Big Historical Foundations for Deep Future Speculations: Cosmic Evolution, Atechnogenesis, and Technocultural Civilization

Abstract

Big historians are attempting to construct a general holistic narrative of human origins enabling an approach to studying the emergence of complexity, the relation between evolutionary processes, and the modern context of human experience and actions. In this paper I attempt to explore the past and future of cosmic evolution within a big historical foundation characterized by physical, biological, and cultural eras of change. From this analysis I offer a model of the human future that includes an addition and/or reinterpretation of technological singularity theory with a new theory of biocultural evolution focused on the potential birth of technological life: the theory of atechnogenesis. Furthermore, I explore the potential deep futures of technological life and extrapolate towards two hypothetical versions of an ‘Omega Civilization’: expansion and compression.

Full text

Big Historical Foundations for Deep Future
Speculations: Cosmic Evolution, Atechnogenesis,
and Technocultural Civilization
Cadell Last
1
Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
Abstract Big historians are attempting to construct a general holistic narrative of human
origins enabling an approach to studying the emergence of complexity, the relation
between evolutionary processes, and the modern context of human experience and actions.
In this paper I attempt to explore the past and future of cosmic evolution within a big
historical foundation characterized by physical, biological, and cultural eras of change.
From this analysis I offer a model of the human future that includes an addition and/or
reinterpretation of technological singularity theory with a new theory of biocultural evo-
lution focused on the potential birth of technological life: the theory of atechnogenesis.
Furthermore, I explore the potential deep futures of technological life and extrapolate
towards two hypothetical versions of an ‘Omega Civilization’: expansion and compression.
Keywords Big history Anthropology Futures Evolution Singularity Philosophy
1 Introduction
My focus is to explore the ‘deep future’ of ‘big history’ in-as-far as it can be explored
given a lack of empirical data, inability to test future predictions, and an incomplete
knowledge of local and global physical, biological, and cultural processes currently in
operation. We can gain a new understanding of possible future trends and processes by
analyzing the emerging science of cosmic evolution within the narrative architecture of big
history. Although modern phenomena like technological complexification and sociopo-
litical convergence receive considerable attention, few researchers approach these issues
from the vantage point of 13.8 billion years of interconnected evolution. Fewer still have
&Cadell Last
cadell.last@gmail.com;
http://www.cadelllast.com
1
Global Brain Institute (GBI), Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) (Free University of Brussels),
Brussels, Belgium
123
Found Sci
DOI 10.1007/s10699-015-9434-y

detailed a working model for understanding deeper reaches of the human future despite the
fact (or perhaps because of the fact) that the phenomenon of humanity has the broadest of
all possible future event states. We can predict the future evolutionary possibilities for
galaxies, stars, and planets on the deepest conceivable scales of time, but we have trouble
predicting human possibility out even 100 years.
The most important addition to the literature offered in this paper involves taking bio-
cultural evolution seriously as a natural phenomenon of equal significance to the hierarchy
of cosmic processes that also include physicochemical and biochemical forms of evolu-
tionary change. The failure to understand culture, and in particular the relationship between
biology and culture as part of cosmic evolution, may be one of the primary failings of
science in the modern world. This is a factor in holding back progress in our understanding
of both the nature of humanity and the future of humanity. Therefore, in my approach to the
deep future I focus on the emergence of the big historical cultural era. Specifically, I want to
bring closer attention to the biocultural reproductive nature of the human phenomenon as it
presents us with a peculiar cosmic evolutionary relationship that potentially offers clues
regarding the future of evolutionary change and complexity construction.
This approach to culture as part of a cosmic evolutionary process is partly a response to
an emerging realization that we need to understand the ‘‘nature of cosmic culture’’ (see
Dick and Lupisella 2009), as well as the ‘‘future of culture’’ (see Dick 2009a). Our inability
to understand the nature of cultural phenomenon and its future implications has many
causes, but is made all the more difficult due to the ‘‘two cultures’’ divide that has pervaded
academic inquiry for decades (see Snow 1959; Wilson 1998; Kauffman 2010). The heart of
this divide is created by fundamentally different epistemological worldviews that
emphasize different approaches to understanding natural phenomenon. Historically (and
broadly) the sciences attempt an understanding of the world that is predictive and
approaches objectivity through the formulation of timeless, context-independent physical
laws. In contrast, the humanities have mainly focused on narrative construction and the
subjective dimension of human experience, with special emphasis on context, choice, and
latent possibility within any event. This epistemological division prevents the construction
of unifying conversation between diverse fields within biology and anthropology, and more
broadly between the ‘physical/life sciences’ and the ‘social science/humanities’.
The most relevant consequence of the ‘two cultures’ divide in respect to this paper is
that there has been little research that specifically attempts to understand cosmic processes
connecting the development and evolution of physical and chemical systems to the
development and evolution of biological, ecological, cultural, and technological systems
(Heylighen 2011). As a result, no dominant academic conceptual framework comfortably
situates the human phenomenon within an evolutionary context of the whole cosmos.
