Thinking about the James Webb telescope’s peering into the origins of our universe and seeing the remnants of galaxies that began over 13 billion years ago I wonder if the species of those early galaxies survived and migrated to newer galaxies. The possibility of a xenospecies that has already tamed the powers of a galaxy and harnessed its black hole or other quantum sources for more profound complexity and travel between galactic clusters astounds me. With trillions of galaxies in the known universe all surrounding in the nets of dark energy / dark matter is even more strange and speculative.
We humans are so myopic in our little mythologies and traditions believing we were the center and circumference of some grand master of the Cosmos: God or gods. Even now we still cannot believe there exists something else because with our primitive technologies and sciences we think we should have detected something, some message written in the code of our own technical notions of universal science. Such myopia and lack of vision has always been part and parcel of our narcissistic mind-set. I doubt that will change anytime soon.
What if these beings are already observing us like we do colonies of ants? What if they are as many suggest AI best synthetic beings, syntellects that are not only long-lived but have other thoughts and notions that would make ours seem like the thing they are: portals of illusion/delusion. Possibly beings that have not contacted us because what would be the point of it all knowing that organic life is doomed to repeat itself ad infinitum without ever escaping its narrow confines of thought and desire? Maybe as some suggest these aliens are awaiting the arrival of our posthuman progeny both artificial and non-organic species.
Taking a look at the popular fictions and their narratives since the turn of the new millennia we have seen for the most part Dystopian visions of our future in film, novels, and articles. We seem to have a foreboding about our future being one of terror, horror, and chaos. Our visions of technology have become objects of external threat from Terminator gods returning from the future to destroy our civilization to the cataclysms of Climate Change overwhelming us and presenting us with Super Storms and drought, disease, migrations, wars, and collapse. When I look for positive and optimistic works, I see delusional and utopian projects of containing the worst-case scenarios but not alleviating them.
We’ve always populated the future with our pasts reminding ourselves of every failure of human history to create peace and plenty on earth and a sustaining peace. Maybe humanity cannot do this? Maybe we truly are doomed to repeat over and over our dastardly deeds of slaughter and mayhem rather than create a viable alternative for our future civilizations. Even now we fear and objectify Artificial Intelligence as if it were an enemy or a cannibalistic god in the hands of money-grubbing Capitalists who seek to oust human creativity and progress. Others ponder this and suggest that AI is a tool like any other, that it will only augment and help us to speed up the process of collecting, collating, and analyzing the masses of data that no one human nor group of humans can possibly do anymore. With trillions of zettabytes of data, we live in a glut of information that has become useless in our fight to survive as a species. But even with the help of AI to sift through all of this data we are now blocking these very tools from accessing it, closing it off in silos behind gates that have been shut by the very powers that vie for control over it. We are doomed to repeat the gestures of stupidity and greed continually at every turn even as we march forward into our own oblivion. Sadly.
I often wonder what some alien species observing this might think. Would it assume that humanity’s only enemy is humanity itself? Probably. I do.
Yet, there are those who see a future where our convergence with technology begins to reshape us and our planet, terraforming ourselves and our planetary civilization into something thriving and beyond the human nexus and into an age of converging posthumanism. One in which the faulty desires that have led humanity into illusion and delusion are stripped of their affective stupidity. One in which we become more machinic and our intelligent machines become more human. Will this come about as the Singulatarians suppose? Or will it be something quite different? How will our heritage in genetics and brain sciences coalesce to produce something new?
taken from here