Thursday, July 16

Omniman

I imagine that a future step in evolution for humans is to create a meta organism comprised of all of us. Just as cells banded together to form colonies, and then specialized to the point where a muscle cell couldn't replace a brain cell, humans could form a creature with a meta consciousness.

Let's give this creature a name: Omniman. Let's suppose that this creature has systems something like current life as we know it, but not exactly. Perhaps it has avenues to transport resources, a skeletal system of sorts, excretions, ingestion, perhaps it can even reproduce.

Maybe this thing we call the internet is an early attempt at a nervous system. Perhaps Omniman will have a consciousness. Individual humans will be connected via a web, much like how our brain is connected, and Omniman will think thoughts that humans seperately would be unable to fathom (much like how bacteria are unable to dream up and create books and automobiles and chess sets.)

I wonder what Omniman will look like as a species? Will their bodies have a definite skin, with their skeletons limited to a planet? Or will they float through space, like giant amoeba, asexually reproducing using the raw resources of stellar dust?

Will Omnimen form tribes and allegiances that span solar systems at first, and then nations across galaxies? And will we as humans be able to comprehend our place in the heirarchy, just as a cell in our body might wonder whether their is something more that they just can't quite put their psuedopod on?

Will humans always be fundamentally equivalent in such an organism, or is it the nature of evolution to shape us into cogs, with definite non-interchangable parts and functions? Will my kid's kid's kid's kid's kid's kid be limited to a caste, much like our cells in our bodies, with brain people and muscle people and blood people and sweat gland people and on and on?

My hope, and possibly an unfounded one, is that Omniman will have compassion for humans. However, I doubt this, since humans have zero compassion for the individual cells that make up our bodies. Who cares about skin cells that fulfill their function and then peel? What heaven do cells go to when they fall to disease or trauma or die to old age?

And if they don't, then why do we?

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