Furthermore, dominant academic paradigms within academia do not lend themselves to
such an analysis. In the sciences, many researchers have (often successfully) employed a
physically reductionist program to understand life and the universe with the belief that all
phenomena can be understood through an analysis of the mechanisms of its constituent
parts. Consequently most ‘higher phenomena’ (i.e. more complex) are conceived of as
representing ‘epiphenomena’ ultimately reducible to lower-level phenomena. The reduc-
tionist program has proven successful in many domains of physics and chemistry, but does
not help us in understanding the evolution of complex adaptive systems (CAS) like
organisms, ecosystems, and civilizations. Alternatively, over the past several decades,
many influential social theorists have developed a postmodern relativistic program, within
which grand narratives explaining the human experience are explicitly rejected, and
modern notions of a historical direction towards greater ‘freedom’, ‘equality’, and
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‘progress’ are problematized. The postmodern program has proven successful in critiquing
many naı
¨ve and western-centric assumptions inherent to the original conception of the
modern project, however it offers us no new alternative model within which we can
construct a common humanistic sociopolitical direction.
My point here is to emphasize that both reductionism and postmodernity, albeit suc-
cessful in different ways within the sciences and humanities, cannot help us in terms of
formulating a better understanding of big history and its meaning for the human species
moving forward into our common future. The physically reductionist program cannot
explain the emergence and intensification of hierarchical local complexity, as well as the
existence of goal-oriented, purposeful systems (Corning 2002a). Consequently, everything
that humans are (e.g. complex, goal and value-oriented, conscious, subjects) and every-
thing the human system exhibits (e.g. emergence, purposeful organization, autonomy)
becomes alien, unnatural, and impossible to predict and reduce. In contrast, the postmodern
relativistic program ignores or fails to confront the implications of rising technological
complexity and global convergence, leaving human civilization goal-less on the deepest
scales of time (Stewart 2010). As a result, any sociopolitical insight we can gain from
understanding large-scale patterns and processes discernible over big historical scales are
not fully appreciated.
However, pointing out potential flaws in worldview structures is much easier than
constructing new worldview structures, and I do not hope to solve all of the problems that
have characterized the two cultures divide or the problems of our modern scientific and
humanistic approaches to understanding in this paper. However, what I do hope to offer is
the foundations for a big historical perspective with relevance to human futures specula-
tions (Sects. 2–2.4), an introduction and exploration of a biocultural evolutionary theory in
the context of technological singularity theory (Sects. 3–3.3), and a discussion on the
implications for our understanding of the deep future (Sects. 4–4.2). The end goal is to help
academics work towards a more holistic and constructive understanding of humanity and
our relationship to the world with general evolution, universal history, and a common
future at the foundation.
For this exploration the development of cosmic evolutionary theory is of central
importance. Throughout scientific history we have come to imagine ourselves as separate,
marginal, or accidental by-products. In fact, it has not been uncommon for scientific pro-
gress in understanding the universe to become coupled with a type of existential nihilistic
worldview in relation to the human phenomenon. Physicist Steven Weinberg most
depressingly articulated this general perspective in The First Three Minutes (1977, p. 154):
The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it (also) seems pointless.
This general pessimism can (and has) been countered by reversing Weinberg’s perspec-
tive—as the late physicist Albert Einstein did—pointing out that the most remarkable thing
about the human-universe relationship is in its symbiosis (Vallentin 1954, p. 24):
The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.
I personally share the more optimistic ‘Einsteinian’ view, finding it remarkable that
humans can learn so much about the fundamental structure of the cosmos beyond our
limited and unreliable perceptual access. The very fact that our intellectual activities have
produced knowledge about the worlds of the very small, the very large, the deep past, the
potential future, and everything in between, is a source of tremendous wonder.
However, at the same time, Weinberg’s cosmic nihilism is not entirely ridiculous. In
fact, it is impossible to ignore the fact that sciences as diverse as astronomy, cosmology,
Big Historical Foundations for Deep Future Speculations…
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biology, and anthropology have played a role in symbolically removing humanity from
‘center stage’ of the cosmic drama, whether that imagined center represented a particular
civilization, our species, life, our solar system, the galaxy, or the whole universe. The
progressive ‘de-centering’ of the human story in relation to nature has been a source of
collective historical psychological discomfort. What is the function and purpose of
humanity? Are we mere epiphenomena, here for the blink of a cosmic eye, destined to
perish on a universal stage that did not expect us and does not need us? Is the historical
process really directionless and meaningless with no escape and no hope for a higher state
of humanity in relation to each other and the universe?
