April 25, 2017 • 9 mins
Humans are ill-suited to the rigors of space, but augmenting ourselves with technology may create opportunities to explore and colonize worlds beyond our own. In this episode, we experiment in such a future.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to How Staff Works. Now. I'm your host, Lauren Vogelbaum,
a researcher and writer. Here at How Stuff Works. Every
week I'm bringing you three stories from our team about
the weird and wondrous advances we've seen in science, technology,
and culture. Except when I'm not. This week, we've got
a single segment for you. Occasionally, our writers and editors
(00:22):
that now explore their questions about the future through speculative fiction.
This piece is one of those thought experiments from our
senior writer, Robert Lamb. It's about trans humanism and how
humanity might involve for space travel. But I'll let him explain.
Humanity exists in a curious place right now, suspended between
past sci fi dreams of human oriented space exploration and
(00:46):
the threshold of technological singularity and virtual worlds. How will
flesh and blood human space travel fit into the grand picture?
Interestingly enough, I keep coming back to the nineteen paper
Cyborg and Space by Manford Declins and Nathan S. Klein,
a pivotal work of futurism that coined the word cyborg
(01:07):
and explored the necessary transformation of Homo sapiens for life
beyond Earth. While space agencies have largely bypassed the paper's
vision of space ready augmented humans. The concept continues to
resonate through our culture, from our smartphones to cutting edge biotechnology,
the human experience grows increasingly interwoven with technology. In keeping
(01:29):
with Donna J. Harraway's essay a Cyborg Manifesto, more and
more of us express an openness to ideological cyborg identity,
the realization that personal identity can itself be an intentional
hybrid status, unbound by the didactic expectations of the past.
(01:50):
So come with me as we engage in a science
fictional thought experiment, a creative simulation of what an interplanetary
human race might evolve to be. Silba gazes up at
the stars from the ice plains of Jupiter's moon Europa.
(02:13):
She limits her ocular vision to a near human spectrum,
as if entering deep meditation. She dims her awareness until
everything beyond her physical body is but a whisper patrol
drones sailing over the frost plains, submarines within the darkness
of the Moon's ice locked oceans, even the perfect spirals
of orbiting satellite's fade to ghostly tingles along some distant
(02:36):
second skin, sil Will becomes a single mind within a
single body, a practice she has rehearsed and anticipation of
the end bound guest, she chenses her gazelle like spike
appendages on the ice. She stands within a one clearing
of her own, making this in turn surrounded by a
vast forest of naturally occurring ice monoliths. It was easy
(03:00):
work for this robotic body, designed as it was for
excavation and modular assembly. Yet even with her senses dulled,
she can't help but sense the incoming spacecraft's trajectory. She
piques at the manifest data for cybernetic humans and most amazingly,
a pure flesh human, the first to ever venture beyond Mars.
(03:24):
Europa's occupation is typical. Mere probes arrived in the early days,
with more enlightened robotic avatars arriving thereafter. Distant human minds
and artificial intelligences empowered the first such colonists, but cybernetic
mind states like her own came to dominate the work,
a graceful fusion of the organic and the artificial. She
(03:46):
gazes east to where Jupiter swells on the horizon, a
most impossible world. When she contemplates it substantiated by storms
and orbited by dozens upon dozens of hostile moons. This
region of the Solar System offered only desolation and cataclysm
to early humans. For all the might of their technology,
they were a fragile species. The poles and mountains of
(04:09):
their own planet were death realms. The void even less forgiving.
So they deployed mechanical myrbidons and programmed minds. They embraced
a cybernetic existence. Silver feels the impending arrival as if
(04:34):
by the phantom lamb sensations of her satellites. She refuses
to focus those perceptions, yet she cannot completely ignore them.
Excitement mounts within her mind state. Such a strange journey
to this point. Over the course of centuries, humans became
unfixed from the physical, unmoored from the limits of physical existence.
(04:56):
Cultural expectations sex and gender, or religion and nationality melts
it from the underlying form they broke free to from
chain link servitude of genetic expectation. There was a cost,
of course, one paid in blood and misery. The inevitable
seismic horrors of vast cultural transformation shook the species, risked
(05:19):
everything it had accomplished until the war is finally withered
and social unrest assumed its resting decay state. The survivors
became something beyond human, yet irrecoverably tied to the origin
(05:41):
of their accession, an interplanetary civilization grown from the seed
pod of a planetary species. Silva has processed all the
literature on the topic. She holds one of her silvery
lancelike appendages to the lights of Jupiter and the Sun.
She splits the spike into five separate digits and bends
(06:01):
them to mimic, albeit and perfectly, a human hand. It's too,
is life, a self organizing principle, emergent from the data
that came before. I am the primate and the crowd.
