Sci-Fi Brain
Recently, I detected in myself a belief that progress was inevitable, and I mean at the scale of the human species. We are taught this in school in a round-about way, that the story of history of one of technological progress, but for me it was popular science fiction that truly underscored it, and none moreso than Star Trek, which has as its foundational narrative the idea that humanity figured out solutions to its most persistent problems. In the Star Trek universe, when humans invented warp drive and made contact with an alien species, it realized that it didn’t actually live in a fishbowl called Earth, and from there those pesky problems like poverty, tribalism, wealth inequality, just evaporated. Star Fleet is the quasi-military operation in which people work meaningful jobs in service of a higher ideology that does its best to reflect reality and adherence to truth. Some of the best episodes of Star Trek are in the Next Generation series, when some ethical issue comes up and gets adjudicated by the brass at Star Fleet, which always comes around to truth and reality in the end.
Aside from my particular exposure and belief in these ideas, this Sci-Fi brain believe that humans will continue to make progress, and that progress is always good, is present in just about everbody, more or less. It is a foundational frame in how we think about the world. I just want to point out that it doesn’t reflect reality, that it is a frame, a narrative overlay, and it is probably a harmful delusion.
The first time I was able to see this belief in myself was when Elon Musk made claims about human beings going to Mars. I simply asked the question, is that even possible? Turns out, the answer is no. In 2026, humans don’t have anything close to the technological and engineering advancements to travel in space. Quickly, we don’t have a propulsion system that is efficient enough to handle the payloads we would need to go to Mars and then come back. A mission to Mars would need to take air, food, water, fuel, and all the sundry supplies that make human life possible, but let’s say we did come up with some new technology that solved that problem. What are you going to do about radiation? What are you going to do about the need for gravity to prevent the body from atrophy? Humans are evolved to live on Earth, which is in essence just a huge fishbowl. We are evolved to live in these exact conditions, and all other conditions are entirely hostile to our existence. Earth is our fishbowl. Once you fully understand that, then it becomes clear that going to Mars is not only impossible in terms of its engineering, but it is also impossible in terms of its economics, which is precisely where my sci-fi brain took the greatest hit. Put succintly, economically, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. We have no economic motive to go to Mars. We will never have an economic motive to go to Mars.
Digressing a bit, but how about Elon Musk as the premiere salesman of sci-fi brain? I just read an blurb from a talk of his about how aging can be hacked like computer code. He’s known for pointing out that humans will have to leave Earth eventually if it doesn’t want to go extinct, which is true, as far as I know. The sun will eventually go supernova in a few billions years, I think, but again, here’s the narrative. Humans will go extince far sooner than a few billion years. Thousands is more realistic. We’re like gnats, in that cosmic deep-time sense. We are bound to flicker for a nanosecond, then die off. That’s how this works. What, then, is the point of hacking our code to give us another few decades, or even unlimited immortality? What, exactly, is the point of that? To what end?
The frame that is closest to bare metal looks something like this: Human will go extinct eventually, either by a means of our own doing, like pollution or nuclear holocaust or rogue AI or some black swan event we can’t understand or predict, or it will go extinct by an act of God, by an asteroid or comet or rogue planet slamming into us, or by supervolcano. Down to basics: anything that significantly changes our environment is going to kill us all. That is how evolutionary biology works.
Every single time humans run up against a bare metal interpretation of what is going on, it generates a narrative to frame it differently. That’s sci-fi brain. That’s all religion.