This is where cosmic evolutionary theory has a chance to re-organize our perspective
and provide new insight. Throughout the development and evolution of our local universe
there has been an interconnected growth of complexity from physical, chemical and bio-
logical systems, as well as cultural and technological systems. This growth of complexity
appears to open up new possibilities for the exploration of new relationships and new
opportunities for experience in the universe. When we consider humanity from this per-
spective we find that our scientific focus shifts towards the human system which now
occupies a frontier position of highest complexity and cognition. Consequently, we are
capable of directing the future of evolution, and whatever emergent possibility could stem
from our uniquely cultural and technological activities. Or said in another way, whatever
‘act’ comes next in the ‘cosmic drama’ it will emerge from within the domain of collective
human social values, cultural creativity, and our exploration of latent technological pos-
sibility. In this way the universe gives the appearance of internalizing its future potentiality
within a network of billions of biocultural nodes that in aggregate represent a phenomenon
capable of producing yet another level of complex organization.
This perspective does not succumb to the trap of anthropocentrism as I am not arguing
that humans are ‘reclaiming centrality’. Instead I am making the philosophical argument
that humans could represent an important process in the context of the growth of local
complexity that is part of a much larger ‘multi-local’ cosmic phenomenon. Of course this is
speculative but it is entirely plausible that cosmic evolutionary theory has application on a
universal scale, with other analogous levels of local complexity developing via a type of
‘universal culture’. Therefore, in this attempt to understand the deep future, I do not
attempt to specifically focus on understanding the role of mysterious impersonal forces
such as dark energy and dark matter, but rather seek to understand how intimately familiar
processes related to culture, technology, language, and mind could reshape the universe
and/or possess a cosmic function in the operations of the cosmos itself, consequently
adding new dimensions of purpose to our lives today and hope for a higher future. In short,
we stand on the frontier of cosmic evolution and a future of tremendous possibility
unforeseen by most historical humans.
This exploration, being a futurist work, will also require scientifically grounded
extrapolation and philosophical speculation when confronting questions that many scien-
tists, philosophers, and historians would deem unknowable with any degree of certainty.
However, we live in unprecedented times, in terms of technological complexity and
geopolitical organization, when compared to any known time period throughout cosmic
history, and consequently, we need new ideas to open conversation about what we are and
where we may be going (Weiner 1963, pp. 5–6):
It is the part of the scientist to entertain heretical and forbidden opinions experi-
mentally, even if [s/]he is finally to reject them. […] It is a serious exercise, and
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should be undertaken in all earnestness: it is only when it involves a real risk of
heresy that there is any point to it.
Finally, like other works focused on the deep future, this analysis will leave us with far
more questions than answers; but it is important to live in the questions, not the answers
(e.g. Kiriakakis 2015). We are the inheritors of a deep and interconnected cosmic process,
and find ourselves awkwardly navigating the highest levels of complexity our local region
has ever known; within this evolutionary labyrinth a big historical inquiry may offer a
light.
2 Big History
Big history is the study of the human past in relationship to the history of the universe (see
Christian 2004; Spier 2011). This endeavor attempts to utilize the entire collective body of
human knowledge in order to construct a deeper understanding of all natural processes
(e.g. Aunger 2007a,b; Chaisson 2011a,b) from ‘‘Big Bang to Global Civilization’’ (e.g.
Rodrigue et al. 2012). In contrast with the traditional attempt in physics to construct a
‘grand unified theory’ of the universe, big historians see the subject as providing the
beginnings of a working ‘‘grand unified story’’ of the universe (Christian 2004, p. 4). From
my perspective this goal should not be to eventually develop ‘one unchanging objective
story’, but rather to develop the empirical framework for a story of our collective history
that everyone can in turn relate to and utilize on a personal level. Thus big history has the
opportunity to become simultaneously one story of our shared world as well as an infinite
number of stories of how individuals can relate to that world. The usefulness of such a
common origin story is that it can always be re-symbolized depending on contemporary
sociopolitical context and scientific understanding. Consequently, big history offers
humanity a deeper perspective and an opportunity for cosmic reflection in relation to the
meaning of human life from an exploration of the processes that culminated in our
existence.
In concert with this inquiry, cosmic evolution as a subject has emerged as a theoretical
branch of study that attempts to understand all physical processes related to space, time,
energy, and matter (STEM) (Spier 2005; Chaisson 2012). In this attempt to further gen-
eralize evolutionary change theorists have integrated physical evolution (e.g. galaxies,
stars, planets), biological evolution (e.g. organisms, ecosystems), and cultural evolution
(e.g. worldviews, civilization, technology) into an interconnected process characterized by
growing complexity. Cosmic evolution can therefore provide an analysis of the develop-
mental and evolutionary mechanisms within which the larger unified story of our common
history unfolds. In this sense cosmic evolution and big history are complementary subjects
that could transcend the ‘two cultures’ and ultimately share the goal of providing a sense of
holistic unity for our species with all nature (e.g. Sagan 1977,1980,1997; Chaisson 1981,
2001,2005; Bloom 2000; Christian 2004; Niele 2005; Dick 2009b; Kauffman 2010; Spier
2011): a history and a science, a story and a process, which can help the human species
build a sense of common home and a sense of common creative origin.
