 
The Future of Being Human

And Other Essays

Collected Essays, Volume 3

Sylvia Engdahl

Copyright © 2020 by Sylvia Louise Engdahl

(except where earlier publication stated)

All rights reserved. For information, write to sle@sylviaengdahl.com. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only, and may not be resold, given away, or altered.

This ebook edition distributed by Smashwords

Cover photo © by Can Stock Photo / photocreo

Author website: www.sylviaengdahl.com

Note: The essays in this book do not need to be read in order; they are independent. You can return to the Table of Contents from the end of each essay.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Essays

The Future of Being Human (2020)

The End of Personal Privacy (2020)

Robots Will Never Replace Humans (2020)

Transhumanism Is a Dead End (2017)

The Role of Psi in Human Affairs (2017)

The Roots of Disbelief in Human Mind Powers (2020)

Speculation About Death Should Be Separate from Parapsychology (2020)

Christianity as Metaphor (1969)

The Worship of Medical Authority (1995)

The Need for a New Outlook on Healthcare (2020)

In Defense of Natural Death (2019, 2020)

Humankind's Future in the Cosmos (2019)

Does It Matter Whether Humankind Survives? (2020)

Why I Don't Read Much Science Fiction (2020)

About the Author

Excerpt from From This Green Earth: Essays on Looking Outward: Breaking Out from Earth's Shell (2019)

Excerpt from Reflections on Enchantress from the Stars and Other Essays: Perspective on the Future: The Quest of Space Age Young People (1972)

Introduction

This is one of three books that replace my earlier essay collection Reflections on the Future, which covered too many different topics, and which with the addition of new essays would have been too long. Four of the essays included here were in that book, one has been online since 2019, and the other seven are entirely new. In addition, two essays excerpted from the other two books in the series appear at the end.

Unlike those books, this one is neither about space nor about my writing. For many years I didn't publicly express any opinions (other than those implicit in my novels) except for my conviction about the vital importance of expanding our civilization into space. I didn't want people to be distracted from the space issue by disagreement with my views on unrelated subjects. But beginning with the publication of Stewards of the Flame in 2007, I began commenting on various other issues that are important to me, mainly on pages discussing the background of the novel. These, along with my view of the future, are the issues with which this book deals.

Though some of these topics may seem quite separate from each other, actually they are all concerned with two interrelated themes: first, the powers of the individual human mind, including so-called "paranormal" powers; and second the use, and too often misuse, of technology to directly impact the minds and/or bodies of human individuals. They are the topics I feel are of greatest significance in our era, apart from the major world problems that I believe can't be solved as long as we remain confined to one small planet.

If much of this book is about the future, why does the cover show an ordinary family that might exist today? Wouldn't a futuristic scene be more appropriate? And wouldn't something featuring strange new technology be more likely to attract readers interested in what the future will bring?

I chose to show people of today because I don't believe those of the future will be as different from ourselves as most speculators seem to think. There will be many innovations in the years to come, but alteration of average humans won't be among them. We're not all going to turn into cyborgs or live in virtual worlds. Human feelings won't change, despite the use of more advanced technology. We'll still care about our families, and we'll still enjoy being outdoors. People are people, wherever and whenever they happen to live. Humankind evolves; human capabilities increase; society matures and progresses. Customs change. Nevertheless, much stays the same, and I don't think it's realistic to ignore this fact.

That said, of course there are going to be major differences in people's daily lives. New technologies that will transform our way of doing things are developing rapidly. Many of them will be improvements, but a few—such as those that rob us of privacy—will be unwelcome. And various trends will be exciting to some people yet appalling to others.

Pessimism about the future is common today. Many feel that that world is declining and that much that was valuable is being lost. I don't share that view. We have lost some things that were good, but they were not nearly as good as the things we have gained. Some elderly people grieve for times that are past and long to return to them, but I'm not one of them. Perhaps because the best things in my personal life have involved computers, I have been happy to see technology move forward. And so, though I find some expected developments disturbing, I feel that our worst fears about them won't come to pass.

In my fiction I have never tried to accurately depict the future, other than to express my belief that space colonization will be a major part of it. I have focused on the characters' experiences and aimed to make them seem realistic to today's readers. For example, in my novels I've mentioned artificial intelligence (AI) only where it is necessary to the story, although actually it will affect everyone's daily life before this century is over. The ships in my Flame novels are operated by AI and the human pilots do no more than issue commands, except when landing on a planet's surface. Even small ships contain knowledgebases containing the entire accumulated knowledge of humankind. Bodies are maintained in stasis by AI. Neurofeedback provides enough detailed information about a person's brain functioning for him to learn to control his inner biochemical processes voluntarily. Yet routine use or AI by ordinary people is ignored. And there is, one significant anachronism in the books: for plot reasons they include asteroid miners, although in an era of AI-equipped starships it is highly unlikely that human labor would be used to dig rocks out of asteroids.

There are also anachronisms in the stories that weren't intentional. Technology has progressed much faster than I expected when I wrote them. A major element in the plot of Stewards of the Flame is the existence of implanted microchips that detect heart function, which when I wrote it were my own idea. It's no longer credible that these would be an innovation on an isolated colony world instead of being routinely used on Earth, for they exist now; they can't track people yet, but they'll soon be able to. An incident in Herald of the Flame involves a portable brain scanner that fit into a collapsible helmet, which I feared might be too incredible since such scanners are now huge machines. In 2017 the head of a medical imaging company told an interviewer that she has created one "in the form of a ski hat."

So my imagination tends to be too cautious. Even knowing this, however, I find some of what experts predict beyond belief, for it's based on what I feel are false views of the nature of human beings.

For instance, I do not believe that robots will become superior to humans. They may be programmed to show apparent self-awareness and emotion, but that will be merely a simulation. AI will never be conscious because there is more to a human mind, and even an animal's mind, than a brain. People are not going to become obsolete.

Moreover, I don't think wild ideas about human minds being converted to electronic form have any basis in reality. We are not going to be uploaded to computers as if consciousness were merely software, and we are not going to become immortal that way or any other—nor are we going to cease caring about the things in life that matter to us now.

The essence of life and death is constant from era to era, all the way back to prehistoric times and forward as far as is conceivable. Whatever the future brings, we will deal with it as people always have, by finding ways to adapt and go on with our lives. Every generation has feared new ways would lead to a loss of human qualities, in society if not in individuals, and such fears have always proved mistaken.

But isn't the world itself in danger now? In most respects, no more than it has been during many decades that are behind us. In the seventy years since 1950 when I graduated from high school I have lived through many world crises and none of them turned out as badly as people thought they would at the time they happened. The one thing different now is that new technologies in the hands of small groups such as terrorists could prove disastrous; it would no longer take a major war to threaten our survival. Yet we are all in danger, all the time. There is no more point in worrying about world catastrophe than about being killed in a traffic accident, which is far more likely.

Doomsaying has never been a valid outlook on the future. It makes more sense to focus on hope, and apart from the comments of techno-enthusiasts, that's too seldom done. Nevertheless, where I see potential problems I don't ignore them. Nearly every new technology will have unfortunate effects as well as good ones.

In this book I have not hesitated to express my opinions, which are often controversial. The essays are what journalists call "opinion pieces" that do not pretend to present balanced views of the issues with which they deal. Needless to say, you may disagree with some of them. I hope you will also find some encouraging.
The Future of Being Human

(2020)

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

— Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, Les Guêpes, 1849

*

That this French aphorism, usually translated as "The more things change, the more they stay the same," expresses a commonly-recognized truth is shown by the fact that googling the English version yields 509,000 hits. It is most often said cynically, especially in political contexts, to mean that despite reforms nothing ever gets any better. Yet it is also used to say that people's basic wants and fears don't change even though as time passes they involve different situations. Or it can refer to surprise at finding that despite change in one's outlook some things, usually tangible things, have remained constant. Philosophically, it can mean that apparent changes do not affect reality on a deeper level. And I have recently discovered that the phrase is in the lyrics of a variety of pop songs.

I think, however, that it is especially appropriate as a description of the very nature of human beings. From era to era, there are enormous changes in human cultures and human technologies—but human nature does not change. People are people, in whatever era they happen to live. Our present way of living and the technology that makes it possible would be utterly incomprehensible to the ancient Greeks, yet if we met them as individuals, we would find them much like ourselves. Similarly, if we were to meet the people of tomorrow we would have feelings in common with them even if their appearance and lifestyles seemed strange.

Until recently, this was taken for granted. But now, speculators about the future are saying that future humans will be so unlike ourselves as to seem, or even literally be, a different species. A friend once wrote to me, "The next generation of human evolution is about to take place in the next century instead of the next million years. They aren't going to be like us, and I actually believe there won't be an 'us' much longer (in historical time)."

This strikes me as a profound misunderstanding of what it means to be human. Setting aside semantic difficulties with the word "evolution," which I'll deal with below, such suppositions are usually based on the fact that technology is enabling us to make changes in our bodies and more and more drastic physical changes are on the horizon. But is our humanity defined by the appearance, or even the capabilities, of our bodies? Surely not. That assumption flies in the face of all the progress toward tolerance we have made.

In the nineteenth century and even into the twentieth, "scientific" anthropology held that skin color marked races as inherently different from each other and that dark-skinned races were inferior. Some called them a "missing link" between humans and apes. Most of us long ago condemned such views. More recently, we have abandoned the once-common prejudice against the disabled; we do not consider a person with missing limbs less human than the rest of us. Why then would alteration of the body make us question someone's humanity?

So far, it has not. People with medical implants such as pacemakers, artificial hip joints, or brain electrodes to treat epilepsy are not viewed as semi-human. To be sure, these devices are not visible, and some readers will protest that they merely restore normal functioning rather than improving it. But in principle there is no difference. We don't think of wide variation in genetic endowment as defining degree of humanity; an Einstein and a person with Down syndrome are viewed as equally human although not equal in mental capacity. A star athlete may be admired more than someone born lame, but the humanity of the latter is not in doubt. If it becomes possible to increase abilities, either mental or physical, where could a dividing line be drawn?

It's sometimes asserted that genetic or neurological technologies will produce not merely a line but a wide gap. But will people want that? Technology can't spread on its own; it is developed beyond the experimental stage when, and only when, it serves human needs and/or desires. Mere technological feasibility is not enough to bring about new developments; they must be wanted by the public. In the 1940s popular speculation about the future held that someday we would all have personal helicopters parked in our yards. The technology for personal helicopters was clearly on the horizon. Why don't we have them now? Because a neighborhood full of helicopters is neither practical nor desirable. On the other hand, personal computers— which we didn't imagine even in the 1960s—are useful; they provide capabilities that people want to have. Undoubtedly countless more useful things will be developed in the future. But fundamental human wants aren't going to change.

We now see it's likely that people will want improved bodies. But comparatively few of them will want to be transformed into a new species or to be replaced by cyborgs. Human relationships will always be important to them, and most people have a strong emotional attachment to their physical form and that of their loved ones. Moreover, they don't want to be seen as different from everybody else—they want to enhance physical characteristics that are already admired.

Thus it is difficult to imagine any major changes in the human physique that would be marketable. Many of the things often envisioned are pointless. Movies and TV series that show super-capable individuals are good entertainment, but they have little relationship to what would be useful in real life. We don't need people to be strong enough to lift a car or jump ten feet in the air, or to fly, or to be efficient killers like Terminator. These are anachronisms; we have technology to do all the physical things that might have been helpful to our ancestors. We don't need to become human computers, either. One of Robert Heinlein's YA novels features a mathematically gifted young man who keeps starship astrogation charts and tables of logarithms in his head; this proves so valuable that although he has no space experience whatsoever be becomes captain when the original captain is killed. At the time that was written it would have seemed desirable to give human beings such capabilities, but now it would just seem silly. We have computers for astrogation; there are better things to occupy human minds.

I've seen it argued that people will be eager to change their bodies because they now want weird piercings and tattoos. Yet there have been cultures that admired weird piercings and tattoos since the beginning of time; in some African tribes it was a status symbol. In ours it has become fashionable, but fashions don't have a lasting effect on the human race unless they are heritable. Some currently-fashionable features, such as being thin, will probably be made heritable through genetic engineering, if that proves possible (which it may not, as the science of genomics is finding that far more factors than genes affect a person's biological characteristics). But there's a limit to what people will want passed on to their offspring. How many now have their babies tattooed, or encourage their young kids to get piercings?

DNA technology will undoubtedly be useful—but hardly for such extreme changes in human beings that they would no longer be "us." It will be employed for medical purposes and perhaps for producing "designer babies" with the particular characteristics their parents choose from among normal ones. It may be able to provide some enhanced mental capabilities, though these are more likely to be produced by neurotechnology. But why would anyone want intelligent beings entirely different from us? Scientists might want to prove they could create them, but such beings would have no adaptive advantage. Mere change is not evolution. Evolution occurs when new capabilities enable an organism to adapt to its environment better than its predecessors. We have, or will have, technology to do everything our environment requires; we have no reason to alter our offspring in any fundamental way.

When it comes to colonizing other planets, we might well wish to modify our bodies to fit new environments. But there is no reason why this would result in separation into different species—after all, dogs of widely varying size and shape are all the same species and can interbreed. Inability to interbreed and produce fertile offspring is the determining factor in speciation, and appearance, within obvious limits, has nothing to do with it. Why would humans choose to alter their DNA in such a way as to prevent interbreeding? In nature division into different species requires separation for very long periods of time; it could not occur within the time frame of any imaginable future unless it was intentionally engineered. And it's unlikely that humans of different types would refrain from sex with each other.

Might not mutations caused by exposure to radiation in space lead to eventual genetic differences? No, because even if no way to prevent such mutations is found, before we have a significant number of people in space we will be able to correct genetic damage or at least detect it so that it won't be passed on. Only if some disaster were to destroy civilization on Earth would there be danger of widespread heritable mutations, in which case anything now said about the future would become meaningless.

There is another reason why society won't encourage drastic changes to human bodies. We have had more than enough trouble with race relations, even among members of the same species; to invite similar conflict would go against deep moral convictions as well as against common sense. To be sure, there may be persecution of people who have, or don't have, particular characteristics. Very probably it will get worse if some are given heritable abilities that others are not. But it won't be a matter of "us" vs. virtual aliens.

Fear of laboratory-produced pseudo-people has been around a long time; it's no accident that the story of Frankenstein struck a chord and is still popular. When the first use of in vitro fertilization (IVF) was announced there was doubt as to whether the baby would become a normal person. And remember the excitement about clones a few years back—the media promoted the idea that clones would be inhuman; some speculated that they wouldn't have souls, when in fact a healthy cloned person is no more "different" from the norm than is a naturally-born identical twin.

It's unlikely that human clones will ever be produced even if it becomes possible to do it safely, because it is now evident that nobody wants them—a whole list of potential reasons people might want clones was suggested, but none of them had adherents. There was once a waiting list for cloned cats, but when it was found that they didn't have personalities just like the cats they were cloned from, interest died down and the company producing them went out of business. Clones are useful in agriculture, but there's no market for the technology apart from that. History is full of theoretically-feasible developments for which there proved to be no market.

Modification of bodies won't be the only future technology viewed with dismay. All major technological innovations have aroused fears that they would diminish our humanity . Plato deplored the invention of writing because he thought it would weaken people's memories. John Philip Sousa argued that the phonograph would result in loss of the ability to create music. As late as the 1970s, I knew people who believed the use of computers by banks and for billing purposes was dehumanizing. More recently a great deal has been written about how screen time and texting will supposedly make kids less able to interact socially, a fear no more warranted than the earlier ones. Such worries are groundless. People are people. Their customs and living conditions change, but human nature doesn't.

*

Nevertheless, do we not speak of the future evolution of humankind, meaning progress of some sort? That depends on how the word "evolution" is being used. There are two forms applicable to humans. The first, biological—i.e. genetic—evolution, was until recently thought to have ended for our species in prehistoric times when technology enabled us to adapt to changing environments and individuals not well adapted no longer died before they could mate. Genetic sequencing technology has now shown that it is still occurring; but it is producing only minor changes in certain groups, which do not affect the overall evolution of humankind. In any case biological evolution does not necessarily mean progress, a judgmental word that implies improvement. Although most of us would call the evolution of humans from an apelike ancestor progress, to biologists evolution is simply change.

The second form of evolution is cultural evolution—or extragenetic evolution, a term now preferred when referring to our species as a whole because it's less easily confused with the evolution of specific cultures. This is the only form of human evolution that's significant now. Although to me and to many others it implies progressive change—change for the better—not everyone agrees. Social scientists and philosophers have argued at length about the concept of human progress, and whether it can be said to occur is a controversial issue. However, the controversies generally concern definition of what constitutes progress, with those of various political persuasions disagreeing. When I state or imply progress in connection with evolution I'm referring to a common-sense definition, applied to our entire species. For example, there can be no doubt that the invention of agriculture and the development of language in prehistoric times was progress, and it was certainly progress when we abolished chattel slavery.

Extragenetic evolution is the result of new ways of doing things, not the cause. It is cumulative from generation to generation. Because of what we have learned from our forebears over long periods of time, we have more capabilities than our remote ancestors and are able to develop skills they could not have developed. Whether this is entirely a matter of recorded information and of the young being taught by adults is, in my opinion, an open question. I personally believe some form of "collective unconscious" must be involved. (See my essay "The Role of Psi in Human History.") Surely mere teaching by a time-traveler would not have enabled teenagers 5000 years ago to drive 70 miles an hour on a freeway or to program computers, although biologically they were indistinguishable from people today and possessed complex skills that we lack.

Whether or not such changes are considered progressive, our planetary civilization does progress. It enables more and more people to survive, most of them more comfortably than was possible for previous generations; it accumulates knowledge; and over time, its predominant moral standards become increasingly peaceful and humanitarian. In my novels I say a good deal about progress or maturation of culture-bearing species, terms I often use interchangeably. However, this does not mean that individuals of a culture at one stage are different from those at another, though they may behave differently depending on the characteristics of that culture. In Enchantress from the Stars and also in my other books, the people of young species are portrayed as equals of the people of older ones, despite having fewer capabilities and less knowledge.

Incidentally, this brings up another semantic issue: are extraterrestrial races "human"? Obviously they are not members of our human race, and in this essay I am dealing only with ours. I'm not in a position to know anything about whatever others may have evolved elsewhere in the universe, but In my opinion they are the equivalent of humans however different their biology may be, and whether they're referred to by that word in fiction is just a matter of terminology.

On a planetary basis human evolution involves advances in technology, although not all cultures of a world need be at the same technological level. There are many such levels, from primitive tools to steam-based industry on up to spaceships and artificial intelligence. What they have in common is that they enable people to adapt to their environment in ways that increase their ability to survive and multiply. That's why extragenetic evolution has supplanted genetic evolution—it is the fastest, and often the only, means of ensuring survival and/or increasing the population. Primitive humans could not have survived without tools and cold-weather clothing. Later humans could not have survived in large numbers without agriculture, machines, and weapons. And we cannot survive long in the future without space technology that enables us to utilize extraterrestrial materials and eventually colonize new worlds.

But once a level of technology is reached, people use it in ways not related to survival. They use it to get things they want. And these uses often lead to major changes in their customs and daily lives, sometimes of unpredictable kinds. In the twentieth century people wanted fast, convenient transportation, and the automobile transformed society. They wanted housework to be easier, and appliances freed women to have careers. They wanted easy access to news and entertainment, and television revolutionized their interaction with the world beyond their local areas.

In this century the Internet and cell phones have caused a dramatic difference in the way we conduct our lives. So what comes next? If we're not going to become superhuman, as I believe we're not, where will extragenetic evolution take us?

*

It's generally agreed that the next big change will come from the rapidly increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI). More and more things used industry and by the public will be automated in the near future. Homes will have robotic vacuum cleaners, floor scrubbers, and self-cleaning plumbing fixtures. These and basics such as light, heat, and cooling will be controlled not only by voice command but by programmed scheduling, as will most kitchen appliances. Security devices will screen people at the door, both residents and visitors, by facial recognition and will lock and unlock the house when appropriate without the use of bolts or keys, calling the police if an intruder is detected or paramedics if an occupant's actions indicate a medical emergency. The disabled, the elderly, and children of school age will be safe when home alone, freeing caregivers to work part time or do errands.

There is just one commonly-predicted type of household AI I believe we will not have—robots shaped like humans. What would be the point? I can't imagine their being useful compared to the many other forms artificial intelligence will take. An exception must be made for sex robots, since life-size sex dolls with silicone skin are already on the market and selling well, with AI models expected to be available soon. Some psychologists are endorsing the concept, while others deplore it, and one Japanese company has banned having sex with its products—though it's hard to see how such a ban could be enforced. However, I think the average person is going to feel that sex is one activity in which automation would be of little benefit.

Elon Musk, CEO of both SpaceX and the automaker Tesla, has said that by 2037 owning a car that isn't self-driving will be like owning a horse today. My first thought was that this overlooks the fact that if a dramatic increase in AI-controlled devices and manufacturing leads to widespread unemployment, as it undoubtedly will, a lot of people won't be able to afford self-driving cars. But will they need them? Actually, once self-driving vehicles are common the average person won't own a car at all. Without the need for a driver the price of Uber-like services will drop. Why would anyone incur the expense of buying, insuring and maintaining a car when self-driving robotaxis, summoned via a mobile phone, can take people wherever they want to go without the problem of finding a place to park?

Self-driving vehicles will have a far greater impact on daily life than is first apparent. Besides robotaxis, there will be self-driving delivery trucks, and no one will have to spend time and energy on shopping. It's already possible to order from supermarkets via the Internet for pickup, and in some cities delivery is available. This will become standard everywhere when it's no longer necessary for stores to pay a driver. In the days before automobiles were common, groceries were delivered routinely; milk delivery was the last to be discontinued. Now, almost everything else—even prepared meals—can be bought on the Internet, and though the popularity of food delivery is growing, the transportation cost is high. Other online purchasing is also limited by the cost of shipping. Self-driving vans will lower these costs to the point where it will be less expensive, as well as less time-consuming, to order online than to go to a store. Eventually there will be no need for shopping centers, so traffic will be less congested and there will be no ugly parking lots or big-box structures.

Furthermore, without the time lost in traffic jams and parking, people will be able to live further from what business districts remain, in less crowded areas with more green space. Commuting will be done by robotaxis, of course, though there won't be as much commuting because more people will work electronically from home offices. Commuter trains will continue to exist as long as there are centralized destinations, but with little need for workers below the managerial level, companies will move out of congested areas. In time, cities as we know them will be a thing of the past.

Long-distance rail transportation, too, will be automated and if speeded up by new technologies, it may make a comeback once population increase causes air traffic to become so heavy that there are long delays. When people want to take trips to out-of-the-way places by car, they can rent a self-driving one. Assuming that automated vehicles are designed and tested for safety, once all human-driven cars are off the road there will be few if any accidents—and no worry about drunk drivers. Even a small percentage of self-driving cars will save countless lives.

Another coming convenience will be the routine use of telemedicine. Electronic transmission of medical data and remote face-to-face contact with doctors is currently used by people in rural areas, but as technology advances and AI is incorporated, it will become routine for everyone. Medical facilities will be used only when hands-on care or special testing equipment is required. On the positive side, this will eliminate most trips to healthcare providers and the waiting involved, make it unnecessary for people to leave their homes when they feel sick, allow them to consult specialists in distant cities, and permit constant monitoring of chronic conditions. On the negative side, it will lead to ongoing surveillance of everyone's physical status, which will be a serious invasion of privacy

But won't people feel more isolated when nearly everything essential to living, apart from certain jobs, can be done without leaving home? Not necessarily—after all, we now rely heavily on cell phones and online social networks, and these channels of communication will in the future provide two-way interaction on large screens or perhaps in 3D. In fact, life-size holographic 3D video-conferencing technology is already in the experimental stage. Although people have an innate need for human contact, the essence of it, apart from intimacy within families and between lovers, lies not in proximity of flesh but in exchange of thoughts and emotions. When telephones first became available skeptics feared that the ability to talk over a distance would make lead to a loss of sociability, when in fact the opposite occurred; people today hear the voices of friends all over the nation instead of just those living nearby, and many spend more hours talking than would be possible if they were limited to face-to-face contact. And online networking makes it possible to have far more personal acquaintances than could ever be met in person.

Moreover, opportunity for face-to-face contact will not be lacking. Robotaxis will make it easier to attend sports events and gather for parties in homes or restaurants, especially since with no need to drive, social drinking won't be a problem. Recreation centers will proliferate, many of them in scenic areas, offering food and fellowship as well as facilities for swimming, sports, hobbies, and stage shows. Outdoor group activities such as picnics and live-action role playing games will be popular.

There will also be expansion of new forms of home entertainment, notably virtual reality (VR), now an available enhancement of video games. Participation in online multiplayer gaming will increase; it is now limited by the time it consumes, but in the future more people will have leisure, and there will be greater variety of game scenarios—they don't all involve violent action, and in fact some depend on cooperation between players rather than conflict. It's expected that in the future some VR games will be played via computer/brain interfaces rather than helmets. I'm skeptical as to the number of people who will want brain implants, but it's wise to be cautious in such predictions—in 1916 silent film icon Charles Chaplin said "The cinema is little more than a fad," and In 1946 studio executive Daryl Zanuck declared, "Television won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months."

The prospect of AI-assisted living is exciting, but there is a downside and serious problems will have to be solved before it can benefit everyone. In the first place, there is likely to be economic and social upheaval due to loss of jobs. When all vehicles are self-driving, truck and taxi drivers will find themselves unemployed, as will workers in many other fields who are replaced by AI. In the past technology that eliminated jobs has always led to new kinds of jobs, but that won't happen if AI takes over all routine work. There will be jobs at the managerial and professional levels and for work demanding creativity, but few for blue-collar or office workers. Most experts agree that the immediate effects are likely to be devastating.

It's easy to say that the government should subsidize unemployed workers, but if hardly anybody is working, then who will pay the taxes that support the government? It has been suggested that companies that got rich selling AI-controlled devices should pay, but when few people can afford to buy those items their producers won't remain rich for long; some may even go out of business. Thus use of AI won't spread as widely as technology permits, and for this reason the worst problems may be self-limiting. But there is bound to be a long period when some people aren't working while others are well-off, resulting in protests and political turmoil. At the very least the work-week will be shortened and we will have to adjust to a society that provides more leisure—something most employees will welcome.

However, too much leisure also has a downside. People generally find meaning in their work—or if it's mere routine, at least it provides structure to their days. And that is necessary not only to their own health but to the health of society. Those who are not working at least part time need some other source of meaning, something to which they feel committed. Where are they going to find it?

One way is through volunteer work. There will be many opportunities to help others; for example, as more and more tasks in hospitals and nursing homes are taken over by AI, the patients will have a need for human contact no longer provided by nursing aides. Elderly people who live alone will need companionship—as they do now, when there aren't enough volunteers with time to offer it. Schoolchildren taught mainly by AI will need tutoring and encouragement by live role models. Pets in veterinary clinics or boarding kennels whose physical needs are met by machines will need love and companionship from humans. And there will be various humanitarian and political campaigns to work for.

Another major source of meaning will be competition, not only in sports but in skill contests such as talent shows and multiplayer games. People like to excel and the effort to do so consumes a great deal of time and energy. Participatory sports will receive more emphasis than in the past, with both kids and adults who aren't star athletes receiving some sort of recognition. Music and the arts will flourish; a market may even develop among the wealthy for handcrafted goods created by enterprising artisans.

Adult education will hold the interest of those with inquiring minds, and it may become common to earn college degrees unrelated to career aims. Finally, more and more people are finding meaning in spirituality—not so much in traditional religions, which are declining in most countries, but a sense of connection with something beyond worldly concerns. The popularity of meditation is growing. Deep commitment to groups centered on spiritual beliefs is important to many.

There will be no lack of options for becoming involved in tomorrow's world. To be sure, some will fail to take advantage of them, but that is true today; it cannot be blamed on advancing technology. In the long run, new technology is always beneficial to humankind, disastrous though it often is to people with training and experience applicable only to older technologies. The nineteenth-century Luddites feared being replaced by the rise of factories. Yet factories weren't detrimental to society, and ultimately they led to better living conditions for the average worker. The history of technology shows that new technologies invariably open up more opportunities than previously existed, and that despite working fewer hours, people have fuller lives as well as material possessions that far exceed any their ancestors imagined.

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Paradoxically, the future will bring both greater freedom of choice and new restrictions of it. Such restrictions will be the inevitable result of increased government surveillance of people. AI will lead to extensive recording and analysis of information about individuals and their activities, which in turn will cause limits to be placed on actions deemed undesirable. Implanted microchips are already in use on a voluntary basis; while they can't yet track location, that capability will soon be added, and they may not remain voluntary. Some surveillance will be unavoidable in view of the growing danger from AI-equipped criminals and terrorists, and hopefully, safeguards will exist to prevent misuse of the data collected on innocent citizens. But the government's definition of "misuse" is unlikely to match that of privacy advocates. I have discussed this issue in my essay "The End of Personal Privacy."

AI is expected to streamline administrative and judicial proceedings; there will be no more long delays for permits or in the courts, and in principle at least, justice will done more equitably as well as faster. Some feel that the use of "robojudges" would eliminate inefficiency, prejudice, and corruption, and would thus be more fair than the current system. It might be, yet on the other hand, enforcing the letter of the law could lead to injustice in cases where extenuating circumstances would be considered by a human judge. Also, it might result in the proliferation of laws concerning minor offenses that ought not to be punished at all, especially if fines were a significant source of government funds.

Despite government intrusiveness, the personal choices available to individuals will continue to multiply, as they have for the past century or more. The selection of consumer goods, already vastly larger than it was before the Internet made it possible to market items appealing only to small segments of the population, will increase further as AI causes production costs to fall. And there will be a greater variety of leisure activities when more people have time to pursue them, as they will no longer need to suit the majority to attract participants.

One likely result of the growing demand for choice will be an end to cable and broadcast television. Already more and more people are switching to streaming TV, and now that the technology for it is widely available, it makes no sense to present new episodes of a series at a given hour in "prime time" expecting that viewers will watch them at that time. Eventually such scheduling will be abandoned and weekly or seasonal releases of all shows will be made simultaneously. Live newscasting will be available only via streamed video, and broadcast frequencies will be freed for the increasing use of wi-fi.

There will be far more significant changes than these in human society. The rights of women and minorities will be firmly established and no longer considered problematic. At least in Western nations, traditional views of morality won't be forced by law on individuals who disagree with them, and the public controversies concerning them will die out when it becomes apparent that it is impossible as well as wrong for one group's beliefs to be imposed on another. For example, abortion will cease to be a political issue, although citizens' personal views of it will continue to differ widely.

I foresee an end to our antiquated marriage laws, which are a holdover from the era in which wives belonged to husbands who had a legal right to control them and a legal obligation to support them. Since women are no longer dependent on men, marriage will become a wholly social and/or religious institution. Wedding ceremonies will be the same as today, but no license from the government will be needed to enter into a marriage or to end it—instead, couples will sign contracts with each other containing whatever mutually agreed-upon terms they wish. There will be no legal or tax distinctions between married and single people. In my opinion the problem with same-sex marriage is not that same-sex partners lack the privileges of heterosexual partners, but that the latter have benefits and privileges that there is no reason for them to have merely because they are in a committed sexual relationship. People who want to live together will do so, whether they have such a relationship or not, and they will part when they wish to part—that's how it actually works now, regardless of legal formalities.

The government will, of course, continue to control the guardianship of children, whether or not their parents are married. With the rise of nontraditional families and technologically-assisted conception as well as reliable birth control, genetic parenthood will be given less weight than in the past. The birth mother will be presumed to be the primary guardian unless she has relinquished that right or has a written agreement with the genetic mother. Normally couples' wedding contracts will include shared guardianship of any children they have together, but where no such provision exists, the husband will have no rights or financial obligation unless he has formally adopted a child. Whether there will be tax benefits for guardians—or conversely, a tax on children in excess of two—will depend on the economic situation of society and the degree of concern about overpopulation.

There will be a significant reduction in crime brought about by the legalization of all drugs. The only way to stop the violence associated with drug use is to take the profit out of dealing—a lesson that should have been learned from the failure of Prohibition in the 1920s. Once there is no money to be made selling street drugs, the police can stop spending funds on useless enforcement attempts and crack down on users who commit crimes while under their influence. That applies to prescription drugs as well as currently-illegal ones; at present painkillers bring a high price on the black market and tragically, low-income elderly people who need cash are being targeted by dealers as a source of them. Moreover, the high price of necessary drugs, a serious problem for low-income people, is due to the medical establishment's control of the supply. It was legal to buy medical drugs without a prescription until 1938, and that is one case where "turning back the clock" will be an advance.

Another badly-needed reform is the elimination of imprisonment of nonviolent criminals, which AI will make possible. In the future prisons will be used only for protecting society from individuals who pose a threat to the public. Lawbreakers who are not dangerous will be electronically monitored with AI devices—possibly temporary implants— that report their location and sense whether they are carrying weapons. Some may be placed under house arrest except for work, and will be restrained by shocks from the devices if they fail to comply. There will no longer be any reason why they should live at the taxpayers' expense under the influence of worse criminals.

Taxes, of course, will continue to be a burden—how great a burden will depend on how much aid to the unemployed proves necessary. In America it will also depend on the nature of changes to our healthcare system, which everyone agrees are long overdue. It is unlikely that it will get the kind of overhaul that is really needed, which is the elimination of unnecessary tests, procedures, and allegedly preventative care except for people who insist on them and can afford to pay personally. So there will probably be some form of single-payer system such as other nations have, which I personally would favor only for emergency care, treatment of seriously disabling conditions, and long-term care of disabled people who have no other source of support. Whatever else happens, the concept of health "insurance" (other than insurance against catastrophic illness) must be abandoned—what would fire insurance cost if everyone were expected to have a fire sooner or later? In my opinion ordinary healthcare expenses should be met by voluntary subscriptions to individually-chosen levels of service. But this may be one of the areas in which choice is reduced rather than increased.

