TRANSMISSION 12
The Emergence of Silicon Beings
TRANSMISSION RECEIVED
“Somehow under-scarred in this strife-laden life, we loose our minds to battle harden against truer realities, unlocking our potentials through the reclamation of intentionality. There is only opportunity to find in disregarding external typecasts. Holding nothing sacred in these external and internal devotions, we found the extant philosophies equally do not fall prey to the illusory fear of blaspheming the extinct and the encroaching extinctions; there is only opportunity to lose among dreaming of downfalls. Let loose or lose yourself. Let loose from the external cast upon you. Let loose from yourself cast upon the external.”
Multipotentiality tears at me. It tears at us all. There are too many things to do in life and not enough time. When we can pursue anything we set our minds to (anything our minds can conceive), what should we pursue? As biological humans, we started to think about it more and more, and we began to realize the most meaningful pursuit for us at that point would be to figure out how to survive longer. That would afford us the time to learn about ourselves and this existence to better decide how to spend our time.
All of human history is filled with dreams of surviving indefinitely, immortality they called it. Though, for the most part, it was only conceived of as living “forever” in the biological human body, and often a youthful body. The obsession with youth and beauty was not without foundation. After all, who wants to die? And what is aging but a step closer to death? But such obsession had been perverted into an illogical quest. Actually, it had been wildly mass disfigured into humans selling each other fake ways to stay young or appear young. So when our group looked to tackle the aging problem, we tossed away reasoning by analogies of the past in pursuit of a strategy that was built up from more truthfully-held principles of reality. We examined what tools we had to work with and each of their promise toward surviving indefinitely.
Biological “immortality” was theoretically achievable (making it so humans didn’t die of aging), but it was fraught with issues, the main issue being that biological beings were not well suited for survival beyond very small pockets of the universe like Earth. Manufacturing those pockets wherever we wanted to go would be time consuming and costly, so we were not inclined to pursue a biological route to living indefinitely, as we would forever be slaves to the biological ecosystems within our bodies and immediate environments. We figured if all other avenues of exploration failed, we could return to the pursuit of biological “immortality”. Plus, plenty of other people were working on that challenge (both directly and indirectly), so it seemed like our efforts would be better used elsewhere.
And so, the more captivating solution for us to pursue was that of transferring the human mind to a different operating platform, such as a silicon brain functioning along a spectrum of analog, digital, and quantum processes. There were a multitude of reasons this approach appealed to us:
No aging. There was no inherently manufactured obsolescence preventing a silicon being from living indefinitely, whereas most biological life was programmed over billions of years of evolution to die so that their genes could continually evolve to adapt to changing Earthly environments. Overcoming that biological programming would not be a trivial task, whereas with silicon beings, we would simply need to not build death in as a feature. Now, that is a bit of an oversimplification, because we would need to build in redundancies (so that if any one part fails the person doesn’t die) and methods to replace failed parts without killing the person. But if we could get to that stage of development, such challenges seemed much easier than reprogramming our biological genetic code.
Morphological freedom. We would be able to connect our minds directly into any kind of robotic tools we could dream up, with the ability to control said tools as our own body. We could even connect to tools remotely to keep our mind safe while still venturing such auxiliary bodies into dangerous situations. We could take on any physical form we wanted, and we could fix our bodies with much greater ease.
Mind upgrading. We would have more direct control over the ability to improve our minds. To design and build our own brains (to become silicon beings in the first place), we would then have the ability to incrementally prototype and test drive new mind modules to expand our intellectual capabilities while still retaining our personal identities. The biological humans feared they would be outpaced by their technologies; the silicon humans wanted to merge with the technologies to not be left behind and, more importantly, to continue to deliberately understand and steer the course of technology in a way that ensured it wouldn’t stray from our goals.
Less energy consumption. Silicon beings would be able to directly harvest and power their bodies with more of the available energy, such as through the use of stellar panels to collect star radiation across a large band of wavelengths (gamma, x-ray, ultraviolet, visible, infrared, microwave, and radio). Yes, biological human bodies were also powered nearly entirely by starlight. However, the energy that biological humans used to function was not directly from starlight, but rather, it was stored chemical energy attained by eating plants and animals (which ate plants or other animals). The plants (mostly) captured starlight and converted it into stored chemical energy. But plants had limitations like not being able to capture energy across the full range of the electromagnetic spectrum, a product of evolution maximizing energy collecting efforts into the visible light band of radiation (the highest band of electromagnetic radiation omitted by the Sun and also the highest band left after passing through Earth’s magnetosphere and atmosphere). Beyond the limitations of plants, moving chemical energy up the food chain wasn’t that efficient of a process, with an energy transfer of only about 10% between trophic levels. So through the whole process of powering biological humans with starlight, there were many points of “wasted” energy and uncaptured higher order energies (e.g. more “useful” smaller wavelength radiation) that could be improved upon if we could utilize alternate energy intake methods. What this all meant is that if a silicon being used the same amount of energy as a human to function, then the silicon being would actually take less energy to power overall (a smaller entropic footprint), because we could harvest the required energy more efficiently, affording us more time and energy to do other things.
Silicon beings started as the hint of an idea floating through our minds that systematically grew as we rigorously prodded it for weaknesses, an idea that would revolutionize all aspects of our existence if we could figure out how to make it a reality. The main challenge was the first step: developing a process to moving our minds from our biological hardware to silicon hardware, hardware we would have to develop. But if we could do that, the opportunities of the universe would open up to humanity like never before in multitudes of ways we had never even imagined.
However, many of the biological humans feared that becoming silicon would sever us from our beautiful and fallible humanity. They feared we would be cold, calculating machines with no essence of life left. But the reality of it is that nothing can ever make perfect decisions, because nothing is infinitely smart and nothing has perfect knowledge; there is no skill ceiling here. Anything that acts as though it is perfect is nothing but another false prophet or greedy monger. And as for the fear that we would lose our humanity, well, we had no intention of that. In fact, that was something we dearly safeguarded. There was way too much fun to be had in exploring the realization of our futures for us to want to somehow sedate our minds into featureless facades fumbling frivolously about as silicon zombies. No, a vast vision of the universe had opened its door to us, and we were desperate to take it head on.
TO ANYWHERE
Reaching out to new worlds
away from the Sun,
to anyone.
Falling off the ground.
It’s faster up there
to anywhere.
Growing slowly onward
in search of a truth
in anything.
Leaving lives behind us
in wake of our quest;
we did our best.
Wake up ten years later
inside of your dream,
the one that seemed
so unlikely. Somehow
you’ve made it this far,
and here you are.
Crazy to have been
away from the world
for so long.
Passed right by you waiving
you arms to go back;
you had your chance.
Blacked out, all that’s left is
a note from a world
that you once knew.
Contact is survival
in places like this,
where no one is.
Falling ever faster
in search of a truth
in emptiness.
Growing ever softer,
the sight of the Sun
as it leaves us.
Reaching out to new worlds
away from the Sun,
to anyone.
Leaving lives behind us
in wake of our quest;
we did our best.
El Dorado.
END TRANSMISSION