Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Part I Naked Singularities
- Introduction
- 1 The Punchbowl and the Fishbowl: Postsingular Metafiction and the Crisis in sf
- 2 Two Posthumanisms, Three Singularities
- Part II How We Became Post-Posthuman: Postcyberpunk Bodies and the New Materiality
- Part III Economics 2.0
- Part IV The Last Question
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction
from Part I - Naked Singularities
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Part I Naked Singularities
- Introduction
- 1 The Punchbowl and the Fishbowl: Postsingular Metafiction and the Crisis in sf
- 2 Two Posthumanisms, Three Singularities
- Part II How We Became Post-Posthuman: Postcyberpunk Bodies and the New Materiality
- Part III Economics 2.0
- Part IV The Last Question
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In the distant future, a handful of twenty-first-century humans awake from fifty million years in suspended animation to find their world utterly transformed. Continents have drifted and converged, creating whole new topographies and climates. Plant and animal life have pursued startlingly novel, even unrecognizable evolutionary trajectories. More disturbing still, the planet is completely depopulated, with every vestige of human civilization long since wiped away by the passage of time. What has become of humanity? In the course of Vernor Vinge's novel Marooned in Realtime (1986) we meet a series of characters, each with his own pet theory accounting for the apparent ‘Extinction.’ Each theory is considered in turn, and each dismissed. Alien invasion? Compellingly science-fictional, but paranoid and rather too pessimistic for Vinge's liking. Ecological crisis? Tree-hugging nonsense! Nuclear armageddon? So twentieth century – human beings are far too resourceful, Vinge reckons, their civilizing impulse too robust to be permanently undone by something so trifling as a thermonuclear exchange.
In the end, only one possible explanation remains. The answer lies in a retrospective analysis and logical forward-extrapolation of the period just prior to the Extinction:
During the last two thousand years of civilization, almost every measure of progress showed exponential growth. From the nineteenth century on, this was obvious. People began extrapolating the trends. The results were absurd: vehicles traveling faster than sound by the mid-twentieth century, men on the moon a bit later. All this was achieved, yet progress continued […]
By 2200, we could increase human intelligence itself. And intelligence is the basis of all progress. My guess is that by mid-century, any goal – any goal you can state objectively, without internal contradictions – could be achieved. And what would things be like fifty years after that? There would still be goals and there would still be striving, but not what we could understand.
To call that time ‘the Extinction’ is absurd. It was a Singularity, a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied. And those new models are beyond our intelligence.
Human beings, in other words, couldn't have simply died off – logically, they could only have transcended to a new and incomprehensibly higher order of existence, leaving no trace behind. Perhaps they learned to transcode their consciousness into software and beamed themselves into space, or spontaneously evolved into some sort of bodiless universal mind.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- SingularitiesTechnoculture, Transhumanism, and Science Fiction in the 21st Century, pp. 3 - 15Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2013