Where is Science Taking Us?

Once upon a time and not so very long ago, science fiction found its inspiration in the near solar system: landing on the moon was science fiction. Landing on Mars was outright fantasy.

Now the equipment associated with the moon flight stands in museums, Mars is on the drawing-boards, and science fiction of the intervening decades has gone to the stars...a territory where the rules are a little less rigid, and where the histories aren’t yet written.

But there’s a problem with that scenario. Science fiction isn’t founded on escaping from science, or from humanity. Quite the contrary. It’s a literature of human dealings with science -- at the very core of its significance; it’s what-if, and what if-this-goes-on with us? It’s us meeting nature on the macroscopic and microscopic level. And above all, it’s about what happens to us when we run into places and situations that just aren’t Kansas.

Science fiction has dealt with strange landscapes aplenty. It’s dealt with strangers. The physics of how to get there is unfolding around us. The star probes I wrote about a decade or so ago are increasingly probable in a real future. Those frontiers are just ahead, and who knows? They’ll be the next relics.

But there’s more to the future than where we’re going. Science fiction also lies in what we’re taking with us and in who we’ll be when we go. And that’s the result of changes we’re already making.

There are new frontiers.

The science of what we may become is one of the most exciting and potent—the power of genetic change. The power of the sub-visible. The power to work invisibly to create visible changes. If this sounds like alchemy—it is. If it sounds like magic—well, it answers that description well enough, too.

The expansion of understanding already required of human beings just to live in the 21st century is staggering. In an era when the pace of living requires a cellphone stuck to one’s ear while shopping, in an age when democratic process goes electronic, in an age where what we see may have been computer-enhanced beyond all resemblance to the truth...the news that the world is going to go on changing at an accelerated rate sounds incredible.

It should. The fact is that human beings are still the 10000 BC model, designed for agriculture, with a decision-making rate adequate for walking and running, and a reproductive rate designed for occasional plagues. We overlay on that a philosophical and political system a couple of thousand years old, the origins and reasons for which we collectively don’t remember very well. We invent paper records to keep up with the changes and then we invent computers to remember where we put it all. Which means we now prowl superhighways having cell phone arguments with our spouses a thousand miles away, while trying to cope with the traffic flow and simultaneously find out where we are via the GPS display. Mental meltdown and fast traffic aren’t mixing well, as is, and somehow we hang on.

Meanwhile science has still more change in store. The 10000 BC model is thinking about improving not just document storage -- but himself.

The 10000 BC model won’t change everything about himself, however. And it’s my guess we still hark back to some very old patterns, if you strip everything of our civilization away. If you try to create a new world, depend on it, we still come with genetic baggage. Given a problem, we still try to do things the old way.

And how much of that capability is in our genes?