Speaker 1: Welcome to How Staff Works. Now. I'm your host, Lauren Vogelbaum,
Speaker 1: a researcher and writer. Here at How Stuff Works. Every
Speaker 1: week I'm bringing you three stories from our team about
Speaker 1: the weird and wondrous advances we've seen in science, technology,
Speaker 1: and culture. Except when I'm not. This week, we've got
Speaker 1: a single segment for you. Occasionally, our writers and editors
Speaker 1: that now explore their questions about the future through speculative fiction.
Speaker 1: This piece is one of those thought experiments from our
Speaker 1: senior writer, Robert Lamb. It's about trans humanism and how
Speaker 1: humanity might involve for space travel. But I'll let him explain.
Speaker 1: Humanity exists in a curious place right now, suspended between
Speaker 1: past sci fi dreams of human oriented space exploration and
Speaker 1: the threshold of technological singularity and virtual worlds. How will
Speaker 1: flesh and blood human space travel fit into the grand picture?
Speaker 1: Interestingly enough, I keep coming back to the nineteen paper
Speaker 1: Cyborg and Space by Manford Declins and Nathan S. Klein,
Speaker 1: a pivotal work of futurism that coined the word cyborg
Speaker 1: and explored the necessary transformation of Homo sapiens for life
Speaker 1: beyond Earth. While space agencies have largely bypassed the paper's
Speaker 1: vision of space ready augmented humans. The concept continues to
Speaker 1: resonate through our culture, from our smartphones to cutting edge biotechnology,
Speaker 1: the human experience grows increasingly interwoven with technology. In keeping
Speaker 1: with Donna J. Harraway's essay a Cyborg Manifesto, more and
Speaker 1: more of us express an openness to ideological cyborg identity,
Speaker 1: the realization that personal identity can itself be an intentional
Speaker 1: hybrid status, unbound by the didactic expectations of the past.
Speaker 1: So come with me as we engage in a science
Speaker 1: fictional thought experiment, a creative simulation of what an interplanetary
Speaker 1: human race might evolve to be. Silba gazes up at
Speaker 1: the stars from the ice plains of Jupiter's moon Europa.
Speaker 1: She limits her ocular vision to a near human spectrum,
Speaker 1: as if entering deep meditation. She dims her awareness until
Speaker 1: everything beyond her physical body is but a whisper patrol
Speaker 1: drones sailing over the frost plains, submarines within the darkness
Speaker 1: of the Moon's ice locked oceans, even the perfect spirals
Speaker 1: of orbiting satellite's fade to ghostly tingles along some distant
Speaker 1: second skin, sil Will becomes a single mind within a
Speaker 1: single body, a practice she has rehearsed and anticipation of
Speaker 1: the end bound guest, she chenses her gazelle like spike
Speaker 1: appendages on the ice. She stands within a one clearing
Speaker 1: of her own, making this in turn surrounded by a
Speaker 1: vast forest of naturally occurring ice monoliths. It was easy
Speaker 1: work for this robotic body, designed as it was for
Speaker 1: excavation and modular assembly. Yet even with her senses dulled,
Speaker 1: she can't help but sense the incoming spacecraft's trajectory. She
Speaker 1: piques at the manifest data for cybernetic humans and most amazingly,
Speaker 1: a pure flesh human, the first to ever venture beyond Mars.
Speaker 1: Europa's occupation is typical. Mere probes arrived in the early days,
Speaker 1: with more enlightened robotic avatars arriving thereafter. Distant human minds
Speaker 1: and artificial intelligences empowered the first such colonists, but cybernetic
Speaker 1: mind states like her own came to dominate the work,
Speaker 1: a graceful fusion of the organic and the artificial. She
Speaker 1: gazes east to where Jupiter swells on the horizon, a
Speaker 1: most impossible world. When she contemplates it substantiated by storms
Speaker 1: and orbited by dozens upon dozens of hostile moons. This
Speaker 1: region of the Solar System offered only desolation and cataclysm
Speaker 1: to early humans. For all the might of their technology,
Speaker 1: they were a fragile species. The poles and mountains of
Speaker 1: their own planet were death realms. The void even less forgiving.