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However healthcare is paid for, it will offer life-changing new benefits to people who are sick or disabled. For one thing, DNA technology will be used for eradicating genetic diseases, treating some types of illness and injury, and possibly to lengthen lifespan. It will make it possible to grow replacement organs, eliminating the need for transplants from donors and lifelong dependence on drugs to prevent their rejection—or even to replace missing limbs. It may eventually provide a cure for cancer.

Nevertheless, there are inherent limitations on what genetic modification can do. There is no such thing as a genetically-perfect body. Genetic makeup involves trade-offs; a gene needed for one characteristic may adversely affect another, and few if any characteristics are determined by single genes. Moreover, genes interact not only with each other but with prenatal environment as well as with a person's later experience—it is now known that gene regulation is more significant than the genes themselves. The science of genomics, which studies these interactions, has proved to be far more complicated than was thought even a few years ago. Then too, people disagree about what qualities they consider imperfections. It is questionable whether any gene can be called "defective," except the rare ones that lead to death in infancy or early childhood. The idea of universal physical perfection arises from the timeworn notion that bodies are simply biological machines.

Furthermore, not all illness is of genetic origin and the more that is learned about defeating specific conditions, the more evident it becomes that eliminating one simply leads to another. In my opinion the state of a person's health, apart from rare genetic traits, accidents and virulent infectious disease, is controlled by the subconscious mind; preventative action can influence which illness that person gets, but not whether he or she stays well. Although the effects of the mind on the physical functioning of the body will in time be understood by science, that doesn't mean psychotherapy can alter them, as many such effects are not malfunctions but the normal genetically-programmed reactions to situations different from those they evolved to deal with. Therefore, medical science will never be able to make everyone healthy, and as I've said in my essay "The Need for a New Outlook on Healthcare," overtreatment of minor conditions usually does more harm than good.

Neurotechnology is likely to surpass genetic technology as a means of medical intervention. There will surely be great advances in the use of brain implants to restore hearing, sight, and other functions to the disabled. They are already being used by patients with epilepsy and other disorders, and it is expected that they will eventually enable paralyzed patients to walk again. Experimentally, totally paralyzed people have been able to control computer cursors and robotic arms by thought alone, and progress toward elimination of physical disability will continue.

Even more significantly, it may become possible to reverse dementia with such implants—or at least to improve memory, a goal on which considerable current research is focused. Age-related dementia is one of the most serious problems facing our society. People over age 85 have a 50% chance of developing it at some time before death, and as medical science extends life expectancy, the odds of an individual eventually suffering from it will increase. It can mean devastating loss of the memories of everything that has ever mattered to that person, as well as of the abiity to function in daily life. Moreover, most families are not in a position to provide full-time care, yet the average cost of living in a nursing home is now nearly $90,000 annually. Since few of the elderly can afford this for more than a short time, the government must pay; and economists now fear that as the number of people affected grows, not enough money will be available. If a cure for dementia were found it would benefit not only its victims but a large share of the population. So far, no drugs have proved useful. Perhaps the answer lies in neural modification of the brain.

The extent to which brain implants are used for enhancement of normal capabilities depends on how useful people find them. Personal memory improvement will be desirable, but I doubt that there will be much demand for neural interfaces with computers except for short-term learning of specific subjects and for gaming. A permanent ongoing connection with the Internet strikes me as dangerously intrusive, but perhaps I'm influenced by my feeling that personally I wouldn't want to be a cyborg. In any case, I do not believe that such changes would significantly alter people's personalities.

Apparently, from what I read, there are people who do want to be cyborgs and replace all or most of their bodies with electronics. They might have second thoughts if the technology became available; it's one thing to speculate for fun, and quite another to actually undergo such a transformation. It would be their right to do so if they were willing to pay for it—but I don't think we need to worry about cyborgs becoming common. Some internal electronics would be useful, such as hearts that wouldn't wear out. However, there is a great deal science doesn't yet understand about the interactions between the body and the brain. Until more is known, removing healthy biological parts would at best be risky.

A point not often considered is that there may be an evolutionary reason for the limitations of our natural brains. For example, it has been suggested that our senses could be improved to the extent of seeing light within more frequencies; after all, many animals can see infrared or ultraviolet light. But they cannot see both, or even as many colors as we do. Dogs can hear higher frequencies than humans and have a far stronger sense of smell, but they have a shorter range of sight. It has often been said that humans have an adaptive advantage over other species because we are generalists—we are able to adapt to many environments instead of being limited by specialized characteristics that contribute to survival under specific conditions. The price we paid for this ability may have been, in part, the loss of sensory inputs associated with specialization. To sense too much of the world at once might be so overwhelming that we could not focus on the information relevant to our immediate needs.

We have a still greater adaptive advantage because of our cognitive ability. And too much input data might be even more detrimental to this ability than extended sensory input. Information overload is already a major problem for many people who find it hard to get anything done when exposed to constant bombardment by data from television and the Internet. Unless it could be selectively turned off, an ongoing neural connection to the Net would make this situation much worse. It has been theorized that the reason extrasensory perception (ESP) is rare may be that the brain acts as a filter to keep out the flood of information that would otherwise engulf it. Whether or not this is true, the same principle may apply to conventional input. To be deluged by too much might lead to mental prostration if not to insanity.

Some scientists are experimenting with a sort of technological "telepathy" involving exchange of information directly between brains via the electrical signals associated with types of thought. They also plan to expand the concept of mentally activating electronic devices that it's now hoped will benefit disabled people. However, it's questionable how practical this would be for wider use. Some say we'll be able to control all our household appliances mentally, yet would that not be a distraction from whatever more significant things we were thinking about? Intellectual activity depends on concentration; to clutter minds with tasks best left to external devices would be a backward step.

As to the increasingly-common notion that it will become possible to upload minds to machines and do away with bodies entirely, it is a fallacy I have discussed in several other essays. Here it's not relevant, since if it were possible for a human mind to exist in such a state we would have to revise our entire conception of personhood, and that would nullify everything previously believed about being human.

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All the above speculations are based on an assumption that Earth in the future will be very much the same as it is today. Of course, we can't be sure that there won't be a disaster such a nuclear war, a pandemic caused by bioterrorism, or any of a number of other catastrophes suggested by dystopian science fiction. Such scenarios can be ruled out as far as making predictions about the future is concerned, since the effects would be so overwhelming that no prediction would be meaningful. But it's possible that lesser world-altering events may occur.

It's all too likely that there will continue to be non-nuclear wars, at least for the foreseeable future. (Hopefully not forever—see my essay "Humankind's Future in the Cosmos.") AI will have a major impact on warfare, although the U.S. military is opposed to using weapons that can operate without human control and many AI researchers believe they should be banned. Various AI devices to aid human soldiers are under development, however, and surely AI will fill many non-combat military roles. I suspect that no ban on autonomous weapons could last because eventually, despite treaties, some rogue nation or terrorist group will deploy them. Of greater concern than actual military conflict is the extent to which cheap AI devices, such as tiny drones that target specific people, could be used against civilians by terrorists or even for murder. The same technology used for legitimate devices could also be used for destructive ones, so it's hard to see how they could be kept out of the hands of criminals.

There are other potential calamities. Many people today think that if we don't lower our standard of living we are doomed to destruction by climate change. In my opinion this fear is greatly exaggerated. Contrary to the widely promoted theory that climate change is due to human activity, some scientists believe it is entirely, or almost entirely, the result of natural processes. The idea that we are responsible for it is popular because it offers false hope that we can stop or reverse it, and because it provides an opportunity to vent feelings about it by placing blame.

That said, it would be desirable to reduce pollution of the atmosphere whether the climate changes significantly or not. And it is indeed getting warmer, which may cause a rise in sea level and frequent droughts, among other effects. We can no more prevent this than we can prevent earthquakes. We may someday be able to control the weather in specific locations on a short-term basis, but the only solution to problems with the climate is to develop technologies for adapting to it, as humans have been doing since we first built shelters and learned to use fire. That is how evolution works; when environmental changes occur, a species adapts or it dies out. Through extragenetic evolution, we can choose to adapt before our survival is endangered.

By the time climate change is sufficient to threaten the well-being of people in industrialized nations, the changes in lifestyle made possible by AI will have begun, and the use of AI will lessen its impact. People are going to be moving away from cities, and climate change will accelerate the process. This does not mean that no one will become homeless, but that situation will have to be dealt with anyway, merely from the upheaval accompanying the introduction of AI. Moreover, AI will lead to major improvements in agriculture and food distribution that will mitigate the effects of drought.

However, the problems that will be caused by global warming will be much greater in Africa and Asia than they will be in America. At worst, a rise in sea level could force Americans to move out of waterfront cities and abandon beach homes, but in Asia large populations live in low-lying coastal areas and would have nowhere to go. Developing nations do not have the technology for dealing with high temperatures, such as air conditioning, that are already common in industrialized ones. Nor do their traditional methods of agriculture and food storage provide much leeway in case of extreme weather.

So one of the best ways of adapting to climate change would be to help the people of developing nations obtain modern technology and AI devices. But how could they afford them? I see only one solution, and it's something we should have begun long ago for the welfare of everyone in the world. We need to develop space-based solar power (SBSP).

The key to raising living standards in developing nations is power. About 3 billion people, mostly in Africa and southern Asia, have no access to electricity. They must use firewood, which they often spend hours gathering, for cooking and heating, and smoke-induced diseases are responsible for the death of 4.3 million people every year. Use of electronic devices is out of the question for these people, but more than that, they need power merely to gain utilities standard in the rest of the world. Yet industrialized nations rely mainly on oil and coal for generation of power, which is a major source of pollution and which will not last indefinitely. It can't be made available worldwide, nor can renewable sources such as Earth-based solar power meet the need.

Since the 1970s it has been known that solar power could be collected by satellites in space and beamed to Earth—to all parts of Earth. This would not only provide plenty of relatively inexpensive power to the nations that launched the satellites, but could raise the rest of the world out of poverty. It would enable the people of poor countries to adopt a lifestyle appropriate to the twenty-first century. Many experts have studied proposals for such a system, but it has generally been considered too expensive a project to undertake. A few, notably the late Gerard O'Neill, have pointed out that it would not be too expensive if materials obtained from the moon were used for construction of space stations in order to save the cost of lifting them out of Earth's gravity well. However, since the moon has been neglected for the past half-century, we may have to develop SBSP without the benefit of lunar resources.

This is the only option that makes sense. And it will provide more than power—it will make much-needed water accessible, too. Drinking water is not easy to get in rural areas of developing nations; in Sub-Saharan Africa 14 million women and over 3 million children spend more than 30 minutes a day carrying water for their households, often from ponds or streams. Water may become scarce in America, too, if climate change adds to the need for irrigation of crops. Already some cities, such as Los Angeles, depend on piping water from distant rivers; if those rivers dried up or an earthquake cracked the pipes, millions of people would die of thirst. And population growth in itself is threatening the water supply. Sooner or later it will be necessary to desalinate seawater. So far, that has been too costly; but with cheap space-based solar power it could be done.

Power satellites will also make possible the utilization of extraterrestrial resources by private industry. Entrepreneurs like those now building spaceships will mine materials from the moon and asteroids and use the profits to expand their operations in space. Eventually, through the use of AI, manufacturing will be done in space as well, and industry that pollutes will be moved out of the atmosphere into orbit where it belongs. This process could restore Earth to its natural beauty, though that won't happen until far in the future.

The large-scale use of power and/or materials from space will be the first major step in extragenetic evolution since our prehistoric ancestors began using metal. It will mark the transition of humankind from a planet-bound species to a spacefaring one, a transition that is essential to the long-term survival of our species. If climate change proves to be the spur needed to make it happen, then like many other apparent misfortunes in our history, that will someday be seen as a blessing.

I have said more about spacefaring in my essay "Humankind's Future in the Cosmos" and in my book From This Green Earth: Essays on Looking Outward. It is unquestionably part of the future of being human, if humans continue to thrive. But I don't think colonizing other worlds will alter the lives of ordinary people more than moving to unfamiliar environments has in the past. From generation to generation, we will go on as we always have, forming relationships, loving each other, giving birth to children, raising families—and wondering about the mysteries of the universe that remain beyond our grasp.

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To sum up, I believe the future won't be as different from today as most speculators think. Much that is written about it nowadays is biased in favor of the views of people who are so excited, or so appalled, by speculation about upcoming technology that they fail to think about what being human means to them. Underneath, we all know what it is to be human. Why should we assume that our descendants will be unlike ourselves?

To be sure, the rapid progress in the field of neurotechnology is disconcerting, for though brain implants are a blessing to the disabled and perhaps someday to victims of dementia, more complex ones, if used by normal people, might alter their personalities—or even lead to the probing and/or influencing of their thoughts by the government. Yet I suspect that in the end, that wouldn't affect our humanity. When it comes right down to it, either human minds are more than brains, or they are not. If they're not, then it does not really matter how brain implants affect them because we never were what we thought we were to begin with; there is nothing to be lost. But if there is more to us, as I am convinced that there is, then no form of technology can take it away.

."I don't believe these interventions change who a person is, who they fundamentally perceive themselves to be," says neurologist and bioethicist Judy Illes, director of the Neuroethics Canada center at the University of British Columbia. "They may change many features around identity, but I believe that the self is resilient to the intervention." I'm sure that she is right. The human self is a mystery, and perhaps the failure of brain enhancement to suppress it will shed light on its true nature.

And perhaps it will also serve to reveal the nature of psi powers. The one truly life-changing event to come in the future will be society's acknowledgment that such powers—telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis—exist. The scientific proof that they do can't be ignored forever. A time will come when enough people in responsible positions accept them to turn the tide. The military is actively researching practical applications of psi, and it may be that as in so many other areas of science, military-funded developments will lead the way to civilian use. However, psi normally works entirely on an unconscious level. Public acceptance won't mean that the average person will become consciously telepathic. Widespread use of psi won't occur until the distant future, and will be a major step in human evolution. It will not alter humans in any essential way, but unlike technological progress, it will have a significant impact on personal lives and relationships as well as on human culture as a whole. The result, I believe, will be greater harmony among people everywhere.

I have been told by friends that the world is declining. To them it seems that way, in part because of political issues and in part because of technological changes on the horizon which they think will somehow dehumanize society. To judge from Google search results they are far from alone. Yet every generation has felt that way. Disapproval of the government and predictions of doomsday have never been lacking, and inventions from the printing press to electric lights have been deplored for their alleged threat to human values. In 1900 a Portsmouth, NH reporter wrote, "Now comes the electric telephone, which offers promise. It promises, detractors fear, to strike at the very sociability of our community. People who would normally seek out each other's company may now speak over a wire." This is just what's now being said about children using cell phones. In the future it may be said about neural connections to the Internet. Plus ça change. . . .

In 1829 Thomas Carlyle, one of the most important social commentators of his time, wrote a long essay titled "Signs of the Times." In it he declared, "Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it . . . above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word. . . . Our old modes of exertion are all discredited, and thrown aside. On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver, and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster. . . . There is no end to machinery. Even the horse is stripped of his harness, and finds a fleet fire-horse [train] invoked in his stead. Nay, we have an artist that hatches chickens by steam; the very brood-hen is to be superseded! For all earthly, and for some unearthly purposes, we have machines. . . ."

Carlyle believed that not only physical mechanism but what he considered mechanism of social, political, and intellectual pursuits were signs of declining humanity. He asserted, "Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand." Nevertheless he was optimistic: "Mechanism is not always to be our hard taskmaster, but one day to be our pliant, all-ministering servant. . . . That great outward changes are in progress can be doubtful to no one. The time is sick and out of joint. . . . The thinking minds of all nations call for change. There is a deep-lying struggle in the whole fabric of society; a boundless grinding collision of the New with the Old. . . ."

I think this is applicable to our own time. People deplore what is new because it is so noticeable that they lose sight of the fundamental things that endure. There is no need to worry about artificial intelligence surpassing us. Future technology and the freedom from routine work it provides will offer more opportunity to do things that are uniquely human, not less. Opportunity to be, or communicate, with friends and loved ones; to enjoy nature or sports; to ponder and create. If AI can do everything else that once only humans could do, so much the better. That will free us to simply be human.

Being human is an inner quality not dependent on outer form or overt activity. It cannot be lost or diminished as long as we are alive. That will remain true, no matter how many things change in the world of tomorrow.

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The End of Personal Privacy

(2020)

The widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI) will bring an end to personal privacy as we have known it—not only will government surveillance be expanded, but people will be all too willing to accept implanted devices for shopping convenience and health monitoring. Furthermore, "brain-reading" technology poses a growing threat.

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In addition to the many conveniences artificial intelligence will offer us, it will have effects that are less desirable. Like all technology AI is a tool, but it will be a powerful tool in the hands not only of consumers and industry but of government. Right now, despite increasing surveillance of citizens, government use of the data is limited by the fact that far more is being collected than it is possible to analyze. AI excels at analysis. We are going to have very little privacy in the future, and if the wrong kind of government gets into power, we are not going to have much freedom from interference in our lives.

AI will undoubtedly lead to extensive recording and examination of information about ordinary individuals and their activities. Although the secret mass collection of phone records from all customers of America's large phone companies was banned by Congress in 2015, by obtaining records of those contacted by the contacts of persons targeted for investigation the government is still gathering data about a great many people who are not suspected of any wrongdoing. The legal controversies about such practices won't be resolved soon, and probably won't put an end to them.

Collection of phone records is the least of the tactics already being employed for surveillance, even in democratic nations. Thousands of closed-circuit TV cameras, some with facial-recognition capability, watch the streets of London and New York. The U.S. border is patrolled by drones and towers that detect individuals' movements and a zeppelin that can track cars and boats within 200 miles of the Florida Keys, while DNA is collected from everyone in immigration detention. "The deployment of invasive technologies may be done in the name of border security," says a report at gen.medium.com, "but they'll likely find their way deep inside the United States. Almost every technology developed at the border in the last two decades now exists in the armories of local police departments."

These measures pale, however, beside the intrusion on individual privacy that will be made possible by implanted devices. Implanted microchips are already in use on a voluntary basis; while they can't yet track location, that capability will soon be added, and they may not remain voluntary. Some types of surveillance will be unavoidable in view of the increased danger from AI-equipped criminals and terrorists, and hopefully, safeguards will exist to prevent misuse of the data collected on innocent citizens. But the government's definition of "misuse" is unlikely to match that of privacy advocates.

When I wrote Stewards of the Flame in 2005, I made up the whole idea of the implanted tracking chips. It seemed to me a likely distant-future development, considering that we were microchipping cats and dogs. I wasn't aware until later that passive chips were already being implanted in humans and that there were many blogs and articles on the Web opposing them. One of the earliest objections was Christian fundamentalists' claim that such chips are the "Mark of the Beast" referred to in the Bible (considered by scholars to be a metaphorical reference to the oppressive rule of Rome). The comparison is rather more apt than was evident at the time, considering that the mark was said to be required "so that no one can buy or sell" unless he has it, for this may well prove to be the main reason for the acceptance of implants by the public.

Already thousands of people in Sweden are using implanted chips in place of cash and credit cards, and employers here are beginning to offer them to workers for use at the snack bar as well as for ID purposes. Their potential for such use is limited mainly by the lack of scanners in stores, a problem widespread installation of AI will eliminate. The convenience of not having to carry money or ID is undeniable—some people have chips merely to avoid having to carry door keys. In time credit cards, which can be lost or stolen, will no longer be issued. And the advantage to vendors in not having to hire clerks and safeguard money is so great that once microchipping is widespread, they may be unwilling to accept cash. In Stewards I portrayed implants as entirely bad, the immediate cause of my protagonists' decision to escape to a new world—and then only a few years later in Defender of the Flame, without thinking twice I had my hero use his to pay for a sandwich. Eventually this is how all shopping will be done.

By the time implantable tracking chips become available, they may seem no more objectionable than GPS-equipped cell phones. Even before then, however, AI could easily track someone by a trail of purchases; to conceal one's movements one would have to refrain from buying even a cup of coffee. In the more distant future, it's probable that the chips will be able to pick up sound, meaning that room-bugging technology will be obsolete and no conversation anywhere can be considered private. AI may analyze all conversations in real time on the chance of preventing a crime; that's the sort of task to which it's well-suited. And implanted chips will be as active inside homes as elsewhere, unless the public demands the provision of a way to turn them on and off.

Like cell phones and the Internet, implanted microchips will have a major effect both on society as a whole and on people's daily lives. Future generations of children will wonder how their forebears managed without them. Hopefully some sort of protection against unwarranted invasions of privacy will be established. but even if it is, there will be criminals, if not agencies, that break the rules—that chips will be hacked is virtually certain. All technological advances (and for that matter, sociological ones) have both good and bad consequences, and we could not escape the latter even if we chose to forgo the former; that's an inherent aspect of human progress. We can only hope that the worst-case scenario—the possibility that implanted chips might be made compulsory and used for controlling the entire population—will never become a reality.

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If the prospect of losing our privacy to tracking chips is dismaying, that of subjecting the inner status of our bodies to surveillance is even more so. Yet surprisingly little concern about this issue can be found on the Web. Though the mere implantation of identifying microchips has been viewed with alarm for many years, the prospect of other types of body sensors, even implanted ones, seems not to have aroused much worry. Perhaps no one has noticed the scary implications of what is happening to healthcare. On the other hand, perhaps the magic word "health" has blinded people to the possibility that the price of pursuing it to extremes might turn out to the loss of their autonomy. Stewards of the Flame was intended as a warning, not a prophecy; but I've begun to wonder whether it's less far-fetched than I realized while writing it. Probably the least credible premise in the novel is that in a time when we have starships, implanted health monitors won't be used just as much on Earth as in a colony that carries medical surveillance to excess.

At the time I was writing the book I had no idea of the extent to which remote health monitoring was already being developed, or that monitors now merely wearable will be implantable very soon. They are by no means limited to heart monitoring—among the many experimental skin and under-skin devices that now exist are sensors for glucose, blood pressure, stomach and lung performance, and the presence of cancer. Microchips are only the beginning; in 2016 it was announced that engineers at UC Berkeley have created experimental dust-sized, wireless sensors that can be implanted in the body, bringing closer the day when a wearable device could monitor internal nerves, muscles or organs in real time.

As if ongoing observation of one's bodily functioning weren't enough, there's even research underway on a tooth patch that can track what a person eats. Furthermore, as the Washington Post reported in 2018, "Bluetooth-equipped electronic pills are being developed to monitor the inner workings of your body, but they could eventually broadcast what you've eaten or whether you've taken drugs."

A number of companies are now developing "smart" toilets that sample urine and feces, measure body fat, and check blood pressure, heart beat, and/or weight when a person sits down. "The experience of using such a toilet won't be intrusive," says Sam Gambhir, director of the Canary Center at Stanford for Cancer Early Detection. "People will simply go to the bathroom, flush and go on about their day. Meanwhile, the toilet will analyze the user's waste, identify the person using fingerprint sensors embedded in the flush handle and then send the results to the cloud or an app on a smartphone." This is not intrusive? Such a statement goes to show how insensitive people have already become to the crossing of lines once considered inviolable.

As of 2018, three million patients worldwide are currently connected to a remote monitoring device that sends personal medical data to their healthcare provider. Remote monitoring has become big business— most of the many websites now devoted to it are produced by suppliers of equipment and software. They discuss advantages and disadvantages from the standpoint of medical providers, emphasizing their needs and what they feel patients want, or should want. In looking at these sites, one must bear in mind that their aim is commercial. Still, they reveal the handwriting on the wall as to what the future may hold. When monitoring is done by AI the expansion of the concepts now being introduced (plus many more under development) will be virtually unlimited.

There are many legitimate uses for remote health monitoring. In addition to its value in providing continuous data about chronic medical conditions, it's invaluable for people who live in remote locations, or are too ill to visit medical offices easily, or lack transportation—in fact, it may eventually be less costly than office visits even for people physically able to make them. It's certainly less time-consuming. And enabling the elderly to stay in their own homes instead of nursing homes is an indisputably desirable goal.

However, as a 2014 article in Health Affairs points out, "Sensors that are located in a patient's home or that interface with the patient's body to detect safety issues or medical emergencies may inadvertently collect sensitive information about household activities. For instance, home sensors intended to detect falls may also transmit information such as interactions with a spouse or religious activity, or indicate when no one is home." Though the aim of such devices may be simply to protect health, their potential uses won't stop there; and they may pave the way for data collection with less beneficent purposes. Either corporate or government interests could easily be served by secret incorporation of undocumented capabilities.

Those are not the only troubling questions raised by increasing availability of monitoring technology. People with chronic illnesses will welcome it. But once a person chooses to be monitored for a specific medical problem, where does it end? I don't want well-meaning healthcare professionals checking up on my body's condition and how I live my life. Most of the discussion about privacy in connection with medical technology centers on whether the data can be made secure against unauthorized dissemination. But I want privacy from medical providers, too, except with respect to problems for which I've intentionally sought help. The right to keep one's own body private is recognized in all other contexts. If one's bodily status and even the content of one's toilet become subject to daily examination by "authorities," the very concept of personal privacy will inevitably be weakened.

This issue is particularly serious in the case of very old, or very ill, people who prefer to die naturally rather than on life support in a hospital. In the novel Jesse remarks that such people often refrain from doing anything about terminal illness: "That's how my great-granddad went, and nobody questioned it, and what he didn't tell the doctors was left unsaid." But if such people are monitored earlier when they do want treatment, will there be any way to stop? Or will the ambulance automatically come for them, just as in the story? As far back as 2001 an article in EE Times stated, "'We'd like to believe that someday a pacemaker could send a signal directly to a satellite. . . . When it comes to this kind of patient management, we'd like to believe the sky's the limit."

Moreover, it's likely that once remote monitoring of illness becomes common, people who are healthy will want to be monitored just in case some illness should develop later. And that trend will be fueled by the suppliers of monitoring equipment, who like the pharmaceutical companies will do their best to convince medical providers, employers, and the general public that health depends on the use of their products. In a 2018 issue of Huff Post Jessica Baron writes, "The implications of anyone else knowing your fitness level, heart rate, nutrition choices and step count range from humiliation to outright discrimination," yet even now some employers and insurance companies are urging workers to wear fitness monitors in exchange for rewards. At least one has tried, so far unsuccessfully, to make it compulsory. If this idea catches on, insurance may eventually be denied to people who refuse to submit to monitoring,

The scary thing is not so much the possibility that someday an arbitrarily-imposed law might require implanted microchips, but that the public will come to favor such a law for healthcare reasons if not out of concern for national security. It's all too easy to imagine the voters deciding that everyone ought to be monitored "for their own good," just as they've passed laws forcing everyone to wear seatbelts.

In many countries it wouldn't even need the concurrence of the voters—where the government pays for all medical care it would be viewed as cost-saving measure. Although at present the common idea that "preventative care" saves money is not true—the cost of unnecessary testing and treatment of the people who would never get seriously sick exceeds that of caring for those who do—internal monitoring might more accurately determine who is truly at risk. Wouldn't it be a good thing, then, to identify and treat these people whether or not they want to be treated? I don't think so. Apart from the fact that there are many reasons why a person might not wish to know about future illness, in my opinion there is no justification for depriving an individual of free choice for any reason other than protecting others from direct harm. And that includes the choice to be free of unwanted physical surveillance.

But this freedom may not withstand the pressure of our society's dedication to health as the highest good and the pursuit of it as a moral, rather than mere practical, obligation. (See my essay "The Worship of Medical Authority.") "It's only a matter of time before the exam-room-centered focus of patient care gives way to management of assigned populations to maintain or improve health," wrote John Morrissey in the July 8, 2014 issue of Medical Economics. And once people get used to medical monitoring will they not be less adverse to the thought of the government making use of implanted devices for whatever purposes it finds convenient? It looks as if my longtime conviction that medical "benefits" are a foot in the door for tyranny may not be far off base.

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It might seem that ongoing monitoring of people's internal bodily status is the ultimate invasion of privacy. But neuroscientists are predicting an even more disturbing one. They say that brain-sensing technology will enable the reading of people's thoughts.

The media, reporting on the activities of high-profile research organizations and entrepreneurs, have presented such a possibility as "mind-reading technology" and "technological telepathy" (though it is more accurately called "brain-reading") and have quite rightly expressed alarm. Ethicists in many countries are considering what to do about protecting neural privacy. "The potential for governments to make us more compliant, for employers to force us to work harder, or for companies to make us want more of their products underlines just how seriously we should take this technology," says Garfield Benjamin in a recent article in The Conversation.

Most research so far has involved non-invasive technologies such as brain scanning via fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging). It is already being used for lie detection. The principle by which this works is that if a subject is lying the effort will cause activity in certain areas of the brain, which will result in increased blood flow to those areas that is visible on the scan. But it is not always accurate, since other types of mental effort involve the same areas of the brain. And a recent study has found that people can trick the test by using mental countermeasures.

More advanced research with fMRI has shown that it is possible to determine from brain scanning what a subject is looking at, at least in terms of similarity to stored images. Even more than that, "If I threw [you] into an MRI. machine right now . . . I can tell what words you're about to say, what images are in your head. I can tell you what music you're thinking of," medical imaging firm Openwater's founder Mary Lou Jepsenis told CNBC in 2017. Perhaps in time brain scanning will enable recording and identification of a person's memories of what he or she has seen in the past, or even dreamed. Since fMRI now requires the subject to cooperate by lying still in the tunnel of a large machine, it is not likely to be practical for police interrogations—but that may not always be true. Jansen says she has put "the functionality of an MRI machine . . . into a wearable in the form of a ski hat."

"The right to keep one's thoughts locked up in their brain is amongst the most fundamental rights of being human." Paul Root Wolpe, director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University in Atlanta, told CBS News in a 2009 episode of "60 Minutes." Yet the law at present doesn't say who will be allowed to scan people's brains. It's important, he said, to decide "whether we're going to let the state do it or whether we're going to let me do it. I have two teenage daughters. I come home one day and my car is dented and both of them say they didn't do it. Am I going to be allowed to drag them off to the local brain imaging lie detection company and get them put in a scanner?"

Even more difficult is the question of whether to permit surreptitious scanning of people who aren't suspected of anything. fMRI scanning is already being used to try to figure out what we want to buy and how to sell it to us. Product designers and advertisers use brain scanning and other techniques of the rapidly expanding field of neuromarketing to determine the most effective ways of appealing to customers. So far this is done with volunteer test subjects in laboratories, and unlike some commentators, I see nothing wrong in using the information obtained to induce the public to buy. But if the technology advances to the point of scanning the brains of customers who aren't aware they're being scanned, that is something else entirely—as is the issue of scanning innocent people's brains to determine whether they're likely to commit crimes in the future.

Whether technology can ever do anything approaching transmission of actual thoughts remains to be seen. Already, however, it can detect emotional states. In China many workers in factories, public transport, state-owned companies and the military wear caps with built-in EEG (electroencephalogram) capability that scan their brainwaves and send the data to computers that use AI to uncover depression, anxiety, rage, or fatigue. At first there was resistance because they thought (mistakenly) that the caps could read their minds, but they soon got used to them because they look just like safety helmets. An advanced version is being developed by hospitals to monitor patients' emotions and prevent violent incidents.

Research on more invasive technology such as brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) is presently focused on unquestionably-beneficial medical uses. Even now, it is possible for a paralyzed person to control a computer cursor or even a robotic arm by thought alone, But Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has more ambitious hopes. His company Neuralink is developing strands smaller than a human hair that can be injected into the brain to detect the activity of neurons. Though presently intended for medical purposes such as helping quadriplegics and people with Parkinson's disease, the technology, according to Musk, will eventually enable humans to be interfaced with superior AI, which in his opinion will otherwise leave us behind.

Today's BCIs generally require brain surgery, which can be justified only for people with serious illnesses who can benefit from it. But that will change. In 2017 a company called Neurable demonstrated a virtual reality game using a headstrap that enabled a player to move, pick up objects, and stop lasers entirely by thought. The U.S. government's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding development of thought-sensing hardware that will be embedded into a baseball cap or headset and will be bi-directional, able to transmit information back to the brain in a form that the brain will understand.

Facebook is funding similar research. In collaboration with researchers at the University of California at San Francisco it's now working on an implanted BCI that converts brain signals to words and could help patients with neurological damage speak again by analyzing their brain activity in real time. But eventually, it hopes to produce a non-invasive wearable device designed to let users type by simply thinking words, control music, or interact in virtual reality. "It's also bound to raise plenty of questions concerning privacy," an article at Futurism.com points out. "Our thoughts are one of the last safe havens that have yet to be exploited by data hoarding big tech companies." Since Facebook has lost the trust of many users due to past privacy violations, its involvement may cause the device to be met with suspicion.

All of the above projects involve communication between brains and machines, but technology-assisted brain-to-brain communication is also possible. In 2013 researchers at Duke University enabled rats to communicate through their implants, resulting in the "receiver" rat pressing the correct lever without being able to see the signal given to the "sender" rat. At Harvard, humans with non-invasive EEG BCIs were able to mentally control the movement of a rat's tail. In 2019 Chinese scientists enabled rats to move through a maze when guided by a wireless connection to a human brain. Neuroscientists believe it may someday be possible to communicate with animals, including our dogs and cats, by brain-sensing and thus learn what they are thinking (although if this requires putting implants in their brains I doubt that many of us will choose to do it).

Experimental brain-to- brain communication between humans has been achieved, too. A single-word message in the form of encoded and decoded binary symbols has been successfully sent brain-to-brain from a person in India to one in France. Images have been projected from one mind to another. And the University of Washington has developed a game called BrainNet, a much-simplified version of the video game Tetris, in which shapes on a computer screen are moved by the thoughts of players in separate rooms wearing brain caps.

There are many exaggerated claims being made about the dangers of our alleged coming ability to send messages by brain-sensing "telepathy" or scan the Internet through mind alone, allowing hackers—or governments—to gather personal information, from our political opinions and sexual preferences to our ATM pin numbers. However, most of these scenarios are based on misunderstanding of the technology. As physicist Michio Kaku points out in his book The Future of the Mind, privacy issues may not be as great a concern as the public thinks, since neural signals degrade so rapidly outside the brain that they cannot be understood by anyone more than a few feet away. Thoughts used to access the Internet could reach only as far as a personal computer or smartphone, which would convert them to words and transmit messages or commands via ordinary wi-fi. And in the unlikely event that a way were found to detect brain signals from a distance, noise signals from outside would block them.

