What the historical task consists of is humanity turning itself inside out, and .
What is loose on this planet, and has been for at least a billion and a half years, is a self-replicating information system. It first appears as replicating polymers which then grow sophisticated enough to be DNA and cellular matrices and enzymatic feedback systems. And then, at a very late period in its history relative to us, it transcends mere genetic information and evolves epigenetic information such as culture, writing, this sort of thing. This phenomenon is localized in the monkeys.
Knowledge and understanding are inevitably two-edged, so that as we reach for angelhood to free ourselves, we inevitably gain the power to destroy ourselves. We cannot become some kind of star-roving, hyper-dimensional, cybernetic species radiating out through the galaxy unless we go through the very narrow gate that has to do with the fact that we discovered fusion processes while we were still bound to a single planet. We have fifty, a hundred, two hundred years before we are home free.
All effort to take control of something in the technological area will find it mercurially slipping through one’s fingers.
You can’t live on a planet and have the kinds of powers and ideas which we have because a planet is such a delicate thing. What we dream of is so outlandish and so centered upon ourselves that the only way it can be realized without being Faustian, without destroying us and everything else, is to build it in space. The human imagination has to be lifted off the surface of the planet for our survival and the survival of the planet. It’s like a mother come to term; this baby must now be born.
History is a ten thousand year dash from the point in time when you cognize that you could go to the stars to the point in time when you look back on the receding Earth and breathe a sigh of relief and say, “We made it.”
If you need to take a shower, you just stretch it out over your head and water comes out of it; if you’re hungry, you eat it; if you need to go somewhere, you sit on it and it takes you there; if you need to know something, you ask it and it tells you. It is something which we have a great deal of trouble conceiving of because it violates all our notions of category. But something like this will come.
The current rather primitive state of molecular biology is already talking about taking control of the genetic code and genetic engineering and that sort of thing. Obviously, once that’s done, once a species discovers how to do that, its form is no longer dictated by the evolutionary constraints of its planet of origin; its form is dictated by imagination.
If a species wanted to radiate through the galaxy and was searching for contact with other minded species, a good approach would be to create a probe which is more biology than technology.
Outer space is only a barrier to species drift, no more a barrier to species drift than oceans are.