In light of this academic ambition, the emergence of big history and cosmic evolution
represent more than just new silos of academic inquiry. Throughout modern history aca-
demia has become fragmented into many disparate disciplines, but in this fragmentation it
can be hard to find the whole picture and piece together how these separate domains of
knowledge relate to one another towards a higher coherence. Consequently, big history and
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cosmic evolution attempt to consume academic silos, and have an important and still
incomplete role to play in the ongoing construction of an inclusive global worldview for
the whole of humanity (e.g. Christian 2004; Dick 2009b; Vidal 2014a). Ideally such a
worldview would provide higher integration, working towards building the connections
and identifying the potentials for convergence within different domains of human
knowledge (Heylighen 2011). From higher intellectual coherence and vision of the whole
we should be able to form worldviews that can help the human species contextualize
modern challenges within the broadest contexts (e.g. Niele 2005; Spier 2011), allow for the
construction of future visions of humanity that represent practically realizable utopias (e.g.
Heylighen 2002), or help us potentially discover processes and trends to guide evolutionary
cosmic goals and purpose towards higher levels of experience (e.g. Turchin 1977; Stewart
2000; Kurzweil 2005; Vidal 2014a).
2.1 History of Big History
The study of big history as an intellectual tradition can be understood as both old and new.
The subject is old because we have evidence of humans constructing complex physical and
metaphysical narratives, and thinking about natural and supernatural explanations for the
‘totality’ of human existence in the world, for as long as we have evidence of writing. In
fact, this narrative tradition may have been manifest in the human species from the dawn of
complex material culture (North 2008), as all modern human groups develop cosmic
cultural worldview structures (Blainey 2010), regardless of ecological organization.
Consequently, the origin of our symbolic ‘totalizing’ behaviour is hypothesized to have
emerged in concert with the emergence of full linguistic capabilities (Dunbar 2009), as the
formation of human worldviews is deeply interconnected with the formation of the lin-
guistic domain itself (Underhill 2009). The ramifications of this speculation suggests that
‘big history’ as a symbolic activity could in some form represent a cultural archetype of
human worldviews that is at least as old as the emergence of modern humans (*150 to 200
thousand years ago) (e.g. White et al. 2003; McDougall et al. 2005).
However the early origins of academic big history in the modern Western tradition can
be found in the construction of empirically based cosmic narratives. These types of his-
tories from various scientific and philosophical perspectives started to emerge in the
nineteenth century (e.g. Chambers 1844; Humboldt 1845; Fiske 1874; Spencer 1896) with
the early development of modern evolutionary thinking (e.g. Darwin 1794; Lamarck 1809;
Darwin 1859,1871; Wallace 1871; Butler 1887). Early big history narratives—like many
of the narratives constructed by religious, spiritual, and philosophical perspectives in pre-
modern cultures—were always concerned with the human relationship to life and the
cosmos as a whole. In these works central questions regarding the origins of the universe,
life, and mind were often presented and explored, but the lack of a firm empirical
grounding in the knowledge and theory of many subjects prevented the coherence of any
testable scientific model. Thus the early study of big history, as well as the formulation of
cosmic evolution, failed to mature or gain widespread academic credibility in the nine-
teenth century (Dick 2009b). Even throughout the early twentieth century there were only a
few works that can be seen as important precursors to the contemporary subject (e.g.
Bergson 1911; Wells 1920; Shapley 1930).
The last half of the twentieth century was characterized by a noticeable increase in
large-scale interdisciplinary big history work than ever before. In retrospect, the discovery
of the big bang in 1964 appears fundamental and crucial to the development of big history
as we know it today. The big bang allowed for a real beginning to a cosmological narrative,
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as well as an empirical way to understand the connections between the worlds of cos-
mology, physics, and astronomy, and the worlds of chemistry, geology, biology, anthro-
pology, sociology, psychology, cybernetics, economics, and history (e.g. McGill 1972;
Sagan 1977; Cloud 1978; Jantsch 1980; Chaisson 1981; Poundstone 1985; Reeves 1985;
Christian 1991). Also important were the first NASA images of the Earth from space [e.g.
‘‘Earthrise’’ (1968) and ‘‘Blue Marble’’ (1972)], which allowed humanity to see the whole
planet for the first time, and reflect on our place within the cosmos with ‘new eyes’. In this
historical intellectual environment astronomer Carl Sagan’s introduction of ‘‘The Cosmic
Calendar’’ (1977, p. 8) marks an important symbolic moment; as this metaphor captured a
clear pattern marked with a connected, directional, and accelerating set of cosmic ‘events’
from ‘particles to people’.
The modern form of big history, in its attempt to become a rigorous academic disci-
pline, is formulating a common conceptual framework that can be used to understand the
whole of nature. Although no common framework currently exists contemporary
researchers have tended to place particular emphasis on energy flow as a necessary com-
ponent of physical change and structural complexity (Niele 2005; Spier 2005; Chaisson
2011a,b), information processing as a source of functional variation and organizing
complexity (Smith and Szathma
´ry 1995; Corning 2005; Lloyd 2006), and complexity,
which can be understood as a measure of the relationships between distinct but connected
parts interacting within an integrated whole (Heylighen 2000; Davies 2013).
