Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction

by Newitz, Annalee

  One of Ginsberg’s most memorable design projects is called “pollution sensing lung tumor.” It’s a sculpture of a pair of human lungs, made entirely out of sparkling red crystals. It comes from one of Ginsberg’s scenarios for a synbio future in which the environment is full of materials made out of biological components. One material might be a pollution sensor made from thin crystalline sheets of carbon monoxide–sensing bacteria. What if some of those biological components got loose, and started spreading in the air or water supplies? These bacterial sensors might enter the lungs of a smoker, proliferating there because of all the “pollution” they discover. Suddenly, instead of a bacterial infection that gives you a cough, you’ve got an infection that builds crystal sensors in your respiratory tract. The crystalline structure Ginsberg created, which at first appears to be a pair of lungs, actually represents a tumor that has been removed from a woman’s body.

  Ginsberg got the idea for this project after seeing plans for such sensors, as well as for materials like the self-healing concrete I described in chapter 18. Ultimately, her concern mirrored Anderson’s. We might create synbio organisms with the best of intentions, but end up modifying humans in ways that make them sick or “grossly broken,” as Anderson put it. At the same time, Ginsberg strongly advocated against “viewing nature as a fixed thing.” Looking out the window at the busy street, she pondered out loud: “Maybe it’s ethical to disrupt nature after all. It’s just that there are so many questions that we don’t know answers to. I don’t know whether we can ever actually think it over enough to do it well.”

  Though neither Anderson nor Ginsberg could imagine humans modifying themselves successfully, science-fiction writers have no trouble imagining this at all. We already explored Octavia Butler’s vision of a transformed humanity in her novels, and she’s not the only one. The British author Paul McAuley has suggested in recent novels like The Quiet War that humans will modify themselves as they colonize the solar system. He imagines a war between the Inners, people like Ginsberg from the inner solar system who think it’s morally reprehensible to modify their germ lines, and the Outers, people who have genetically modified themselves to adapt to life on the moons of Jupiter and beyond. McAuley began his career as a botanist at Oxford, and his background as a scientist informs his work. He told me how he thinks future humans might justify doing the human genetic experiments Anderson said “nobody would go for.” It all comes down to necessity. The Outers, he told me,

  developed the [genetic] tweaks during or immediately after the political crisis that forced them to flee Earth’s Moon for the Jupiter and Saturn systems; that is, the work was performed under conditions where lifeboat ethics applied. The same kind of desperation, albeit to a much lesser degree, that drives people suffering mortal illnesses to seek out experimental treatments. Do or die. This may explain the lack of social outrage, or the so-called “yuck” factor, in the Outer communities.

  Ultimately, McAuley imagines that one possible reason we might start modifying ourselves will be because we have no other choice. We’re likely to die in space anyway, so we might as well try something extreme.

  Kim Stanley Robinson, another science-fiction author whose work deals with how humans will modify themselves to colonize space, told me that humans will get over the “yuck” factor as soon as we have decent longevity treatments. Once synbio researchers figure out a way to prolong human life, Robinson believes, people will be willing to experiment with their germ lines to create future humans who live for hundreds of years. And once we’ve done that, the floodgates will open. We’ll see humans changing their bodies more radically. We might shrink ourselves into smaller creatures so that we consume fewer resources, or modify our DNA to repair itself after radiation damage in space.

  It’s tempting to say that scientists have the right answers here, and that the science-fiction writers are just engaging in rank speculation. But scientists have a duty to deal with strictly present-day scientific knowledge, not futuristic predictions. Sometimes it takes someone who isn’t involved in the day-to-day responsibilities of scientific work to see where today’s research is truly leading.

  Getting Rid of Our Bodies

  Synbio intervention into evolution may strike us as morally problematic, but it’s a plausible outcome of today’s research. Still, there are many other possible ways humanity might evolve. A group at the Oxford Martin School—where we visited a group of visionary geoengineers in chapter 19—thinks the future belongs to machines. The philosophers who make up the Future of Humanity Institute reside in a set of offices loosely clumped near a meeting room full of conference tables, a wall-sized whiteboard, a coffeemaker, and boxes of slightly odd Scandinavian sweets. Their goal is to explore existential threats to humanity, or extinction-causing events, including many of the dangers we’ve already discussed in this book. But their biggest concern is the possibility that we may be wiped out by “machine superintelligence,” or artificially intelligent computers (AI) that essentially take over the world.

