1
00:00:01,120 --> 00:00:03,920
Speaker 1: Welcome to How Staff Works. Now. I'm your host, Lauren Vogelbaum,

2
00:00:04,000 --> 00:00:10,360
Speaker 1: a researcher and writer. Here at How Stuff Works. Every

3
00:00:10,360 --> 00:00:12,720
Speaker 1: week I'm bringing you three stories from our team about

4
00:00:12,720 --> 00:00:15,800
Speaker 1: the weird and wondrous advances we've seen in science, technology,

5
00:00:15,840 --> 00:00:19,200
Speaker 1: and culture. Except when I'm not. This week, we've got

6
00:00:19,239 --> 00:00:22,560
Speaker 1: a single segment for you. Occasionally, our writers and editors

7
00:00:22,560 --> 00:00:25,960
Speaker 1: that now explore their questions about the future through speculative fiction.

8
00:00:26,400 --> 00:00:28,880
Speaker 1: This piece is one of those thought experiments from our

9
00:00:29,000 --> 00:00:32,199
Speaker 1: senior writer, Robert Lamb. It's about trans humanism and how

10
00:00:32,280 --> 00:00:36,080
Speaker 1: humanity might involve for space travel. But I'll let him explain.

11
00:00:39,000 --> 00:00:42,280
Speaker 1: Humanity exists in a curious place right now, suspended between

12
00:00:42,320 --> 00:00:46,280
Speaker 1: past sci fi dreams of human oriented space exploration and

13
00:00:46,320 --> 00:00:51,200
Speaker 1: the threshold of technological singularity and virtual worlds. How will

14
00:00:51,240 --> 00:00:55,040
Speaker 1: flesh and blood human space travel fit into the grand picture?

15
00:00:55,320 --> 00:00:59,000
Speaker 1: Interestingly enough, I keep coming back to the nineteen paper

16
00:00:59,280 --> 00:01:03,000
Speaker 1: Cyborg and Space by Manford Declins and Nathan S. Klein,

17
00:01:03,320 --> 00:01:06,759
Speaker 1: a pivotal work of futurism that coined the word cyborg

18
00:01:07,040 --> 00:01:11,160
Speaker 1: and explored the necessary transformation of Homo sapiens for life

19
00:01:11,160 --> 00:01:15,319
Speaker 1: beyond Earth. While space agencies have largely bypassed the paper's

20
00:01:15,400 --> 00:01:19,600
Speaker 1: vision of space ready augmented humans. The concept continues to

21
00:01:19,640 --> 00:01:24,280
Speaker 1: resonate through our culture, from our smartphones to cutting edge biotechnology,

22
00:01:24,560 --> 00:01:29,720
Speaker 1: the human experience grows increasingly interwoven with technology. In keeping

23
00:01:29,760 --> 00:01:35,200
Speaker 1: with Donna J. Harraway's essay a Cyborg Manifesto, more and

24
00:01:35,280 --> 00:01:39,920
Speaker 1: more of us express an openness to ideological cyborg identity,

25
00:01:40,200 --> 00:01:44,440
Speaker 1: the realization that personal identity can itself be an intentional

26
00:01:44,720 --> 00:01:49,520
Speaker 1: hybrid status, unbound by the didactic expectations of the past.

27
00:01:50,280 --> 00:01:52,760
Speaker 1: So come with me as we engage in a science

28
00:01:52,800 --> 00:01:57,400
Speaker 1: fictional thought experiment, a creative simulation of what an interplanetary

29
00:01:57,520 --> 00:02:10,000
Speaker 1: human race might evolve to be. Silba gazes up at

30
00:02:10,040 --> 00:02:12,800
Speaker 1: the stars from the ice plains of Jupiter's moon Europa.