I am the bacterium and the circuit. Before this mission,
the necropolis of Mars stood as a testament to the
(06:24):
lost dream of human space exploration and colonization, pyramids from
another dead cosmology. Even as probes reached the Brand System
and beyond, unaugmented humans remained confined to their home world.
The most influential mind states campaigned intensely for beyond Earth
(06:44):
human presence. Every moon, our planet, and human space must
know the touch of its unmodified origin. Sylva knows there
is a vanity in such aspirations, but also a nostalgic pride.
This is what we arose from the Least we can
do is bring life to the old dreams, no matter
(07:05):
how symbolic the gesture. And so Silba gazes up from
the frigid ice. The landing module appears, at last, visible
against the stars. It takes all of her resolve to
contain her consciousness to the single body, to will herself
into a shape individual, female and humanoid, But as the
(07:27):
capsule grows closer, she can't help but expand her awareness.
She reaches out to touch the onboard life support systems.
She ignores the four augmented mind bodies aboard, each hardened
and engineered to thrive beyond Earth. She focuses instead on
the module's core, a single human, hermaphroditic and ambi racial
(07:50):
and all encompassing of the human experience. A perfect ambassador.
She feels the pulsations of its heartbeat, and glimpse is
the florid patterns of its shifting brain waves. She could
read them if she wanted, but this is sacred. The
great pear shaped module descends through Europa's then atmosphere in
(08:11):
a swirling birth call of molecular oxygen. The heartbeat quickens.
The landing invokes a vicious storm of ice, but Stilba
stands against the blast. The crystal shred away some of
her body's more delicate sensors, but these she can repair later.
Certain probe sensations slicker and die, but all she needs
(08:32):
is the here and now. When the module's door finally open,
five figures stand at the threshold and identical space suits,
but the middle figure alone radiates an importance she can
scarcely define. The visitor is both ancestor spirit and contemporary heart.
(08:53):
She raises her shining metal hand in greeting. Your name too,
is Zilva, she says, for we have birth, traveled this
fast distance to find ourselves. That's our show for this week.
(09:14):
Thank you so much for tuning in further thanks to
our segment narrator Amy Reese, our audio producer Dylan Fagan,
and our editorial liaison Allison Laddermilk. If you liked Mr
Robert Lamb's work, check out his short fiction collections on Amazon.
You can subscribe to now Now for more of the
latest science news and Hey, send us links to anything
you'd like to hear us cover. You can send us
an email at now podcast at how stuff works dot com,
(09:36):
and of course, for lots more stories like these, head
on over to our home planet, Now dot how stuff
works dot com
Welcome to How Staff Works. Now. I'm your host, Lauren Vogelbaum,
a researcher and writer. Here at How Stuff Works. Every
week I'm bringing you three stories from our team about
the weird and wondrous advances we've seen in science, technology,
and culture. Except when I'm not. This week, we've got
a single segment for you. Occasionally, our writers and editors
(00:22):
that now explore their questions about the future through speculative fiction.
This piece is one of those thought experiments from our
senior writer, Robert Lamb. It's about trans humanism and how
humanity might involve for space travel. But I'll let him explain.
Humanity exists in a curious place right now, suspended between
past sci fi dreams of human oriented space exploration and
(00:46):
the threshold of technological singularity and virtual worlds. How will
flesh and blood human space travel fit into the grand picture?
Interestingly enough, I keep coming back to the nineteen paper
Cyborg and Space by Manford Declins and Nathan S. Klein,
a pivotal work of futurism that coined the word cyborg
(01:07):
and explored the necessary transformation of Homo sapiens for life
beyond Earth. While space agencies have largely bypassed the paper's
vision of space ready augmented humans. The concept continues to
resonate through our culture, from our smartphones to cutting edge biotechnology,
the human experience grows increasingly interwoven with technology. In keeping
(01:29):
with Donna J. Harraway's essay a Cyborg Manifesto, more and
more of us express an openness to ideological cyborg identity,
the realization that personal identity can itself be an intentional
hybrid status, unbound by the didactic expectations of the past.
(01:50):
So come with me as we engage in a science
fictional thought experiment, a creative simulation of what an interplanetary
human race might evolve to be. Silba gazes up at
the stars from the ice plains of Jupiter's moon Europa.
(02:13):
She limits her ocular vision to a near human spectrum,
as if entering deep meditation. She dims her awareness until
everything beyond her physical body is but a whisper patrol
drones sailing over the frost plains, submarines within the darkness
of the Moon's ice locked oceans, even the perfect spirals
of orbiting satellite's fade to ghostly tingles along some distant
(02:36):
second skin, sil Will becomes a single mind within a
single body, a practice she has rehearsed and anticipation of
the end bound guest, she chenses her gazelle like spike
appendages on the ice. She stands within a one clearing
of her own, making this in turn surrounded by a
vast forest of naturally occurring ice monoliths. It was easy
(03:00):
work for this robotic body, designed as it was for
excavation and modular assembly. Yet even with her senses dulled,
she can't help but sense the incoming spacecraft's trajectory. She
piques at the manifest data for cybernetic humans and most amazingly,
a pure flesh human, the first to ever venture beyond Mars.