In this big historical system energy, and specifically the rate of energy flow utilized for
internal work, is seen as important in enabling higher associative interactions. This
essentially means that material complexity typically comes at an energy cost, and mea-
suring the density of energy flow that can be maintained by a physical object or living
subject, gives us an approximate understanding of its structural complexity. Information
also plays a dominant role in big history by allowing us to understand changing patterns in
all physical processes and the functional ability of information processors to reduce
uncertainty by increasing knowledge of their environment. From this perspective the
emergence of information processors: entities that develop a subject-object relation, or
input–output function, remain fundamental to understanding how functional organizations
emerge to purposefully maintain and direct energy flows with greater autonomy from
physical and chemical processes devoid of subjects. Consequently, there is a clear break or
divide in the history of the universe between living systems (or autopoietic self-main-
taining/organizing systems) and physical systems. Living systems have an internalized
subjective relationship (self) to the larger object (environment) within which they exist,
making their behaviour a process of goal and value formation emerging from that subject-
object interaction/tension.
Big historians also need to focus on the general evolution of all processes in the local
universe. In this attempt there is a conceptual emphasis on a general systems framework,
which understands the universe as a nested and hierarchical metasystem of organizations
from the microscopic level (e.g. subatomic particles, atoms, molecules, etc.) to the
macroscopic level (e.g. organisms, ecosystems, civilizations, etc.). In this general systems
approach it is not the substrate that matters but rather the organization of substrates, i.e. the
functional (cybernetic) process of the substrate to maintain organization, and the (evolu-
tionary) mechanisms of its change over time. To understand the evolution of complexity
within these systems emphasis is placed on differentiation as a property of subsystem
variation within a larger metasystem (Heylighen 2000; Stewart 2000,2014), as well as
integration as a property of subsystem interconnection within a larger metasystem (Turchin
1977; Smith and Szathma
´ry 1995).
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The evolutionary-cybernetic properties of differentiation and integration are necessary
to understand the growth of complexity. This is because networked patterns of intercon-
nected distinctions inherently characterize increasingly complex systems, irrespective of
material substrate. These increasingly complex networks enable multi-level adaptive
capabilities (i.e. higher organism-environment relations) exhibiting emergent properties
that are completely absent at lower levels of organization. Thus by studying the way
differentiation and integration have progressed via new forms of cooperation big historians
can identify commonality in the evolutionary processes that enabled continuous local
development of hierarchical ordered levels. From this conceptual framework we can start
to build a comprehensive view of the local universe as a region of ever-complexifying
relationships, which produce new levels of organization facilitated by higher levels of
awareness, and consequently, new living system goals and values in relation to the cosmic
object. In elucidating the complexifying connections between all historical processes we
may be able to provide a foundation for understanding both our contemporary world and
our potential future.
2.2 Three Eras
The universe has been categorized into major eras both ‘locally’ and ‘globally’. Cos-
mologists developed a universal categorization tool for classifying ‘global’ eras of the
physical universe (Table 1), whereas big historians have developed a classification scheme
for ‘local’ eras of the physical universe (Table 2). Both categorization tools are based
around the concepts and perceived relationships between disorder/order and simplic-
ity/complexity. The global classification of the universe is composed of five major tem-
poral eras based on known (as well as by projected) thermodynamically defined matter-
energy regimes. These eras include the Primordial, Stelliferous, Degenerate, Black Hole,
and Dark eras respectively (Adams and Laughlin 1999) (Table 1). All of these eras can be
seen as the product of the quantity and inherent physical relationship between gravita-
tionally attractive and repulsive forces (Davies 2013).
The universe is approximately 13.772 ±0.059 Gyr (Bennett et al. 2012). Consequently
the human species currently finds itself in the Stelliferous era (Adams and Laughlin 1999).
This era is characterized as the only temporal region to play host to star formation
(Laughlin et al. 1997), and may therefore be the only era inhabited by complex information
processing entities (Linde 1988; Krauss and Starkman 2004;C
´irkovic
´2004), at least as we
know them (see Adams and Laughlin 1999). In the Primordial era life would have been
unlikely or even impossible considering that only basic molecular elements like hydrogen
and helium existed. Likewise, in the Degenerate era life will either have become extinct or
Table 1 Five eras of the global physical universe
Primordial era Big bang (0)—1 million years A.B (10
5
)
Stelliferous era 1 million A.B. (10
6
)—100 trillion A.B. (10
14
)
Degenerate era* 100 trillion A.B. (10
15
)—Duodecillion (10
39
)
Black hole era* Duodecillion (10
40
)—Googol (10
100
)
Dark era* Googol (10
101
) and beyond
* Projected/predicted based on physical shape, matter-energy composition, as well as the current expansion
rate
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will be clinging onto the last stable physical structures, as most large-scale objects like
planets, stars, and galaxies will be in a state of decay removing any stable platform for
living system adaptation. In the Black Hole era the universe will be entirely dominated by
physical black holes making life impossible. And finally, in the Dark era the universe will
likely exist in its final drift towards complete thermodynamic equilibrium, i.e. the end of
heterogeneous energy gradients (or: heat death).
