a new and vastly more powerful type of gene that had freed us from the leash that tethers all other animals to their DNA. Thinking about it, I started to grasp how this made humans profoundly different from all other life and gave them undreamed-of potential.

Humans are an amazing species. We emerged from Africa just seventy thousand years ago and did something that had never been done before by any other species. In what is a blink of the eye in evolutionary time, we learned how to live in every habitat on earth and then spread relentlessly to every corner of the globe. And now we have become so dominant that we are altering the balance of nature, causing mass extinctions and changing the climate.

Surprisingly, there is no real consensus yet on how we are able to command so much power. What is it that makes us so special? Scientists have postulated that our success is due to the way we cooperate in groups. Others claim that it’s our ability to make tools that sets us apart. Most people would just say it’s simply because we’re smarter than other animals. This is all true. But it could be argued that at the root of all these attributes is our invention of language.

Our intelligence comes from the way that words allow us to name any object or concept and then create intricate structure and relationships between all of our concepts. We think in words, and without words and sentences we really wouldn’t be able to think. Animals are limited in their thoughts to just images, emotions, and instinctual drives. Animals can speak, but they can only communicate emotions such as alarm, anger, or fear. Some can learn to use tools but only in ways that can be imitated by watching what others do. Many animals also cooperate, but they can’t communicate anything more than just feelings so they can’t make any real plans. The most advanced animal cooperation by ants and bees still requires the invention of a simple language such as the dance bees use to communicate.

People are special because language has created an entire new inner world of ideas and relationships never before experienced by life. The way our minds use language to expand our understanding and awareness has been a miraculous leap into unknown worlds. And in addition, language created the first internet of life by connecting all of us and our thoughts together, so we could share and build on each other’s ideas.

Language has been the key invention that has propelled our success. But if we look deeper, we can see that it’s even more than this. Words are symbols that represent abstract ideas, and these symbols allow us to create abstract simulations of reality and store these for future use. This is how we created that wonderful thing called knowledge and became intelligent. But still, it was just the beginning. Once we had language we were able to invent writing, which allowed us to store nearly endless knowledge permanently with precise accuracy. Then we went on to invent mathematics (another powerful type of language) and the printing press and to establish libraries and universities. And just lately we have developed what may be the most powerful advances yet—computers, electronic data storage, and the Internet.

For humans, the invention of language and conquering the entire world is just the beginning. Language has expanded our awareness of ourselves and the vastness of the universe and the strangeness of our quantum existence in such a magical way that it is difficult to fully grasp. This book will try to outline the full scope of the amazing transformation that we are experiencing and give us a glimmer of the true power we possess. We have a future of endless possibilities not only in the way we will continue to expand and dominate physically but also in the way our consciousness can continue to grow and gain deeper understanding into the mysteries of reality.

To me, a Woody Allen movie called The Purple Rose of Cairo illustrates this in a beautiful way. In this movie, Mia Farrow plays a woman who escapes a drab existence and loveless marriage by going to the movies. She is shown going to the same romantic adventure movie over and over, until one day, the dashing hero of the movie, in the middle of a familiar scene, suddenly turns toward Mia Farrow’s character and says something like, Haven’t I seen you here before? As the other actors in the scene start protesting, the hero steps off the screen and introduces himself to the startled woman in the audience. While the movie is still playing, with the other actors standing around on the screen in confusion, the movie hero and the woman leave the theater together and embark on their own adventure, exploring the real world.

The woman is surprised to find that the movie hero thinks his existence in the adventure movie is a rather dull, repetitive monotony, and he is amazed and enthralled by the real world. The best line of the movie is when the movie hero tries to explain his perspective and says, It’s so magical out here.

Most of us go to the movies for escape and entertainment, and sometimes we picture ourselves as living in a larger-than-life movie world. But a movie or any other simulated or imagined reality is just a one-dimensional, static, play actor for the real thing. Even our human reality, created by our minds and projected out onto the world like a movie, cannot encompass the real thing. We go to movies for the thrills and chills of high adventure, monsters, the supernatural, or science fiction, but really nothing can match the true mystery of the actual world we live in. Our consciousness tries to create a map of reality that can make us feel comfortable with our existence and direction, but really this world our mind creates is only a hopelessly superficial and self-centered mirror of whatever lies beyond. In the deepest sense, everything really is magical out here, and we are just beginning to explore this mystical realm.

This book is optimistic in the extreme about our future, but for some people the ideas presented here might be disturbing and might seem to be antithetical to humanistic values. It confronts some uncomfortable realities head-on and is rather blunt about some scientific truths. It’s just an unvarnished factual analysis of evolution and what it means for our future. But I think the truth is the facts are the most amazing, spiritual, and magical story of all. I hope the reader will come away from this book with the same idea. I invite you to step away from the script of everyday living for a while to try to perceive the world and all its inscrutable being-ness from what is a unique and truly objective point of view.

Introduction

The truth will set you free. But first it will piss you off.

—Gloria Steinem

You may read the title and say, What a ridiculous book! But haven’t we all daydreamed from time to time about traveling to other worlds and pioneering settlements on other planets? We’ve all heard that space is the final frontier. So why not start thinking about ways to actually make it happen?