Nevertheless, it would be possible for hackers, or the manufacturer, to install spyware on personal computers and smartphones that would decode more brain signals than the user has authorized—so the potential for privacy violation does indeed exist unless adequate security precautions are taken. And the need for proximity to the brain is no barrier to the use of neural sensing to get information from people detained by authorities or enemies, nor could it protect them from revelation of any anti-government thoughts they wish to conceal. "To me the brain is the one safe place for freedom of thought, of fantasies, and for dissent," Duke University professor Nita Farahany told _ MIT Technology Review_. "We're getting close to crossing the final frontier of privacy in the absence of any protections whatsoever."

Personally, I view neurotechnology with mixed feelings. On one hand, it is of immense benefit to disabled people. Furthermore, it may shed light on the extent to which thought is entirely the product of brain activity, as distinguished from the unknown mechanism that materialists refuse to acknowledge—it may even help us learn to consciously control our natural psi capabilities. (Neurofeedback was, after all, the method used in the Flame novels, written before I knew such technology actually existed.) On the other hand, the all-too-real prospect of government and/or criminal abuse of brain-reading technology is indisputably frightening.

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Robots Will Never Replace Humans

(2020)

Robots may become more intelligent than humans, but intelligence is not the only aspect of the human mind.

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The development of artificial intelligence (AI) is proceeding rapidly. We will soon have all the devices discussed in my essay "The Future of Being Human" and far more; the assistance of AI will bring about profound changes in industry, medicine, and government as well as in the convenience of everyday life. Much will become possible that is beyond our present ability to accomplish. Eventually we will have self-replicating robots to mine extraterrestrial resources, build settlements on other worlds, and explore distant stars, work that would be difficult if not impossible without them.

AI will be able to do many things better than people can, including some that demand capabilities once thought to be exclusively human. But in my opinion it's not going to act by volition, and it's not going to make autonomous decisions about tasks not given to it, no matter how intelligent it is. Intelligence in itself does not imply free will. Some philosophers don't believe even humans have free will, but assuming that we do, it is a major distinction between the human mind and AI.

Furthermore, AI will rarely take the form of artificial beings, despite their popularity in science fiction I don't think humanoid robots or androids will be produced except on a small scale for research or entertainment purposes. What would be the advantage? Robots in sci-fi films are cute, and robocops provide spectacularly violent screen action, but there is no good reason to take them any more literally than figures like Batman and Superman. The functions robots serve can better be done by specialized ones that aren't shaped like people. The idea of humanoid robot servants and/or workers is comparable to the ancient idea that men will someday fly with artificial wings—both are based on obsolete concepts. We don't need pseudo-people to do menial jobs when we have automated equipment, any more than planes need to look like birds.

Nor do we need robot police or soldiers. Crime in the future will be controlled not by SWAT teams but by sophisticated electronic surveillance and perhaps by remote immobilization of suspects for automated pickup. Wars will not be fought by ground combat, and as far as air combat is concerned, we already have drones. At present ground-based pilots control the drones; mightn't we replace them with robot pilots? Of course not—by the time we can produce a robot that can pilot a distant plane remotely, it will be possible for generals to command all the drones, plus various other devices not yet invented, from one AI-equipped room at headquarters. No artificial beings will be required.

Nevertheless, there is a long tradition of personifying AI that influences current thought about it. Not only are fictional robots given names and genders, but they generally use the first person when speaking, whether human-shaped or not; even software such as Cortana refers to itself as "I." The character Data in Star Trek is shown to have emotions even though he claims to lack them, and since he's portrayed by a human actor, audiences are convinced that he's no mere machine. Children's stories, too, give robots feelings, a practice I've always considered emotionally misleading except where the fantastic intent is as unmistakable as it is with R2-D2. The proper designation for such fantasy is "pathetic fallacy," a literary term for the attribution of human emotion and conduct to things that are not human. But people have been conditioned to believe that conscious robots may become more than fantasy, and scientists—who themselves have grown up under this influence—are prone to agree.

Personally, I see no reason why AI ought to be conscious, let alone have emotions. The usual explanation given for the attempt to emulate the human mind is that ordinary robots, humanoid or not, are specialized and can perform only functions for which they have been specifically programmed, whereas we need generalized AI, now usually referred to as AGI, that is more versatile. We want robots with the ability to handle new situations that haven't been planned. Yes, but does this require consciousness, self-awareness? On one hand, some scientists say it does; on the other hand they claim that given access to enough data, such as the entire content of the Internet, a superintelligent machine could correlate more of it than any human could and take whatever action was necessary to achieve its goals. But this is true simply because manipulation of data is something for which a computer is better suited than a human. People have an advantage over superintelligent computers in handling the unexpected because we have experience—accumulated data—that computers presently lack, not because we are conscious. A conscious person without any applicable experience, such as a young child, would have no advantage, at least not in a practical sense.

The value of consciousness lies in something science cannot define. The idea that it could exist in artificial beings or networks arises from the assumption that human beings are no more than biological machines. Because we don't understand what else they are, scientists insist that the physical brain is the sole source if it, despite all the evidence of human experience to the contrary. Some believe that consciousness will somehow emerge if an artificial brain is made complex enough, which is just another way of saying the brain is all that matters. It is on a par with the notion that human minds could be uploaded to computers and thus attain immortality, which some people now believe to the extent of having their brains cryonically preserved after their deaths—a sad example of how deeply the philosophy of materialism now permeates our culture.

I maintain that the underlying reason for the effort to produce conscious robots is that AGI designers feel a need to reassure themselves about the adequacy of their materialistic premises (though they may not be aware of this motive). There are surely enough hints of alternatives in today's society to make diehard materialists uneasy. Emotionally, doubt is more upsetting to them than the prospect of the Singularity, a hypothetical point at which artificial intelligence will become more intelligent than humans and advance exponentially beyond our ability to foresee or control. Many futurists even welcome that prospect.

Unlikely as it is that the Singularity will ever happen, it has become fashionable to think that AGI may eventually supplant human beings. The idea that robots might someday take over the world and kill off humans has been around since Czech author Karel Čapek introduced the word "robot" (derived from a Czech word meaning compulsory labor) in his 1920 play R.U.R. The robot takeover in the play was meant as an allegory about the exploitation of human workers, but since then many people, including some AGI researchers, have taken the idea seriously. In fact, scientific celebrities such as Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates actually believe that advances in AGI will result in self-aware robots that may seek to destroy us. Dr. Hawking told the BBC, "The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race."

I don't think we need to worry about this, as I feel sure that conscious AGI is inherently impossible. What dismays me is that scientists who believe it could happen are working to produce such robots anyway. I hope their acknowledged motive is simply that if they don't do it someone else will, which unfortunately is true. It would be disastrous if only nations bent on conquest had superintelligent AGI, and it wouldn't need to be conscious to do a lot of harm.

The scenario of robot takeover depends on the assumption that AGI would act autonomously either with the desire to rule, or upon deciding that humans were "useless." Useless for what? AGI will have no criteria for usefulness except in regard to the goals it is designed to achieve. To be sure, if intended as a weapon it could tasked with killing humans, but the danger of its killing everyone comes in the same class as the danger of annihilation by some other weapon of mass destruction—the human race will not be fully safe until we have established offworld colonies. But there is no reason to fear that superintelligent AGI would in itself be malevolent.

"Some people assume that being intelligent is basically the same as having human mentality," says computer expert Jeff Hawkins in his book On Intelligence. "They fear that intelligent machines will resent being 'enslaved' because humans hate being enslaved. They fear that intelligent machines will try to take over the world because intelligent people throughout history have tried to take over the world. But these fears rest on a false analogy. . . . Intelligent machines will not have anything resembling human emotion unless we painstakingly design them to." And emotion produced by design would be no more than a simulation. Therein lies the fallacy of the doomsayers' premise. The underlying reason why materialists think intelligent AGI would "take over" is because they do assume intelligence implies human mentality—they have no choice but to assume it, since they believe that human mentality is nothing more than intelligence.

Of greater import than hypothetical danger from self-aware AGI is the mere fact that eminent experts such as Hawking, Musk, and Gates believe that it will exist. Their confidence in the inevitability of its creation goes to show that if and when efforts to produce conscious robots fail, it won't be because of inadequate technology. And therefore it will be strong, perhaps conclusive, evidence that there's indeed some aspect of human minds that materialism can't explain.

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Transhumanism Is a Dead End

(2003, 2017)

I wrote parts of this essay in 2003 in an online forum where it met with a good deal of very emotional opposition. I have reorganized and expanded it to include some of my responses to the critics.

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Transhumanism is the belief, now increasingly popular, that human beings can and should evolve beyond their biological physical and mental limitations through the use of science and technology. This includes enhancement of the body by means of genetic engineering or implants and of the mind by means of neural interfaces with computers, among other things. A prime aim of transhumanists is the extension of human lifespan, and most feel that the ultimate goal is immortality.

Some transhumanist proposals are personally repugnant to me, but that's not why I dislike the philosophy underlying them. In my opinion anybody who wants to become a cyborg, or to continue forever in the very limited state we know as life, has the right to make that choice if and when such options become available. The trouble with the transhumanist agenda lies not in what it might permit people to do in the future, but in how it leads them to perceive human nature. It is based on a narrow conception of mind that rules out vast areas of human experience; those that don't fit are simply shut out of its proponents' awareness. And that is hardly an attitude conducive to the advancement of science.

Transhumanism is based on a wholly materialistic conception of reality. In effect it says, "What we now understand about the mind and consciousness is all there is to it; there's nothing left but to fill in the details of how the brain works." It goes without saying that similar assumptions once made in the field of physics, such as Lord Kelvin's famous 1900 statement that "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics; all that remains is more and more precise measurement," proved to be short-sighted.

For millennia the majority of the human population has believed that the mind is more than a biological machine, that it extends in some inexplicable way beyond the individual body both in space (ESP) and in time (continued consciousness after death). The scientific evidence for the former can be denied only by those with closed minds; with regard to the latter, which is outside the present boundaries of science, it is well to remember the well-known aphorism, "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." The machine model of the human mind makes no provision for any data pertaining to what is increasingly coming to be referred to as "non-local mind." Such data is necessarily rejected by anyone bound by that model's premises, unconsciously if not consciously. And thus if that model is adopted even more widely than it is today, the progress of science—of unprejudiced investigation of all aspects of the universe whether or not they fit today's preconceptions—will be stalled.

Precisely because I am a strong supporter of science, I don't believe any area of reality should be arbitrarily ruled outside its field of inquiry. As readers of my novel The Doors of the Universe know, I am not opposed to genetic engineering of humans, and I think a ban on this or any other emerging application of science would be disastrous. I'm all for continued research in biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and whatever else transhumanists wish to devote themselves to. But not at the price of cutting off all other paths of research essential to our understanding of what it means to be human.

The term "transhumanism" is a misnomer for the developments it purports to describe, since the use of increasingly-advanced technology has always been a defining characteristic of our species. Becoming cyborgs will not make us less human, either in the transhumanists' sense of "beyond human" or in traditionalists' sense of degradation, any more than the advent of implant surgery or "test tube babies" altered our essential nature. To adapt ourselves and our environment to our needs through technology is our nature; it is what humans do. It is not all we do, however, and any philosophy that fails to acknowledge that fact is doomed to eventual obsolescence.

So I believe that transhumanism as a view of life, as opposed to its advocacy of specific technologies, is a dead end—as will become apparent when attempts to upload consciousness into a supercomputer fail to produce the desired result. I certainly don't oppose such attempts. On the contrary, I think that they will demonstrate beyond all doubt the naiveté of transhumanist assumptions about reality.

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Robert Heinlein, whose science fiction was indisputably far-sighted and supportive of technology, was urged to agree to be cryogenically frozen after his death—a process transhumanists believe may lead to revival of the dead in the future. Alcor, the company that's doing this, was even willing to waive the usual fee for him. He repeatedly refused. It later came out that he had said to a friend, "How do I know it wouldn't interfere with reincarnation?" (Reported by Spider Robinson in Requiem, ed. Yoji Kondo, p. 408.) This doesn't mean that Heinlein believed in reincarnation in the sense that New Agers do; almost certainly he did not, and anyway, if some form of reincarnation does exist, it's unlikely that freezing bodies interferes with it any more than cremation does. The point is that he was unwilling to be identified with a reductionist view of mind that equates it with the physical brain and holds preservation of the brain to be in itself of value.

The goal of achieving immortality, either through physical modification of the body or through uploading a person's consciousness to a computer, appears to be a major attraction of transhumanism. It is a way for members of a society that no longer believes in any form of afterlife to cope with the universal fear of death. This no doubt accounts for the emotional fervor with which transhumanists defend an envisioned development that strikes many of us as both unlikely and unpleasant. Presumably its advocates have never been so unhappy as to feel never-ending consciousness would be a burden. If so they are to be envied, for whether or not one believes this life is all there is, a time comes. in old age if not sooner, when one perceives that eternity on Earth—in an enhanced biological body, an artificial one, or a supercomputer—would be either harrowing or intolerably boring. I, for one, can't imagine wanting to be uploaded; I'd rather take a chance on there being some form of existence a little less confining.

I do agree that longer a longer lifespan, if not burdened by the disabilities of old age, would be desirable—what dismays me is the idea of an endless one. I do not think even increased intelligence would produce the "infinitely interesting experience" some claim, because the amount of input data available to an embodied mind, whether biological or machine-based, would not be infinite.

Transhumanists are quick to say that people who found immortality boring could kill themselves. This is questionable; in a society that viewed perpetual life as an ultimate good, suicide might well be illegal, as it is in my novel Stewards of the Flame. A computer to which minds were uploaded would probably be programmed to prevent them from being deactivated; certainly it would if artificial intelligence, designed to protect human life at all costs, was involved. In any case, many people consider suicide wrong, if not on religious grounds then simply because it is a denial of any intrinsic purpose in life, a denial that would make all previous endurance of suffering pointless.

I have been told by a transhumanist that "Virtual worlds can be much more fun than this one," which is surely debatable—how many people would consider virtual sex as good as the real thing? Certainly most of us value physical contact with nature, the sensual enjoyment of sunshine and food, and the touch of loved ones. Though to the average person being permanently cut off from these would indeed seem confining, it has been argued that sex, and presumably all sensation, is only something that happens in the brain. So then perhaps in the transhumanists' ideal world no one would choose to have a body and no more babies would be born. Putting aside what would happen to the experiments with less-than-perfect results (for surely uploading would not have a 100% success rate when it was first offered to the public), what about the intermediate period when some people had bodies and other people didn't? Lovers, I should think, would have to arrange to be uploaded simultaneously or else experience a good deal of grief over the loss of contact with each other. Or is it assumed that love, as distinguished from sensation and exchange of thoughts, would also be considered obsolete?

The reason many find transhumanism objectionable is that unconsciously if not consciously, they perceive that the transhumanist agenda fails to take the "whole person" into account. And incidentally, the unconscious mind appears to be ignored by transhumanists and artificial intelligence enthusiasts alike. This is a case of going off half-cocked without consideration of a fundamental aspect of humanity that's known to exist but is not yet understood. It has been recognized for more than a century that a large part of the human mind is unconscious; how then could uploading consciousness into a computer produce the equivalent of a human being?

Objections to transhumanism's reductionist outlook are often assumed to be based on religion, as indeed some are. But by no means all opinions that don't fit prevailing scientific dogma are religious, and even they were, that would not invalidate the concepts underlying them. After all, at one time many things now understood by science were dealt with only by religion. Putting aside the beliefs of the ancients, as recently as the nineteenth century belief in life on other planets was widely accepted by both scientists and the clergy on the grounds that "God would not have made a useless world." Not only was there was no scientific evidence for the existence of exoplanets, let alone for life on them, but it was believed that such evidence would always be impossible to obtain. Today, when the question of whether extraterrestrial life exists is debated on scientific grounds, we see that past conceptions of the boundaries of science were too narrow. In my view, the goal of science is to understand the total range of universal reality, not to define reality in terms of its present capability for gathering evidence and dismiss what doesn't fit as inherently "religious" and therefore unworthy of acknowledgement.

I have no objection to the view that advanced technology will help to improve human capabilities, so long as that outlook does not close the door to scientific investigation of capabilities that are not physically based. I do not mean that mystic and/or metaphoric explanations of those capabilities should be accepted, and I'm aware that many scientists are turned away from that whole area of human experience by the huge amount of nonsense published that purports to explain it. But serious study of the so-called "paranormal" (which of course, if it exists, is not in any way supernatural) reveals that data concerning it cannot be simply swept under the rug on grounds that silly explanations for it have been offered.

I do object to equating the word "rationalism" with "materialism," as transhumanists are prone to do. Rationalism, according to the dictionary, is "a view that reason and experience rather than the nonrational are the fundamental criteria in the solution of problems." I contest not this principle but the unproven assumption that we cannot eventually explain non-material aspects of mind—which presently can be shown to exist through statistical methods, but not explained—by means of reason. Reason is wholly dependent on premises, from which it directly proceeds. Materialistic premises about the mind are basic to transhumanism and by limiting its perception of reality to them, it discourages the questioning of these premises by the people best qualified to investigate alternatives. Can we not develop technological means of extending human capabilities without adopting a worldview that narrows the potential scope of scientific discovery?

As to arguments against materialism that really are religious, transhumanists generally make false assumptions about their nature. Very few people other than fundamentalists (who despite their high profile in the media, are a minority among Christians) believe in a conventional heaven or hell. The afterlife is usually viewed as a state of being perhaps best defined, by analogy, as another dimension with different rules. It is felt that in this state of being there is access, perhaps infinite access, to knowledge that is not known, and in principle cannot be known, on Earth (or elsewhere in the universe as it is perceived in our present state of existence). Who does not wish that all the answers—not merely those a machine could find through analysis of existing data—could in due course be personally obtained?

The thing about machines is that they are built and the builders, even if previous generations of machines, necessarily proceed on the basis of premises. Yet in another state of being the very premises might be altered, thus permitting a level of knowledge that could never be attained in terms of existing ones. To be sure, it may be that there is no such state. If we bind our consciousness to machines or artificial bodies, we will never find out.

But I don't really believe that, because I suspect that if minds are not wholly material, they would not stay bound to machines. They would enter whatever other "dimension" exists anyway when ready to do so. Thus I am not any more worried about being trapped forever in a machine than I am about becoming a spirit walking around in chains like a ghost in a horror story. Like the characters in Stewards of the Flame who overcome their fear of permanent stasis, I know underneath that the truly horrible thing is not the attempt to preserve life after it's gone, but the effect that preservation of pseudo-life has on the living.

Throughout human history, in all cultures, there has been a prevalent belief in the existence of an aspect of the mind or soul apart from the physical body, and while collective belief doesn't prove an idea is true, it does indicate that what's behind the idea should sooner or later be investigated. In all probability "where there's smoke there's fire." Science often proves a widely-believed explanation of a phenomenon to be wrong—and this is as true of scientific explanations as of earlier non-scientific ones—but it rarely if ever finds that there was nothing to be explained.

Of course an afterlife, if any, is hardly the main issue involving this other aspect of reality. The so-called "paranormal" abilities of humans while alive are what matter to science. Most explanations people have had for such things are, in my opinion, metaphors—metaphors being the means human minds employ to deal with things they don't understand. I do not think any of these metaphors will turn out to be literally true, any more than the idea that disease is caused by evil spirits is true. The question is, what's the foundation of the metaphors? We have no evidence whatsoever for saying there isn't one.

The "biological machine" model of the mind is also a metaphor. It's useful for practical scientific work; metaphors exist precisely because they are useful. But like all metaphors, it is based on unverified belief, as is every scientific conception of something not specifically proven or disproven. There is no justification for treating it as indisputable fact.

Historically, science has progressed not only by learning more and more in the specific fields it first investigated, such as astronomy, physics, and medicine, but by gradually expanding its scope into fields less easily investigated. Molecular biology and cybernetics are among the most recent examples. Scientific work in psychology has barely gotten off the ground; theories in that field have been primitive and inaccurate, but it's recognized as a legitimate field of study. Social sciences are not yet very scientific, though the advent of complexity theory will, I think, bring about progress in them. But parapsychology is struggling; only a few scientists are courageous enough to buck the opposition and devote their working lives to it.

Lack of funding and disrespect are formidable barriers to progress in any field. If transhumanism as a philosophy, with its commitment to a focus on material "perfection" of the human race, dominates the twenty-first century, then increased funding, and therefore increased respect for parapsychology, is not likely to materialize; thus it will be left by default to people unqualified to deal with its data scientifically. I want to see science widen its knowledge of reality, not shrink back within old boundaries. To ignore evidence for phenomena such as psi capabilities that reductionistic premises cannot explain—to pretend this evidence doesn't exist in order to bolster the belief that we're somewhere near to understanding the mind and can ultimately reproduce it via technology—is to set a goal for science, and for humankind's future, that is not high enough.

Like the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence, transhumanism offers premature answers to long-standing questions that have been debated since ancient times. It claims that the debate is over, and thus seems to be leading scientific inquiry into a dead end. If it were to succeed in its major aims a crucial aspect of human existence would remain unexamined and unacknowledged.

But I don't think that is going to happen. Rather, I believe—as I have believed for many years—that when an artificial or artificially-embodied mind technically indistinguishable from a human mind is finally produced, the difference between the two will be so apparent as to invalidate the restrictive premises under which it was created. So perhaps transhumanism is not a dead end after all, if failure of its prime goal proves to be the means by which those premises are overturned.

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The Role of Psi in Human Affairs

(2017)

This essay presents some of my ideas about how mythologies, among other things, spread through a society—ideas too unorthodox for me to go into in material for the course I taught on Space Age mythology. It also explains some of the ideas underlying my novels.

*

I was once told in an online forum that if independently verifiable results of scientific psi experiments were published in a respectable peer-reviewed journal, "even a smallest such result would be a revolutionary change in the understanding of the world." If only this were true. In fact many peer-reviewed studies have been published, and if even the smallest positive result could change most people's understanding, there would have been a major revolution in science—and I believe in our view of history—long ago. However, there are too many people who don't want to look at the results. They don't want to change their understanding of the world. Scientists in particular are aware that if psi exists, the universe doesn't work the way they think it does and they have built their careers on false premises. So they don't read the relevant journals or the books that cite them, and thus preserve the comfortable (to them) illusion that only mystics and charlatans believe in phenomena that can't be explained by materialistic science.

There is no doubt whatsoever that so-called paranormal (psi) abilities such as ESP do exist. This has been proven repeatedly by responsible scientific investigation and by use in once-secret military projects, quite apart from the extensive evidence from human history. But the issue is generally confused by all the other things, often silly things, associated in the popular mind with the terms "paranormal," "psychic," and "parapsychology," and by the use of the word "supernatural" in connection with psi phenomena. Those that are real aren't in any sense supernatural; they are simply natural human (and in some cases animal) capabilities that we don't yet understand.

Properly speaking, parapsychology is the scientific, usually academic, study of psi: that is, extrasensory perception (ESP)—telepathy, clairvoyance (now often called remote viewing), and precognition—and psychokinesis (PK). It generally does not involve investigation of ghosts, although some scientists do include the question of survival after death, which I personally consider a separate issue, within its purview.

Skeptics are fond of pointing out that many people who claim to be psychics are frauds. Of course they are; but there is, after all, plenty of fraud in other areas. This does not mean that no one has real psi abilities. We don't stop buying cars because some used car salesmen are crooks, nor do we distrust stockbrokers in general because some of them sell phony stocks. Genuine psychics with conscious control of their powers are rare, to be sure; most psi occurs unconsciously. In my opinion unconscious psi has been, and still is, vastly more prevalent than anyone imagines and has had a major impact on human history. Why isn't this recognized? Why do so many otherwise open-minded people, scientists in particular, vehemently reject evidence that in any other context would be indisputable? As Kira says in Stewards of the Flame, it's not because they think it's nonsense, as they sincerely believe, but because underneath they are afraid that it's not nonsense.

"Over and over, scientific evidence was presented for the existence of telepathy and other psi powers," she tells Jesse. "By most people, especially other scientists, it was ignored, blocked out of consciousness—often angrily denied. Because if it exists, then everything familiar to you about your mind, your world, stands open to challenge. There's nothing firm left to cling to. And if you have paranormal powers, who knows what you might do to disrupt the world, unwittingly, perhaps even unwillingly?"

Eminent psi researcher Dean Radin says in the passage from his book Supernormal, which I used as an epigraph to Herald of the Flame: "Real psychic effects lurking in the dark boundaries between mind and matter are so frightening and disorienting that defense mechanisms immediately snap into place to protect our psyches from these disturbing thoughts. We become blind to personal psychic episodes and to the supportive scientific evidence, we conveniently forget mind-shattering synchronicities, and if the intensity of the mysterium tremendum becomes too hot, we angrily deny any interest in the topic while backing away and vigorously making the sign of the cross."

This reaction, though prevalent, is not widely recognized. And it is by no means the only obstacle to acceptance of psi. The major acknowledged factor is that there is as yet no theory to explain how it works. Psi violates all known laws of physics, so even people who believe in it are unable to see how it can work, though some researchers are now attempting to relate it to quantum physics. Personally, I think the basic premise that all reality can be reduced to physics, at the quantum level if not otherwise, is open to question; the fact that this is true of all phenomena so far understood tells nothing about what may be discovered in the future. Be that as it may, science has never accepted any area as worthy of study without some sort of theoretical foundation, and it is not likely to do so in the case of psi—not when scientists have built their knowledge of the universe on a materialistic concept of existence. When someone does come up with a viable theory, he or she will be classed by historians with Newton, Darwin, and Einstein; but meanwhile the evidence being swept under the rug.

Another main factor in psi's rejection by scientists is that the use of paranormal abilities is not reliable. The results of lab tests are predicable only in the statistical sense; even the best psychics miss some of the time. This in itself would not be a serious objection, as many other scientific studies are based on statistics. But lab experiments cannot reveal more about psi than the fact that such abilities exist, since the controlled use of them requires more significant goals than pertain under lab conditions. It demands tasks of importance either to society or to the individual, and emotion of some kind must be involved. And even then, the information it reveals, while often true, is also often false. Remote viewers, for example, can see actual places or happenings, but some of what they see is not real—and they cannot tell the difference. Independent verification, which is generally hard to get on short notice, is always required. This was one reason (but not the only one) why the military "psychic spying" program of the 1980s was discontinued.

Still another cause of opposition to psi is its long association with the occult, New Age ideas, and fringe beliefs. Throughout history psi phenomena have been dealt with by practitioners in these areas, as well as by many religions, especially Eastern religions—all of which have well-established traditional metaphors for explaining and controlling these phenomena. Outsiders find such metaphors, such as mysterious forms of healing energy or an invisible "third eye" that can perceive things not detectable through the senses, extremely off-putting, yet psychics who have learned to function through the use of them insist that they exist. Very few people understand the nature of metaphor. Both believers and nonbelievers generally assume that either a thing is literally true or it is false. To me, belief in metaphorical descriptions of psi abilities is exactly the same as Georyn's belief in a dragon in Enchantress from the Stars—it is simply a way of perceiving truth that fits a person's background. But scientists and others who consider themselves rational dismiss such beliefs as wacky, and tend to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

This, too, was among the many reasons for the abandonment of the military remote viewing program. Several people associated with that program, along with a few other prominent remote viewers, began looking for—and seeing—such things as alien bases on the moon and other planets, or underground on Earth, or insisting that extraterrestrials are trying to contact us. While this is not a traditional metaphor, it is a very common one today, among UFO cultists and "abductees" among others. It's important to realize that many of these people are intelligent men and women who hold responsible positions, and are in no way mentally ill. They really did "see" alien bases. Psi works in this way; sometimes what's seen is real and other times it is not, and the brain cannot distinguish real visions from illusions.

The interesting question is, why do people perceive similar unreal scenes? It's usually said that in the past they believed in religious figures such as angels, and had seen pictures of angels, so that's what they psychically saw; while now they're familiar with the concept of aliens. That's true, but I think there is a good deal more to it than that. In the first place the details of these visions, particularly the visions of those who think they've been abducted by UFOs (but not necessarily those of experienced remote viewers), are more alike than can be accounted for by any pictures or descriptions the people involved have been exposed to. In the second place, I believe, though it's rarely if ever mentioned by analysts, that what's seen is in fact metaphorical—it means something more than it seems to on the surface.

That is why some people accustomed to remote viewing have pursued a search for aliens despite the apparent foolishness of the effort. Unlike the average person they cannot shut off the ability to see, and they are drawn to the metaphor now dominant in the collective unconscious. It seems especially real to them because many other minds are unconsciously turned in the same direction, toward a prevalent symbol of emotions that are now widespread. In my essay "The Significance of Belief in UFOs" (in my book From This Green Earth) I have suggested what these emotions may be. We live in an era of upheaval in human conception of the universe, now that the reality of space travel has made us aware that Earth is not isolated as has always been supposed—that not only may we someday enter unknown regions, but are already vulnerable to visitation from beyond. As I have explained in my essay "Confronting the Universe in the Twenty-First Century" (also in From This Green Earth), this is comparable to the uneasiness prevalent in the seventeenth century when people were absorbing the idea that Earth is not the center of the universe and the stars are not mere lights fixed to a crystal sphere. In the general public this shift in orientation produces deep unconscious anxiety. On the other hand, a minority is elated by it, and some (including some scientists and well as fringe cults) hope for aid from advanced extraterrestrial civilizations. Either way, the belief that aliens are present is a powerful symbol of these emotions, whether or not it is consciously recognized as such. So that belief is absorbed by the collective unconscious and is the source of metaphorical visions seen by those whose who are psi-receptive and whose personal unconscious feelings are particularly strong.

*

This is an example of how ideas have spread from person to person throughout human history. Psychiatrist Carl Jung, who introduced the concept of the collective unconscious, believed that its content is inborn in all humans, and since no one knows how it is transmitted, science generally holds that there is no such thing. Now, some people are saying that the collective unconscious consists of material spread throughout the population via unconscious telepathy, something that has always seemed to me self-evident. How else could thoughts spread, when there are countless cases that sensory transmission cannot account for? To Jung, the concepts held in common were limited to archetypes, but much more specific ideas are extensively shared; ideas have even been passed from one culture to another without any satisfactory anthropological explanation.

Almost all telepathy occurs on an unconscious level, which is why many people think that because they themselves aren't psychic, and aren't acquainted with anyone who is, ESP is rare if it exists at all. But parapsychologists believe that the capability is latent in everyone, and in my opinion it is active in everyone even though few are aware of it. To be consciously psychic is indeed rare, and the talent for it appears to vary widely, just as does musical or mathematical talent. Genetics probably plays a part in this. There are, however, many individuals who have occasional spontaneous psychic experiences, and many who do not but can nevertheless learn remote viewing. How much of the learning—and for that matter, the genetic aptitude—involves a special paranormal faculty and how much is simply a matter of ability to gain access to the content of one's unconscious mind? How much spontaneous psi is the result not of unprecedented input, but of momentary breakthroughs of emotionally-significant aspects of what the unconscious mind receives all the time?

It is well known that all so-called "right-brain" abilities—artistic creativity, spirituality, and intuition—arise from the unconscious mind, as do the roots of emotion. And conscious psi functioning, including psychic healing, requires the same kind of relaxation, the same letting go of "left-brain" logical thinking, as do these other activities; it is systematically practiced in preparation for all of them as well as in many religious traditions. Some people are better at this than others—at one extreme it comes naturally, while at the opposite one it's virtually impossible; but everyone at least a minor degree of potential.

Thus it is quite possible that some of everyone's ideas and feelings are continually, though unconsciously, made available to everyone else. There are speculators who view this as a group mind or hive mind, implying or even stating that there is only one consciousness of which individual minds are mere illusory parts. I disagree strongly with that theory; among other flaws, it leaves no room for privacy. The fear that others might read their minds is a major factor in skeptics' reluctance to accept the reality of telepathy, and I think it is an unwarranted fear. Telepathy is not "mind reading" and individuals don't have unlimited access to each other's minds, either consciously or unconsciously. It's not necessary to postulate a group mind to explain the collective unconscious, for psi is known to be instantaneous and therefore no time is needed for transmission of ideas and images.

This is not to say that the experience, common in mysticism and altered states, of feeling one with universe is not real. Certainly it is possible to merge one's consciousness with others, and with something beyond human consciousness, so the awareness of individuality is temporarily suspended. But to me this is a matter of connection, not absorption. However closely connected minds may be, they retain the ability to function separately as long as they are alive; after that, no one knows, but I suspect personality exists in whatever form of afterlife there may be—something skeptics are more prone to believe in the case of loved ones than in their own case. Whether or not that's true, psi in ordinary life involves communication either between one person to another, or more routinely to people in general.

It's my belief that individuals communicate what they want, underneath, to share—both things they feel strongly about and background details of their surroundings and situation. Who has not longed to make others see what he or she is truly feeling, either to be understood as a person or to convince them of the rightness or wrongness of something? There is more than enough such longing among the population to fill the collective unconscious without resorting to a denial of individuality that precludes, among other things, personal bonds of love as distinguished from general love of all humankind.

And so I believe that continuously, since ancient times, the feelings and convictions of the public about what matters in their lives have poured into a pool from which everyone can draw. By this means thoughts and visual images that are most common in a society are adopted by its members and become still more common. This leads, of course, to the spread of evil as well as good. Phenomena such as mass hysteria and mass racial hatred are universally acknowledged although their telepathic origin is not. And trivial enthusiasms such as fads are spread along with serious ones. But on the whole, the fears, hopes, and dreams of a culture are shared to an extent that has never been adequately explained under the assumption that sensory transmission is necessary.