However there is by no means universal consensus on the potential of habitable zones
post-Stelliferous era as it depends on the future resourcefulness and adaptability of living
systems (see C
´irkovic
´2003), and so we still do not know with absolute certainty whether
life will remain confined to worlds with stars. But if life is denied any habitable zone post-
Stelliferous era, and is thus pushed to extinction at the end of star formation, there is still a
large expanse of time remaining for complex life to emerge and grow (Vidal 2014b).
Several trillions of years remain in the universe to produce the structure of complexity
found on Earth. Consequently, there are also trillions of years remaining for the future of
evolution stemming from our own information processing and replication regime (see
Bostrom 2003; Armstrong and Sandberg 2013).
In contrast to the cosmologist, the big historian attempts to understand the ‘local’
universe, which has existed in three temporal phases based primarily on material rela-
tionships that can be considered ‘physical’, ‘biological’, and ‘cultural’ in terms of infor-
mational mechanisms for ordering/organizing energy flow (Aunger 2007a) (Table 2). The
first phase is called the Physical era and is characterized by the emergence of inanimate
and gravitationally ordered matter-energy (Spier 2011). During the Physical era structure
in the universe has been ordered from the gradual accumulation of heterogeneously dis-
tributed matter and dark matter via gravitational attraction (Massey et al. 2007). Therefore
all structure producing during the Physical era—galaxies, stars, planets—can be attributed
to a relatively abundant and natural source of ‘‘gravitational energy’’ (Dyson 1971;
Corning 2002b). Gravitational energy continues to dominate the universe, providing the
structural foundation for a grand and relatively uniform ‘cosmic web’: a universe-en-
compassing platform for more energy dense hierarchical processes (Massey et al. 2007;
van de Weygaert and Schaap 2009).
The second phase of big history emerged with an important transition from passively
ordered physical objects towards actively organized living systems (Thompson 2007;
Deacon 2011). Biochemists call this transition from physical to living systems ‘abiogen-
esis’: the process whereby autocatalytic chemical systems generate ‘biological’ properties
like autonomous (self-) growth, maintenance, and reproduction (Pross and Pascal 2013).
To maintain these properties living systems are fundamentally distinct from physical
systems in their ability to control available energy gradients and distribute and direct them
towards processes necessary for their own continued presence (Corning 2002b,2007).
Therefore, the transition from physical to living systems is a shift towards systems with
Table 2 Three eras of the local physical universe
Physical era *13.8 billion years B.P. —*4.0 billion years B.P.
Biological era *4.0 billion years B.P.—*2.0 million years B.P.
Cultural era *2.0 billion years B.P.—present
The local matter-energy phases of big history occur in three major era based around new means of forming
structures and transmitting information
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internal information processing capabilities and information reproduction (inheritance)
capabilities (Aunger 2007b). Once these replicating biochemical systems achieved a
dynamic stability with their environment (i.e. persistence) (see Pross and Pascal 2013), we
entered a world of constructed functionality (Corning 2002b).
The functional behaviour of living systems seems to be produced by cybernetic pro-
cesses of goal-directed control and feedback between organisms and their environment to
maintain existence (Corning 2005). This means that all living systems must by dynamically
embedded or embodied in their environment, allowing them to define context-dependent
functional survival and reproduction goals, as well as overcome challenges in relationship
with their socioecological circumstances (Heylighen 2014b). As a result, all living systems
define, either perceptually or conceptually, boundaries between internal organization and
the environment. These boundaries serve the dual function of protecting achieved internal
organization (i.e. ‘self’) as well as enabling further growth and learning from interaction
with the environment (i.e. active knowledge construction), the latter of which is bounded
only by finite available energy and the internal cognitive information processing capa-
bilities of the living system. From this perspective the life history of biological systems can
be defined by this process of controlling available energy and directing it intelligently
towards goals and values that have a biological or cultural relation to survival, growth, and
reproduction (i.e. ‘fitness’) (Kaplan and Gangestad 2005).
The third phase of big history can generally be defined by the emergence of conceptual
awareness, as well as conscious awareness of other minds (i.e. groups of organisms with a
‘theory of mind’). Although many species today display forms of perceptual awareness
(Bermu
´dez 2009), it seems likely that humans are the only modern species with a com-
prehensive conceptual understanding of self and existence through symbol (Heyes 1998;
Call and Tomasello 2008; Penn et al. 2008). This can be most saliently recognized in
analyzing the human/non-human animal difference in conceptualizing death (e.g. Teleki
1973; Nakamichi et al. 1996; Hosaka et al. 2000; Warren and Williamson 2004; Anderson
et al. 2010; Biro et al. 2010). The human mind is the only known type of mind with the
reflexive capability to understand its own finite existence—both our gift and our curse (see
Cave 2012)—as coming to terms with our own mortality often proves fundamentally
challenging for most humans, but also is an important component in what makes the
human experience the human experience (Heidegger 1962).