  Nick Bostrom heads the institute, where he’s written widely cited articles about everything from human genetic enhancement to existential threats and what he calls “the intelligence explosion.” A Swedish ethicist with closely cropped hair and a perpetually serious expression, Bostrom welcomed me into a spartan office whose windows overlook the courtyard where it’s said J. R. R. Tolkien wrote The Hobbit. When I asked him about humanity’s future, he wanted to get one thing straight right away. If humanity survives, he believes, it’s inevitable that we will pass through an “intelligence explosion” during the next century or two in which we will invent machines with greater-than-human intelligence. Other thinkers have called this event the “Singularity.” These machines will either wipe us out or help us create a future so unlike the present that we can hardly imagine it. But why is it inevitable that we’ll invent AI? “It’s one of those technologies that it’s hard to refrain from developing if we can,” he said. “All the steps up to it have obvious uses. We want better search algorithms, better recommendations from Amazon, and automatic fraud detection. We also want to understand the human brain, for both scientific and medical reasons. It seems hard to imagine how that would stop short of a global cataclysmic event.”

  What Bostrom and his colleagues predict is that at some point humans will put together an advanced knowledge of the human brain with the “smart” algorithms that already power services like Google and predictive programs like the ones we’ve seen modeling epidemics and natural disasters. The result, he believes, will be a machine like a human brain with the processing power and memory of an enormous cluster of computers.

  Imagine a brain that could process nearly unlimited information and use it to predict possible outcomes to problems and advance scientific knowledge. If such a thing existed, it would dramatically transform humanity—and our relationship to outer space. Bostom put it to me this way. Given that humans are the apex species on the planet due to intelligence, it seems likely that if we invented something with superhuman intelligence it would best us. The question is how, exactly, this besting would occur. Would it become our friendly intellectual older sibling, helping humans to stop pandemics, design the perfect space elevator, and gain superintelligence of our own? Or would it consider humans a bother, the way we do ants? In the latter case, it’s possible the machine’s “fatal indifference” to humanity would end our species forever. It might just kill us accidentally, as it went about its incomprehensibly advanced business.

  Assuming we do make it through the intelligence explosion intact, however, Bostrom and his colleagues have a few ideas about what might happen to humanity. Most important to their scenarios is the idea of “uploading,” or turning our brains into software on computers. Our minds could be transferred into virtual worlds, where we would have incredible adventures and expand our consciousness to include the whole of human knowledge. When our bodies died, our uploaded minds would live on—and maybe get downloaded into new bodies.
We could also make many virtual copies of ourselves, which is a particularly weird idea that would make perfect sense in a world where you could upload your brain anytime you wanted. Why not save yourself as an upload at different times, the way you do with avatars in a video game, so that you could revert to an older copy if something horrible happened that you’d rather forget? Uploads would completely change our relationships to our bodies and identities, as we easily slid between virtual and biological existence.

  Because Bostrom believes this future of superintelligence and uploads is inevitable, he’s convinced that we won’t go to space at all. We won’t want to. Instead, we’ll convert all of outer space into a giant computer running all our uploads in a vast virtual world. His idea hinges on the notion that nobody would want to live in reality anymore when they could upload themselves into a virtual world of plenitude and mental transcendence. So instead of exploring outer space in fantastical vessels, we’d use robots to dismantle every object in space, from planets and asteroids to suns and black holes. Then we’d convert these massive bodies’ every molecule into a giant supercomputer where our uploaded brains could expand forever. In essence, we’d use our superintelligence to convert all of outer space into a vast virtual space for our minds.

  What would this look like? Bostrom said, “There’s an image I have in my mind of … a growing sphere, a bubble of technological infrastructure with Earth at the center. It’s growing in all directions at the speed of light.” This growing sphere would be a machine that was converting all matter in the universe into what Bostrom calls “computational substrates,” or computers powerful enough to run a simulation that would satisfy machine superintelligences. In a sense, it would be like paving over the universe with our computers. “Most likely, everybody would live in virtual reality, or some abstract reality,” Bostrom concluded. Space would be ours, but only because we converted every piece of matter into our high-tech brain farm.

  But, to continue the paving analogy for a moment, what if there was life using some of that matter in the universe? Wouldn’t we be destroying it to build our virtual world? Bostrom is unperturbed by this possibility. “My guess is that our observable universe doesn’t contain intelligence, so we don’t need to worry about taking matter away from them.” His main concern is what’s going on inside that sphere of technology he imagined hurtling out of the Earth. What if it were a version of the Windows operating system, but with superintelligence? In a dark scenario, “we might all be paperclips or calculating pi to millions of decimals,” he mused. But in a brighter one, we might be liberated from our bodies, evolving beyond death in a virtual world of our own devising. We’d have become beings who explore inner space rather than outer space.