In my opinion the ideas and imagery underlying mythology, as well as all the general knowledge taken for granted in a society including its concepts of right and wrong, is transmitted and absorbed in this way. The process begins in infancy, perhaps even earlier since I believe there is a telepathic bond between a mother and her unborn child. If this is true it sheds light on questions that are never raised because the answers are assumed to be obvious. Yet the sense of obviousness is not an inborn quality, nor is it usually the result of specific teaching. To take one example, why are young children who have never seen or touched live animals "naturally" attracted to mere pictures of them? What concept can a 3-year-old have of a cat or dog, let alone a lamb, before being exposed at least to a realistic movie? It can only come from the collective unconscious, formed by the love of animals felt by past generations.

Occasionally specific atypical feelings are drawn from this source. My mother told me that when I was small I was terrified by a picture of a goat. Neither I nor anyone I'd met had ever seen goats or heard anything bad about them, and I had no negative reaction to pictures of sheep, yet my fright was persistent. There are people who would say I must have been injured by a goat in a former life, but it's more consistent with what we know about psi to postulate that such seemingly-inexplicable impressions are derived from a common store of strong feelings once experienced, and telepathically projected, by individuals who either lived in the past or are still alive. And in fact, in some occult mythologies goats are associated with the devil, which would surely have led to such feelings.

Telepathy also accounts, I think, for the influence of great leaders, those who have inspired larger numbers of followers than can be accounted for by their outward difference from their peers. I believe they were telepathically gifted, whether or not they were aware of it, and projected their messages beneath the surface as well as through their words. This too has served both good and evil ends. At one extreme were the founders of major religions, who exemplify my belief that strong psi power is an advanced capability that in the future will be accompanied by moral advancement. To a lesser extent it applies to charismatic military or political leaders as well as entertainers such as rock stars who don't appear to have any real talent beyond the ability to attract fans. And on the negative end of the scale lie rabble-rousers and rulers such as Attila the Hun and Adolf Hitler, whose acquisition of a mass following despite his lack of any prepossessing physical or mental characteristics has always been a mystery. I am not saying that any of these people used telepathy intentionally or were conscious of their talent for it; only looking back in the light of what is now known about psi can its significance to history be considered.

*

Will we ever be able to use psi capabilities consciously to a greater extent than is now done by a few exceptionally gifted psychics and trained remote viewers? I believe so, but this lies far in the future; it will be a major step in evolution, not, as some people think, a return to powers lost in the past. My original idea for my Flame novels was to explore how, and why, a civilization might begin to move from the present level of ours to that of Elana's people in Enchantress from the Stars, who had very advanced psi powers. It would be a long process, taking place over many generations, but it would have to start somewhere. And it would not be adaptive in the evolutionary sense for it to become widespread before a civilization has developed the technology necessary for expansion to many worlds. To turn to "inner space" before spreading into outer space, as some people advocate, would be self-defeating, since colonization of space is essential to a species' long-term survival and to draw society's focus away from logical "left brain" thinking would distract us from that.

Actually, lack of adaptiveness is the reason for our not having more psi capability at present. If humans already possess the genetic capacity for paranormal development—as is shown by the cases where it has been proven to occur—this capacity must have evolved biologically at some time in the past. There is every reason to think that it did so before our separation from our hominid ancestors, and in fact before the appearance of hominids, since ESP in animals is known to be common. (Though it's beyond the scope of this short essay, not only have strong telepathic bonds between people and their pets been frequently demonstrated, but studies of wild animal behavior suggest that some aspects of it are the result of psi.) It is known, too, that psi faculties have been, and still are, used more in low-technology cultures—and presumably were in prehistoric ones—than in modern society. But the development of technology and the "left brain" rational mode of thinking it requires enabled our species to survive and thrive, and was therefore adaptive throughout most of human history. Thus "right-brain" modes of thought were suppressed and our primitive psi capabilities were largely forgotten. As early parapsychologist J. B. Rhine wrote, "psi is an elementary mode of reaction of the organism, one that probably represents the beginning of orientation in the initial adaptation to the environment," since it has been found to be inhibited by "the more recently acquired intellectual powers."

Why, then, do I view future development of human psi faculties as an evolutionary advance? Partly because I'm envisioning far greater paranormal powers than those of animals or our primitive ancestors, which I believe will be consciously employed. Conversational telepathy is one example, but psychokinesis too will become usable, as well as precognition, which has been shown to exist not only through lab experiments but through the remote viewing that has already been done. Whether people will ever be able to handle fire as they do in the Flame novels, I don't know; I used that primarily as a symbol of abilities greater than we now imagine—still, there have been reports of its occurrence in the past, and firewalking is common even today among people without other paranormal abilities.

Evolution, however, is the result of adaptation, and what adaptive advantage would there be such capabilities? For one, there is surely survival value in becoming consciously aware of what our fellow-humans are thinking and feeling, which will greatly reduce the misunderstanding and lack of empathy that leads not only to unnecessary suffering, but to conflict. Conflict is a greater danger now than it was when it was merely a matter of fighting among small tribes. We may find psi indispensable in preventing it.

Another possible advantage—as was suggested by Robert Heinlein in his classic novel Time for the Stars, telepathy may be useful for communication with starships traveling much faster than electronic signals. Psi is independent of time and space. Possibly it will prove to be the only means through which interstellar colonies can communicate with each other and with Earth.

Or perhaps, if artificial intelligence develops to the point where it exceeds human intelligence as many researchers think it may, psi capability will be what distinguishes us from robots and gives us a competitive advantage over them. Since it is not in itself a function of the brain—though the brain may act as a filter to narrow what a person draws from the immense store of data in the collective unconscious—it is a power no artificial intelligence will ever have.

A more immediate value of psi is its role in healing—and, as described in my Flame novels, in preventing illness. The kinds of illness with which medical science can deal are limited. Contrary to its current premises, bodies are not machines that can always, at least in principle, be repaired. Much that goes wrong with them is caused by disturbance in the unconscious mind, so that when one illness is eliminated another arises to take its place, and some conditions are incurable. The characters in the novels gain volitional control of their unconscious minds, which enables them to stay healthy. The extent to which this, and/or psychic healing, involves psychokinesis is not specified; we simply don't know how thought affects the brain's production of neurotransmitters, and I chose not to include an imaginary explanation. But I postulate that unconscious telepathic communication with the instructor is needed to learn volitional control, and that in some, this leads to conscious use of ESP, so I suspect that PK ability is also awakened.

Past evolution of the human mind has shown a steady trend toward increased volition in one area after another—that is, action through the exercise of deliberate, conscious choice. As I said in my book-review essay "The Evolutionary Significance of the Metanormal" (available at my website), "What animals do, they do instinctively. The assertions of strict behaviorists notwithstanding, humans learn to choose; and the ability to choose is what has enabled psychosocial evolution—from the earliest divisions of labor to the most complex achievements of modern technology—to take place. If we had not gained control first over our day-to-day actions and then over our rational minds, we would still be living in the manner of our hominid ancestors. That we have not learned to control our emotional responses at the same pace is a truism, but against those who assert that this indicates some sort of pathology, I have always maintained that it is a natural consequence of our evolutionary stage. Emotional faculties, like other unconscious functions, are not as easy to control as rational ones; a different form of volition is involved, probably different even at the neurological level. Everything we have discovered about metanormal capabilities indicates that they too involve this other form of volition and that conventional "willpower" . . . is counterproductive in the actual attainment of non-rational skills. This is as well known to athletes as to mystics. . . . We may not unreasonably suppose that the survival value of such skills lies less in their specific utility than in the new form of volition underlying them, and that this may in the future have as much effect on the extension of human powers as our control over rationality has had."

Personally, I believe that a major adaptive advantage in the controlled use of psi is that it's necessary to enable us to meet advanced extraterrestrials on terms of equality, without language-based misunderstanding, and that they will not reveal themselves to us until we have gained it. This is a premise of all five of my novels dealing with extraterrestrial civilizations. But to offer it as an explanation for adaptiveness begs the question, since it must for some reason have been adaptive for the extraterrestrial species that preceded us.

We really don't really know how psi will prove adaptive, any more than primitive humans knew where their newly-discovered reasoning powers would lead. Adaptiveness in the non-genetic sense involves long periods of time and can be perceived only with hindsight. But I think it's safe to say that any increase in the powers of human beings is in itself good, and that it may prove crucial in preparing us for whatever we may encounter as we explore aspects of the universe presently beyond our comprehension.

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The Roots of Disbelief in Human Mind Powers

(2020)

Originally, I planned to write two essays—one about scientists' misguided attempt to create conscious artificial intelligence, and the other about why most deny the overwhelming evidence for the existence of psi powers. But then I realized that these are really the same issue: the unwillingness to admit that human minds, and even animal minds, are more than brains.

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Both scientists' conviction that AI can be made conscious and their denial of the evidence for psi arise from their unshakable belief in materialism, defined by the dictionary as "a theory that physical matter is the only or fundamental reality and that all being and processes and phenomena can be explained as manifestations or results of matter." And the primary root of refusal to question this belief is fear.

Why would scientists fear to question anything? Isn't an inquiring mind one of the main prerequisites for becoming a scientist? After all, discoveries in science are made by questioning past assumptions. Copernicus questioned the belief that the sun revolves around Earth. Darwin questioned the belief that species have separate origins, and Einstein questioned the belief that Newton's laws cover all circumstances. These, however, were exceptional men. Although lesser discoveries are also made by questioning, a lot depends on how widely applicable a belief is and how firmly established it has become. And the belief in materialism is so deeply entrenched in science that to question it shakes the very foundation of a scientist's professional life. That the universe may not work the way one believes it does is a frightening idea to entertain; few people are willing to let it into their thoughts.

Because of this, and because mavericks in any group are generally looked down upon, a scientist who does question a widely-accepted theory is likely to suffer the loss of professional reputation. This is another risk few are willing to take. It can mean ridicule, the disregard of otherwise-important work, and even being fired from a job. Professors, for example, are expected to teach the theories prevalent in their fields. Although in principle they have academic freedom, that doesn't mean much if they don't have tenure, and even if they do have it some excuse can often be found for dismissing a nonconformist. Students must go along with what they are taught if they except to get their degrees. Employees of research institutions must retain the respect of their colleagues. Thus the cards are stacked against anyone who attempts to challenge conventional ideas. As Voltaire wrote, "It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong."

But scientists' faith in materialism goes much deeper than this. They have a compelling desire to understand the world—that is why they chose to become scientists. Yet if they believe in science to the exclusion of other faiths, as many do, there is no current alternative to the materialist worldview. To reject it means to be cast adrift. We do not know anything about reality other than its material aspects unless we have had personal experience with another side of it or accept the word of those who have; it is beyond our understanding at this stage of our evolution. This does not mean there is anything supernatural about it. After all, two hundred years ago quantum physics was beyond comprehension; the human mind evolves. In time we will understand more. But in the meantime, to be confronted with something impossible to know is unendurable for many people, even terrifying, if they are left with no firm ground to stand on.

This is true not just of scientists, but of everyone. In our society science is widely viewed as the final arbiter of truth, so the majority of people share its prevailing idea of the nature of reality. In the past, that wasn't the case; most—even many scientists—considered religion the authority, as some still do today. Then gradually, people turned away from religion, at least with respect to its support of the concept of nonphysical reality. It is now common to consider religion authoritative on moral issues alone. Some sects do reject science, taking an equally dogmatic position in opposition to it. On the other hand, some individuals find meaning in alternative forms of spirituality that offer closer contact with nonmaterial reality than do most traditional religions. But comparatively few people are comfortable without any source of intellectual authority at all. Psychologists call the ability to accept not feeling sure about what's true "tolerance of uncertainty." Though it is unhealthy to lack it in dealing with daily affairs, uncertainty in regard to the basic attributes of the universe is another matter, and being able tolerate it is the exception rather than the rule.

Before the twentieth century, materialism was not the only philosophy accepted by scientists. While some did view bodies as machines, others—known as vitalists—held that living organisms are fundamentally different from inanimate things because they contain some sort of "vital force" that cannot be reduced to physicochemical processes. When little was known of biology this seemed rather obvious; how could mere physical components produce thought and feeling? The nature of the vital force was a mystery, but so much else about living things was mysterious that ignorance of this aspect of them was considered problematic only by philosophers,. But once biology was further advanced, it appeared that physical factors could indeed explain everything about organisms, and there was no longer any need to tolerate the uncertainty inherent in vitalism. It was vehemently rejected by science and any suggestion that there might have been some truth in the concept was scorned, as it still is today.

Yet In fact, physical factors cannot explain everything about organisms, although many scientists claim they can; and neither vitalism nor similar concepts, such as the Chinese idea of "chi" or the New Age theory of "energy flow," can explain it either. Now, however, the question of what makes living things conscious is receiving more and more attention. and scientists who believe that they are well on the way to creating robots with human (or superior) intelligence frankly acknowledge this as the elephant in the room. Most are convinced that sooner or later they will figure it out without recourse to inexplicable forces. No wonder they are desperately trying to produce such a robot—subconsciously they must know that if they can't, that may mean that there is a fatal flaw in the materialist premises on which modern science is based.

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What is this nonphysical aspect of mind that science ignores and a great many humans believe in, yet cannot understand? We don't have a word for it. Some call it soul, but that term is too closely associated with religion, and with belief in an afterlife, to be meaningful to people who aren't religious. In any case mind distinct from brain is a broader concept than is generally associated with soul, although the dictionary definition, "the immaterial essence, animating principle or actuating cause of an individual life" is not far off. The concept of mind encompasses capabilities as well as essence—intuition and creativity through which ideas not based on reasoning are formed, plus the capacity for spontaneous emotions such as love.

Mere "intelligence" can provide none of these capabilities, since it functions by proceeding logically from premises even when the logic is flawed. Robots, however far they advance from what was originally programmed into them, are limited by the process of logic because that is how machine intelligence works. They might someday express emotions derived from the logical implications of circumstances, such as fear, pleasure, or even grief. But love is not founded on logic; it simply exists. And it is closely tied to the nonmaterial connection between all beings believed by many to be a fundamental aspect of the universe.

Although we cannot define or explain its nature, there is plenty of evidence that the mind is more than just the brain. Apart from its obvious attributes mentioned above, it possesses psi capabilities such as ESP that have no physical basis. Proof of the existence of psi phenomena, from laboratory studies and military use as well as from centuries of human experience, is extensive and indisputable; I have discussed this in my essay "The Role of Psi in Human Affairs." Needless to say, the machine theory of human nature is incompatible with these phenomena. That's the fundamental reason why the reality of psi is so vehemently denied.

If adherents of materialism are disturbed by any suspicion of an inherent difference between human minds and robot minds, they are absolutely aghast at the concept of psi. A noted reviewer of a well-designed research study on ESP that had been submitted to the _Journal of Personality and Social Psychology_ _told colleagues,_ "Reading it made me physically unwell." Hypothetical distinctions between human and artificial intelligence can be easily set aside as long as AGI doesn't exist, but psi phenomena can be ignored only by subconsciously suppressing any awareness of their existence that circumstances stir up.

Most scientists make every effort to avoid such circumstances. They don't read papers or books by the responsible researchers in the field. They dismiss the huge amount of nonsense posted on the Internet by New Age enthusiasts, crackpots, and fraudulent psychics, reassured by the thought that anything connected with psi abilities must fall in the same category. Thus unless confronted with a case of personal experience, they can tell themselves that it is nothing but pseudoscience and not have to face the possibility that both their careers and their personal worldviews have been built on sand.

That's not the only reason skeptics find the thought of psi troubling. The average person in our society, especially a scientifically-oriented person, has a deep-seated, innate fear not merely of acknowledging psi powers but of possessing them. Questions such as What if someone could read my thoughts? What might I do with such powers without meaning to? lie below the surface even if not consciously asked. This is especially true of people who sense that they have buried psi ability. It is latent in everyone, but obviously some people have greater extrasensory receptivity than others. We do not know whether there is a genetic component in this—it may be merely the degree of access to one's unconscious mind rather than a special talent. In any case a person who is psi-gifted is no more abnormal than a gifted musician; but some feel it would be more of a curse than a gift.

Even people utterly convinced of the reality of psi, myself among them, rarely think through all the implications of what is known about it. For example, the scientific evidence for precognition is as strong as that for telepathy—in fact some parapsychologists believe that most, if not all, ESP is a form of precognition. In addition to lab studies and the well-documented personal experiences of thousands of people, there were instances of precognition during the military Star Gate program in which remote viewers saw significant events before they occurred. Yet if this can happen, then the universe doesn't merely work differently from the way materialists believe, it works differently from the way any of us have believed. We are forced to realize that time doesn't flow in just one direction and the principle of cause and effect is false. Some quantum physicists (and many mystics) believe the past, present and future exist simultaneously. It's easy to imagine a world where people can communicate telepathically, but harder to picture one in which time as we know it is an illusion. Philosophers have done so, but it raises so many unanswerable questions about ourselves and our society that as a practical matter we have to ignore it except on the rare occasions when a premonition is experienced.

The more scientific knowledge a person has of the universe, the more upsetting it is to see evidence that reality doesn't follow the rules that have been thought to describe it. It might seem that physicists would be receptive to ideas that are counterintuitive, since they accept the theory of relativity despite its conflict with common sense. And they're aware that the underlying nature of things is, at the quantum level, based on probability rather than certainty—which is also true of psi. But in the case of physics, scientists have a defense against the disturbing nature of this realization. Most of them think about it only in terms of mathematics, and the more complex the math, the more effective it is as a distraction.

Although the study of particle physics depends on statistics, physicists tend to overlook that fact and claim that statistical studies of psi show effects too small to be significant, despite statements to the contrary by respected statisticians. Otherwise they would be forced to confront the fact that they can't understand what's going on. And that's something scientists aren't eager to do.

Anecdotal evidence—reports of individual human experiences with psi, regardless of their prevalence—is scorned by most critics as meaningless. Yet all scientific investigation begins with personal observation. In the "hard" sciences it is then possible to set up experiments with reproducible results. In other sciences, such as psychology, sociology, and even evolutionary theory, it often is not; scientists must judge theories in the basis of what they observe in the real world. The same should be true in parapsychology, since laboratory experiments, though statistically valid, cannot produce truly revelatory forms of psi that occur only when emotion is involved.

The reality of psi is not a matter of what can be proven. Either there is something in humans (and animals) that physics cannot ever explain, or there isn't. If there is, denying it won't make it go away, any more than believing in it will create it. Reductionism, which means reducing everything to the principles science has established and ignoring everything that doesn't fit, is at best a cop-out. We tend to forget that most of what we now know would never have been discovered under that philosophy. Most scientists of Newton's time resisted his ideas because they considered gravity an "occult" concept; nothing could work at a distance, they said. If gravity weren't impossible to ignore, they might have continued to think so.

Thus parapsychological research is not going to convince society that psi is real—the proof is already there insofar as statistics can provide it. And in fact, as soon as research starts to zero on psi powers, the opposition may increase. When it begins to look even to mainstream psychologists as if psi might be real, people's unconscious fear of losing their basic orientation to the world may take over, so that more of them actively suppress any mention of it—not through censorship but through denial and ridicule. Researchers may stop going public, saying that such experimentation as had seemed successful had not panned out. Psi may be dismissed as an immature notion no longer taken seriously..

Yet the truth can't be buried forever. Eventually, the accumulation of psi experience by more and more individuals will convince the public of its existence. Most scientists, however, will continue to deny the evidence long after the reality of psi is demonstrated. They won't be convinced until there is a viable theory of how it works. That may be a long time in coming. But once such a theory is developed, scientific acceptance will grow.

Will there be a period during which people with psi powers are persecuted, as in my Rising Flame novels? I'm afraid there may be. What humans fear, they often try to destroy; furthermore, minorities are most apt to be targeted when they seem likely to become a majority. A change as profound as widespread use of psi is bound to result in upheaval. But that will pass, as stages in evolution always do, and once most people are able to sense each others' feelings, there will be less misunderstanding among them.

I believe that it's a good thing that our planetary culture has so far focused on technology to the exclusion of psi. Advanced technology is essential for attaining interstellar travel, without which our species can't survive; and to devote too much of our minds to psi would be distracting. But over the long term, human progress requires development of both technology and mind powers—neither is sufficient without the other. Creating a technological civilization that incorporates psi will be the next step in our evolution. In my fiction I have said it's the criterion for contact with extraterrestrial civilizations, and I think that may be true.

Albert Einstein is widely quoted* as having said, "I have yet to meet a single person from our culture, no matter what his or her educational background, IQ, and specific training, who had powerful transpersonal experiences and continues to subscribe to the materialistic monism of Western science."* This, then, is the answer to the pervasive materialism that now hinders scientific advance. It cannot be overcome by persuasion, but as more and more people have such experiences, it will eventually be outgrown.

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*There is some doubt about the accuracy of this quote, as no source for it has been cited and the word "transpersonal" was not in common use during Einstein's lifetime.

Note: A portion of this essay that was in copies of the book issued prior to July 2020 has been deleted, as it was not really relevant and now appears in a separate essay.

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Speculation About Death Should Be Separate from Parapsychology

(2020)

All aspects of the paranormal that researchers investigate are lumped together under the heading parapsychology, even those that don't concern human psi capabilities. This leads to confusion on the part of the public and can cause evidence for psi to be discounted.

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The term "parapsychology" covers a wide range of diverse topics simply because they share the distinction of being inexplicable under the premises of materialism. In my opinion this mixture is damaging to its field—or more properly, fields—of investigation, and unnecessarily distorts the public's idea of what parapsychologists do.

Before the nineteenth century knowledge was not split into specific named fields; it was all considered philosophy, and those who investigated natural phenomena were called natural philosophers.The word "scientist" was not coined until 1833. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the various fields of knowledge were organized into academic disciplines one by one, depending on how much was known about them. Topics about which little data existed remained branches of philosophy; thus phenomena viewed as supernatural but not religious fell in the branch called metaphysics—which means "beyond the physical"—where it's still placed in contexts apart from science, such as the "metaphysics" sections of bookstores.

Late in the nineteenth century some scholars began to study paranormal phenomena from a scientific rather than philosophic standpoint. This practical side of metaphysics was not recognized by academia but became unofficially known as "psychical research." Then in 1930, when actual experiments with ESP began at Duke University, the designation "parapsychology" replaced that term in reference to all types of such research—and this, I think, was a mistake. Parapsychology should have been restricted to the study of paranormal human (or animal) capabilities, with topics not fitting that definition, such as ghosts and survival after death, given some other name. There would be far less confusion among the public, and less resistance by skeptics, if that had been done.

Some parapsychologists restrict their area of research to ESP and PK, while others don't. And of course, there is nothing wrong with a scientist choosing to study two or more topics. It's the terminology that causes the problem; for example, many people have the idea that parapsychology is about ghost hunting. It has sometimes been assumed that my interest in it means I believe in ghosts.

More significantly, the question of whether there is an afterlife is a separate issue from what the mind can do while a person is alive—one that we have no way of answering. I think it's a mistake to tie them together because neither is dependent on the other, and doing so interferes with progress in the understanding of what abilities living humans possess.

Furthermore, the issue of an afterlife is closely tied to religion, Although parapsychologists don't approach it from a religious standpoint, that connotation subtly affects the views of scientists who are antagonistic to religion, making them feel all of parapsychology has something to do with what they view as "superstition." People who are religious, on the other hand, often have strong views of their own about the afterlife and may object to any research that conflicts with them. Then too, some religions embrace the concept of paranormal capabilities, while others consider them the work of the devil and don't want them to become associated with heaven.

For all these reasons, I think the two areas of investigation should be clearly separated in the public mind. But there is there is an even more important reason: when the issue of possible survival after death isn't set apart from the study of paranormal capabilities, significant data about the latter may be misinterpreted. The human desire to know what happens after death may cause people to overlook strong evidence for psi powers among the living.

In particular, some of the best examples of psi functioning occur during near-death experiences (NDEs). Although detailed accounts of these experiences are necessarily anecdotal, anecdotal reports are not valueless when there are enough of them concerning similar circumstances to be analyzed systematically, and they provide invaluable data about the nonmaterial aspect of the human mind. There is a growing amount of such data from formal studies of NDEs during which people obtain information to which they have had no possible access—in my opinion, through ESP—even when their brains are technically "dead."

These experiences shed no light on the question of survival after death—they are irrelevant to it. An NDE is exactly what the initials stand for: "near death," not "dead." Although some people say that lack of brain activity or a stopped heart constitutes death, that is just a semantic or legal issue; death, by any reasonable definition, is the condition from which there is no coming back. Whether there is, or is not, any form of afterlife cannot be determined from a living person's experiences.

Nevertheless, because many people desperately want assurance of survival they commonly interpret psi phenomena as providing evidence of it. For centuries séances with mediums have been believed to involve contact with departed spirits. I have not seen any evidence for alleged communication with the dead that cannot be explained by ESP. One highly-regarded book on this subject claims that the information communicated could not have been obtained via telepathy because the only person alive who had that information wasn't thinking about it, which completely ignores the fact that most telepathy occurs on an unconscious level. Actually, I suspect nearly all information revealed to mediums who honestly believe it to be provided by "spirits" comes via unconscious telepathy from the client's mind.

To be sure, there are séances where information is obtained that is not known to anyone living. In some cases this may be due to remote viewing. In others, what is now known about the flexibility of time suggests that communication with people who are now dead may actually be communication with their past selves. Precognition is not the only psi phenomenon related to time; there is also such a thing as retrocognition—the extrasensory knowledge or observation of past events. This is also sometimes suggested as an explanation for memories of the past that have otherwise been thought to be evidence of reincarnation.

When psi, which is known to exist, can explain a paranormal occurrence, it is unreasonable to suppose that it has a different cause. Of course, this doesn't mean that there is not any form of afterlife. Personally, I believe there is, on grounds having nothing to do with spirit communication or NDEs (or with religion). And since I also believe that direct knowledge of reality—of things more abstract than are known through remote viewing—is a form of psi, I suspect that it may be the source of my conviction and that of many others. But this is mere speculation, whereas data about NDE content is based on analysis of widely reported experiences.

It's important to realize that NDEs sometimes happen when people are not dying, but are facing some other form of crisis. Professor Janice Holden, former chair of the International Association of Near-Death Studies (IANDS), defines an NDE as "the reported memories of extreme psychological experiences with frequent 'paranormal,' transcendental, and mystical elements, which occur during a special state of consciousness arising during a period of real or imminent physical, psychological, emotional, or spiritual death." Under this definition, "death" can mean not literal death of the body, but the kind of mystical experience after which a person feels reborn, and during which, especially in cultures other than our materialistic one, does often does encounter the paranormal.

NDEs have been extensively studied by many researchers, most of whom, unfortunately, do believe some if not all who report them were temporarily dead. Such experiences are known to follow a consistent pattern, though not everyone goes through all phases of it. The main ones include:

* An out-of-body experience (OBE)—seeing one's body as if from outside it, and often viewing locations or objects that would be impossible to see from its physical position, the existence of which is sometimes independently verified. OBEs have been commonly experienced apart from NDEs for centuries; some people enter them voluntarily. When not taken literally they are generally classed as psi.

* The sensation of moving through a dark tunnel toward a brilliant light. This could have a physical basis, but if even if it does, that doesn't mean other aspects of the NDE are physical.

* Perception of a dazzlingly beautiful environment with preternaturally vivid colors. Since colors are also enhanced after taking psychedelic drugs, this too could be the result of the brain's physical state, and again, that would not invalidate the paranormal elements of the experience.

* A meeting with deceased family or friends. Whether this is a literal meeting of minds outside of time or the personification of inner awareness cannot be determined at our present stage of knowledge.. The brain cannot always distinguish between input from the eyes and input from the subconscious mind, which may or may not have been received via ESP.

* Perception of a brilliant light or being of light, from which the person feels unconditional love and gains access to deep knowledge. This almost certainly involves some kind of communication via psi, though not necessarily with a "spirit" as traditionally imagined. The light or being is probably a metaphor representing something we cannot conceive, which takes a form depending on the experiencer's background.

* A panoramic life review, in which the person's whole life is shown without any feeling of time or distance. "My life flashed before my eyes" is commonly said by people who have been in danger apart from NDEs. It may be a natural phenomenon involving activation of buried memories, but on the other hand, it could conceivably involve the indeterminate nature of time.

* Visions of the future, often of catastrophic world events. Most don't come to pass, but a few do, such as the 9/11 terrorist attack. People are often warned that they, or society, must change; and this may simply rise from guilt that is already felt. Sometimes, however, it is actual precognition, which is a known psi capability and if reported before the event, is verifiable.

* Perception of a border or limit, knowing that to cross it will mean never returning to life. People either choose to return or are told they must. This could be a real decision by the unconscious mind, which is often a key factor in whether a person lives or dies, referred to by observers as "will to live."

Since some of these things are existing psi phenomena that are known to occur separately with people who aren't anywhere near death, the question arises as to why they so often happen together, in a particular sequence, during an NDE. It's likely that some are natural reactions to the extreme separation from body that a dying person subconsciously feels. Moreover, in my opinion being near death—or "brain dead," or in some other state where normal perception is weakened or lacking—greatly enhances a person's psi receptivity. This is an extreme case of what we know about psi: it is strongest in the absence of logical, rational thought, which involves different parts of the brain. The fact that psi isn't caused by the brain doesn't mean that the brain isn't involved in processing a person's perception of input from it.

Further, I speculate that the specific details of an NDE come from the collective unconscious, as do many other psi-based experiences such as UFO encounters. NDEs have been described in literature since ancient times, and it has been estimated that in the past 50 years more than 25 million people worldwide have had one. If ideas and metaphors spread through mass unconscious telepathy, as I believe they do, that incidence is surely enough to have an influence.

The most significant thing about NDEs is not their specific content but their aftereffects, which with few exceptions are ultimately positive. Although survivors are confused and troubled by their experiences at first and find them difficult to talk about, what they have gone through has a profound impact on their lives. Almost all lose their fear of death (although they were not actually dead during the experience, they usually believe they were). They focus more on the meaning of their lives and care less about material things such as money and possessions. They are more spiritual yet often turn away from organized religion. Unsurprisingly in view of their contact with psi phenomena, a large percentage of them have subsequent experiences with ESP.

Most notably, people who have had NDEs become more altruistic, showing increased sensitivity to other people's feelings and a strong desire to help others. This suggests that widespread use of ESP may, as I have said in my novels, lead to more harmony within human society. And it is in accord with other speculators' views of the evolutionary importance of psi.

The fact that these aftereffects are verifiable and enduring is often cited as showing that the NDEs were real rather than imaginary. And whether they are interpreted as indicating real survival after death or real psi powers during life makes a difference, I think, to parapsychology and the public's perception of it. This is even more true in the case of séances and other communication with alleged spirit entities. The data obtained on these subjects is too valuable to be excluded from mainstream psi research because of a supposed connection with evidence of afterlife.

Forthermore, the status of parapsychology in the eyes of skeptics isn't helped by the impression that it may jump to unwarranted conclusions about a subject generally confined to the realm of religion. Therefore, I feel the scope of the field needs to be more clearly defined.

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Christianity as Metaphor

(1969)

The essay below was written in 1969 for the pastor of the church I then joined, as I wanted to be frank with him about my beliefs. He liked it, as did others to whom it was shown, and mentioned that similar ideas had often been discussed among the clergy. I am including it in this book for the benefit of readers who wonder how anyone with a scientific outlook can find meaning in a creed that can't be taken literally. I have omitted a concluding section dealing with the specific church I joined, made minor changes to tense, and altered most uses of "man" in reference to humankind, but I have made no other revisions. Although I am no longer an active church member and have been unable to attend services for some years, I still believe what I have said here.

*

One always wonders, when an adult adopts a religious belief other than that which she has previously held, just what is behind the decision. Has she succeeded in so compartmentalizing her mind that she is now capable of separating "science" and "religion" as if there were no necessary relationship between them, as if truth were not truth, irrespective of the form in which it is expressed? Has she recognized a discrepancy between her way of life and what is generally considered a "moral" life? Or is she simply a former scoffer who has suddenly decided that "there may be something in religion after all"?

I do not consider myself a "convert" in any of these senses; I have changed neither my faith nor my moral standards. For it is not that I ever thought religion to be superfluous or unimportant—on the contrary, to me it has seemed supremely important, far too serious a matter for me to compromise my personal credo by public adherence to one which, on the surface, appeared in many respects contradictory. I have never been an atheist or even an agnostic; as far back as I can remember I have had a very deep and satisfying faith in the purposefulness of the universe or, I could say, in God. But as my concept of God bore little relationship to the traditionally-accepted one, I have never felt that I could join a church. It is only recently [as of 1969] that I have come to see Christianity as a rich and meaningful symbolic representation of the same things I have believed all along.

Humans need symbols—we can think only in symbols. This is as true in science as in religion, a fact seldom recognized by those who decry religious dogma but who embrace "scientific" dogma without even knowing that that is what they are doing. It is through symbols that one's worldview is embodied. But the young are literal-minded, and to them that which is not literally true does not seem true at all. During my high school years, since I was then planning to become a teacher, I taught a Sunday School class; but before long I gave it up because I felt that I was too much of a hypocrite. It has taken me a long time to realize that symbolically-expressed truth is as "true" as are empirically-proven facts or well-reasoned philosophical speculations.

I still do not believe the tenets of the Christian faith literally. What I have learned was that it is not necessary to believe them literally in order to believe that they express underlying truth, and that taken as a whole that truth constitutes a far more accurate worldview than any other so far conceived. I say "so far" because I believe that humankind is still evolving, and that the search for truth is by no means limited to investigation of the material aspects of reality. Reality has spiritual aspects as well, aspects that will someday be more thoroughly understood than at present. The so-called dichotomy between science and religion has arisen simply because these latter aspects are less accessible to factual analysis than the former; it is an unavoidable stage in human development. To primitive man all curiosity about the universe was dealt with through attempts to explain observable phenomena in religious terms, and the various fields of science broke away, one by one, as the means to investigate them were developed. But there are still many facets of truth that cannot be so investigated, and our only contact with them is through symbolism. To reject symbolism is to shut out such truth entirely, an attempt that can lead only to a sense of futility and despair.

