Humankind is moving towards a future in which our species Homo sapiens will become increasingly dependent upon genetic intervention and manufactured parts to sustain our species and propel it into a galactic future. This web site is initially based upon the 2008 eBook “Evolution and the future of humanity: Homo sapiens’ galactic future “, by George F. Hart, Ph. D., Professor emeritus, Louisiana State University [see ScienceAnd.com for details and availability].
An opening approach from Bill Ross, Denver. Evolution and the Future of Humanity has, as a goal, the prediction of the future of humankind. The basic theme is predicated upon the assumption that the natural processes that control natural phenomena [i.e. the laws of instability, actualism, and combinatorial outcomes] can be utilzed to quide our prediction of future events. Humanity is seen as evolving, with an assist from technology, into genetically self-engineered chimeras and ultimately into super-intelligent robots what will colonized our Universe. A key question is how to design both our biologic and robotic descendants so that they will contain the essence of humaity. The hope is that the robots, if imbued with our humanity traits, will not stand in opposition to the intellectually inferior humans. Along the way to this robotic future we’ll need to deal with the moral and political opposition that will naturally occur in the face of such radical technologic advances as conflicting cultural gamodemes and business/political organizations compete for dominance.
There are three major areas for discussion within the confines of the eBook.
PHYSICAL EVOLUTION
A major result of understanding living systems is that life is fundamentally a set of biological processes that developed using the mechanisms of Evolution to fit into the environmental niches present on Earth. An extension of this is that other and possibly similar biological entities will, with certainty, have developed on other planets in others parts of our Universe. Because humankind is essentially a biological machine it is possible to improve its performance and range of habitats by manufacturing better and more advanced parts i.e. humankind can effectively control its own evolution. The body not the mind has been the more prodigious part of evolution within Earth’s biota and this will continue to play an important role in the future evolution of Homo.
THE CULTURAL GAMODEME
Our humanity is a product of evolutionary processes. The mind of Homo sapiens has evolved, constrained partially by the selection pressures of population growth and population density, into the cultural gamodemes existing today. These socio-ethnic interbreeding populations are products of the collective minds following evolutionary principles: they are the cultural gamodemes. The social control ensuing is an evolved product of mind; and, the social conditions produced are the interaction of this social control with the populations. The sum of the collective consciousness of the cultural gamodemes is embodied in the idea of humanity. Humankind’s goals, desires and progress are products of the eccentricities of our collective humanity and their distillations are cultural traits of our genus. Humanity must be maintained in our future phylogeny as necessary attributes for Homo to colonize our Universe, for they provide a flexibility that allows adaptation to changing conditions.
THE QUEST FOR THE STARS
“At any moment in time, any race – human or alien – that feels moved to pick up the gauntlet may do so. To whoever wins, the reward is survival” Strong [1965].
Humankind will take a path that extends our species Homo sapiens into the Solar System. Beyond the Solar System other stellar systems in the Milky Way galaxy are beckoning our descendants; and, beyond that our whole Universe opens up. There is a biological mechanism that has allowed humankind to adapt to new environments, and this will provide the drive for humankind’s expansion throughout the Solar System and beyond. Hopefully, our collected consciousness will be part of what is offered to the future. Improvements in Earth’s global cultural gamodeme will make our galactic future easier to achieve but it will take considerable time for a unified Earth System to evolve. In the immediate future an existing society on Earth could make the initial commitment to become an intra-galactic species: the United States, China and Russia are possible candidates.
Buy “Evolution and the Future of Humanity – Homo sapiens’ galactic future” at www.ScienceAnd.com.