This book will show that a human conquest of the galaxy may actually be much more likely and may arrive much faster than most people expect. Religion tells us that we have dominion over the earth and all other species. In fact, we may have a much more far-ranging dominion. We are a truly unique and powerful form of life. You may look around at all the problems in society and all the suffering, poverty, and conflicts and say this isn’t true. But you would be wrong. Humans have a magically powerful tool that no other species has ever had in the history of life. This amazingly powerful tool that will likely give us command of the entire galaxy is simply called writing. This tool has been the key to all our success so far and will allow us to continue to expand on our success indefinitely and relentlessly into the future.

What is so special about writing? Many people would agree that writing was a momentous invention that was vital to the discovery and preservation of so much of our knowledge and culture. But if we compare humans to other animals, we realize that it’s really more than even this. Writing is the only other way to store information, besides DNA, that has ever been invented in the four-billion-year history of life! DNA was only recently discovered by man and has reverently been labeled the key to life and all of evolution. This molecule allows life to store and access information accumulated through eons of natural selection. But writing does the same thing as DNA, except that it does the job many times faster and enormously better! The invention of writing has fundamentally changed what we are and how our future evolution will unfold. It is the secret weapon that will make us the conquerors of the entire galaxy.

In these pages the term writing is used in a broad sense and is meant to include all forms of symbolic communication and information storage, including language and all types of modern information processing as well as simple written text. Writing to us seems like such an ordinary thing, but it is our ability to store and make accessible all the information needed to construct and operate our technology and civilization that is the underlying factor creating mankind’s current success. The word writing is used here as a label for all advanced forms of information storage because text was the first breakthrough that enabled accurate storage of information in some form other than DNA. This initial breakthrough has blossomed into an accelerating trend toward the creation of increasingly powerful information processing and storage that is impacting all life on earth. It is now becoming evident that symbolically stored information will be the basis for an evolutionary expansion so vast and far-reaching that it will seem as if life really only began with this remarkable invention.

We are marching ahead toward domination of the earth and beyond. The only trouble is that we, as human beings, are probably not completely in control of our own destiny. Writing allows us to discover and store vast amounts of new information, but as we will see, discovering and implementing new information is an evolutionary process. Our future is determined by how this process of evolution unfolds, but unfortunately, a species can’t consciously plan the direction of its own evolution. We can decide what we do with our individual lives, but the direction we take collectively as a species is beyond our control. This is a fundamental and indisputable fact of evolution, and we are just as constrained by the forces of evolution as are any other living beings.

As Darwin pointed out, evolution is a process whereby all individuals struggle to survive and reproduce, but it is fitness that determines the outcome. All the different characteristics of individuals of a species and the choices that they make merely provide the raw material of variability that evolution works on. An essential trait for any individual is the belief that his way is the best and that he deserves to prosper. People provide different options through their abilities and choices in the belief that they are right. They do their best to fulfill their dreams, but it is some higher authority, embodied in the structure of physical reality, that makes the final determination of what will survive and prosper and what won’t. All life is subject to this basic law of nature.

Individuals by themselves can’t control the future, but they are still the agents of change. Evolution is a lot like voting. No national election has ever been decided by one vote, so an individual could rightly say that his vote will never really make a difference. But if everybody said that, there could be no elections. With voting, it seems that one person can’t make a difference but together we actually make all the difference. It’s the same with evolution. It operates only on what we do collectively, but we still need to make all our individual decisions in order for it to work However, unlike voting, evolution is nonlinear, so a tiny individual action or decision can also sometimes mushroom into a historical, world-changing event. Though we may not ever even realize it, a single individual choice could have a huge impact on the future. We may not be able to consciously plan and control our future, but still, what we do is the determining factor in creating it.

Most people think that our future is guided by what we decide to do or maybe by decisions or plans that our leaders make. This book should convince you that our future will be determined by an autonomous evolutionary process. But both are really true. We cannot plan evolution, but evolution cannot operate without our plans. The trick for us is to find the right answers that lead to the successful evolutionary path. We will conquer the galaxy—but only if we learn to harness the power of evolution and incorporate it into our plans instead of trying to thwart it or ignore its effect.

So what are some of the forces of evolution and characteristics of reality that will propel us toward this expansion and conquest? How will evolution determine what direction we take in the future? How can we nudge it toward a favorable outcome? Not many people have ever considered these questions from a strictly evolutionary perspective. We consider things that will affect our immediate well-being all the time and make choices that change our future. But these decisions are based on personal, short-term considerations, such as what will makes us happy, or wealthy, or maybe more accepted and respected in our community. We seldom take actions based on what the consequences will be thousands or millions of years in the future or even consider what will happen a few generations from now.

In fact, we seldom consider evolution at all in our daily decisions. Humans are still instinctual animals in this sense. Evolution shapes our emotions, drives, and attitudes, which determine our actions. Then our actions lead to success or failure in reproduction, which determines what characteristics future people will have. But this trail of causation seldom enters our thoughts. Like all animals, we just live according to how our emotions and attitudes tell us to.

This book will depart from the norm and look at what our choices may portend for our descendants in the more distant future. Our evolutionary path has always seemed so remote and of no real concern to us as individuals with such short life spans. But now that technology has increased the rate of change to an unprecedented pace, and advances in biotech have the potential to speed up the rate of our biological evolution to the same extent, it seems that the future may arrive a lot sooner than we expected. And the choices we make now could have a profound influence on what happens to us, just as the trajectory of previous lives have determined how we live now. No individual or group of individuals is able to dictate what will be our destiny, but our choices are still instrumental in providing the possibilities. This book tries to construct a vision and roadmap of the vast opportunities that lie ahead in our amazing future and maybe help us to reach it a little sooner. Conquering the galaxy will be an evolutionary process, so this