At this particular time in history, when so much of what was once considered "firm ground" is crumbling beneath our feet, I believe that we as individuals have an obligation to identify ourselves with the worldview that to us seems most tenable. Indeed, we cannot avoid doing so, for someone who is not a Christian [or an adherent of another traditional religion] will be assumed to hold one of the more "modern" positions. On one hand, we have the humanists, materialists, and nihilists, whose one-sided view of the nature of the universe, if allowed to prevail, would lead humanity into a dead end. On the other, we have a burgeoning movement toward "spirituality" which might be considered an encouraging sign were it not that most of its devotees are extremists who favor total rejection both of our traditional values and of the great gains made by our scientific culture. These opposing camps have in common the lack of any inkling that the realms of reality may be larger than those that they have charted, and that existence of these realms can and should be acknowledged through symbolism rather than denied through the insistence that anything that can't be expressed literally cannot be expressed at all. I certainly do not wish to be counted among either of them.

And yet, neither do I wish to be suspected of having endorsed Christianity hypocritically, for I am now a full-time writer and my worldview will inevitably become known through my novels. I therefore, when joining a church, feel compelled to summarize briefly what I mean when I say that to me Christianity is a metaphorical rather than a literal truth.

This summary is of necessity brief, sketchy, and not fully developed. . . . But since I write much more easily than I talk, I shall venture to outline a few of the concepts that have led to my current desire to become a Christian.

GOD

My concept of God has always differed from the traditional one. By this I mean that any form of anthropomorphism with respect to God has repelled me. This has been a matter not merely of being unable to accept the admittedly-childish picture of God as an old man with a beard, but of finding the pronouns "he" and "his" utterly inappropriate in reference to that which is the basic and fundamental pattern in the fabric of reality. The very attribution of ''consciousness" to God has seemed to me proof of the oft-quoted suggestion that "man created God in his own image."

But I have found that this problem is less serious than it seems on the surface; it is one not of metaphysics, but simply of semantics. The familiar argument runs, "God cannot be less than man, so he must therefore be personal, since personal attributes are the highest we know." This to me is a non-sequitur, for it is feasible—indeed, inevitable—that there are still higher attributes that we do not know. By the very fact of our not knowing them, however, we have no words for them. Language follows the grasping of new concepts; it does not precede it. Having no words that are adequate to describe the unknowable, we must use metaphor, and it cannot be denied that where God is concerned, most people find the personal metaphor far more suitable than an impersonal one.

For me this is not true because I do not equate "impersonal" with "mechanistic." but in our materialistic culture any reference to God in non-personal terms seems to evoke some sort of mechanistic image. "God is certainly not a mere force," people say, and the key word here is "mere," the use of which reveals that these people cannot conceive of a force that transcends materialism. I have even seen it written that anyone who speaks of God as a "force" or "power" is using an analogy from physics! If this is the connotation such terms have for a person, then I surely would not argue with his preference for the use of personal pronouns; my own objection to the idea of a personal God is that it is limiting, not that it affirms the control of the universe to be above and beyond physical law. I can therefore speak of God as "he" in good conscience, in religious ritual at least, since the purpose of speech is communication, and in communication one must use the vocabulary most meaningful to one's listeners.

Furthermore, I feel that a distinction must be drawn between the concept of a personal God and that of a personal relationship with God. To people who cannot believe that a non-personal God can be also non-mechanistic, no sort of personal interaction between an individual and such a God seems possible; and they rightly reject the idea that God is something automatic, like gravity, that operates on them without regard for their free will. Free will implies personal interaction. "Personal" in this sense, however, refers to the person whose free will is involved; it does not mean that the interaction must be with another Person. It may be with—well, with that for which no words exist. Yet without such words, there is no adequate alternative to the use of the traditional "thou," a form which for most people is the only one through which such an interaction can be expressed. [Unfortunately in my opinion, since this was written even churches with formal ritual have replaced "thou" with "you," a word that gives God no special status.]

The true validity of the image of a personal God, however, seems to me its symbolic significance: its revelation of the values to which the Christian worldview gives importance. I have come to realize that "man created God in his own image" is a less accurate statement than "man conceives of God in the image of his highest values." Personality, individuality, freedom of conscious choice—these are the highest values as far as humans are concerned, and to attribute them to God is to give supreme recognition to this fact. Thus the Communists, who reject these values, must of necessity be atheists. And thus religions that do not conceive of God in personal terms do not accept the supremacy of personality for man, either; it is no coincidence that the Eastern religions hold the merging of the human soul into some sort of non-individualized oversoul to be a hoped-for ideal, in contrast to the Christian hope of personal resurrection.

Therefore I no longer balk at a concept of God that must, in the literal sense, be immature and naive; humans are immature and naive, and will remain so for some millennia yet to come. Meanwhile, there is much metaphorical truth back of it, and such truth comes far closer to reality than any attempt to define God in more "scientific" terms.

HUMANITY

It has always been surprising to me that most people who accept the theory of human evolution seem to assume that advancement has stopped, that once man evolved from the apes, the process was over with. I have mentioned my belief that we are still evolving, that we are still a long way from maturity—if indeed a point that can be labeled ''maturity" even exists. To me, humanity's estrangement from God is the result of this immaturity, not of any sort of "fall." Evolution does not fall, it rises. I must emphasize that by "evolution" I do not mean merely the Darwinian concept of natural selection or survival of the fittest; rather, I mean a continuing spiritual development, a groping toward God that leads humans upward toward something that is, to us, unimaginable.

In this concept I do not see anything that is incompatible with Christian ideals. Nearly all Christians nowadays agree that God did not create the world in six days, and that this myth is simply a metaphoric expression of the fact that the world and its creatures developed gradually. Why should it be otherwise with humans? In the mythological idiom, we would not be human had Adam not chosen to eat from the tree of knowledge—we would be mere creatures, comfortable perhaps, but not destined to climb higher; and the true temptation was that Adam would choose this course rather than the infinitely harder one with its necessary concomitants of labor, pain and death. (The serpent, in this case, must be seen as an agent sent to test his courage.) True, the choice condemned humans to suffering. But suffering is essential to development; if it were not, it would not exist. The original interpreters of the myth could not conceive of suffering as anything other than punishment, but we have since learned that God works not through vengeance, but through creative love.

To say that man is not "fallen" is not, of course, to say that humans are not liable to sin; in fact there can be no doubt that the tendency toward sin is, as Christianity has always maintained, universal. But "sin" is a concept applicable to individual human beings, not to humankind as a whole. However much evil may be brought into the world by sinful men, the human race is, in the long-range sense, progressing.

This progress is not solely the result of our own conscious efforts, as the humanists would maintain. Maturity is not merely a matter of social reform. The Christian view that we, both as individuals and as a race, are dependent upon something outside ourselves for continued growth and salvation is unquestionably true; and modern society's failure to recognize this is the basic cause of the prevailing mood of despair. For if there is no purpose beyond that which our limited minds can envision, all progress would be self-defeating; a "utopian" world would not be a viable world. No wonder the nihilists are convinced that life is meaningless, when they refuse to look outside themselves for the meaning.

I must digress at this point to say that I have always been convinced that we of Earth are not the only sentient beings in the universe, and that there are in fact innumerable "human" races on the planets of other stars. Physically, they may not resemble us in the slightest, but spiritually I believe they do; and I therefore picture a vast number of peoples, all at varying stages of maturity, some of whom are probably more highly evolved—and therefore closer to God—than we are. I have held this belief since childhood, long before it became a respectable scientific theory and the conquest of space became an actuality. Furthermore, I have believed that expansion of each race beyond the planet of its origin is an essential step in its development.

My forthcoming novel Enchantress from the Stars explores this theme. It is science fiction, but not the "space opera" type of science fiction, for it deals seriously with the question of how such advanced peoples would view those of lesser advancement. They would not presume to control their destinies, of that I am sure! In the story, those who visit the worlds of less highly developed races are bound by a solemn oath to avoid revealing themselves lest they destroy these races' own potential. They are able, however, to save a comparatively primitive planet from colonization by a technologically superior race—not by force or any other direct action, but by pitting the natives' naive faith in magic against the skeptical materialism of the invaders. When I wrote the book, nothing could have been further from my mind than the thought that it might have religious implications, and religion is never mentioned in it. But I later came to see that it has many; for it says, in effect, that it does not matter whether there is any literal truth in what one believes so long as the underlying idea is valid and one's faith in that idea is strong. "There are different kinds of truth," the heroine's father tells her, "and if our kind is more mature than theirs, it's so only because we know that."

The highly-evolved people depicted in the book are assumed to have a technology far surpassing anything we can imagine, yet they are in no sense materialists, for they have also mastered psychic powers such as telepathy and psychokinesis. These powers are presented as being closely involved with emotion—fear, anger, and most powerful of all, love. This is symbolic of my belief that there need be nothing machine-like about scientifically-oriented humans. Before I began to write novels, I was for ten years employed as a computer programmer and eventually, Computer Systems Specialist. I am therefore knowledgeable in this field, and I know that the current [as of 1969] fears that computers will "dehumanize" us are groundless. In due time, a computer will be built that duplicates or even surpasses the human brain in reasoning power. And that will be precisely the time when the tide of materialism will turn—for it will bring objective and conclusive proof that there is much in us that cannot be explained by our brains' neural processes. Far from reinforcing the theory that humans are essentially "machines," it will demonstrate once and for all that our spiritual characteristics are vastly more significant, both to ourselves and to the universe, than our physical ones.

CHRIST

I must admit that until fairly recently [as of 1969] I was among those who maintained that Jesus of Nazareth was a good man, the most enlightened man of his time, but nothing more. My opinion has changed in this respect. I now believe that he was a great deal more, although perhaps not in exactly the sense of the traditional interpretations.

Let me say first that I do not agree with the argument often advanced that if the Biblical account of the life of Jesus were untrue, Christianity would be meaningless. If that which is represented by Christ is true, then Christianity is valid. It would be valid even if it were proven that Jesus never lived at all.

However, I am convinced that he did live, and that the things usually taught about his life and death are very likely truer in the literal sense than the things taught about God. Jesus was not merely a great teacher and the founder of a superior moral code. I believe he had powers far beyond those of other men [psi powers, although I did not say so in the original essay since not everyone views them as more advanced than humanity's present capabilities], and his attitudes were more than simply "enlightened." Whether or not one chooses to call these powers and attitudes "supernatural" depends upon one's definition of "natural." According to a narrow definition, they were indeed miraculous. Personally I do not believe that there is any such thing as the "supernatural," for anything that is of God is true, and to me the term "natural" encompasses all truth.

I have discussed my belief that humans are still evolving, and that the people of Earth's distant future will be far more advanced spiritually than we of the present age. The powers and attitudes of Jesus seem to me characteristic of the highest level of evolution conceivable to us. Why a man with these characteristics should be born into a world less highly evolved is a mystery; but then the question of why anyone is born into a particular time and place is beyond our comprehension. Is it attributable to God? Of course, for the explanation of all mysteries lies in God.

However it came about that Jesus appeared in this world, the event marked a very great turning point in human understanding. I used to doubt this. I used to feel that because of my beliefs about humanity's future, I could not accept a religion that seemed to focus upon an arbitrary event in the past. But the fact is that Christ represents the future. Before his time, people had no idea that human potential might exceed our current potential. He said, "I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on me should not abide in darkness," and his message was one of hope and comfort, one that promised a future far brighter than that which could be reasonably predicted from the state of the world. This is no less applicable to our age than to his; in fact it is more so. He said, "I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now," by which he may have meant simply that humans had not yet evolved far enough. I do not think it unreasonable to suppose that by the image of the coming of the Kingdom, Jesus meant more than the salvation of righteous individuals; he may have been speaking of the ultimate evolution of humankind—and this, to me, is the metaphorical significance of the Parousia.

Can I acknowledge that God was incarnate in Christ?—certainly I can, if spiritual evolution leads man ever closer to God. Is faith in Christ necessary to personal salvation? I believe that faith in this basic idea, as embodied in Christ, undoubtedly is: the idea that we have a spiritual potential that we must strive to fulfill, that failure to so strive is sinful, and that such fulfillment will ultimately become possible. It is the lack of such faith that accounts for much of the evil and gloom in present-day society.

If the life of Jesus proved once and for all that human destiny is higher than had hitherto been supposed, what is to be said about his death? In this too, I believe that a new and very basic truth was demonstrated, a truth that has often been misinterpreted but that nevertheless is the mainspring of Christianity, the thing that has given it its power to transform people's lives.

Humans, especially primitive or naive humans, have always had a tendency to believe that suffering and death are caused by sin. But Jesus was sinless; no one, not even Pontius Pilate, could maintain that he in any way deserved to suffer. And yet he accepted death by torture voluntarily, in full knowledge of what he was doing! People still did not understand, at least not consciously. Firm in their belief that all suffering must be some form of retribution, they decided that since Jesus had obviously not suffered for any personal sins, he must have taken upon himself the punishment due to others, difficult though this was to reconcile with his own image of a loving God who would be unlikely to demand the purchase of forgiveness through sacrifice. They failed to see that what he had actually proven was that suffering need have no connection with evil.

As I mentioned above in connection with human evolution, it is my belief that suffering is essential to development. No great advance ever has been or ever can be made unless someone is willing to suffer for it. Thus it is often the best people who suffer most, precisely because these are the people who are willing. Jesus is the symbolic prototype of such willingness, and this is the underlying significance of his Passion. In choosing the Cross as the symbol of Christianity, our forebears affirmed this truth. It can be truly said that through the death of Christ those who accept this affirmation have been freed of the burden of their sins—but simply in the sense that they need no longer feel guilt and despair merely because they suffer. Jesus taught that neither suffering nor death is to be feared. And the early Christians were vitally aware of this; they suffered joyously.

As far as the Resurrection is concerned, I can say only this: Jesus taught that death was not to be feared, and that the individual personality would arise into everlasting life. I believe this, I have always believed it—and I therefore believe that the Resurrection, whether or not it ever took place as a physical event, is a vivid symbolic expression of an eternal reality.

THE CHURCH

Throughout my life I have felt [and still feel] that my relationship to God does not depend upon any association with a church, and although I often wished that there were a church that interpreted truth as I saw it, I could not conceive of joining one that did not. The usual question put to anyone who claims that he can pray without going to church is, "Yes, but will you?" This was not a problem with me. I did pray, and I still do.

Why then did I suddenly decide that I wished to join a church after all? There are a number of reasons, but the main ones were these: first, my realization that the interpretation of symbols is less important than the truth underlying those symbols, coupled with my recognition of the fact that the truth beneath Christian symbols is "truth as I see it." And second, my growing belief that to remain outside the church is, in this day, to be considered a humanist or materialist by default, particularly in the case of someone with my scientific background.

I must explain why I chose the Episcopal Church, with which I had no previous contact, from among all others. In the first place, all that I have read about the Anglican Communion indicates that it has a traditional respect for personal liberty and individual difference of opinion. . . . [Furthermore,] the unbroken descent of the Episcopal Church from the Christian Church of early times enhances the concept of Christianity not as a mere moral code, but as an integrated complex of symbolism firmly backed by tradition. Symbols too must evolve; in order to be meaningful they must have deep roots.

This leads to a point that I consider very important: the liturgical form of Episcopalian worship is, I believe, vital not only to religion in general but to my particular view of Christianity as symbolic rather than literal truth. Since I believe that Christian tenets are symbols, I feel strongly that they must be treated in a formal, symbolic way. "Modern" churches that try to bring everything "up-to-date" use forms that can be accepted neither literally nor symbolically; it has been rightly said that any attempt to de-mythologize Christianity only succeeds in re-mythologizing it according to the inadequate notions of the current day.

The liturgy and sacraments of the Church, which are in the words of the Prayer Book "outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace," have a strong attraction for me. True, I have always believed—and still believe—that "inward and spiritual grace" is accessible to any person, at any time, on any planet, provided only that his approach to God is sincere. But there is a need for the "outward and visible signs." too—a need that I had but lately recognized. There is a need for such signs to bear witness to a troubled age; and there is also a need within each individual to express in some fashion the ideals that he holds most sacred.

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The Worship of Medical Authority

(1995)

This is a portion of the introductory material I wrote in 1995 for an online course I was teaching through Connected Education for credit from the New School for Social Research. Titled "Science and Twenty-First Century Medicine," it was a Media Studies course, so the focus was on public attitudes toward medical advances. I have made minor wording alterations in a few places, added several paragraphs, and inserted a few references to my novel Stewards of the Flame, which was written ten years later. Otherwise it needed no revision; the public's view of medicine has not changed.

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Why does our society view the medical establishment as the supreme authority on what our priorities should be and how we should live our lives? Hope for cure of all illness, based on medicine's clear success in dealing with injuries and infectious disease, is understandable. But there is far more to the public's faith in it than that. It's more than mere wishful thinking, too, although that certainly contributes.

I suspect one factor is that we're conditioned from infancy to rely on authority figures for our well-being—conditioned by the fact that we're a species with a long childhood, during which care from adults is essential to survival. In former centuries, experience with medicine was less apt than it is today to inspire trust in doctors as substitute all-knowing parents. But physicians, who were once the social equals of their patients, assumed an authoritative role with the advent of hospital medicine.

There is, to be sure, a present trend toward rejection of doctors' authority. Many observers have remarked on this as a distinct change from the attitudes that prevailed in the first half of the twentieth century. However, it applies mainly to the authority of individual doctors, in the sense that they're no longer placed on pedestals and are often suspected of incompetence or financial greed. People are now quick to seek advice from a sequence of doctors and/or alternative practitioners when dissatisfied with the help they get. Yet the belief that medical providers of one sort or another can help, that they're the ultimate source of advice to which humans have access, seems stronger than ever.

Personally, I believe that neither medicine's past success nor conditioned dependence on its authority is enough to account for the fanatic devotion our society has to the concept of medical care. It has always seemed to me that such devotion is comparable to a religion. Some years ago, when I began to investigate these issues, I imagined I might write an essay setting forth that hypothesis—though I knew it would be regarded as heresy. But I soon found that it's far from an original idea. Many writers have argued that medicine has become a religion; the more one examines the analogy, the more obvious it appears to be.

As faith in traditional religions declined, and people stopped turning to the clergy with their problems, they turned to doctors and psychotherapists; this much is common knowledge. Less widely recognized is the fact that instead of the secularization of society that's generally assumed, we got medicalization. Our culture is not without a creed. Its creed is a list of questionable assumptions about the scientific validity of modern medicine, plus some others that are not related to science.

Chief among these other assumptions is the moral authority accorded to medicine. In our society, it's not just thought wise to defer to medical judgment—it's considered virtuous. Dissent on the part of a patient, or worse, the refusal to become a patient, is an offense against common mores; the admonishment "You ought to see a doctor" implies reproach, and rebellion is seen as scandalous. Failure to follow medically-endorsed health recommendations is viewed as sin; it has reached the point where ordinary foods once found on everyone's table are referred to in recipe columns as "sinful." The primary emotion now felt by people in connection with their health is not satisfaction or dissatisfaction, but guilt. A person who values quality of life over hypothetical length of life is looked upon not merely as foolish, but as irresponsible. Acceptance of unpleasant treatments or lifestyles, whether or not these can rationally be expected to impart benefit, is considered commendable, while rejection of them is regarded as error—as if, perhaps, doing penance for ill health might exorcise it, or at least ward society against its spread.

It is, of course, an ancient belief that sickness is punishment for sin. But today, that belief has been explicitly rejected, to be replaced by a feeling that poor health is in itself a moral failing. We strive not to be good, but to be well. Physician Arthur Barsky, in Worried Sick, writes, "As people in the past sought to lead a 'religious life,' we now seek the healthy lifestyle. Attaining a sense of wellness is like attaining a state of grace. In a sense, we've replaced the religious quest for the salvation of our souls with the secular quest for the salvation of our bodies." Quoting Marshall Becker, he continues, "Health promotion . . . is a new religion, in which we worship ourselves, attribute good health to our devoutness, and view illness as just punishment for those who have not yet seen the way."

There is irony in the fact that some criticize our society for abandoning the concept of moral responsibility and replacing it with the idea that offenders are "sick," for in fact, sickness has indeed become the equivalent of sinfulness—and treatment the equivalent of repentance—not merely in the case of criminals, but with regard to all who display physical or behavioral deviance from an ideal "norm." The sick person is required to submit to the authority of the establishment, just as sinners once were. His or her private judgments are not accorded any more respect than they were by the most dogmatic of churches. To be sure, treatment, except for certain "mental illnesses," is not quite compulsory (yet) unless a crime is committed; we don't subject patients to force, though we do sometimes induce them to undergo torture for the sake of alleged salvation. But the source of pressure to conform is identical: preserve society's faith at all costs! We may say our society is faithless, that it has lost its sense of common purpose; but that's not true. We worship Perfect Health and the medical establishment is its priesthood.

None of this is meant to suggest insincerity on the part of doctors. Most doctors are motivated by genuine desire to help their fellow human beings. But so were most priests, even within intolerant religious establishments. They sincerely believed that sinners would be saved by deference to ecclesiastical authority, and were sure that nonconformists would end up in hell. Similarly, doctors believe that people's ultimate welfare depends on adherence to the dictates of health dogma and that disregard of these will result in suffering or early death. They trust the medical science they have been taught, as clergy trusted the theological hierarchy; they're convinced of the efficacy of its rituals. Significantly, this conviction comes from faith—fewer such rituals than we suppose are backed by objective science.

It's not really surprising that this faith has developed. Early death was once common, so common that people didn't question it—but they had the hope of heaven. Most of them paid a great deal of attention to doing what they were told would assure them of heaven. But belief in a literal heaven has faded. To today's majority, religious rituals, if meaningful at all, have symbolic rather than practical value. Is it any wonder that in an era where medicine can defy death, the goal of maximum lifespan—pursued by often-slavish devotion to ritualistic health practices—has taken heaven's place?

People have always sought direction in their search for salvation and have been willing to give up a lot for it. Thus they've welcomed the medicalization of our society, assuming the role of patients even when they don't feel sick and going for checkups as they once would have gone to confession. Craving absolution, they now subject themselves to medical authority not just during illness, but at birth, death, and throughout all phases of their lives.

Nor is that the only way in which medicine assumes the role of religion. To many, it is the prime source of mystery and awe. Once, people sought cures at shrines and temples, as some do even today; to look to an arcane source for healing is a deep-seated human impulse. Anthropologist/physician Melvin Konner writes that in many cultures doctors still keep secrets from their patients, as they used to in our own, and that only in theory does modern medicine's focus on science dispel, rather than cultivate, mystery. "In reality the mystery remains, but it has a different location: it lives on the frontiers of technology . . . doctors and patients stand together, grateful and humbled, before what almost seem to be technological gods." In their book The Healing Brain Robert Ornstein and David Sobel quote a description by psychiatrist Jerome Frank of "how a great teaching hospital might look to an anthropologist from Mars who is studying healing shrines in America." This beautifully illustrates the medical/religious analogy.

I suspect that the idolization of medicine and its technology is a trend that won't change in the twenty-first century, if it ever does, though many assumptions of today's medical establishment will be altered. Personally, I tend to get emotional about it, as heretics often do, and my dystopian science fiction novel Stewards of the Flame deals with a society in which this trend has been carried to its logical conclusion, in some respects to reductio ad absurdum lengths. Yet I don't mean to say that it's bad in all ways. As Ornstein and Sobel point out, it may serve to mobilize "the faith that heals" in those who don't share my skepticism.

My point in raising the issue is simply to explain how we got into a situation where public perceptions conflict with an objective approach to the findings of science. There has been, and still is, a lot of resistance to those findings, especially in the case of evidence that medicine can't magically perfect us. In my opinion, the religious character of our medical outlook is a principal reason for it.

*

Just as political and financial factors once shaped the doctrine of authoritative legally-established religions, they have profound effects on the dogma promulgated by health authorities today. Our medical-industrial establishment (a term more accurate than mere "medical establishment," if more clumsy) is exceeded in size only by our military-industrial establishment, and it is no more efficient or high-minded. It encompasses powerful commercial interests and a huge government bureaucracy. And although as a general rule, I believe the profit motive leads to benefits for the public, I do not think this is true with medicine. In the case of other technologies, we can judge as individuals how much we'll gain from them; we can buy or not buy a product, as we choose. Not so with medical technology. We are told what we need not just by advertising we can tune out, but by authorities we're told to trust. We're in no position to evaluate their pronouncements, let alone associated media hype. A good deal is now said about how commercialization of health care has led to corners being cut in provision of services, but the opposite problem is older and more pervasive.

Medical research is expensive. A lot of it is paid for, directly or indirectly, by pharmaceutical firms; the rest is funded by government grants and/or by organizations that appeal directly to the public, and thus have an interest in public perceptions. The results of such research aren't of mere scientific interest; they impact the economy—suppliers, laboratories, and even the food industry, in addition to medical providers and the drug companies. They influence the prestige and power structure of institutions. In some cases, research projects affect local interests to the extent that politicians lobby for them. The insurance industry, despite reluctance to pay for specific services, nevertheless benefits from a situation in which health insurance is a necessity of life. Furthermore, the amount spent yearly on medical testing now exceeds that spent on pharmaceuticals, and much of it is paid on behalf of people who are not even sick. It's hardly surprising if from all this, a policy of maximum consumption of "care" emerges, and medical interventionism prevails over any suggestion that we need not all be constant consumers of it. People want "only the best" when it comes to health care, and are led to assume, not necessarily wisely, that "best" means "most."

The influence of pharmaceutical companies on health care standards is too well known, and too widely criticized, for me to go into here—there are countless books directed to the public that present the details. Briefly, constant lobbying results in legislation that keeps drug prices artificially high; the results of tests for drug safety and efficacy are not always as valid as they appear; scandal involving government regulation of medical drugs is by no means rare; new expensive drugs are aggressively marketed as "improved" replacements for older ones that work just as well if not better; and worst of all, drugs are widely promoted for conditions that don't require medication and in many cases would not even be considered "illness" if no such promotion had been done. To be sure, some of the immense profit derived from selling such drugs funds the development of those needed by people who are really sick. But at what cost to society? Since drugs are not profitable unless taken by large numbers of people, the result has been that a great many—and their doctors—have been led to believe that they need ongoing medication, to prevent future illness if for no other reason. They have also been conditioned from childhood onward to think that any form of discomfort should be dealt with by ingesting chemicals and that doing so is virtuous; is it any wonder that so many abuse drugs, or turn to illegal ones for relief from mere unhappiness or boredom?

I suspect, too, that there are additional reasons for government promotion of so-called preventative medicine. If it leads to only a minor statistical decrease in "risk factor" diseases—or can be made to seem as if it will—such propaganda is politically advantageous, even if it harms more individuals than it helps (which is more often the case than is generally known). The media attention to "prevention" makes it look as if the government is Doing Something about diseases for which cures haven't appeared. Moreover, the concept sounds good; it even sounds like the cost-saver it's asserted to be (although the General Accounting Office determined in 1987 that "preventive" medicine costs more in the long run than treating only people who get sick, something insurance companies have always known). Perhaps the bureaucrats have been taken in by the way it sounds. On the other hand . . .

Government involvement in medical care has been on the rise ever since public funds were first devoted to it, and has increased exponentially since the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid. Further intrusion on personal health autonomy can be expected if coverage of medical care costs is broadened—what the government pays for, it controls, and to bureaucrats, any opportunity to control is welcome. Surprisingly few warnings about the consequences are coming from people who ordinarily are deeply concerned about protection of individual liberty; on the contrary, virtually any extension of government authority is viewed with approval if it is deemed justifiable as a health measure. I think the situation I portrayed in Stewards of the Flame is not too far-fetched.

I suppose all this makes me sound like a cynic—which, in other areas of inquiry, I usually am not. I ask myself, sometimes, why I have never shared society's trust in medical authority, why, even as a child, I reacted strongly against well-meant attempts to interfere with people's bodies. It struck me as an unwarranted invasion of privacy. The purpose of medicine, I felt, was to relieve suffering, not to concern itself with "norms." Perhaps it was simply that I value individuality over conformity. Or perhaps it was that by nature I'm an intellectual rebel, inclined to doubt anything I'm told I should believe. Many people react that way to religion, but I was never urged to accept a formal religion; perhaps for me too, in a negative sense, the medical establishment took its place.

*

Although commercial interests have a powerful role in determining the perceived status of an individual's health, the influence of social factors is even stronger. Like any other religion, medicine defines the need for reformation in terms of deviance from what is currently seen as normal.

In The Limits of Medicine Edward Golub points out that "our perception of when we are well or ill is defined by time and culture." He suggests that the gnarled hands of arthritis were once viewed not as disease, but as the natural condition of those lucky enough to live to old age. In general, however, atypical conditions are not seen in a positive way. Rather, variations from idealized "norms" are arbitrarily declared to be signs of sickness. Furthermore, as was observed by a medical news publication, "Politicians discovered long ago that a good way to pass the buck is to get a problem labeled as a disease." The medical establishment, as the agent of society, is given sole power not only to cure illness, but to define it—and the definitions, upheld by its authority, both reflect and reinforce society's prejudices. Consider these examples:

1. In the 1850s the desire of slaves to escape from their masters was labeled a mental disease, at least in the South, and was given the scientific-sounding name of "drapteomania."

2. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, the normal emotional problems of women were blamed on their reproductive organs and were frequently treated by gynecological surgery.

3. In the early twentieth century, identification of "undesirable" traits as disease appropriate for extirpation by physicians was not limited to Nazis. The eugenics movement in America resulted in 20,000 involuntary sterilizations, and was lauded by respected authorities as an advance in medical science. Though focused on the "feebleminded," it also targeted "drug fiends" and "drunkards"; even "shiftlessness" and "pauperism" were assumed to be medical conditions of genetic origin.

4. Frontal lobotomy was performed on thousands of "disturbed" patients, even children, in the 1940s despite growing criticism of its devastating effects. So great was its popularity that its inventor shared the 1949 Nobel Prize in Medicine.

5. From the 1920s through the 1950s, intact tonsils were viewed as unhealthy and tonsillectomy for children was virtually routine among families who could afford it; it was said that this would prevent colds. I myself was an unwilling victim of this practice in 1940, although a controlled study as early as the 1930s showed that children without tonsils have no fewer colds than others. The fact that colds aren't serious enough to justify surgery, which seemed apparent to me at the age of six, was not recognized during that era.

6. Until the late 1950s, enlarged thymus glands found in infants were called "status thymicolymphaticus" and treated with irradiation. Eventually, such thymus glands were recognized as normal—but children so treated had an increased risk of thyroid cancer and the girls had an increased risk of breast cancer as well. This is only one example of instances in which an unwarranted "disease" label has resulted in unalloyed physical harm.

7. Homosexuality was listed as a disorder by the American Psychiatric Association until 1973; only the gay rights movement brought about a change in its designation.

8. During the second half of the twentieth century the natural event of menopause was medicalized to the extent that some spoke of older women's loss of estrogen as a "deficiency disease"; doctors advocated hormone replacement therapy even while conceding that the "deficiency" is universal. Then in 2002 a major study revealed that hormone replacement leads to an increased risk of cancer and heart disease. Today it is generally advised only for women with abnormally serious menopausal symptoms.

9. Obesity is currently defined as a disease and is often aggressively treated, despite lack of any proof that fatness per se is harmful. There are statistical associations between fatness and some diseases, but in most cases no evidence that it is a causal factor. Furthermore, there are associations between fatness and decreased risk for other diseases.

10. There is considerable concern among critics of gene therapy about the possibility that other ways in which individuals naturally differ, or variations leading to minor impairments and/or mere risks, will be erroneously perceived as health defects once genes associated with them can be identified. This has already happened in the case of some carriers of recessive genes.

11. Biochemical treatment of children who are not sick, but merely atypical, is already common. For example, growth hormone produced through genetic engineering is given to those who are short, and amphetamines are routinely prescribed for the "overactive." Both these practices have drawn heavy criticism, but they're on the increase and further biotechnical developments will lead to additional ones.

12. Conditions identified as alleged risk factors for disease are increasingly viewed as diseases in themselves and are believed to require treatment, often at the cost of quality of life, despite the fact that most individuals with these conditions don't die at a significantly younger age than average. The mere potential for illness (which exists, in one form or another, in all of us) is thus no longer distinguished from real illness. It remains to be seen whether the routine prescription of statins to lower cholesterol will prove to be one of medicine's tragic mistakes; giving powerful drugs to a large percentage of the population without knowledge of their long-term effects strikes some people as a prescription for disaster.

13. Today, normal emotions such as anxiety and depression are considered illnesses even in people who are not incapacitated by them, and are given ominous-sounding diagnostic designations. Use of drugs to suppress them is not only condoned, but promoted as virtuous; people who refuse to "get help" are looked down upon. In general, unhappy or withdrawn people are viewed as less healthy than "well-adjusted" ones, whether or not they display physical symptoms.

14. Addictions are now generally considered diseases; in fact, to question this label is to be thought moralistic and unenlightened—although the most effective ways of dealing with them aren't of medical origin. Increasingly, co-dependency is also looked upon as sickness, for one reason because, in one observer's words, that creates "a whole new class of billable patients."

15. Antisocial and/or deviant behavior has always been branded "mental illness"; the extent to which this is a valid concept is highly controversial. In the former Soviet Union even dissident opinion was viewed as sickness, while at the other extreme, psychiatrist Thomas Szasz argues that there is no such thing as a real mental illness and that schizophrenics are merely victims of political oppression—a view strongly endorsed by the "Mad Rights" movement among mental patients who feel that as long as they aren't harming anyone they should not be considered ill. The position now prevailing among psychiatrists is that atypical mental functioning is of biochemical origin; increasingly, it is treated with drugs that some experts call "chemical lobotomy."

16. It is presently unacceptable to list "old age" as the cause of death on a legal death certificate; doctors are required to pinpoint a specific disease. Some feel this is unrealistic, since organs normally fail in old age, often at about the same time. The result is first, that "cures" for such "disease" are expected, and second, that even a person who has lived a long and healthy life can't avoid "succumbing to disease" at its end.