The origin of the human mind is likely an origin deeply intertwined with the origin and
structural order of the human symbol system as manifest in the linguistic code (Dunbar
2009). The animal kingdom is full of phylogenetically diverse organisms that display
complex social learning capabilities and express simple cultural behaviours (Laland and
Hoppitt 2003). Notable examples include chimpanzees (Whiten et al. 1999; Boesch 2003),
bonobos (Hohmann and Fruth 2003), gorillas (Breuer et al. 2005), orangutans (van Schaik
et al. 2003), capuchin monkeys (Fragaszy et al. 2004; Ottoni and Izar 2008), whales
(Garland et al. 2011; Rendell and Whitehead 2001), dolphins (Patterson and Mann 2011;
Mann et al. 2012), various species of bird (Freeberg 1998; Hunt and Gray 2003; West et al.
2003; Williams et al. 2013), along with several other mammals, and even fish (see Free-
berg 2000; Laland and Hoppitt 2003). But humans alone possess a symbol system struc-
tured by a universal grammar with the capability of generating the reflective and
conceptual narrative, as well as adaptive cultural behaviours and artifacts with an inde-
pendent evolutionary trajectory (Marks 2002). Therefore language enabled both a theory of
mind (Dunbar 2009), as well as ratcheting ‘‘cumulative culture’’ (Tennie et al. 2009;
Tomasello and Herrmann 2010).
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These big historical eras can be unified by the local trend of rising complexity from the
first simple galaxies to the emergence of global human civilization. From the perspective
of complexity as a relational property of increasing distinctions and connections evolving
in systems with multiple levels of organization we see this process of rising complexity as
both interconnected and accelerating from the big bang towards the present moment. For
example galaxies, the first large-scale phenomena to emerge, were diffuse gaseous bodies
composed of mostly hydrogen, helium, and lithium atomic systems, which differentiated
through the gravitational integration of chemical compounds into more complex con-
stituents like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, etc. in the center of stellar bodies. However,
stars gave birth to more complex planetary bodies, which diversify towards a new inte-
gration in the structure of geological formations. In turn, geological structures composed
the substrate for the emergence of living systems. Living systems are more complex than
any known physical systems, as they are composed of differentiated constituents that must
be specifically located and expressed within integrated networks composed of millions and
billions of molecules.
This trend of increasingly complex interrelationships has reached its highest expression
within modern human civilization. Human civilization is an extremely complex entity
which requires not only the stable platform of a home galaxy, star, and planet, but also the
stable functioning of single-celled organisms, organelles, organs, individuals, groups,
societies, states, and international entities (Miller 1978). All of these nested and hierar-
chical systems exhibit higher levels of differentiated constituents (at the atomic, molecular,
cellular, neuronal, and societal, etc. levels) functionally adapted to operate within inte-
grated networks. Thus with the emergence of physical objects, living systems, and aware
minds, there has been an increase in complexity, which has progressed with the arrow of
time in a clear event-based directionality.
From the growth of complexity hierarchically structured interrelationships have allowed
for emergent platforms of new dynamic actions and re-actions in approximately six levels
from the atomic to the superorganismal (Table 3). These new actions and re-actions
possess properties that were completely absent at lower levels of organization, and enable
future complexity and possibility that cannot be predicted or anticipated precisely. This
means that not only is the whole more than the sum of its parts, but also that the whole is
completely different than the sum of its parts (Anderson 1972). In other words, as a system
becomes more complex, the quantity of possible interrelationships may increase, but also
new qualities of interrelationships can emerge, that simply did not exist previously. For
Table 3 Levels of hierarchical complexity
Atomic Relationships that occur only through simple subatomic and atomic systems (e.g. quarks,
gluons, electrons, hydrogen, helium)
Molecular Relationships that occur through the aggregation of chemical elements (e.g. amino acids,
polymers)
Cellular Relationships that occur through networks of simple single-cellular life forms (e.g.
prokaryotes, eukaryotes)
Multicellular Relationships that occur through networks of interconnected cellular bodies (e.g.
animals, plants, fungi)
Societal Relationships that occur through networks of individual multicellular organisms (e.g.
groups, family/kin)
Superorganismal Relationships that occur through networks of groups (e.g. colonies, kingdoms, nations)
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example, throughout the evolution of humanity from our foraging organizations to our still
developing global organization, there has been an obvious quantitative increase in the
number of interrelationships that occur between humans, but this rise in quantity has also
been coupled with an emergent qualitative dimension of interrelationships, like being able
to interconnect with people from anywhere in the world, irrespective of spatial or temporal
constraints (an unimaginable property for pre-historical and most historical humans).