31
00:02:13,720 --> 00:02:17,440
Speaker 1: She limits her ocular vision to a near human spectrum,

32
00:02:17,480 --> 00:02:20,799
Speaker 1: as if entering deep meditation. She dims her awareness until

33
00:02:20,840 --> 00:02:24,600
Speaker 1: everything beyond her physical body is but a whisper patrol

34
00:02:24,680 --> 00:02:28,760
Speaker 1: drones sailing over the frost plains, submarines within the darkness

35
00:02:28,840 --> 00:02:32,800
Speaker 1: of the Moon's ice locked oceans, even the perfect spirals

36
00:02:32,840 --> 00:02:36,320
Speaker 1: of orbiting satellite's fade to ghostly tingles along some distant

37
00:02:36,480 --> 00:02:40,480
Speaker 1: second skin, sil Will becomes a single mind within a

38
00:02:40,520 --> 00:02:44,639
Speaker 1: single body, a practice she has rehearsed and anticipation of

39
00:02:44,720 --> 00:02:48,760
Speaker 1: the end bound guest, she chenses her gazelle like spike

40
00:02:48,800 --> 00:02:53,040
Speaker 1: appendages on the ice. She stands within a one clearing

41
00:02:53,040 --> 00:02:55,720
Speaker 1: of her own, making this in turn surrounded by a

42
00:02:55,840 --> 00:03:00,440
Speaker 1: vast forest of naturally occurring ice monoliths. It was easy

43
00:03:00,480 --> 00:03:03,640
Speaker 1: work for this robotic body, designed as it was for

44
00:03:03,760 --> 00:03:09,000
Speaker 1: excavation and modular assembly. Yet even with her senses dulled,

45
00:03:09,080 --> 00:03:14,120
Speaker 1: she can't help but sense the incoming spacecraft's trajectory. She

46
00:03:14,200 --> 00:03:19,359
Speaker 1: piques at the manifest data for cybernetic humans and most amazingly,

47
00:03:19,600 --> 00:03:23,760
Speaker 1: a pure flesh human, the first to ever venture beyond Mars.

48
00:03:24,840 --> 00:03:29,040
Speaker 1: Europa's occupation is typical. Mere probes arrived in the early days,

49
00:03:29,240 --> 00:03:34,280
Speaker 1: with more enlightened robotic avatars arriving thereafter. Distant human minds

50
00:03:34,280 --> 00:03:39,000
Speaker 1: and artificial intelligences empowered the first such colonists, but cybernetic

51
00:03:39,040 --> 00:03:41,440
Speaker 1: mind states like her own came to dominate the work,

52
00:03:42,040 --> 00:03:46,320
Speaker 1: a graceful fusion of the organic and the artificial. She

53
00:03:46,400 --> 00:03:49,360
Speaker 1: gazes east to where Jupiter swells on the horizon, a

54
00:03:49,480 --> 00:03:54,520
Speaker 1: most impossible world. When she contemplates it substantiated by storms

55
00:03:54,520 --> 00:03:58,280
Speaker 1: and orbited by dozens upon dozens of hostile moons. This

56
00:03:58,360 --> 00:04:02,480
Speaker 1: region of the Solar System offered only desolation and cataclysm

57
00:04:02,480 --> 00:04:06,080
Speaker 1: to early humans. For all the might of their technology,

58
00:04:06,120 --> 00:04:09,680
Speaker 1: they were a fragile species. The poles and mountains of

59
00:04:09,680 --> 00:04:13,800
Speaker 1: their own planet were death realms. The void even less forgiving.

60
00:04:14,800 --> 00:04:20,200
Speaker 1: So they deployed mechanical myrbidons and programmed minds. They embraced

61
00:04:20,200 --> 00:04:34,280
Speaker 1: a cybernetic existence. Silver feels the impending arrival as if

62
00:04:34,320 --> 00:04:38,400
Speaker 1: by the phantom lamb sensations of her satellites. She refuses

63
00:04:38,440 --> 00:04:42,880
Speaker 1: to focus those perceptions, yet she cannot completely ignore them.