Speaker 1: So they deployed mechanical myrbidons and programmed minds. They embraced
Speaker 1: a cybernetic existence. Silver feels the impending arrival as if
Speaker 1: by the phantom lamb sensations of her satellites. She refuses
Speaker 1: to focus those perceptions, yet she cannot completely ignore them.
Speaker 1: Excitement mounts within her mind state. Such a strange journey
Speaker 1: to this point. Over the course of centuries, humans became
Speaker 1: unfixed from the physical, unmoored from the limits of physical existence.
Speaker 1: Cultural expectations sex and gender, or religion and nationality melts
Speaker 1: it from the underlying form they broke free to from
Speaker 1: chain link servitude of genetic expectation. There was a cost,
Speaker 1: of course, one paid in blood and misery. The inevitable
Speaker 1: seismic horrors of vast cultural transformation shook the species, risked
Speaker 1: everything it had accomplished until the war is finally withered
Speaker 1: and social unrest assumed its resting decay state. The survivors
Speaker 1: became something beyond human, yet irrecoverably tied to the origin
Speaker 1: of their accession, an interplanetary civilization grown from the seed
Speaker 1: pod of a planetary species. Silva has processed all the
Speaker 1: literature on the topic. She holds one of her silvery
Speaker 1: lancelike appendages to the lights of Jupiter and the Sun.
Speaker 1: She splits the spike into five separate digits and bends
Speaker 1: them to mimic, albeit and perfectly, a human hand. It's too,
Speaker 1: is life, a self organizing principle, emergent from the data
Speaker 1: that came before. I am the primate and the crowd.
Speaker 1: I am the bacterium and the circuit. Before this mission,
Speaker 1: the necropolis of Mars stood as a testament to the
Speaker 1: lost dream of human space exploration and colonization, pyramids from
Speaker 1: another dead cosmology. Even as probes reached the Brand System
Speaker 1: and beyond, unaugmented humans remained confined to their home world.
Speaker 1: The most influential mind states campaigned intensely for beyond Earth
Speaker 1: human presence. Every moon, our planet, and human space must
Speaker 1: know the touch of its unmodified origin. Sylva knows there
Speaker 1: is a vanity in such aspirations, but also a nostalgic pride.
Speaker 1: This is what we arose from the Least we can
Speaker 1: do is bring life to the old dreams, no matter
Speaker 1: how symbolic the gesture. And so Silba gazes up from
Speaker 1: the frigid ice. The landing module appears, at last, visible
Speaker 1: against the stars. It takes all of her resolve to
Speaker 1: contain her consciousness to the single body, to will herself
Speaker 1: into a shape individual, female and humanoid, But as the
Speaker 1: capsule grows closer, she can't help but expand her awareness.
Speaker 1: She reaches out to touch the onboard life support systems.
Speaker 1: She ignores the four augmented mind bodies aboard, each hardened
Speaker 1: and engineered to thrive beyond Earth. She focuses instead on
Speaker 1: the module's core, a single human, hermaphroditic and ambi racial
Speaker 1: and all encompassing of the human experience. A perfect ambassador.
Speaker 1: She feels the pulsations of its heartbeat, and glimpse is
Speaker 1: the florid patterns of its shifting brain waves. She could
Speaker 1: read them if she wanted, but this is sacred. The
Speaker 1: great pear shaped module descends through Europa's then atmosphere in
Speaker 1: a swirling birth call of molecular oxygen. The heartbeat quickens.
Speaker 1: The landing invokes a vicious storm of ice, but Stilba
Speaker 1: stands against the blast. The crystal shred away some of
Speaker 1: her body's more delicate sensors, but these she can repair later.
Speaker 1: Certain probe sensations slicker and die, but all she needs
Speaker 1: is the here and now. When the module's door finally open,
Speaker 1: five figures stand at the threshold and identical space suits,
Speaker 1: but the middle figure alone radiates an importance she can
Speaker 1: scarcely define. The visitor is both ancestor spirit and contemporary heart.
Speaker 1: She raises her shining metal hand in greeting. Your name too,
Speaker 1: is Zilva, she says, for we have birth, traveled this
Speaker 1: fast distance to find ourselves. That's our show for this week.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for tuning in further thanks to
Speaker 1: our segment narrator Amy Reese, our audio producer Dylan Fagan,
Speaker 1: and our editorial liaison Allison Laddermilk. If you liked Mr
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb's work, check out his short fiction collections on Amazon.
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