(03:24):
Europa's occupation is typical. Mere probes arrived in the early days,
with more enlightened robotic avatars arriving thereafter. Distant human minds
and artificial intelligences empowered the first such colonists, but cybernetic
mind states like her own came to dominate the work,
a graceful fusion of the organic and the artificial. She
(03:46):
gazes east to where Jupiter swells on the horizon, a
most impossible world. When she contemplates it substantiated by storms
and orbited by dozens upon dozens of hostile moons. This
region of the Solar System offered only desolation and cataclysm
to early humans. For all the might of their technology,
they were a fragile species. The poles and mountains of
(04:09):
their own planet were death realms. The void even less forgiving.
So they deployed mechanical myrbidons and programmed minds. They embraced
a cybernetic existence. Silver feels the impending arrival as if
(04:34):
by the phantom lamb sensations of her satellites. She refuses
to focus those perceptions, yet she cannot completely ignore them.
Excitement mounts within her mind state. Such a strange journey
to this point. Over the course of centuries, humans became
unfixed from the physical, unmoored from the limits of physical existence.
(04:56):
Cultural expectations sex and gender, or religion and nationality melts
it from the underlying form they broke free to from
chain link servitude of genetic expectation. There was a cost,
of course, one paid in blood and misery. The inevitable
seismic horrors of vast cultural transformation shook the species, risked
(05:19):
everything it had accomplished until the war is finally withered
and social unrest assumed its resting decay state. The survivors
became something beyond human, yet irrecoverably tied to the origin
(05:41):
of their accession, an interplanetary civilization grown from the seed
pod of a planetary species. Silva has processed all the
literature on the topic. She holds one of her silvery
lancelike appendages to the lights of Jupiter and the Sun.
She splits the spike into five separate digits and bends
(06:01):
them to mimic, albeit and perfectly, a human hand. It's too,
is life, a self organizing principle, emergent from the data
that came before. I am the primate and the crowd.
I am the bacterium and the circuit. Before this mission,
the necropolis of Mars stood as a testament to the
(06:24):
lost dream of human space exploration and colonization, pyramids from
another dead cosmology. Even as probes reached the Brand System
and beyond, unaugmented humans remained confined to their home world.
The most influential mind states campaigned intensely for beyond Earth
(06:44):
human presence. Every moon, our planet, and human space must
know the touch of its unmodified origin. Sylva knows there
is a vanity in such aspirations, but also a nostalgic pride.
This is what we arose from the Least we can
do is bring life to the old dreams, no matter
(07:05):
how symbolic the gesture. And so Silba gazes up from
the frigid ice. The landing module appears, at last, visible
against the stars. It takes all of her resolve to
contain her consciousness to the single body, to will herself
into a shape individual, female and humanoid, But as the
(07:27):
capsule grows closer, she can't help but expand her awareness.
She reaches out to touch the onboard life support systems.
She ignores the four augmented mind bodies aboard, each hardened
and engineered to thrive beyond Earth. She focuses instead on
the module's core, a single human, hermaphroditic and ambi racial
(07:50):
and all encompassing of the human experience. A perfect ambassador.
She feels the pulsations of its heartbeat, and glimpse is
the florid patterns of its shifting brain waves. She could
read them if she wanted, but this is sacred. The
great pear shaped module descends through Europa's then atmosphere in
(08:11):
a swirling birth call of molecular oxygen. The heartbeat quickens.
The landing invokes a vicious storm of ice, but Stilba
stands against the blast. The crystal shred away some of
her body's more delicate sensors, but these she can repair later.
Certain probe sensations slicker and die, but all she needs
(08:32):
is the here and now. When the module's door finally open,
five figures stand at the threshold and identical space suits,
but the middle figure alone radiates an importance she can
scarcely define. The visitor is both ancestor spirit and contemporary heart.
(08:53):
She raises her shining metal hand in greeting. Your name too,
is Zilva, she says, for we have birth, traveled this
fast distance to find ourselves. That's our show for this week.
(09:14):
Thank you so much for tuning in further thanks to
our segment narrator Amy Reese, our audio producer Dylan Fagan,
and our editorial liaison Allison Laddermilk. If you liked Mr
Robert Lamb's work, check out his short fiction collections on Amazon.
You can subscribe to now Now for more of the
latest science news and Hey, send us links to anything
you'd like to hear us cover. You can send us
an email at now podcast at how stuff works dot com,
(09:36):
and of course, for lots more stories like these, head
on over to our home planet, Now dot how stuff
works dot com
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