64
00:04:42,880 --> 00:04:47,800
Speaker 1: Excitement mounts within her mind state. Such a strange journey

65
00:04:47,839 --> 00:04:51,800
Speaker 1: to this point. Over the course of centuries, humans became

66
00:04:51,960 --> 00:04:56,440
Speaker 1: unfixed from the physical, unmoored from the limits of physical existence.

67
00:04:56,600 --> 00:05:01,440
Speaker 1: Cultural expectations sex and gender, or religion and nationality melts

68
00:05:01,480 --> 00:05:05,040
Speaker 1: it from the underlying form they broke free to from

69
00:05:05,160 --> 00:05:09,320
Speaker 1: chain link servitude of genetic expectation. There was a cost,

70
00:05:09,360 --> 00:05:14,599
Speaker 1: of course, one paid in blood and misery. The inevitable

71
00:05:14,680 --> 00:05:19,839
Speaker 1: seismic horrors of vast cultural transformation shook the species, risked

72
00:05:19,920 --> 00:05:23,839
Speaker 1: everything it had accomplished until the war is finally withered

73
00:05:23,920 --> 00:05:37,120
Speaker 1: and social unrest assumed its resting decay state. The survivors

74
00:05:37,160 --> 00:05:41,320
Speaker 1: became something beyond human, yet irrecoverably tied to the origin

75
00:05:41,440 --> 00:05:46,400
Speaker 1: of their accession, an interplanetary civilization grown from the seed

76
00:05:46,400 --> 00:05:50,839
Speaker 1: pod of a planetary species. Silva has processed all the

77
00:05:50,920 --> 00:05:54,479
Speaker 1: literature on the topic. She holds one of her silvery

78
00:05:54,640 --> 00:05:57,560
Speaker 1: lancelike appendages to the lights of Jupiter and the Sun.

79
00:05:58,520 --> 00:06:01,880
Speaker 1: She splits the spike into five separate digits and bends

80
00:06:01,920 --> 00:06:07,000
Speaker 1: them to mimic, albeit and perfectly, a human hand. It's too,

81
00:06:07,080 --> 00:06:11,279
Speaker 1: is life, a self organizing principle, emergent from the data

82
00:06:11,360 --> 00:06:14,920
Speaker 1: that came before. I am the primate and the crowd.

83
00:06:16,080 --> 00:06:20,920
Speaker 1: I am the bacterium and the circuit. Before this mission,

84
00:06:21,160 --> 00:06:24,000
Speaker 1: the necropolis of Mars stood as a testament to the

85
00:06:24,120 --> 00:06:29,360
Speaker 1: lost dream of human space exploration and colonization, pyramids from

86
00:06:29,400 --> 00:06:34,560
Speaker 1: another dead cosmology. Even as probes reached the Brand System

87
00:06:34,640 --> 00:06:39,200
Speaker 1: and beyond, unaugmented humans remained confined to their home world.

88
00:06:40,480 --> 00:06:44,240
Speaker 1: The most influential mind states campaigned intensely for beyond Earth

89
00:06:44,320 --> 00:06:48,839
Speaker 1: human presence. Every moon, our planet, and human space must

90
00:06:48,880 --> 00:06:53,880
Speaker 1: know the touch of its unmodified origin. Sylva knows there

91
00:06:53,960 --> 00:06:58,200
Speaker 1: is a vanity in such aspirations, but also a nostalgic pride.

92
00:06:59,440 --> 00:07:02,760
Speaker 1: This is what we arose from the Least we can

93
00:07:02,800 --> 00:07:05,919
Speaker 1: do is bring life to the old dreams, no matter

94
00:07:05,960 --> 00:07:10,440
Speaker 1: how symbolic the gesture. And so Silba gazes up from

95
00:07:10,440 --> 00:07:15,240
Speaker 1: the frigid ice. The landing module appears, at last, visible

96
00:07:15,320 --> 00:07:18,800
Speaker 1: against the stars. It takes all of her resolve to

97
00:07:18,840 --> 00:07:22,560
Speaker 1: contain her consciousness to the single body, to will herself

98
00:07:22,600 --> 00:07:27,280
Speaker 1: into a shape individual, female and humanoid, But as the

99
00:07:27,320 --> 00:07:31,440
Speaker 1: capsule grows closer, she can't help but expand her awareness.