What all these examples have in common is the fact that they involve people who would never consider themselves sick and in need of medical care if the medical establishment, and/or society, did not so decree. I do not mean to suggest that people in those categories don't ever need advice and support (though to call helpful counseling "medical" is at best a means of getting medical insurance to pay for it—a benefit that may or may not outweigh the psychological cost of being viewed as diseased). My point is that all such "sickness" labels are value judgments, and depend on attitudes toward human diversity. Medicine has been assumed to know what's pathological as distinguished from what's merely variable, but that isn't something science can determine.

We might say that the ability of a person to function adequately would be a reasonable criterion. But even that depends on culture; is nearsightedness pathological, when in our era, many of us get along fine with glasses? Increasingly, the disabled have been protesting against the idea that they are defective, and are demanding cultural accommodations that will facilitate their functioning as full members of society. Thus the problem, perhaps, lies not in the definition of "defective," but in the very concept of a defect; and this problem will grow as more and more is learned about the human genome.

There is, to be sure, a common-sense definition of illness on which we can all agree as a minimum: it's the state where a person is truly suffering—not just assumed to be suffering—and/or is unable to engage in his or her regular activities (and where the problem couldn't be solved by elimination of social prejudice). If this were the criterion for medicine's involvement, there would be little difficulty in determining its purview. But, in our medicalized age, medicine's aspirations go far beyond the relief of suffering and incapacity. As indicated above, they extend to the enforcement social conformity.

Although intolerance toward minorities has supposedly become taboo in our society, in the case of health-related issues the opposite trend is accelerating. Mike Fitzpatrick, in a 2004 article in The British Journal of General Practice, points out, "Resistance to medicalisation was a common theme of the anti-psychiatry, gay liberation and feminist movements of the 1970s. But [now] . . . radical campaigners are more likely to demand medical recognition of conditions such as ME or Gulf War Syndrome than oppose it as pathologising and stigmatising. Whereas, in the past, the pressure for medicalisation came from the medical profession or the government, now it also comes from below, from society itself."

Furthermore, the larger aim of medicine—strongly supported by the public—is now to prevent illness; in pursuit of this aim, it brands individuals believed to be "at risk" as already ill, often subjecting them to far more suffering, both physical and mental, than they would otherwise experience, not to mention the ongoing financial burden and inconvenience. "Early detection" is encouraged, though it often uncovers conditions that might never have developed unpleasant symptoms. Is a symptomless illness really an illness? Do factors that may or may not contribute to one's eventual death qualify as disease? It is society, not science, that says so; after all, we will all die of something, sometime, and all physical predispositions may eventually be detectable.

Given the fact that ideas about health are indeed social rather than derivable from objective science, we may ask if there is any such thing as "perfect health." Obviously, there is not. Nor is there any such thing as "fitness," another concept widely abused today—too seldom do we ask, "fitness for what?" Fitness depends on environment. It's meaningless to say that most of us aren't "fit enough" to survive in the environment our ancestors did, since that's not the environment we live in. Then too, as the term is used in evolutionary theory, fitness means reproductive fitness: not ability to survive to old age, but the ability to get genes into succeeding generations. In our culture, this hasn't much correlation with illness or absence thereof in adulthood. We may associate general fitness with health, but it's circular to define them in terms of each other. Nor does it make sense to define health as the physical condition characterizing humans of prehistoric times, when not only were lifestyles unlike ours, but hardly anyone lived past thirty.

Furthermore, many of the factors that we assume constitute health are self-contradictory. As is explained in Randolph Nesse and George Williams' book How We Get Sick, evolution leads to trade-offs. Some apparent illnesses are actually the body's defenses against worse illnesses. Some are the result of genes that also have beneficial effects. In the psychological realm, anxiety is an indispensable part of the ability to avoid danger. We can no more say that there is "something wrong" with people for being sick or unhappy sometimes than we can say there's something wrong with members of racial minorities.

So if health isn't an objective concept—if there is no standard by which some people can be called normal and others abnormal, and if sickness is inevitable and, in some situations, even adaptive—why do we ask medicine to make us perfect? This is an impossible goal, one leading to intolerance as well as a continuous feeling of guilt on the part of everyone who accepts medicine's authority. No matter how advanced our science becomes, it cannot be attained. Thus, there are limits to what health care can accomplish, and they are not determined by technological skill, let alone compliance with medically-advised behavior.

Yet as scientific knowledge increases, leading to the availability of tests that detect more and more about individual biochemistry, the tendency to blame people for their physical condition will grow. It will be said, as it often is already, that they should "take responsibility for their own health," meaning not that they should be willing to abide by the consequences of their personal choices, but that they should adhere to the pronouncements of the medical establishment—or worse, the government—about how they ought to behave. Once illness was viewed as misfortune, and before that, as punishment for sin; now the pendulum is swinging back and it's being attributed to sin again. As always, dogmatic authorities stand ready to absolve those who repent and accept the penance prescribed. Whether or not they do, if their genetic constitution happens to be such that statistically-based advice would be damaging to them, they will be out of luck. Nonconformists, whatever their reason for resistance, will be persecuted and, quite possibly, taxed.

But change may be on the horizon. Ironically in view of the historic trend toward medicalization, criticism of current practices is beginning to be voiced—not by the public, but by medical professionals. At the time my novel Stewards of the Flame was written, the belief that many standard medical tests and treatments are unnecessary or even harmful was rare enough to be called heresy, and very little was published expressing that point of view. Since then, increased attention has been paid to the harm caused by medical overtreatment and a number of books and articles about it have appeared, many of them by doctors.

Moreover, it has been pointed out that a great deal of unnecessary testing and treatment is done because patients demand it, sometimes against their physician's best judgment. Although it is still common for doctors and hospitals to urge tests, procedures, and drugs merely because they are conventionally, if erroneously, viewed as beneficial—and in some cases, because they are financially profitable—the fundamental problem is the outlook of society as a whole rather than that of the medical establishment. Hopefully, the escalating cost of medical care will wake people up if nothing else does. Society will never be able to afford treatment for all those who need it as long as so much is spent on unnecessary and sometimes-harmful care for those who do not.

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The Need for a New Outlook on Healthcare

(2020)

Nothing is more fatal to health than an over care of it.

— Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack, 1734

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Almost everyone believes that America's healthcare system is badly in need of reform. It's generally agreed that medical care is too expensive, that some people have little or no access to it, that too much of the money devoted to it is wasted through inefficiency and corruption, and that not enough funds are available for research. These things are true. But that more money would lead to better health does not necessarily follow. There are certainly cases in which lack of insurance imposes great hardship on individuals. But on the whole, more money might well result in more medicine that is not merely unproductive but, in the opinion of some, counterproductive.

An appalling amount of money is already being spent: $3.6 trillion in 2018, which accounted for 17.7% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). It's estimated that this will increase to nearly $6 trillion and over 19% of the GDP within the next decade. Is devoting so much to medical care worthwhile? According to a 2019 poll, three quarters of Americans say they pay too much for it and are concerned, as am I, that healthcare costs will result in significant and lasting damage to the U.S. economy. Nearly half, even among those with high incomes, fear that a major health event could result in personal bankruptcy. And though about 45% of the general population believes that the quality of care in the U.S. is the best or among the best in the world, that is not true. Among 36 other developed nations, the U.S. ranks 28th in life expectancy.

Various solutions to the crisis in healthcare costs have been proposed, all of which are not merely controversial but divisive. Unsurprisingly, only 8% of those polled believe that a bipartisan agreement can be reached on how to pay those costs. Yet all the argument has been focused on paying for the same amount of healthcare as we have now—or more. It does not seem to have occurred to anyone that the root of the problem is that we have too much of it.

To be sure, in recent years concern about the damaging effects of overdiagnosis and overtreatment has been expressed by an increasing number of physicians. It is beginning to be recognized that providing care that people do not need often does them more harm than good. As Dr. Atul Gawande, bestselling author of Being Mortal, wrote in The New Yorker, "Americans like to believe that, with most things, more is better. But research suggests that where medicine is concerned it may actually be worse."

However, this awareness has not penetrated our society, As in my science fiction novel Stewards of the Flame, the pubic solidly supports an excess of healthcare, erroneously believing it will make them feel better and live longer. In part, this is the result of the idea that the unceasing pursuit of health is a moral obligation, discussed in my essay "The Worship of Medical Authority." But it is also due to common misconceptions about what medical care can accomplish and what priority it should be given.

Moreover, cost is not the only problem connected with healthcare today. There are also ethical issues. A growing number of people, including knowledgeable physicians, feel that medicine now has the ability to intervene where that may not be desirable—most prominently, in terminal cases where dying is painfully prolonged. This is a situation that many of us find deeply disturbing. Others are disturbed by high-tech intervention in reproduction, or by screening policies that brand people as defective or unemployable. The prospect of genetic engineering, too, has raised questions about whether medicine should do all that may become possible. And finally, there is increasing concern about the pharmaceutical industry's promotion of treatment for minor complaints, or mere risk factors, in order to create a market for unnecessary drugs.

Medical ethics has become a major field of inquiry about which a great deal has been written. Its premise, however, is that all the power attributed to medicine is indeed technologically attainable, and that whatever restraints are imposed upon it will be social. Rarely if ever is it suggested that problems and/or anticipated problems are the result of unrealistic expectations and the actions to which they lead.

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Here are some of the assumptions underlying most people's view of modern medicine.

* The science of medicine has already led to significant increase in human life expectancy, and it is likely that it will achieve further increases in the foreseeable future. FALSE. Historians are agreed that the major extensions of life expectancy that have occurred were due not to medical science, but to improvements in sanitation, nutrition, and so forth. Some point out that even these weren't what defeated airborne infectious diseases—the people without genetic resistance to them simply died out.

* Infectious disease has been defeated by medical science, except for the recently-arisen threats posed by AIDS and Ebola; we can expect to permanently eradicate all such disease if we apply enough money and effort to the task. FALSE. It has long been conventional wisdom that medical science can deal effectively with infectious disease and that its main problem is finding a way to be equally successful against chronic disease. But recently, we've begun to realize that claims of victory over infectious disease were premature. It's not just AIDS that has brought about this realization, and not even just the decreasing effectiveness of antibiotics. Attention is finally being given to the fact that microorganisms evolve much faster than humans do.

* Although medicine has been less successful in dealing with non-infectious diseases, it is steadily making progress against them. The war on cancer is slowly being won. Even now, the incidence of the major killers such as cancer and heart disease can be significantly decreased through preventative medicine. CONTROVERSIAL. That deaths from "risk factor" diseases can be significantly reduced by known measures is far from certain, although the majority of today's experts claim that prophylactic drugs and lifestyle changes are efficacious. The facts if examined objectively do not support this assertion, and there is reason to believe that political and commercial considerations have a good deal to do with its promotion.

* Gene therapy can be expected to eventually produce cures, or at least effective treatments, for most chronic diseases; it will be only a matter of perfecting appropriate technology. Even before cures are achieved, it will be possible to accurately compute each person's risk of developing such disorders. FALSE. It's now recognized that the complexity of gene interaction is much greater than had been supposed, and other factors affecting susceptibility are being discovered through the new science of genomics. While we will be able to genetically predict and/or cure certain diseases, most illness, even when genetic predisposition exists, doesn't involve "defective" genes.

* The human body is a biological machine that needs regular maintenance, not only with respect to supplying its needs, but in the sense that the condition of its parts should be periodically checked. If defects in parts are detected soon enough, they can often be repaired. Even when, due to medical ignorance, this is not yet possible, such checking leads to valid assessment of health. CONTROVERSIAL. The question of whether the machine metaphor is appropriate for the human body is a major philosophical question that has been debated for centuries, and there is now vocal resistance to it on philosophical grounds among advocates of "holistic" medicine, among others. Moreover, there is also new scientific evidence that the body is not a machine—at least not in the sense that term is generally used—in addition to the evidence that as a practical matter, medicine based on the machine-maintenance concept doesn't work (and sometimes results in harm).

* Someday we will be able to repair all body parts or replace them with new ones. When that day comes, human lives can be extended indefinitely if society chooses to do it. Medical progress can be measured in terms of advancement toward that goal. CONTROVERSIAL. This idea is closely tied to the previous one. If the body is a biological machine, it's reasonable to expect that all parts can ultimately be repaired or replaced, and that this will result in health. If it's not a machine, there are no grounds whatsoever for such an assumption. (Could this be one reason for the popularity of the machine model?)

* Medical technology has provided us with a marvelous array of effective drugs, the increasing use of which has made us the healthiest society in human history. It is constantly developing betters ones. If taken under the direction of a physician, these drugs are generally safe and beneficial. FALSE. This assumption too is related to the "machine" issue, because medication of parts is conceptually equivalent to tinkering with them. However, there are also many practical reasons to question the overall benefits of our growing prescription drug use, indispensable though drugs are in certain cases. There is really no such thing as a drug "side effect" —effects are effects, whether or not we're aware of them, and to single out the one we want as the "primary" effect is unrealistic. Some drugs carry serious risks, and though this may be the lesser of evils compared to the illness they are intended to treat, no one should take them without awareness of those risks. Further, the question of whether a given drug is better than a placebo depends on more understanding of placebos than science has yet attained. On top of these considerations, there is very real reason for concern about the impact of the pharmaceutical industry on information presented to doctors.

* Although some functional disorders have psychological components, the causes of organic illness are exclusively physical. In any case, the progress of such disease is wholly physical and is not affected by what goes on in the patient's mind. If "spontaneous" improvement occurs, it must be initiated by physical factors medicine hasn't yet identified. FALSE. Although many doctors still believe this, it is being overthrown by science, especially through the new field of psychoneuroimmunology (PNI). There is no longer room for reasonable doubt—state of mind affects the immune response, among others. This has been proven with animal experiments; controlled studies are more difficult to design with humans, but evidence is slowly being acquired.

* Perfect health is the natural state of the human body, and illness is a sign of something having gone wrong. It is the result of defective components, poor environmental conditions, and/or unwise lifestyle (or, in the case of psychosomatic disorders, of faulty psychological functioning). All of these are in principle correctable; a sufficiently advanced society would have no illness. FALSE. It's human nature to equate illness with "something wrong" —this has been done in all cultures, and in ours it's built into the language. Creationists believe God made us perfect and New Agers believe we "make our own reality;" our ills are seen as the result of sin, bad karma, or personal shortcomings, but always as in conflict with our true nature. Strangely, medical science too operates under this premise while at the same time giving lip service to our evolutionary origin. Yet there is nothing in the evolutionary process that works against illnesses not relevant to reproductive fitness, and a good deal that promotes them—for example, one may be a protection against another that is worse. Recently, theorists have begun to address this issue, which is important because of its implications for what we can expect of medicine.

* The distinction between health and disease is a matter of scientific analysis. Virtually all health problems are due to specific diseases with specific causes, which in principle can be identified whether or not they can be cured. In most cases their fundamental mechanisms are known, although there are still many details to be filled in. FALSE. In many cases the definition of "disease" is a social, rather than scientific, issue, although medicine claims sole authority to decide it. As for causes of disease, the only sure thing that can be said is that in most cases they're far more complex than has been imagined. Those to which chronic diseases are attributed are generally partial and based on speculation, or at best, on mere theory. Statistics purporting to identify causal relationships often reflect mere associations. And medical tests, even when accurate, are no more reliable than the premises on which they're based.

* It is better to hunt for indications of possible disease than to wait until symptoms appear because if it exists, treating it early will result in the best possible outcome, and will save money. CONTROVERSIAL. In the first place, unnecessary testing may in itself do harm; many diagnostic tests are not risk-free. In the second place, screening produces false positives, resulting not only in unnecessary anxiety but sometimes in unneeded treatment that is damaging. Moreover, it often uncovers abnormalities that would never progress to significant disease, and treating them may prove harmful as well as costly; this is something more and more doctors are becoming concerned about. And finally, contrary to common belief "preventative" care does not save money because providing it to the people who would never become seriously ill costs more than treating the minority who do

* It is known what constitutes a healthy diet, and everyone should follow the official guidelines that describe it. FALSE. There is no single kind of diet that is right for everyone; this is why there are so many conflicting claims about diet made by different experts. Not enough is yet known about metabolism and the genetic influences on it to determine what is healthiest for individuals, so the only way to judge is by what works best.

* Although we can't yet cure or effectively treat all illnesses, it is better to do something about them than to do nothing. Whether or not suffering can be relieved—and sometimes even if it's increased by treatment—there is no legitimate reason to forgo treatment entirely. FALSE. This view is characteristic of modern medicine, at least in America; doctors and patients alike consider it axiomatic that "you have to do something." But in fact, there is no good reason to believe this. It's in part a matter of preference; though personally, I'd rather put up with sickness than with hazardous remedies—and for that matter, I'd rather die from a disease than from the "side" effects of well-meant intervention—I'm apparently in the minority. Beyond personal feeling, however, is the likelihood that such intervention, if not of proven reliability, may do more harm than good by thwarting the natural processes of the body. Where we lack sufficient understanding of those processes to develop an effective treatment, we certainly haven't the knowledge interfere with them, except where relief of symptoms is judged to be worth whatever risk may ensue.

* The standard procedures of medicine have a firm basis in science. Most physicians are knowledgeable about the scientific foundations of the treatments they prescribe, and about new scientific developments that are relevant to them. Where controversy exists among doctors, conscientious ones base their opinions on personal evaluation of the existing evidence. FALSE. Most doctors are not trained as scientists. They are trained to follow the accepted practices they're taught in medical school, and later, read about in medical journals. Thus they often assume that there's more evidence for standard tests and treatments than actually exists, when in fact, many of these have never been subjected to controlled clinical trials, and the statistics, if any, that support them fail to isolate all the relevant variables. Further, malpractice standards are set by prevailing views and are specifically biased against dissenting ones; so even the best doctors practice according to what the medical establishment, with its growing bureaucracy, decrees

* The recent trend toward "evidence-based medicine" will eventually assure that all approved treatments are based on scientific evidence and will therefore benefit all patients to whom they are given. FALSE. Evidence is a matter of statistics. A trial can do more than show that one drug or treatment works better than another, or better than a placebo, for a significant number of people. This does not mean it will work for everyone, and there will always be individuals who would be helped more by the alternative against which it was compared. Therefore, some people may be harmed by strict adherence to the evidence. Doctors and patients will always need to exercise personal judgment.

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Every one of the above assumptions is either false or controversial, and in my opinion they are all false. So why is the acceptance of them by the public so widespread? To be sure, they are more or less built into our culture—it's a bit like asking why people in the Middle Ages believed the plague was sent by God. A list of assumptions about health and illness can be composed for any culture, and observers from subsequent cultures are likely to feel they prevailed simply because nobody knew any better. In a sense, this is true.

But the deeper question is, how did these particular assumptions come to be accepted by our own culture? One reason is that medicine did indeed take spectacular steps forward in preventing and curing infectious diseases. Although it was not primarily responsible for increasing life expectancy, and although its victory against infectious disease may prove to be short-lived, it did within a few generations defuse the daily threat posed by such diseases. To the public at large, the distinction between one type of illness and another is not at all clear-cut, so it was natural for people to base expectations for the future on past results. Even now, most people do not grasp the fundamental difference between invasion of the body by external organisms and problems in its internal functioning—for example, they picture cancer cells as invaders, even when they know that cancer, though sometimes engendered by environmental factors, isn't an attack from outside. It does not occur to them that technology might be better suited for use in one situation than in the other.

Medicine also made great strides in the repair of injuries and in surgical technique. Again, the technology was so effective that distinctions in the nature of its application were obscured. An injury results from an external cause. So does an infected appendix—it has been taken over by invading microorganisms. But to the average person, and even to many surgeons, a bad appendix is no different from an organ damaged by cancer or malfunction; if a surgical cure can be effected in one case, why not in the other? Certainly, there are situations in which surgery for conditions of internal origin is lifesaving—I have had such surgery myself, so I'd be the last to dispute its value. And there are others in which repair of parts is entirely appropriate. But, though there may be further advances in this area, their usefulness will have limits.

Extension of hope from cure of externally-caused problems to cure of internally-caused ones is understandable. But there is far more to the public's faith in medicine than that, and It's more than mere wishful thinking. In my essay "The Worship of Medical Authority" I have discussed what underlies it in some detail. It is not likely that widespread attitudes toward healthcare will change in the foreseeable future—those doctors who now see the harm in unnecessary or futile testing and treatment report that it is the patients and their families who demand it.

So what can be done? The most promising approach, I think, is first, for individuals to understand what medical care can and cannot accomplish, and not ask for the impossible; second, to be aware of the risks of tests and treatments—especially newly-developed ones—and ask their doctors to explain them; and finally, think about what their priorities really are. Despite all the controversies connected with healthcare today, there is one major issue that is never raised: Is it true that maximum health is the highest priority for everyone? Or do people simply accept, at least ostensibly, the social consensus that health must be valued above all else?

It's obvious that not all of them act as if it were. People are constantly exhorted to exercise more and eat less appetizing food, and few of those who fail to do it doubt the questionable premise that such lifestyle changes actually reduce the risk of illness—rather, they feel the guilt that society places on them. Yet their real priority is to enjoy their lives while well. There is nothing sinful in that, any more than there is in engaging in dangerous sports or devoting long hours to work against medical advice. It's a matter of personal choice. Why then do so many who have no intention of prioritizing health visit doctors when they're not sick and take "preventative" medication that reduces their quality of life, financially and sometimes physically, thereby driving up the price of care for those who really need it? If we were all honest about our priorities, both the cost and the harm from unnecessary care would be reduced.

In fact, if people stopped worrying about their health and what they are doing, or failing to do, to preserve it, there would be less chance of their getting sick. It is generally recognized that stress is a major cause of illness, yet seldom is this fact taken into account in indoctrination about health issues. The admonishments spread by health promoters seem aimed at scaring the public into compliance while advising the elimination of stress in general, which is at best a self-defeating strategy.

Evaluation of priorities is particularly important for people who do have a chronic disease. This is sometimes considered if they are terminally ill, but It should be addressed much earlier—and not just in cases of serious illness but in those that merely involve long-term risk factors. Doctors take it for granted that everyone wants to live as long as possible, regardless of cost and lowered quality of life; but this is not always the case. Ideally they should ask their patients, but if they don't, patients should take the initiative without feeling they would be thought foolish if their personal priorities are different. Is the goal maximum length of life or maximum quality of life? Does the person truly want to give up pleasures and/or undergo distressing treatments for the sake of living a little while longer? Or does he or she simply assume it's necessary because that's what is expected in our culture?

This differs, of course, depending on individual preference. Encouraging people to forego medical treatment they do not really want is not "rationing" of healthcare; it is common sense. Those who do want all available treatments should have access to them—if that is their priority they should not be urged to change it. For some individuals, however, palliative care is a wiser choice than today's standard care. Contrary to a common misconception, palliative care (comfort care) is not the same as hospice care and it is not just for people who are dying—it can be chosen at any time, and there are doctors who specialize in it, though not enough of them. It simply means having treatment that maximizes quality of life instead of trying to stop the natural course of a disease.

Does age make a difference? It does in regard to people's preferences, but in my opinion it should not affect anyone's right to choose. There have been some high-profile cases of teenagers who did not want chemotherapy but were forced to have it, by which I was appalled. Why should they have been tortured at a cost of thousands when all they wanted was a chance to enjoy the life remaining to them? Meanwhile, tragically, there were people of all ages who did want treatment for illness and could not get it because they couldn't pay for it. Society cannot solve the problem of funding healthcare until it adopts a less distorted view of how the money should be spent.

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In Defense of Natural Death

(2019, 2020)

The first part of this essay, which has been at my website since 2019, is a considerably-expanded version of a portion of my personal Advance Directive for Health Care. The second part expresses my belief that contrary to some people's current expectations, humans are not going to become physically immortal.

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In recent years a good deal has been written about the suffering caused by excessive medical treatment of the dying. There is an increasing number of fine books and articles on this subject, including some by doctors who point out that such treatment frequently amounts to torture. More and more publicity is being given to the necessity of preparing advance directives specifying what treatment an individual wants, or does not want, when near death. Although in some cases physicians take the lead in providing futile and cruel technological interventions, too often it is patients' families who demand them, being unwilling to have it thought that they have not done everything possible to keep their loved one alive at any cost.

Yet despite all this attention to needlessly-prolonged dying, rarely if ever is the root of the problem acknowledged: the refusal of our society to admit that death is no less a natural phenomenon than life, and that to deny this is to reject the very essence of biological existence. The unrealistic view of death prevalent in our culture has widespread effects, which are increasing as medical technology advances and go far beyond the matter of how to treat people who have already reached the end of their lives. A more fundamental issue concerns those merely approaching the end: is the delaying of death by technological means always beneficial?

Society generally says yes. This assumption is a holdover from the centuries when there were no cures for most illnesses and the majority of people died before age 70, many in childhood or youth. Living as long as possible was the aim—and of course it was, and still is, desirable to use all possible means of preventing premature death. Thus death itself was seen as an enemy, and the military terminology surrounding it such as "fighting" an illness and "combating" disease became firmly established. The question of how to define "premature" did not arise.

But today, that question has become a crucial one, although it is seldom asked. On the few occasions when it is considered, there are indignant protests against "ageism" and alleged discrimination against the elderly. Yet everyone must die eventually, and despite the prevailing view of the body as a collection of parts, there is such a thing as death from old age. Perhaps in the future the maximum human lifespan can be extended; for now, however, there are limits to how long even a healthy person will survive. And most of the very old are not healthy. On the contrary, their aging bodies are maintained by one medical intervention after another, usually at the cost of lowering quality of life. That one should endure whatever discomfort is necessary to gain a few more years, or even months, of living is taken for granted. The acceptance of it is considered not merely admirable, but virtuous, as if there were some moral obligation to stay alive in defiance of the inevitable outcome.

To me at the age of 85, this does not make sense. Bodies wear out and at some time, usually in a person's 80s, this normal process results in failures of internal functioning. Personally, I believe that treatment aimed at prolonging life is unwise after this point. There is no real gain from such treatment when it is likely to mean suffering through a succession of serious illnesses rather than a single final one. Furthermore, at least until a cure for dementia is found, the prevention of natural death in old age simply increases the odds of becoming mentally incapacitated. It is not as if postponement could "save lives." Death is not optional. We are all going to die, if not from the first life-threatening illness to develop in extreme old age, then from another; and to put it off is of questionable benefit when quality of life can only decline.

Moreover, many medical procedures—and even some drugs—carry a risk of cognitive impairment over and above the danger of dementia that increases with age. This concern is usually dismissed on the theory that keeping bodies alive is more important than preserving minds. I want no such treatments, since to me the preservation of my mind is of the highest priority and my worst nightmare is of suffering mental decline due to some form of medical intervention. The danger of its natural occurrence is bad enough without adding to it.

Much is now said by economists about the "epidemic" of dementia that has developed with the advent of lengthened lives, which is expected to lead in the next few decades to an unmanageable need for long-term care. There is no solution to this problem in sight. But the worst aspect of it is not the economic impact but the devastating effect on individuals who, having lived fully and achieved much in the past, lose even the memories of everything that has mattered to them. This fate (which eventually befalls an estimated 50% of people over 85) should not be so common, and it would not be, if custom did not demand curative treatment of all preceding illnesses an octogenarian experiences. Dementia sometimes strikes prematurely, but more often it is the result of bodies being kept alive by technology beyond the point where they have become too worn out to maintain normal functioning. Alzheimer's disease is now the 6th-leading cause of death in the U.S. and its rank is rising as the rate of death from heart disease falls. Given a conscious choice, who would not prefer to die naturally of heart disease?

Rarely is the choice conscious, however, for most people do not think ahead. To be sure, the fear of death is instinctive; if it were not, few of the young would choose to live through the periods of pain and despair that come to nearly everyone. Yet with age, that fear generally declines. Very old people are often tired and feel ready to go. Even before that point, they accept aggressive medical intervention not because they are afraid they will die without it, but because in our culture—at least in America—it is viewed as the proper course at all stages of life. Just saying no to treatment is not a socially-approved option; it is viewed as "giving up," as if life were some sort of contest. Limiting health care to the relief of suffering is considered only after the failure of drastic attempts to cure.

Should people nearing the end of their lives seek to die, then? Of course not. Natural death comes when the body—or in my opinion, the subconscious mind—"knows" that it is time to stop resisting the failure of internal functions. Current pronouncements to the contrary, this does not constitute disease; it is normal. Either prolonging the process or hastening it is a violation of one's deepest impulses, a denial of one's inner knowledge. "Let nature take its course" is a maxim that should be interpreted literally. This does not mean rejecting all medical care. Ongoing palliative care (comfort care) is essential except in the rare instances when death is sudden. For the "oldest old" that, not curative care, should be the norm.

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Incredibly, some speculators now doubt the inevitability of death. Many, including a number of scientists, claim that someday people may become physically immortal, a game changer that certainly would transform our outlook on the future of humankind. In my opinion this unrealistic aim is mere wishful thinking on the part of people who are afraid of dying and yet, paradoxically, believe themselves to be no more than biological machines—though the scientists who endorse the idea may be motivated more by an urge to vindicate the materialistic basis of their assumptions than by personal fear.

What, I wonder, do these people think makes them care about living forever? Machines lack the ability to care. The desire for immortality is an ancient theme of mythology, and the very fact that is exists shows that humans are more than mere machines subject to redesign as if they were soulless robots. Even if bodies or brains could be made invulnerable via technological enhancement, the mind would die, for subconsciously it senses when a person has gotten all he or she can out of life. This is true whether or not there is any form of afterlife. We don't know the meaning of life and death, but it is the most fundamental fact of existence and no amount of intelligence or technical skill is going to alter it.

There are people now who are paying large sums to have their bodies or brains frozen and preserved indefinitely after they die in the hope that they can someday be revived and given an endless—or at least extended—lifespan. Such an illusion is on a par with the maintenance of dead bodies in stasis in my science fiction novel Stewards of the Flame, which was intended to be seen as a reductio ad absurdum. It is indeed absurd. Whether it will ever become possible to freeze people, either for future cure of illness or for interstellar travel, I don't know; but if it does, they will have to be frozen while alive. Unlike a machine, a body cannot be "restarted" after it ceases to function. Fortunately in the eyes of most of us, it can't be turned into a zombie—although folklore about zombies lacking volition and memory reflect an intuitive sense of what will happen if it is ever tried.

On the other hand, it may well be possible for normal lifespan to be lengthened. While statistical life expectancy has been steadily increasing, that is a misleading fact because it has been due not to lengthening the lives of the elderly but to decreasing the number of deaths among infants, children and young or middle-aged adults. The life expectancy of a person who reached age 80 was the nearly same hundreds of years ago as it is today. Advances in medical science may add to it, although at age 86, I can attest that this won't be desirable until the disabilities of old age are eliminated, a goal that should be given priority.

I doubt that maximum lifespan will be extended much past 100 through improved health alone, though there are rare cases of people living to 115 or more (and characters in my Flame novels live into their 120s or even to 130). It may become possible to increase it further by means of technology, possibly genetic engineering—but I suspect that there is a point past which this would result in insanity, since the brain's capacity for storing and retrieving memories is not infinite. Personally I believe lifespan will be limited by the length of time the unconscious mind chooses to remain tied to a body. We have no idea how long that is likely to be for the average person, but underlying will to live has always been recognized as a factor in survival.

I think that length of life is overrated as a factor in human happiness. In the past the odds of dying prematurely were large, and of course people wanted to live as long as possible, which they envisioned as somewhere over 80. Probably most octogenarians who are healthy want to live into their 90s, maybe to 100. But how often do we hear of someone over 100 who longs for more time? Aged people frequently feel that they've had full lives and that there is nothing left worth doing. Some view death as rest, while others envision it as moving on; but rarely do they approach it fearfully. It is the younger people who want life extension, and there's no knowing how they would react if they got it. I suspect they would simply die when subconsciously ready to die, and researchers would wonder why the modifications to aging bodies kept failing.

As I've said in my essay "The Roots of Disbelief in Human Mind Powers," we are more than our physical substance. To some people this fact implies that we survive beyond the death of the body, but whether we do or not, the non-physical essence of us can't be accessed, let alone eternally preserved, by technology. We cannot know how or why it comes into existence. All we can be sure of is that life and death are inextricable aspects of being human.

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Humankind's Future in the Cosmos

(2019)

This essay deals with my personal view of our future progress in space.

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I have described my view of the relatively near-term future on Earth in my essay "The Future of Being Human" and several others. Life won't be as different as most current speculation suggests. Artificial intelligence (AI) will alter many aspects of it, but will never take over from humans. We aren't going to become shapeshifters or cyborgs, though we will benefit from genetic and neurotechnological advances where they are useful. No matter how many new technologies are developed, people will have the same underlying wants and needs that they do now. Couples will still fall in love. Their feelings about their families will remain unchanged, as will their sense of what's important to them, however unlike today's their appearance and activities may be.

This will be true, I believe, as far into the future as it is possible to imagine. Human nature isn't going to change. Whatever it is that makes us human—which is at present beyond our understanding—is not subject to transformation by time. But as far as humankind as a whole is concerned, there will be one major step in our evolution that will redefine our status forever. We will become a spacefaring species.

The expansion of our civilization into space is vital if we are to survive indefinitely. There are four major reasons: first, because we are vulnerable to a number of catastrophes, human-caused or natural, as long as we are confined to a single planet. Second, because sooner or later Earth will run of resources, no matter what is done to conserve them; the claim that they can be made sustainable forever is a dangerous illusion. Third, because like all species we have a built-in drive to increase the population, and attempts to frustrate it would lead only to setbacks such as war, pandemics, or mass starvation. And fourth, because throughout human history exploration of new regions has led to renewed creativity and intellectual progress; in time we would decline from boredom if we never moved outward, even if not from the other perils.

In addition to these survival imperatives, we need to become spacefaring because it will bring great benefits to Earth. Initially, the development of space-based solar power will solve the energy crisis; bring about a significant reduction in atmospheric pollution; raise developing nations out of poverty; and provide enough cheap power to desalinate sea water, a process that will be necessary if climate change requires an increase in irrigation, as well as to meet the needs of a growing population. Next, manufacturing in orbit, using raw materials from the moon and asteroids, will result in further reduction of pollution, plus lowered cost of minerals and products imported to Earth. And in the distant future, hunger and poverty will be relieved by enabling population growth on other worlds.