  One of Bostrom’s colleagues at the institute, Anders Sandberg, was less certain that our future would be purely virtual. A gregarious man who loves science fiction, he talked just as eagerly about role-playing video games as he did about the medallion around his neck that contains instructions on how to freeze his head cryogenically in the event of his death. Sandberg shares Bostrom’s belief in the intelligence explosion, allowing, however, that we might venture into outer space afterwards. But, he asserted, “having a biological body in space is stupid in many ways.” He suggested we might become more like cyborgs, mechanical creatures controlled by uploaded human brains. This would protect us from radiation damage, the need for food, and many other tribulations of space travel and colonization. “Uploading is just a more flexible way of living,” Sandberg explained. He suggested that we might solve the problem of how long it takes to travel in space by loading the crews’ brains into software for the decades or centuries it would take to reach their destination. Once the ship arrived, those brains would be downloaded into whatever bodies might suit the planet where we arrived. Maybe those bodies would be part technological and part biological. Or they might be biological forms ideally suited for life on a world like Titan, with methane gas for atmosphere.

  Excitedly mulling over our future bodies, Sandberg pointed out that living part time as software might ensure humanity’s long-term survival in other ways. It could keep humanity safe from a pandemic, for example. “It’s also about enhancing adults,” he pointed out. “It’s ethically less problematic than genetically engineering our children.” So turning into machines, losing our bodies forever, may cause fewer moral quandaries than modifying our genes but keeping our bodies.

  Evolution Stops for No One

  Even if we don’t genetically alter or upload ourselves, we will nevertheless evolve into a different sort of creature in the next million years. Many evolutionary biologists believe that humans are still evolving. The University of Chicago geneticist Bruce Lahn has demonstrated that some of our genes, like those controlling brain size, appear to be undergoing very rapid selection. And researchers in Finland have pored over the family histories recorded in a Finnish village church, and discovered clear patterns of natural and sexual selection emerging over a period of centuries among the locals. When I spoke to Oana Marcu, a SETI Institute biologist who researches how life first evolved, she emphasized strongly that we aren’t the end results of billions of years of evolution. We are still in the middle of an evolutionary journey, with many changes ahead of us.

  When we begin heading out into space, evolutionary pressures will select for humans best able to survive in our new environments. If there’s one thing we know for sure about evolution, it’s that a change in environment often leads to dramatic changes for species. It also leads to speciation. If humans spread out to many planets and moons, those groups may begin to diverge genetically after millennia have passed. No matter what scenario you think is most likely—synbio, uploads, or natural selection—our progeny may look nothing like us. But they will still be part of humanity, and they will carry in them our profound, seemingly unquenchable urge to explore new environments and adapt to them as best we can.

  23. ON TITAN’S BEACH

  ONE MILLION YEARS ago, our ancestors thought it was pretty fantastic to have fire and flake tools. One million years from today, humans could be living in lakefront communities on Saturn’s moon Titan, using technologies that make our rocket fuels and supercomputers look like a Homo erectus tool kit. Astronomers often point to Titan for possible colonization because it has a thick atmosphere that could offer us some of the protection from radiation that Earth’s does. Plus, it has weather very much like Earth’s, with seasonal rains and snows. On Titan, there are beaches full of dunes, shimmering great lakes, and the occasional volcano. Except that the volcanoes erupt with ice and the lakes are made of methane. The spring showers are methane, too. In short, it’s a place that would freeze and poison any human on Earth today. But what if, in a million years, we’d engineered humans to survive there? Maybe they would be fitted with lung implants that could convert local gases to a mix that would oxygenate their blood. They might be uploads running robotic exoskeletons, or biological beings built from genetic parts that allowed them to thrive in Titan’s atmosphere. Or they might have terraformed the moon to suit human bodies.

  If our progeny do make it that far, it will be because humanity has chosen exploration over warfare often enough that we’ve managed to work together as a planet on several large projects. One of those projects would be pushing our species off this rock, scattering us through the solar system. This project is important for reasons that go beyond how great it would be to fly through Saturn’s rings. It’s also important as a long-term human goal because most of the steps that lead to its realization will take us down the pathway of survival rather than death.

  In this image taken by the international space probe Cassini, we got our first glimpse of the ethane and methane lakes surrounded by sand dunes on the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan. (illustration credit ill.20)

  Planning for Life Beyond Earth

  “Our kids are the last generation who will see no city lights on the Moon,” the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab’s Randii Wessen told me when
we talked about the economic feasibility of space travel. Though his prediction isn’t outside the realm of possibility, we should also think pragmatically about the path to space. Wessen’s colleague the atmospheric physicist Armin Kleinboehl is far more conservative in his estimates of when humans might live beyond Earth. Kleinboehl studies Martian weather via the Martian Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), a craft that has been photographing and analyzing the Martian surface from orbit since 2006. When we met, he showed me some MRO images of dust storms that periodically envelop all of Mars, making it even colder than it is normally. When I asked Kleinboehl what he thought the timeline might be for a Mars colony, he frowned and glanced over at a video simulation of Martian weather. “It won’t be attractive for at least five hundred years,” he said finally. “It’s not very hospitable.” When I asked about terraforming, Kleinboehl conceded that that was one way Mars might eventually become habitable. Perhaps we could cultivate plants or bacteria on Mars that photosynthesize, pop out free oxygen, and change the environment.