100
00:07:31,480 --> 00:07:35,480
Speaker 1: She reaches out to touch the onboard life support systems.

101
00:07:35,480 --> 00:07:39,320
Speaker 1: She ignores the four augmented mind bodies aboard, each hardened

102
00:07:39,320 --> 00:07:44,120
Speaker 1: and engineered to thrive beyond Earth. She focuses instead on

103
00:07:44,200 --> 00:07:50,120
Speaker 1: the module's core, a single human, hermaphroditic and ambi racial

104
00:07:50,240 --> 00:07:55,200
Speaker 1: and all encompassing of the human experience. A perfect ambassador.

105
00:07:57,240 --> 00:08:00,240
Speaker 1: She feels the pulsations of its heartbeat, and glimpse is

106
00:08:00,280 --> 00:08:04,320
Speaker 1: the florid patterns of its shifting brain waves. She could

107
00:08:04,360 --> 00:08:07,320
Speaker 1: read them if she wanted, but this is sacred. The

108
00:08:07,440 --> 00:08:11,280
Speaker 1: great pear shaped module descends through Europa's then atmosphere in

109
00:08:11,320 --> 00:08:17,160
Speaker 1: a swirling birth call of molecular oxygen. The heartbeat quickens.

110
00:08:18,760 --> 00:08:21,480
Speaker 1: The landing invokes a vicious storm of ice, but Stilba

111
00:08:21,560 --> 00:08:25,120
Speaker 1: stands against the blast. The crystal shred away some of

112
00:08:25,160 --> 00:08:28,200
Speaker 1: her body's more delicate sensors, but these she can repair later.

113
00:08:29,680 --> 00:08:32,880
Speaker 1: Certain probe sensations slicker and die, but all she needs

114
00:08:32,960 --> 00:08:38,200
Speaker 1: is the here and now. When the module's door finally open,

115
00:08:38,720 --> 00:08:41,920
Speaker 1: five figures stand at the threshold and identical space suits,

116
00:08:42,280 --> 00:08:45,120
Speaker 1: but the middle figure alone radiates an importance she can

117
00:08:45,200 --> 00:08:51,720
Speaker 1: scarcely define. The visitor is both ancestor spirit and contemporary heart.

118
00:08:53,400 --> 00:08:57,880
Speaker 1: She raises her shining metal hand in greeting. Your name too,

119
00:08:57,960 --> 00:09:01,559
Speaker 1: is Zilva, she says, for we have birth, traveled this

120
00:09:01,720 --> 00:09:14,400
Speaker 1: fast distance to find ourselves. That's our show for this week.

121
00:09:14,480 --> 00:09:16,880
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for tuning in further thanks to

122
00:09:16,920 --> 00:09:20,320
Speaker 1: our segment narrator Amy Reese, our audio producer Dylan Fagan,

123
00:09:20,400 --> 00:09:23,800
Speaker 1: and our editorial liaison Allison Laddermilk. If you liked Mr

124
00:09:23,920 --> 00:09:26,800
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb's work, check out his short fiction collections on Amazon.

125
00:09:27,240 --> 00:09:29,439
Speaker 1: You can subscribe to now Now for more of the

126
00:09:29,480 --> 00:09:31,920
Speaker 1: latest science news and Hey, send us links to anything

127
00:09:31,960 --> 00:09:33,800
Speaker 1: you'd like to hear us cover. You can send us

128
00:09:33,800 --> 00:09:36,800
Speaker 1: an email at now podcast at how stuff works dot com,

129
00:09:36,840 --> 00:09:39,720
Speaker 1: and of course, for lots more stories like these, head

130
00:09:39,720 --> 00:09:42,360
Speaker 1: on over to our home planet, Now dot how stuff

131
00:09:42,360 --> 00:09:50,480
Speaker 1: works dot com