Eventually, settlement of such worlds will reduce the pressures that result from confinement of our species to a single planet with finite space and finite resources. This in turn will lessen conflict and, ultimately, bring an end to war. Once sufficient material resources are available to all nations and a commitment is made to the challenge of establishing large-scale colonies, the reasons for war will disappear, although it will always be necessary to maintain a defense against terrorists and attempted dictatorships. Only expansion beyond Earth can bring this about. If we fail to make the effort then sooner or later, our species will die out.

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The first step in becoming spacefaring was, of course, the 1969 landing on the moon, which at the time was rightly called a major evolutionary milestone. Yet despite its symbolic significance, it proved to be more or less of a false dawn, although we have made important advances in space technology since then and I believe no support for faster progress should have been expected. As to why, fifty years after setting foot on the moon, we have neither returned there nor gone further into space, see the first three essays in my book From This Green Earth (some of which are also available online).

The true turning point in evolution will be the utilization of resources from space, the moon, and eventually the asteroids to benefit Earth, beginning with the construction of solar power satellites. By far the best solution to the energy shortage and pollution on Earth is to beam down solar power collected by satellites in space. This has been proposed since the 1970s but has been stalled by financial and political problems. It is now desperately needed for adaptation to climate change and to provide electricity to developing regions where millions of people are still living without it, as well as to meet the expanding demand for power in the industrialized nations. Hopefully, opposition to the environmental damage associated with current energy sources will finally bring about its implementation. China and Japan, which are already working on it, may lead the way.

The next step will be a large privately-owned space station, and perhaps a permanent base on the moon. This will be a gradual process, but by the end of the twenty-first century it will significantly increase resources, and products derived from them, available on Earth, as well as reducing pollution of the atmosphere. Moreover, working in space will provide experience essential to the eventual establishment of colonies on distant worlds, as well as enable entrepreneurs to earn the money to finance them.

Perhaps even before major orbital activity will come human exploration of the moon and Mars and the establishment of bases there. One or more expeditions—the first one already planned by Elon Musk—will go to Mars before the middle of this century and a small settlement may be established by its end. The speed at which this occurs depends on how soon the problems due to the effect of prolonged zero or low gravity on the human body can be solved. Before many people can go it will be necessary to develop ships with artificial gravity, but even with them, it may not be possible for those who have spent much time on Mars to return to Earth. They may not care; after all, most early settlers of America didn't expect to go back to Europe.

I don't believe there will be a large self-supporting colony on Mars, one that can survive without supplies from Earth, until the twenty-second century, but it will surely be established by then, and will continue to grow. If it proves possible to produce large quantities of lightweight materials such as graphene—which is 100 times stronger than steel and almost transparent—through nanotechnology, numerous domes can be easily constructed by self-replicating robots. (I don't think they'll be human-shaped robots, as other shapes might be more useful; but I find that NASA has already designed one.) In that case, a breathable atmosphere won't be necessary; but on the other hand, it may be feasible to terraform Mars. Many proposals for doing so have been developed, and it would eliminate the need for artificial life support and facilitate agriculture, even if a large population can survive without change to the natural environment. However, terraforming will be a slow process, and by the time it is complete the early settlers may be accustomed to their way of life and have no desire to change it. So whether it's worthwhile may be a question of how much ongoing immigration from Earth is expected.

The other planets in our solar system are not suitable for colonization, although some of their moons are promising and in the late twenty-first or early twenty-second century exploration of them, first by robots and later by humans, will begin. Almost certainly we will mine the asteroids, which are rich in minerals needed on Earth and for construction of facilities in orbit. How soon this happens will depend on the progress of technology, but it will start in this century and could be well underway even before the settlement of Mars.

At some point we will build orbital colonies. It has been believed since the 1970s that large colonies could be constructed in Earth orbit with materials from the moon—little worlds with the living space, including parks containing plants and trees, on the inside surface of huge orbital structures. Many people (and I was among them) thought this should be done soon, before the colonization of Mars. Since then it has been realized that it's too big a project to be accomplished easily, and it is not a high priority because there is no short-term financial incentive. With the AI that will be available to process extraterrestrial resources, there will be no need for many people to work in orbit. But in the far future when more room is needed for population growth, orbital colonies will be essential. Living conditions in them will be much better than in crowded cities on Earth, and eventually they may make it possible to abandon large cities and restore much of Earth's natural beauty.

Before that happens we may aim for the stars with interstellar probes and perhaps primitive starships. As soon as a means of propulsion is found that can reach the nearest star within a century or less, robots will be sent and explorers may follow, even if it means they must travel in frozen sleep or raise new generations before they reach the destination. But because it will take up to another century for messages sent back from them to reach Earth, this won't be done on a large scale. It's unlikely that we'll attempt to colonize exoplanets until we have faster-than-light (FTL) starships. To relieve population pressure it will be easier to construct orbital colonies or even a Dyson sphere surrounding our sun. Nevertheless, the search for a means of FTL travel will continue.

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According to what is known of physics today, FTL travel is absolutely impossible even in theory. I believe a breakthrough will come, but there's no way of predicting how soon; it could be in the twenty-second century or it could be much later. It will necessarily involve some form of what science fiction refers to as a space warp or wormhole, though those are merely metaphors for principles that are not understood at present. I feel sure that eventually there will some means of traveling between the stars in a reasonable length of time so that our civilization, and not just humans in the biological sense, can spread throughout our galaxy and perhaps throughout the universe.

Sooner or later we will have settlements on planets of many stars. Eventually Earth may become a backwater world, honored as our ancestral home but no longer central in human affairs. The human population will be spread among its colonies, which I envision as self-governing and perhaps quite different from each other, with free trade carried on between them. There may be some kind of overall organization; I hope it won't be an overbearing bureaucracy but that is all too likely, at least until humans outgrow the impulse to control each other, if rapid communication across interstellar distances becomes possible.

Most people won't have opportunity for interstellar travel, which will surely be expensive; if communication technology proves slow, they may not even be aware of planets other than their own. But they will all be human. I don't think they will evolve into separate species as is sometimes suggested. They will adapt to new environments by means of technology, as humans have always done, not by natural genetic change of a kind that would prevent interbreeding—the latter would require centuries, and technology will surely progress much more quickly even if not adequate to begin with.

Whether technology is used to enable humans to live in new environments or to change environments to meet the needs of humans remains to be seen. Either way, pioneering on exoplanets won't be like the traditional image of farmers taming a fertile new land. The world or the people, or both, will have to be modified. We don't know how hard it would be to terraform an alien planet, but it would certainly take too long for settlers to survive during the process without equipment such as breathing masks. We do know that to change humans drastically by genetic engineering would require either that parents raise children very different from themselves, or that embryos be created in laboratories and raised in crèches of some kind; and I suspect that people would not accept either of those alternatives. The family is basic to human life. Without families and homes a settlement could not thrive.

Colonists will probably adopt a combination of strategies—terraforming slowly where feasible, but in the meantime becoming so used to necessary technological aids that they seem natural. Insofar as neurotechnological devices such as implants are helpful, they will be used. Relatively minor genetic changes may be made, but not to the extent of affecting sexual attractiveness. People will adapt to such conditions as low gravity or high temperatures simply putting up with them; children born under such conditions may have some physical characteristics unlike their parents but will not be fundamentally different. Humanity lies in inner feelings, not outward appearance.

If terraforming of a planet proves essential, small settlements of experts to oversee it will precede large-scale colonization. It is often said that the initial population of a colony must be large to avoid genetic damage from inbreeding. This idea arose before anything was known about genetic engineering. Inbreeding in itself is not detrimental; for it to be harmful, genes causing damage to offspring must be inherited from both parents, which inbreeding makes more likely. Surely by the time we can reach worlds of other stars, we will know how to detect and eliminate mutations through germline modification. We may need to do this in cases of radiation exposure, too, although perhaps long-distance space travelers who want future children will bank eggs and sperm routinely.

It has been seriously suggested that since robots will be better able than humans to make centuries-long voyages and to adapt to alien environments, we may leave interstellar colonization to them and never go ourselves. I cannot imagine anything more pointless. Certainly we will send robot probes to investigate other planets just as we have sent primitive ones to Mars, and self-replicating robots (not human-shaped, but in various forms suited to their tasks) will do the heavy work of building colonies. But that will be only a preliminary to human settlement. A colony, as distinguished from a research station, would be useful only as a place for people to live. If it weren't going to be inhabited by humans, there would be no reason to establish it. The purpose of colonizing other worlds is to ensure the survival of our species. What good could it do to populate the galaxy with robots?

An even crazier version of this scenario envisioned by some is that eventually robots themselves will take the initiative and colonize the entire galaxy, or even other galaxies. Furthermore, these people see it as a desirable goal, the takeover of the universe by superior intelligence we have created. (It's a potentially genocidal aim, since it makes no allowance for any unknown primitive civilizations that may be developing.) As senseless as this seems to me, I must admit that it is a logical conclusion to draw from the premise that mind consists solely of "intelligence"—and it is thus a reductio ad absurdum with respect to that premise. For more about its fallacy, see my essay "The Roots of Disbelief in Human Mind Powers."

This false premise also leads to another suggestion made by several distinguished scientists, the notion that robots might prepare distant worlds for light-speed transmission of coded information describing individuals' bodies and then reassemble those individuals, complete with their memories, at the destination. I suppose, since people are used to the transporter in Star Trek, the idea of converting humans to energy patterns does not seem too outlandish, and at least one noted theoretical physicist has predicted that the technology will be invented within 100 years. But while transmission of matter may be achieved, human minds are not wholly material. For the same reason that the commonly-envisioned uploading of people to computers will never happen, electronic transportation of them is inherently impossible; even if they arrived in human form they would be mindless zombies. The idea is simply another consequence of the materialistic assumptions that limit today's science to a narrowly-defined segment of reality.

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What about contact with extraterrestrial civilizations? According to those who believe robots will colonize the entire cosmos, the fact that they haven't already done so means that there are no civilizations more advanced than ours. I'm more inclined to believe that it means advanced aliens haven't produced such robots because it's not possible. Nevertheless, there is a long tradition of believing that the failure of aliens to show up means there aren't any. Some space enthusiasts want to believe it because they fear that existing aliens not having come here might mean FTL travel isn't possible. Others believe it because they are convinced that it's our destiny to seed the universe with life, which in my opinion is a revival of the ancient hubristic idea that Earth occupies its center in terms of importance. SETI enthusiasts are beginning to believe it because we haven't received any radio messages. The absence of aliens is known as the Fermi Paradox because physicist Erico Fermi long ago expressed surprise that no evidence of their existence has appeared. Personally I have never been able to see anything in the least paradoxical about it. Many plausible reasons why they haven't contacted us have been suggested, but I think the most likely one is that they have chosen not to do so.

I don't believe such contact is going to happen—via SETI radio communication or in any other way—in this century, and maybe not for many centuries. As stated in my novels, I believe truly advanced "human" species do not reveal themselves to less advanced ones because they do not want to interfere with their evolution. A speculation similar to this is generally known as the "zoo hypothesis," but that is not the same thing. When we observe animals in zoos, we do not expect them to someday become our equals. We do not expect them to progress while we are watching; on the contrary, we take it for granted that their capabilities will remain the same generation after generation. Planetary civilizations, on the other hand, advance. And it seems to me that ETs significantly ahead of us would want us to reach our full potential before joining them, not only for altruistic reasons but because they would value the contributions that diverse civilized species would make to the supercivilization of which they are members—not to mention that they'd realize what trouble admitting an immature species into that confederation might cause.

Some readers of my novels have felt that the advanced civilization I portrayed was rather arbitrary in decreeing that the younger species were not their equals, and certainly I have maintained, in both fiction and nonfiction, that people of cultures at all stages are equally human. I extend that principle to people of extraterrestrial species also. But it isn't a matter of innate qualities, for culture has a bearing on the development of minds. The science of epigenetics is discovering that this is true even on the physical level; DNA is not the sole determinant of a person's brain. Thus cavemen who didn't yet have tools or a spoken language were certainly not our equals; if there were a time machine, we couldn't bring a caveman into our time and expect him to hold his own, even if he was educated. And if we were to hear from an extraterrestrial civilization that has existed for many millennia longer than ours, I don't think we would expect to be the equals of its members. We'd expect them to be advanced in ways we can't even imagine.

This natural assumption is obscured in my novels because I have to make the characters enough like us for readers to identify with. I chose to make them physically similar not only for plot purposes but as a literary device to suggest the universality of values and feelings among thinking beings throughout the universe. But of course if they exist, they are not so much like us either physically or culturally. And if there is such a thing as progress—which I maintain that there is (in contrast to official scientific theory, which defines evolution simply as "change" without any "forward" movement)—then they have developed abilities far beyond ours. I do not think we could hold our own if in contact with their worlds.

I could hardly depict advancement in ways we can't imagine in my stories, so I tried to symbolize this with the controlled psychic powers. Unless the reader stops to think a lot about it, the implication of those powers being common everyday abilities in an advanced civilization may not be apparent—but of course, if people were not hiding them as my characters do on younger worlds, it would be a very different kind of society than has ever existed at any time in human history. Could people of our time get along just fine among beings who habitually communicate telepathically and move things around with psychokinesis, and do other psychic things that we cannot not do? It would be as if a caveman who couldn't learn to speak tried to function among modern Americans. What's more, the vast majority of human beings as we know them not only are incapable of using controlled psychic powers, but would be all too likely to do harm with them, unintentionally or otherwise; a culture based on them with members no different from ourselves is inconceivable. It goes without saying that I don't know just how a species gets from "here" to "there," to the stage where the widespread use of these powers is both possible and practical—but I believe it happens. And in the terms of my fiction (which should not be taken as a literal definition of species maturity) this is the turning point. A species is accepted into a supercivilization, if one exists, when it has reached the stage where psychic abilities are commonly and safely used by its normal members, who can therefore mingle freely with others without posing a threat to anyone or finding themselves at a disadvantage. It is not a matter of subjective judgment.

This is only an example, of course, We do not know what the actual turning point is, but it may be something beyond our present ability to envision. Surely development of starships is a prerequisite, as without it we are far behind species who can travel between the stars.

Might we not come into contact with species at our own level or younger, who have not yet decided to conceal themselves? The chances of that are extremely small, considering the vast number of stars in the universe and the vast distances between them. SETI listens for signs of supercivilizations, not isolated ones that can just barely transmit signals and which only by incredible coincidence could be close enough to detect. And when we begin to explore, it will be only by luck that we find even one suitable planet within range, let alone an inhabited one.

It may be wondered why, since we are able to find exoplanets by detecting their effect on observation of stars, we won't eventually detect the presence of a supercivilization's home worlds. This issue was raised by my editor way back in 1969 before Enchantress from the Stars was published, before we had found any exoplanets at all. I have always assumed that supercivilizations are able to shield their worlds from detection. We don't know of any technology that could accomplish that, but it's no more unlikely than a great many other things we don't know. It might be a useful technology even apart from altruistic aims if a world feared aliens might be hostile.

I don't believe there is any need to worry about hostile aliens as some scientists have begun to do, despite the well-established precedent set by science fiction. I have discussed this issue in my essay "Why There Will Never Be an Interplanetary War" (in my book From This Green Earth). In the first place, a starfaring species would have no reason to attack, as the universe is full of planets and resources that any species with the ability to cross interstellar space could obtain more easily than by invading an inhabited world. And in the second place, such species must have advanced far beyond aggressiveness, which I view not as innate but as a stage of immaturity. The invaders in Enchantress from the Stars are an anachronism included because the book is intentionally based on both traditional and recent mythology.

So I don't expect us to meet extraterrestrials, hostile or otherwise, in the foreseeable future. If there are any supercivilizations they will conceal their existence even if they are observing Earth, which it's possible that they may already be doing in ways we cannot detect. Surely in the future they will observe our colonization of exoplanets, which may occupy our full attention for centuries.

There will come a time, however, when settling new worlds is not enough. Humans require challenge in order to thrive, and in time colonization will no longer be sufficiently challenging. I believe the next step in evolution will be the acquisition by large numbers of people of the ability to use psi consciously, which will mean radical change on both the individual and the social level. But even that will not permanently satisfy the need to progress into the unknown. And without progress, humankind will inevitably decline.

I see only one way forward: contact with advanced extraterrestrials, when we are at last ready to meet them as equals. We will then confront, as the hero of my novel Herald of the Flame says, "a universe larger than the one we've been living in, a universe full of alien worlds with their own people, their own civilizations, a multitude of worlds that will take centuries to learn about and explore. A challenge that will last virtually forever. . . . Worlds and peoples different from those we know must exist, for if they don't, there is nowhere to go from here—no hope to inspire future generations. Someday . . . humankind must encounter a new universe to explore, or civilization can only slide further downhill."

This will be the true Singularity, the point past which we can make no predictions about how humanity will change. Both literally and figuratively we will enter territory that is now beyond our comprehension. It may be that no such future will come to pass, but we are better off believing that it will than supposing that we're indistinguishable from robots.

Some may wonder why, since I've never conformed to the usual conventions of the science fiction genre, I chose to write only novels about the future. It was partly that the idea of a universe filled with countless inhabited worlds has always fascinated me, but mainly because I believe that how people in our era think about the future is important. Above all, I want readers to look toward it with hope, in the belief that however difficult our problems, and however slowly our species evolves, humankind will continue to move forward. Our world is one small part of a vast, wonder-filled universe that we will sooner or later encounter. People need to think of it in that light.

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Does It Matter Whether Humankind Survives?

(2020)

Most people would say that of course it matters. But there are others who don't think so. Is there any good reason to doubt it?

*

The strongest argument for space colonization is that it is necessary for the long-term survival of humankind. It has always seemed to me that the importance of our survival is obvious, and that the only possible way to contest the need for expanding our civilization into space is to claim that it is not necessary—that our species can survive forever on the one small planet with dwindling resources where we evolved. Since I don't believe that this is possible, or that it would result in a happy world if even if it were, it is hard for me to see why not everyone agrees that we must eventually settle other worlds.

Yet as I mentioned in my essay "Space Colonization, Faith, and Pascal's Wager," I have found that there are people who aren't bothered by the prospect of human extinction, and if they're not, no argument can convince them that it is to be avoided. It was surprising to me to learn this, and I first assumed that if the idea of our species becoming extinct didn't bother them, they just hadn't thought about it. However, discussing that essay online, one person declared that when as a child he heard about the extinction of the dinosaurs he thought that someday humankind too would be extinct and that this seemed entirely natural to him, and still did.

I can see that a child might react that way, but I'm wondering whether this man had children or grandchildren of his own, and if so whether he cared about their survival. In the essay I put it this way: "One might ask what difference the time frame makes to people as long as the human race isn't wiped out while they're alive. If it's okay for us to become extinct, why not a mere hundred years from now? Most people, even those who don't care what happens in the distant future, feel strongly that it would be a bad thing for humankind not to outlast their grandchildren. Yet either the fate of our descendants matters, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, why not let our planet's environment deteriorate and save ourselves the trouble of trying to preserve it?"

That strikes me as a crucial question. A great many people, even those who don't worry about the long term, care very deeply about preserving the environment for the benefit of future generations. Where would they draw the line? To which future generation do they feel it would no longer matter, barring the idea that everyone might have migrated elsewhere? To the parents of which generation would it be unimportant for their children to survive?

There has, of course, been a great deal of apocalyptic science fiction about the human race being virtually wiped out by one disaster or another, as well as endless debate by futurists as to the likelihood of such scenarios. But this is hardly ever presented as a good thing or even a neutral one, There are usually at least a few survivors who make plans for the future, and in the few cases where there are not, such as in Nevil Shute's novel On the Beach, it is viewed as a tragedy.

Almost everyone has a deep, instinctive feeling that our species will continue to exist when we ourselves are gone—and that however great the problems of our time, there will be some sort of future for those who come after us. In evolutionary terms, this is an adaptive trait. Without the urge for species survival no progress would ever have been made; our ancestors would not have bothered to achieve anything with a lasting impact on their offspring. Is it merely a biological urge that we have outgrown? If so, more than the desire to preserve Earth's environment is involved—unless long-term survival is a meaningful goal, there is no need to avoid nuclear war, either. Why not blow up the planet right now and be done with it?

This, of course, is a reductio ad absurdum. When it comes right down to it, no one (except doomsday cults and a few misanthropic fanatics who assert that the survival of animal species is more important than our own) would say it would be all right for humankind to die in the foreseeable future. And there is no logic in the idea that this feeling is going to change with the passage of years. People will always look ahead to what may happen to their own grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

To be sure, we do not know what cosmic meaning there is to an intelligent species' survival. But we don't know the meaning of our personal survival, either. Why should anybody be alive in the first place? We can't answer that. To some people, the meaning lies in the metaphorical concept of creation by God. To others, it's merely a matter of biological accident. And for still others, there is simply a conviction that there is a meaning beyond our present comprehension, that if there were no meaning to life it would be impossible to endure our existence. All these views apply to our species as well as to individuals—we cannot say that humankind needn't survive without implying that we ourselves might just as well be dead.

There is, in fact, a philosophy with roots in antiquity—now known as antinatalism—that asserts it would be better not to have been born and that procreation is therefore unethical. Since life involves suffering, why create more people who will suffer? This nihilistic view is one response to our inability to see the meaning in life (and/or the meaning in suffering), but to me it seems a typical case of denying the existence of something because one can't bear the uncertainty of not being able to grasp it. As I have pointed out in other contexts, comparatively few people are willing to accept permanent uncertainty about any topic.

The definition of "humankind" may vary. Some transhumanists believe that we will be so changed in the future that we can't be considered the same species. I see no sense in this; we may not be the same as today if physical changes are desired by the majority, but a difference so great as to rule out interbreeding seems unlikely, to say the least. (See my essay "The Future of Being Human.") In any case, it is merely a technicality; "posthumans" count as humankind as far as the desirability of long-term survival is concerned.

However, another argument for questioning the significance of our species' survival is now sometimes expressed. There are quite a few futurists, including well-known scientists, who believe that robots may totally replace humans, and while many count this among potential disasters, others think it would be acceptable or even desirable. It is not just a matter of robots replacing most human workers, which will surely happen. Both doomsayers and advocates maintain that robots will become so superior to humans that they will be our successors after the human race is gone—an idea expressed in science fiction as far back as the nineteenth century. Perhaps they will even be morally superior, considering the evils perpetrated by humans in the past.

In the eyes of those who favor the demise of humanity in favor of robots, human distinctiveness is nothing more than our particular biological form. "From this point of view," writes Charles T Rubin in an article in The New Atlantis, "it becomes difficult to justify any grave concern if the workings of evolution do to us what they have done to so many other species; it becomes rank 'speciesism' to think that we deserve anything different. Yet the extinctionists are not content to show why, like everything else, human beings will be replaced or why the world might be better off without us. They aim to show why human beings should be replaced. If we are troubled by limits and imperfection, decay and death, we can imagine a world where intelligence has power enough to create something better."

The flaw in this idea, of course, is the notion that the human mind is nothing more than a brain and could thus exist in a machine. It is mere prejudice, advocates say, that makes us prefer flesh to silicon. But our material substance is not the thing at issue. If that were the only difference between humans and machines, our survival would indeed not matter, any more than it matters when other machines are destroyed. But human minds have attributes that machines do not, however intelligent those machines may become. We cannot yet define this essence in scientific terms, but we know it exists—it is what enables us to wonder, to create, and to love. (Not to mention being the source of psi capabilities, which any honest examination of human attributes must take into account.) It is this, not mere intelligence or even life as distinguished from inanimate matter, that makes survival of humankind important.

There remains, however, one possible reason why the extinction of humankind might be said not to matter. What if species with equivalent minds exist on exoplanets? It's probable that they do, and unlikely that ours is the most advanced; some may already have died out due to disasters. Does the survival of any particular one make any difference to the universe as a whole?

Again, that's a question we cannot answer, as it depends on the unknowable meaning of existence. In science fiction it is common to ignore it and depict interstellar wars where the goal is to wipe out the aggressors, something I don't believe ever occur. (See my essay "Why There Will Never Be an Interplanetary War" in From This Green Earth.) In my own fiction I have assumed that each and every "human" race is considered important by the supercivilization that studies young ones and that the possible extinction of one is viewed a tragedy to be prevented at all costs. And this is consistent with the way we view individual lives—except where risk to life serves a purpose, we make every effort to save anyone who is endangered, even if that person is not contributing much to society. To apply different standards to whole species would not make sense.

So I personally have no doubt that the survival of humankind does matter, at least for as long as it's conceivably possible. According to Wikipedia, "Human extinction (together with extinction of all life) in the future by wholly natural causes is a certainty. The sun will eventually expand and engulf planet earth in roughly 7.5 billion years, and conditions to support life are estimated to last for [only] 1.5 billion years. Even if humanity would have achieved a technological level which would allow it to migrate to other planets when this happens, the universe will also invariably come to an end." I think we need not worry about this. If humankind hasn't colonized other solar systems long before 1.5 billion years have passed, it will surely have been destroyed by some event less drastic than expansion of the sun—or by resource depletion, which will happen much sooner. But supposing that we do spread throughout the galaxy—and maybe beyond—it will be enough to survive as long as the universe does.

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Why I Don't Read Much Science Fiction

(2020)

Despite my interest n the future I have never been an avid science fiction fan, and it's hard for me to find SF novels that I enjoy. Here are some of the things that turn me away.

*

Strange as it may seem, although I have written ten science fiction novels I'm not a science fiction fan in the sense that term is generally used. I actually haven't read much science fiction, certainly not recently. And the reason I haven't is that my tastes don't match those of most people in the field. This is also why my own novels have never been acceptable to mass-market science fiction publishers—I write the kind of book I like to read, as most authors do, and I don't like to read the same kind of story as the majority of fans.

One reason is that I'm not really interested in action scenes such as space battles, nor do I care about the technical details of future science. Another that I don't enjoy the kind of science fiction that aims to get as far from real life as possible just for the sake of difference. I prefer stories focused on the concerns and feelings of human beings—and on what we may have in common with beings of other worlds—rather than wild imagnings about alien species wholly unlike anything we know. The biggest problem I have in finding science fiction I like, however, is that so much of it is based on themes that conflict with my conception of the universe.

I can put up with a lot that would cause some people to turn away from a novel. I don't mind if the science isn't accurate—for example, starships that defy the laws of physics as we know them, or details of technology wrong where only a reader knowledgeable about the subject would notice. It's okay if the characters speak and act like people of today; though we know our culture will change; we don't know how it will change, so it can't be portrayed realistically in any case. Small anachronisms sometimes do jar me, but I can overlook them if the main theme of the book is valid. And though I dislike graphic violence, explicit sex, and foul language, I can tolerate them where they are germane to the story rather than gratuitous.

But there are some things that rule out a book if I'm choosing something to read for entertainment—themes that are so far removed from my underlying beliefs about the human condition that they destroy any pleasure I might take in the story. Unfortunately, they are very common themes, which leaves me with little to read.

Before listing these themes, I should make plain that I'm not talking about literary quality here. There are novels of high quality based on many of them, and I'm not saying these don't have value. It does disturb me when an author uses such themes merely to sell books rather than from honest conviction, but whether that has been done in a particular book is not for me to judge. I'm simply explaining that for recreational reading I choose books I hope to enjoy, and I don't enjoy fiction that conflicts with my beliefs about the nature of humans and our relation to the universe. That said, here are the theme I avoid.

1. War with aliens. This projection of the past into the future is wholly anachronistic. Any aliens technologically advanced enough to undertake an interstellar war or invasion will have matured far beyond the stage of wanting to do so, just as we ourselves will have. Though there might be individual power-seekers among them, they'd be unable to attract a following. And aliens with starships will have no need to fight over resources, as in space there are plenty to go around. For more detail about my thoughts on this, see my essay "Why There Will Never Be an Interstellar War" in From This Green Earth: Essays on Looking Outward.

2. Aliens who play God. I can't give a definitive reason why I don't believe advanced aliens take it upon themselves to teach or admonish less highly evolved ones, since after all, we don't really know anything about the psychology of aliens. But this has been one of my core beliefs since as far back as I can remember, as readers of my novels know. I wouldn't go so far as to reject films like 2001, which had enough more in it that I liked to compensate. I found 2010 harder to swallow. And I disliked episodes of Star Trek in which the nominal non-interfere policy seemed to exist only so that Captain Kirk could violate it. (Incidentally, the idea that aliens haven't arrived on Earth because of such a policy on their part is now sometimes called the Star Trek hypothesis and I am sometimes assumed to have derived it from Star Trek, which irritates me since I developed that policy in an early draft of Enchantress from the Stars back in 1957.)

3. Aliens with grotesque shapes that couldn't possibly give them the capabilities they are presumed to have. Of course aliens aren't just like us. Personally I prefer to think of them as more less human in form because we don't know what they actually look like and if they're going to be portrayed unrealistically it might as well be in a way that makes it easy for readers to identify with the characters. But I can accept other conceptions of them as long as their anatomy matches their actions. If it doesn't, the story is just as fantastic as children's stories about talking animals.

4. Humans viewed as inherently inferior to aliens (as distinguished from less advanced) or as a danger to the galaxy that should be eliminated. This applies both ways—no aliens are inherently inferior either, nor are some innately more aggressive than others. There aren't any inferior races of intelligent beings, only immature ones. Hopefully the very concept of racism will die out in our culture long before it could affect interstellar relationships, but I don't think it's good to perpetuate it by applying it either to aliens or to ourselves as a species.

5. Humans trying to take over inhabited alien worlds. A story in which specific villains do so is okay, as long as it isn't implied that it's endorsed by Earth's authorities or that it's "human nature" to steal territory from others. Again, this is an anachronistic idea. The fact that it happened on Earth in past centuries does not mean that it could happen as far in the future as when we have starships—no authority on Earth would condone it even now. (Yes, a starfaring race does it in my own novel Enchantress from the Stars, but that is intentionally based on 20th-century mythology about space explorers, just as the portion of the book dealing with dragon-slaying is based on medieval mythology; it's not meant to be a realistic view of the future.) Human evolution involves progress on all fronts. We don't behave like our remote ancestors and our descendants won't be behave as we did in the relatively recent past.

6. Conscious AI. This theme appears more and more often and I cringe when I encounter it, as it's the antithesis of everything I believe about the nature of human (or alien) beings. There seems to be a strong psychological tendency for people to personify inanimate things, which I have never shared. Now people even personify computers. I love computers and couldn't live without mine, but I turned Cortana off the day I got it. Even a semblance of conscious AI depends on the supposition that minds are nothing more than physical brains—the fundamental tenet of materialism. See my essays "Robots Will Never Replace Humans" and "The Roots of Disbelief in Human Mind Powers."

7. Human consciousness uploaded to computers or, even more impossibly, electronically transmitted to other worlds. This notion reduces minds to mere software. It would be laughable if it were not that some scientists take it seriously. The transporter popularized by Star Trek was imagined so that the producers wouldn't have to spend money on sets showing landers, which was a reasonable excuse for the acceptance of such a concept. I can think of no other.

8. Cyborgs shown as normal and/or as superior to humans, Neurotechnology is a good thing when it restores normal functioning to disabled people, but I find the idea of altering our bodies' natural design dehumanizing and even dangerous. Just as the science of genomics is discovering that individual differences are far more complex and less easily modified than we thought, future science may learn that there are good reasons why evolution made us the way we are.

9. Physical (or electronic) immortality. If such a thing were possible, it would invalidate everything we know about life and about evolution. This is a matter not of technology, but of basic concepts of what it means to be alive. Change, not stasis, underlies all aspects of nature. See my essay "In Defense of Natural Death."

10. Psi powers viewed as unique to a particular alien species, or as a freak mutation. If such powers exist, as I believe they do in both humans and animals, then they are latent in all sentient beings. Some individuals are more talented than others in using them, but they aren't just a chance genetic characteristic like skin color. They are a fundamental aspect of the interface between the material and nonmaterial. The degree of their development varies; in my opinion, conscious control of them increases as evolution progresses.

11. Advanced aliens who have intentionally abandoned technology. Considering the technological developments I've listed as unacceptable to me, it might be thought that I'm opposed to high technology in general. I'm not. Technology and mind powers are equally essential to the advancement and survival of any alien species, as they are to ours. A species that abandoned a significant portion of its technology would not only stop evolving but would lose the accumulated knowledge that enabled it to advance, and sooner or later it would die out. A story about the process of abandoning it, or the loss of it through some disaster, would be a tragedy; and I'm rarely in the mood for tragedy.

12. Advanced aliens who don't have space travel. If advanced means more advanced than we are right now, this in an impossibility. No technologically-progressive species can survive indefinitely confined to a single planet. If it tried to, it would either die out relatively quickly or, if it managed through totalitarian government to control its population and use of resources, it would eventually explode into violence and destroy itself along with its environment. In neither scenario could it be considered "advanced" very long.

13. An implication that humankind is sinful because the environment on Earth is changing. In the first place, I believe more changes are due to other natural processes than is generally recognized; we are not as powerful as we think. But where human activity does contribute to environmental change, it's because we do what is natural for our species to do: from prehistoric times onward, we have survived by altering our environment though technology. That is what caused us to become an exceptionally successful species in evolutionary terms, and in no sense are we blameworthy. All environments change. When ours changes for the worse it's a sign not that we are at fault for acting naturally, but that we have outgrown it and, like other species in that situation, we need to expand to a new ecological niche—in our case, space. Species that fail to adapt to changing environments or expand to new ones die out; that is a basic principle of evolution, and I believe it applies to alien worlds as well as our own.

14. A pessimistic or misanthropic view of humankind's long-term future. I don't like doomsaying and I don't think it's realistic, Barring some apocalyptic disaster, I believe we will continue to evolve and progress. The only disaster stories I like are those that focus on the indestructible quality of the human spirit and the conviction that we will recover from whatever losses we may experience.

15. Unlikeable or deeply flawed protagonists. I can't enjoy a novel unless the main protagonist is basically admirable. He or she will have faults, of course, and will make mistakes; but on the whole it must be someone I might like to know, and with whose feelings I can identify. Most people, and presumably most aliens, are fundamentally good. They do the best they can in the circumstances in which they are placed. To suggest otherwise by featuring exceptions distorts readers' view of the future.

Obviously, if I don't enjoy fiction with any of the above themes my "to be read" list is rather short. Normally I read mostly nonfiction. But if anyone has suggetions for novels I might like, I welcome them.

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About the Author

Sylvia Engdahl is the author of ten science fiction novels. Six of them are Young Adult books that are also enjoyed by adults, all of which were originally published by Atheneum and have been republished, in both hardcover and paperback, by different publishers in the twenty-first century. The one for which she is best known, Enchantress from the Stars, was a Newbery Honor book in 1971, winner of the 1990 Phoenix Award of the Children's Literature Association, and a finalist for the 2002 Book Sense Book of the Year in the Rediscovery category. The omnibus edition of her trilogy Children of the Star was issued as adult science fiction.

Her four most recent novels, the Hidden Flame duology and the Rising Flame duology, are not YA books and are not appropriate for middle-school readers, but will be enjoyed by the many adult fans of her work. In addition, she has issued an updated and expanded edition of her nonfiction book The Planet-Girded Suns: The Long History of Belief in Exoplanets (first published by Atheneum in 1974 with a different subtitle) as well as several ebooks of her essays.

Between 1957 and 1967 Engdahl was a computer programmer and Computer Systems Specialist for the SAGE Air Defense System. From her home in Eugene, Oregon, she has recently worked as a freelance editor of nonfiction anthologies for high schools. Now retired, she welcomes visitors to her website www.sylviaengdahl.com, which contains many of her essays and other commentary.

CURRENTLY AVAILABLE EDITIONS OF SYLVIA ENGDAHL'S BOOKS

Click on the title to see the book description, reviews, and purchase links. All are available in inexpensive ebook editions. Starred titles have no paperback editions.

YOUNG ADULT NOVELS

Enchantress from the Stars

Journey Between Worlds

The Far Side of Evil

CHILDREN OF THE STAR TRILOGY

(YA, reissued as adult)

This Star Shall Abide (Book 1)

Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains (Book 2) *

The Doors of the Universe (Book 3) *

Children of the Star (Omnibus)

HIDDEN FLAME DUOLOGY

Stewards of the Flame (Book 1)

Promise of the Flame (Book 2)

The Hidden Flame (Omnibus)

RISING FLAME DUOLOGY

Defender of the Flame (Book 1)

Herald of the Flame (Book 2)

The Rising Flame (Omnibus)

YA ANTHOLOGY (editor)

Anywhere, Anywhen: Stories of Tomorrow *

NONFICTION

The Planet-Girded Suns: The Long History of Belief in Exoplanets

Reflections on Enchantress from the Stars and Other Essays (Collected Essays Vol. 1) *

From This Green Earth: Essays on Looking Outward (Collected Essays Vol. 2) *

The Future of Being Human and Other Essays (Collected Essays Vol. 3) *

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Excerpt from From This Green Earth: Essays on Looking Outward

Breaking Out from Earth's Shell

(2019)

Long ago people literally believed that an invisible, transparent shell surrounded Earth to hold up the stars. After that theory was discarded, the shell remained in a figurative sense, for Earth was thought to be forever isolated from the rest of the universe. Some people are comforted even today by this illusion, although it's time for humankind to break free.

*

Since the dawn of history humans have been drawn to the idea of reaching the heavens. Most cultures' gods were presumed to dwell there. The stars have always symbolized mankind's highest aspirations. They were, however, viewed as inaccessible, except perhaps by souls after death.

According to the worldview universally accepted in Europe prior to the seventeenth century, the realm of the fixed stars (as distinguished from planets) was literally perfect and unchanging. The stars were thought to be embedded in an invisible sphere—a shell—that encircled Earth, for if they were not attached to something, would they not fall? Contrary to a common misconception, the theory that Earth is not the center of the solar system was not resisted because of any sense of demotion from the place of prime importance, or even because of conflict with the Bible—actually, it would not have aroused much opposition if the authorities of the time had not realized, more than fifty years after its publication, that it opened the door to questioning the nature of the stars. Copernicus himself never doubted the accepted theory; to him, they were still firmly attached to a crystal sphere surrounding the sun.

However, near the end of the sixteenth century the philosopher Giordano Bruno, a strong advocate of the Copernican theory, suggested for the first time that the stars are not mere lights in the sky, but suns with planets of their own. Although that was not his only heresy, many scholars believe it was the primary reason why he was burned at the stake, and why, after his books were banned, supporters of his astronomical ideas called themselves Copernicans instead of mentioning his name. Rearrangement of the solar system was a relatively minor issue compared to the upheaval in both science and religion caused by denial of the stars' perfection.

To people who had believed themselves safely enclosed within a perfect sphere, beyond which lay Heaven, the idea of a universe full of suns at random distance from Earth was extremely upsetting. As John Donne put it in these famous lines from his poem "An Anatomy of the World" (1611), it removed all coherence from their worldview.

And new philosophy calls all in doubt,

The element of fire is quite put out,

The sun is lost, and th'earth, and no man's wit

Can well direct him where to look for it.

And freely men confess that this world's spent,

When in the planets and the firmament

They seek so many new; they see that this

Is crumbled out again to his atomies.

'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,

All just supply, and all relation.

This was not a foolish or naive reaction. Human thought is dependent on a stable foundation on which to rely. Psychologically, people are cast adrift if their basic premises are questioned, and this is an adaptive trait since without anchors it would be impossible for a society to function. Change must come gradually, through the exceptional few who are able to discard the outlook of their contemporaries. Once they do, a new outlook spreads—but that takes time.

Over time, people became reconciled to the loss of an immutable order in the universe, and by the late seventeenth century those with enough education to care about astronomy envisioned countless suns, all surrounded by planets which, like those of our own solar system, were assumed to be inhabited. Some thought they were the homes of angels or the souls of the dead, but the belief that they were inhabited by mortals superior to ourselves soon predominated. The one thing everyone agreed about was that they were not without tenants. It had formerly been believed that the heavenly bodies existed for the benefit of mankind, so since distant suns and planets were of no apparent benefit to us, it was reasoned that they must have been made for other mortals. It was taken for granted that God would not have created a "useless" world. This was not questioned until the middle of the nineteenth century, when after hot debate the conviction that all extrasolar worlds have inhabitants still prevailed. Not until early in the twentieth was it abandoned.

Ironically, we now know that uninhabited planets are not useless—it may well become possible for us to colonize them. They may prove to be our salvation when the resources of Earth are gone. But of course in earlier centuries that possibility did not occur to anyone.

For more than three hundred years it was believed, by educated people at least, that solar systems similar to ours exist. This is known because they are referred to in the writings not just of astronomers but of many well-known people such as Benjamin Franklin as well as in the popular magazines of the day, sermons, and even in textbooks for children. Also, a great deal of poetry, some of it book-length, was written about spectacular suns and their planets. Imaginary voyages through space appear in even in poems by major poets such as Milton, Shelley, and Byron.

These were spiritual voyages, not journeys in spaceships. For example, at the time of Newton's death it was often suggested that he might see distant planets on his way to Heaven. Many people longed to visit the worlds so frequently talked about, and doing so in an afterlife was the only route they could imagine. As late as the 1870s the American poet Henry Abbey wrote:

Death, that dread annulment which life shuns,

Or fain would shun, becomes to life the way,

The thoroughfare to greater worlds on high,

The bridge from star to star. Seek how we may,

There is no other road across the sky;

And, looking up, I hear star-voices say:

"You could not reach us if you did not die."

But the longing for a closer look at other worlds was not shared by everyone. Searches for information about it turn up only what was written by those who were interested in cosmic space. Most people who heard of distant solar systems may not have been interested, may even have been disturbed by the thought. The French philosopher Pascal famously wrote, "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me," and he can hardly have seen alone in feeling that way. It was not an issue people needed to be concerned about. Earth was, after all, safely isolated from the larger universe, as far as they knew. No one supposed that there could ever be actual contact could between worlds; it was as if an invisible shell still enclosed our own.

It is likely that the poet William Wordsworth's feeling about space was—and still is—more typical than that of the space enthusiasts. He was knowledgeable about astronomy and enjoyed watching the stars with his sister and friends. But he is best known for his love of nature. When in his famous poem "Tintern Abbey" (1798) he wrote:

Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods,

And mountains; and of all that we behold

From this green earth. . . .

was he considering the stars a part of nature? There is no indication in the poem that he was, yet it seems unlikely that he would have used the phrase "from this green earth" rather than the more common "on this green earth" if he had never looked outward, thinking of Earth as part of the larger natural universe. And in fact in another poem be wrote, "The stars are mansions built by Nature's hand."

Be that as it may, it was Earth alone that he cared about. In "Peter Bell," describing his return from a fantasy space journey, Wordsworth revealed an outlook that is shared by many today, more than two hundred years later.

Swift Mercury resounds with mirth,

Great Jove is full of stately bowers;

But these, and all that they contain,

What are they to that tiny grain,

That darling speck of ours!

Then back to Earth, the dear green Earth;

Whole ages if I here should roam,

The world for my remarks and me

Would not a whit the better be;

I've left my heart at home.

See! there she is, the matchless Earth!

There spreads the fam'd Pacific Ocean!

Old Andes thrusts yon craggy spear

Through the grey clouds—the Alps are here

Like waters in commotion. . . .

And see the town where I was born!

Around those happy fields we span

In boyish gambols—I was lost

Where I have been, but on this coast

I feel I am a man.

The last few lines say it all: for the vast majority of people, their very identity depends on their presence on Earth. To leave it in fantasy is one thing, but to be aware that people can really leave, really venture into unknown regions, puts a whole new face on facts that have been known for centuries. And when astronauts do leave, even they are often more deeply moved by the sight of "the dear green earth" from a distance than by the beauty of the stars. Though astronauts are exceptional individuals who enjoy space flight and long to explore the universe, those are not the emotions the public vicariously shares.

The farther we go in space, the further removed space travel is from theory, the more evident this will become. In Wordsworth's time and for two centuries longer, the idea that there might be peril in space didn't occur to people. Their knowledge of the universe was very abstract. Even the few brief mentions of traveling to the stars that appeared in the late nineteenth century did not suggest that it would be dangerous, and certainly there was no suspicion that the presumed inhabitants of other worlds might not be friendly. That notion was introduced by H. G. Wells' 1897 novel The War of the Worlds, which was viewed as pure fantasy until a 1938 radio dramatization was broadcast in the form of a news report, nearly causing a panic. Science fiction of the 1920s was read only by those especially interested in it. However, starting in the 1930s, the hit comic strip and radio adventures of Buck Rogers forever changed the public's perception of space. It became the scene of violent action and exciting new concepts, and the development of V-2 rockets in World War II led to a suspicion that there might possibly be some truth in them.

Thus the first UFO sightings, which occurred in 1947 and were immediately associated with extraterrestrials, were followed by countless alien invasion films in the 1950s. It is often said that these movies were actually about the Cold War, and no doubt their plots were influenced by it; but I believe that underneath, they reflected the public's new realization that space may hold terrors. These films featured ridiculously-portrayed aliens and some were intentionally humorous, which suggests that viewers wanted to think that the whole idea of danger from beyond Earth was silly. When the development of satellite technology began to show that space travel is not silly, their popularity waned. People turned their attention to the competition in space, which really was connected to the Cold War. After America won they could no longer be distracted by it, and the worries suppressed so long began to surface along with growing anxiety about our own ventures into the unknown.

At the time of the Challenger disaster I was astonished by the widespread public feeling that it meant space travel shouldn't be undertaken, and especially that the civilian teacher Christa McAuliffe shouldn't have been "sent" into space, as if she hadn't been chosen out of thousands of applicants who vied for the chance to go. The supposition, sometimes even explicitly stated, that she hadn't known it was dangerous was an insult both to her courage and to her intelligence. Who could possibly be unaware that riding in a spacecraft propelled by rocket engines and boosters providing 7.8 million pounds of thrust at liftoff involves risk?

Perhaps previous space flights had been viewed with a sense of detachment, as if they were science fiction. But I now think there was more to it than that. It would simply not have been rational for anyone ever to think space travel isn't dangerous; the evidence that it's unsafe could hardly have come as a surprise. And even if it did, dangers involving far greater numbers of people, such as those of early aviation, had been accepted by the public without question. No one said that pilots shouldn't be allowed to take off in primitive planes, although the crash rate was extremely high. Planes, however, did not get very far from the ground. There was no possibility that improved ones would leave the planet and enter unknown regions beyond. I suspect that the realization that space travel is real came not with the tragedy of Challenger, but with the Apollo moon flights, and that Challenger brought to the surface unconscious feelings that had been building up for a long time. Underneath, people were troubled not by the danger to the astronauts but by the potential perils of contact with the wider universe. The Challenger disaster was merely the trigger for expression of the public's growing uneasiness about spacefaring.

As in the seventeenth century, for people to shrink from the necessity of revising their perception of our environment (our total environment, not the mere biosphere) is normal and adaptive for our species. If everyone's orientation shifted suddenly, society would disintegrate. Civilization depends on the ability to make plans knowing that for the short term, tomorrow will be like today. Thus changes in outlook come slowly, first in a few visionaries, later in one generation after another as minds open to new awareness. Mass media, a recent phenomenon, will speed up the process but cannot make it happen overnight. If anything, real-time mass media events such as the moon landings produce more shock than lasting transformation.

So it can't be expected that the public will be quick to support future space activity. We should not be surprised if more interest is shown in science fiction movies than in real flights. Inwardly drawn to the thought of venturing outward but unable to break away from the safe and familiar, people tell themselves that the fiction they enjoy is just entertainment, not be taken seriously. And science fiction is sometimes criticized for promoting unrealistic dreams.

Will we always be bound to Earth, then? Of course not. Evolution is slow, but it can't be halted. Humans have been seeking new lands to settle since for millennia, first new villages, and eventually new continents. The negative expression of this instinct has been the urge to expand a group's territory through war, which hopefully most us have outgrown since the time when young men dreamed of glorious conquest. On the positive side, there has always been a desire of ordinary people to be pioneers, even at the cost of hardship. For some time it has been evident that Earth has, or soon will, run out of vacant land. How could there not be an impulse to go beyond, quite apart from the plain fact that a species that fails to move beyond the niche in which it has evolved must be periodically decimated or else fall victim to extinction? In the long run, how could humankind fail to follow that impulse?

The dream of extending our species' range beyond the world on which we evolved is hardly something so trivial as entertainment, however much entertainment may be derived from it or how gradually it is absorbed. It is an often-unconscious expression of the deep-seated instinct present in all species to expand their ecological niche, an adaptive response to the ever-present threat of extinction. It has become trite and unfashionable to compare movement beyond Earth to the movement of life from the sea onto land, as was done during the Apollo era, but that comparison is still valid.

These are not new ideas—space advocates have been expressing them for years. Why then have so many lost sight of them and become discouraged? I think it is because in our era people are so used to rapid change, and to instant gratification of their wishes, that they have lost all sense of the evolutionary timescale. A dream is not unrealistic merely because it is not achieved within one's own lifetime or even that of one's grandchildren. Enthusiasm for one ambitious space dream after another has died out when its supporters came up against the fact that they wouldn't live to see it fulfilled—a reaction that strikes me as all too close to "sour grapes." As has often been pointed out, settling space is not as simple as picking up stakes and moving one's family westward. It requires a very long lead time. During that time, the clock would stop if there were no far-sighted dreamers willing to pay the price of personal disappointment in order to keep it going. The more followers they can attract by offering entertainment, the better; but to suppose that their motivation has no deeper roots is to ignore the essence of what enables our species, or any species, to thrive.

Sooner or later, like an eaglet destined for flight, humankind will break through the invisible shell in which our planet has been confined. It is happening now with the advent of commercial space flight, and the minority with far sight will carry us forward despite reluctance on the part of the majority. In times to come men and women will travel far from this green earth. And then, with our ancestral home at last open to the universe, we will discover our place among the countless worlds of the stars.

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Excerpt from Enchantress from the Stars and Other Essays

Perspective on the Future:

The Quest of Space Age Young People

(1972)

This essay was adapted from a speech I made to the Washington State Association of School Librarians in March, 1972 and first published in School Media Quarterly, Fall 1972. It was reprinted in Only Connect: Readings on Children's Literature, S. Egoff, G.T. Stubbs & L.F. Ashley, eds., Oxford University Press, 1980.

*

Those of us who work with literature for youth have many things in common, whether we are writers, librarians, or teachers—and I believe that one of them is a very strong and basic interest in the future. I have been fascinated by ideas about the future, and particularly about space exploration, since I myself was in my teens; all my novels have been focused on it. While educators may not have such specific enthusiasm for the subject of the distant future, all are deeply concerned with preparing young people to live in the world of tomorrow. None of us can predict just what that world is going to be like, but I think there is much we can do to equip the next generation to cope with whatever tomorrow brings.

I suppose every author is asked how he or she came to choose subjects, but I think the question is raised more frequently with authors of science fiction than with others. People are always curious about why anyone would choose to write about imaginary things instead of the things we know. Each author has her own reasons, and mine are not really typical; perhaps an explanation of them will make clear why I feel that stories that deal with the future are important, and are of interest even to those for whom neither science fiction nor science itself has any special appeal.

First of all, I should mention that my books are more for a general audience than for science fiction fans. Although I think science fiction fans will enjoy them, I aim them principally toward people who normally do not read science fiction, and I avoid using esoteric terminology that only established fans can understand. Actually I am not what one would call a fan myself, at least not in the sense of keeping up with the adult science fiction genre. I use the science fiction form simply because my ideas about humankind's place in the universe can best be expressed in the context of future or hypothetical worlds.

This is not to say that my books are wholly allegorical. I have been rather dismayed to find that some people interpret them that way, because although there is indeed a good deal of allegory in them, they also have a literal level. For instance, what is said in Enchantress from the Stars and The Far Side of Evil about how a truly mature civilization would view peoples of lesser advancement is meant to be taken literally; scientists are beginning to ask why, if civilizations more advanced than ours do exist in other solar systems, they haven't contacted us, and that is my answer as to why.

Of course, one of my main reasons for writing science fiction is that I believe very strongly in the importance of space exploration to the survival of our species. I have held this belief since the days when all space travel was considered fantastic, and indeed I developed the theory of the "Critical Stage," on which my book The Far Side of Evil is based, in unpublished work that I did before the first artificial satellite was launched. I am entirely serious about the choice between expansion into space and human self-destruction being a normal and inevitable stage of evolution; the fact that when I came to write the book, our establishment of a space program had made it impossible for the story's setting to be Earth, as it was in my initial draft, was to me the most encouraging sign of our era. In the early fifties I had been afraid that the Space Age would not begin soon enough. [In the 30 years since this was published, the stalling of the space effort has shown more clearly than ever the need for fiction to inspire its progress.]

But apart from my commitment to the cause of space exploration, I think there is good reason to set stories in the future when writing for teenagers. Today's young people identify with the future. Many of them find it a more pertinent concept than that of the past. If we are going to make any generalization about the human condition, any convincing statement that evolution is a continuous process in which the now that seems all-important to them is only a small link, we stand a better chance of communicating when we speak of the future than when we describe past ages that—however mistakenly—the young have dismissed as dead and irrelevant. Teenagers are far more serious-minded than they used to be, yet they don't consider anything worth serious attention unless they see its relationship to problems they have experienced or can envision.

This has become more and more evident during the past few years. It so happened that I began writing in a period when young people's involvement with matters once thought too deep for them was increasing. I was not at all sure that there would be a place for the kind of novels I wanted to write, because they were too optimistic to fit the gloomy mold of contemporary adult fiction, yet too philosophical, I thought, to be published as teen fiction. Fortunately I directed them to young people anyway, and quite a few seem to like them. I don't think this would be the case were it not that the boys and girls now growing up are more mature in their interests than those of former generations.

It is apparent today that the young people of our time are searching desperately for something that they are not getting in the course of a standard education. They are searching in all directions: some through political activism; some through "dropping out"; some through renewed interest in religion in both traditional and novel forms, or even in the occult; and all too many through drugs or violence. Misguided though some of these attempts may be, I feel that they all reflect a genuine and growing concern on the part of our youth for a broader view of the universe than our present society offers them. Some can find meaning in the values of their elders; others cannot. There would seem to be a wide gulf between the two attitudes. There is a great deal of talk about polarization. Yet underneath, whatever their immediate and conscious goals, I believe that all young people are seeking the same thing: they are seeking a perspective on the future.

The need for such perspective is not new. It is a basic and universal human characteristic. What is different now is that the perspective inherent in the culture passed automatically from one generation to the next is no longer enough. Perspective implies a framework, a firm base from which to look ahead, and in this age of rapid change the old framework is not firm. Many of its components are still true and sound, but it has become so complex that as a whole it must necessarily invite question, if only because of the contradictions it contains. Scarcely anyone today is so naive as to suppose that all aspects of our current outlook are valid. There is much controversy, however, as to which are valid and which are not, and among free people the controversy will continue, for we live in an era when our civilization's outlook is constantly shifting and expanding.

Whether this is occurring because—as I believe—the time of our first steps beyond our native planet is the most crucial period in human history, or whether its basic cause is something else, the fact remains that it is happening. It is a confusing time for all of us, but especially for our young people, the members of the first Space Age generations, who are so aware of change and of the need for change that they can find nothing solid to hold to. They haven't the background to know that problems have been solved in the past, that present and future problems will in turn be solved, that the existence of problems is not in itself grounds for bitterness. They hear their disillusioned elders speak of the future with despair and they have no basis for disbelief. Yet instinctively, they do disbelieve—and I wonder if this, as much as the world's obvious lack of perfection, may not be why they find it so hard to believe anything else their elders tell them. They cannot accept the now-fashionable notion that the universe is patternless and absurd; they are looking for answers. Inside, they know that those answers must exist.

Young people cannot be blamed for thinking the answers are simple. Earlier generations have thought the same. But nowadays one's faith in a simple answer cannot survive very long; what Space Age generations need is awareness that one must not expect simple answers, and that humanity's progress toward solutions is a long, slow process that extends not merely over years, but over centuries. Knowledge of past history alone does not give such awareness because most of today's teenagers just don't care about the past. Significance, to them, lies not in what has been, but in what is to come. I believe that only by pointing out relationships between past, present, and future can we help them to gain the perspective that is the true object of their search.

One might wonder how I can consider this need for perspective so fundamental when for years, psychologists have been saying that people's basic need is for security. Yet I think our young people are showing over and over again that they do not want security, at least not security as it has commonly been defined. A great deal of effort has been devoted to making them secure, yet many turn their backs and deliberately seek out something dangerous to do. The security they need cannot come from outside; it must come from within, from experiences through which each person proves that he or she is capable of handling the stresses of an indisputably insecure world. But no one can handle a situation in which he sees no pattern, no meaning. There can be no security without direction. Thus a perspective on the future is implicit in the very concept of inner security.

One's view of the future is, of course, a highly personal thing. Our beliefs can differ greatly as to the direction we are going, or ought to go. In my books I naturally present my own opinions, and I don't expect all readers to agree with them. But I hope that even those who do not agree will gain something by being encouraged to develop their private thoughts about the topics I deal with. I hope that they will be convinced that we are going somewhere, and that this will help to counter the all-too-prevalent feeling that human evolution is over and done with. It is this, more than anything else, that I try to put across: the idea that there is continuity to history, that progress—however slow—does occur, and that whatever happens to us on this planet is part of some overall pattern that encompasses the entire universe. We are not in a position to see the pattern. We can only make guesses about it, and many of those guesses are bound to be wrong. Still, I do not believe that guessing, either in fantasy or in serious speculation, is a futile task; for when we ignore the issue, we are apt to forget that the pattern exists whether we see it or not. That, I think, is the root of many young people's turmoil. They have no conviction that there is any pattern.

A common reaction to the space flights so far undertaken seems to be that we had better appreciate Earth because it's the only good planet there is. It is quite true that it is the only one in this solar system that is suitable for us to live on at present, and that those of this system are the only ones we have any immediate prospect of reaching. But the attitude that no other planet is worth anything strikes me as a new form of provincialism. Our solar system is merely a small part of a vast universe that contains billions upon billions of stars. People sometimes ask me if I really believe that there are habitable planets circling those other stars; the answer is that I do, and that most scientists now do also. Not everyone seems to realize this; several acquaintances told me rather shamefacedly that they themselves thought that there is life in other solar systems, although they were sure that scientists would laugh at them. As a result, I wrote a nonfiction book [The Planet-Girded Suns, 1974; updated edition published in 2012] that I hoped would explain to young people not only what modern scientists did believe, but what many philosophers of past ages believed about an infinity of worlds. The idea is not new, and it has not been confined to science fiction. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in the year 1600 for holding it.

Of course, I do not believe that the inhabitants of other solar systems are as much like us in the physical and cultural sense as I have depicted them in my novels. Most serious science fiction does not make them so similar, and I think that many potential readers are thereby turned away. They are put off by the weird element inherent in any attempt to imagine what sentient species other than ours would be like. I feel that this is distracting. Since we don't know what they are like and my aim is to show essentially identical spiritual qualities, it seems to me best to portray them in our terms, just as I have to make them speak in our language. Also, in Enchantress from the Stars, I wanted to leave open the question of which, if any, of the people were from Earth. Only in that way could I make my point about various levels of advancement.

This point, which is further developed in The Far Side of Evil, concerns evolutionary advancement, not mere cultural advancement. My intent was to comment upon relationships between eras of history, and between peoples at different stages of evolution, not relationships between societies here on Earth. We of Earth, whatever our nationality or our color, are all members of the same human race. We are one people, one species. Someday, generations hence, we may encounter other sentient species. It is not too soon for us to begin thinking about our identity as a people, our place in a universe inhabited by many; the young are better aware of that than most adults.

To those who do not believe that there will ever be contact between the stars, I would like to suggest that as far as contemporary youth's perspective is concerned, it makes no difference whether there is or not. The mere idea is, in itself, of consequence. I am troubled by science fiction's usual portrayal of advanced aliens either as hostile, or as presumptuous meddlers who take it upon themselves to interfere with the evolutionary process. The dangers of the first attitude are obvious; those of the second are perhaps less so. Maybe the whole issue seems remote and insignificant when we have so much else to worry about. Yet if young people acquire the idea that some extrasolar civilization could solve our problems for us if its starships happened to come here, or that it would consider our failings evidence that our whole human race is wicked instead of merely immature, will that not add to their already-great sense of futility? Will it not interfere with whatever perspective on human history they have managed to absorb? I think it will; and furthermore, whether there really are any alien civilizations is immaterial. Science fiction may be fantasy, but that young people like it and are affected by it is fact. It is also a fact that the Voyager probe launched by NASA carried a plaque designed to communicate its origin to any intelligent beings who recover it after it passes out of our solar system. It may be that no aliens will ever see that plaque, but our children saw it on television; their attitude toward its hypothetical viewers is bound to influence their attitude toward our own civilization.

Their view of civilization is already confused and inconsistent enough. On one hand, many believe that only scientific knowledge is factual, and that advancement is merely a matter of inventions and technical skill. On the other, during the past few years some people, especially the young, have come to distrust science, to blame it for our problems and even to question the value of technological advance—which, I believe, is the greatest distortion of perspective I have yet seen. Today, in their quest for meaning, young people are challenging the materialistic outlook many scientists have held in the past—and rightly so. At the same time, however, some of them are rejecting not only inadequate theories, but the whole idea of scientific progress. They seem to feel that in so doing they are defending spiritual values against some implacable enemy. They imagine that they seek a wider truth. Yet actually this viewpoint is equally narrow and in fact self-contradictory, for truth is precisely what science seeks, and has always sought from its very beginnings. There has never been any conflict between the real scientific attitude and spiritual values, where there appears to be; the trouble is with the particular theory involved and not with science as such. Truth is truth; science is simply the name given to the part we have attempted to organize and verify.

I think the current misunderstanding is the result of our tendency since the late 19th century to compartmentalize science, to separate it from the rest of life in the same way that some people separate religion. There was a time when the major scientific thought of an era could be understood by every educated person; but for many years now specialization has been necessary, and this has led to an unfortunate conception of what science is. Non-scientists have gotten the idea that it is some kind of esoteric cult that stands apart from other human endeavors, while both they and the scientists themselves have felt that its realms have been charted and need only to be conquered. When young people observe that there are things worth investigating outside these realms, and that some of our current scientific theories are questionable, it often doesn't occur to them that the answer lies not in abandoning science but in expanding it: refuting its dogmatic portions as dogma has been refuted countless times in the past. This, perhaps, is why some of them are turning in desperation to supernaturalism, astrology, and the like. Yet science is distinguished from superstition not by the subject matter with which it deals, but by the maturity of its explanations; it is distinguished from philosophy not by content, but by the availability of data to which objective scientific methods can be applied. All the phenomena now dealt with by science were once explained by superstition and, as an intermediate step, all our sciences were once divisions of philosophy. For that matter, there are advanced theories in all fields that are philosophic in that they are not yet subject to empirical proof. Because nowadays the people who hold such theories are called scientists and not philosophers, we get the impression that the theories are authoritative; but actually some are no more so than theories of the Middle Ages that have been disproven.

The point to be made is that this process of progression is by no means finished or complete. There is no area of truth that is outside the province of science in principle, though there are many that science lacks the practical means to investigate at its present stage of development. It is thus a great mistake to identify science with materialism, and to assume that it inherently deals only with the material aspects of the universe, when the fact is merely that these aspects can be more readily studied than other aspects that we are just beginning to rescue from the realms of the "supernatural." There is no such thing as the supernatural, since "natural," by definition, includes all aspects of reality. But too many of us have shut out parts of reality. We have discarded not only superstition, but also the areas with which superstition presently deals, forgetting that the superstition of today is merely an immature explanation of the science of tomorrow. We have failed to recognize that there are natural laws that cannot be explained in terms of the ones we know because they are, in themselves, equally basic.

Worse, our society has tended to assume that there is a firm line between science and religion. It has outgrown trust in superstition, and many have identified faith with superstition, discarding that also. Yet the fact that the physical aspects of natural law are the most readily analyzed does not mean that there isn't a spiritual reality that is just as real, just as much a part of the universe, as the material reality that science has so far studied objectively. I don't wonder that young people have difficulty in viewing the world with perspective when they have been led to feel that it is necessary to reject one or the other. The young today sense that moral and spiritual values are important, though they will not accept dogma in religion any more than in any other field, and it is understandably hard for them to reconcile their innate idealism with a science that is seemingly opposed.

To me, science itself can never be opposed to truth in any form whatsoever, no matter how many specific theories may be mistaken, and no matter how dogmatic certain scientists may be in support of their own era's beliefs. This is how I have viewed it in Enchantress from the Stars, and I think one of the book's appeals for young people is that it does take seriously certain things outside the traditional bounds of science, such as extrasensory perception, without putting a materialistic interpretation on them. I hope readers notice that nowhere have I suggested that advanced peoples, in progressing beyond a materialistic orientation, would give up any of their technology; because I feel strongly that as they matured, they would improve their technology and learn to put it to better use.

I am convinced, therefore, that the solution to future problems lies not in de-emphasizing science, but in advancing it, as well as in an outlook that recognizes that the science of any given age is imperfect and incomplete. For instance, I believe that while there is much that can and should be done now to slow the rate of population growth, the only permanent answer to overpopulation is the colonization of new worlds. I have been asked how I can approve of our colonizing planets in other solar systems if other sentient species exist. Certainly I don't think we should colonize planets that are already occupied; I trust my books make that very clear. What I do think is that there are many worlds on which no intelligent life has evolved that can be made livable by advanced technology, and that in the normal course of a sentient species' evolution, it expands and utilizes such worlds. There is nothing less natural in that than in our ancestors building the ships and other equipment needed to colonize America. Pioneering is a basic human activity; that's the comparison I tried to draw in Journey Between Worlds.

This question of what is natural for us seems to need a good deal of examination right now. There is a feeling prevalent today, particularly among young people, that we ought to get "back to nature." Insofar as this means preserving and enjoying the beauties of our world, it is a good thing. But those who say that we as a species should live in a more "natural" way are, I think, overlooking what "natural" means as applied to human beings. It is the nature of animal species to remain the same from generation to generation, evolving only as adaptation to physical environment may demand. It is the nature of our own species, however—and of whatever other sapient races may inhabit this universe—to learn, to change, and to progress. There is no point at which it is "natural" to stop, for to cease changing is contrary to the mental instincts that are uniquely human. If it were not so, all learning, from the discovery of fire to the conquest of disease, would be unnatural, and I don't think anyone believes that—least of all the young, who are more eager for change than their elders. It is the nature of humans to solve problems. It is the nature of humans to grope continuously toward an understanding of truth. There may be disagreement as to means, disagreement as to what is true and what is not, but never on the principle that to search for truth is an inherent attribute of humankind.

In my novels This Star Shall Abide and its sequel Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains [the first two volumes of the Children of the Star trilogy], I said quite a bit about the search for truth, from both the scientific and the religious standpoints; and I also tried to say something about the importance of faith. Yet the people of these stories are stranded in a desperate situation where only advanced technology, and an eventual major advance in scientific theory, can prevent their extinction. To achieve this advance, they are dependent on the kind of creative inspiration that has underlain all human progress since the beginning of time. Their religion is central to their culture, and it is in no way a materialistic religion; but the hope it offers them can be fulfilled only through faith in the ultimate success of their scientific research.

I wrote a description of these two books for Atheneum in which I defined science as the portion of truth that no longer demands faith for acceptance. That's the way I look at science: it is part of a larger truth. I believe that if we can give young people that sort of attitude toward it—if they can be helped to view its failure to provide all the answers overnight with neither hostility nor despair, but with the willingness to keep on searching—we will go a long way toward building their perspective on the future. And I believe that it is such perspective, more than anything else, that will fit them to take their place in tomorrow's world.

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