However, throughout the emergence of hierarchical levels of complexity we can say
that only a minority of systems that reach a particular level are able to then develop
conditions for further complexification. This simply means that most systems within the
atomic level do not form molecular systems, and that most molecular systems do not
develop cellular systems, and so forth. For example, although the ‘cellular’ level emerged
over *3.5 billion years ago, most living forms on our planet today have remained at the
cellular level, and only a minority increased towards the multicellular level. The same goes
for the ‘superorganismal’ level, which emerged tens of millions of years ago, but, with the
exception of human civilization, is composed of organizations (e.g. ants, termites, bees,
naked mole rats, etc.), which cannot further diversify to form higher levels of integration
(Morris 2013). In other words, non-human superorganisms appear to be ‘dead ends’ in
terms of the further growth of complexity.
The difference between the human superorganism and other superorganisms is cultural:
culture enabled humans to evolve the ability to consciously organize information with
symbols (as opposed to organizing with biochemical mechanisms). Thus the human phe-
nomenon gives the appearance of a phenomenon capable of both higher (symbolic)
diversification and (sociopolitical) integration. However, this general property of only a
small subset of higher systems being able to develop further complexity appears to be a
necessary pre-condition for hierarchical complexity, because the higher levels of organi-
zation often depend on the lower levels of organization for their stable existence. We can
once again demonstrate this property within the human superorganism, which was only
able to emerge from the societal (foraging) level through the domestication of plants and
animals during the agricultural revolution (i.e. we are dependent on the lower levels of
complexity to maintain our own higher complexity) (Last 2015).
This hierarchical complexification process appears to be produced by a higher infor-
mation processing capability, which in turn allows individuals to diversify and collaborate
in new configurations with more agents, enabling the exploitation and control of higher and
denser flows of energy, and the exploration of new modes of integration. Consequently,
many big historians quantify this local trend towards higher complexity with the Energy
Rate Density (ERD) metric (e.g. Chaisson 2001,2011a,b). The ERD metric can be defined
by energy (erg) flowing through non-equilibrium systems, controlled for both time (s
-1
)
and mass (g
-1
) (Vidal 2010; Spier 2011). The quantification of local energy flow has
increased legitimacy for the often proposed hypothesis that energy has played some fun-
damental role in the evolution of higher structure and complexity (e.g. Lamarck 1809;
Boltzmann 1886; Spencer 1896; Lotka 1922; Schro
¨dinger 1944; White 1949; Morowitz
1968; Dyson 1971; Prigogine et al. 1972a,b; Smil 1994; Spier 1996).
However, we obviously cannot reduce complexity to energy flow, which is to say that
energy does not in any way dictate living system order/organization or explain the
emergence of higher organization (see Corning 2002b). Energy plays a fundamental role in
natural structure, but the nature of information and the relational properties of how
organisms use information is of equal importance (see Corning 2007), if not greater
importance (see Smart 2009; Gershenson 2012). The dynamic informational pattern, or
fundamental substance of a living subject ultimately enables the flexible and active
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construction of an organism’s self-created world, whereas energy may only be involved in
presenting the subject with certain constraints or opportunities that may be either overcome
or exploited depending on will and context. The problem with analyzing information as a
complexity metric is that there is no practically useful method for quantifying the infor-
mation processing capabilities of subjects, i.e. the living ‘users’, ‘actors’, or ‘beings’ of the
universe (Lineweaver et al. 2013b). The originally formulated theory of information—
Shannon information theory—suggests that one can quantify information processing by
measuring messages between senders and receivers (see Shannon 1948; Shannon and
Weaver 1949). However, the obvious problem with this measure is that quantifying
messages completely ignores the contextual and meaning-laden nature, in other words the
subjective nature, of functional biological and biocultural communication (Kauffman
2000; Logan 2014). Consequently, in reality there is no correlation between Shannon
Information and living system order (Corning 2007).
The subjective nature of information control has led some to assert that an objective and
universal measure of information will prove elusive (Maturana and Varela 1980; Hey-
lighen and Joslyn 2001), and will certainly not be found in a reductive framework (Morin
2007). However, there have been attempts to measure biotic information in a non-reductive
framework (e.g. Corning 2007; Kauffman et al. 2007; Gershenson 2012; Ferna
`ndez et al.
2013), although many still view ERD as the most useful general complexity metric over
the course of cosmic evolution (for more information about ERD see Chaisson 2001). In
the future, there should be progress in this area of understanding local universe complexity,
partly because it seems critical to understanding the future of twenty-first century human
civilization. However, for now we should emphasize that the ‘three eras’ of ordered and
organizing complexity, which have led to the emergence of physical order, living systems,
and aware conceptual beings, share an overarching informational unity in increasing dis-
tinctions and connections. In this trend towards increasingly complex material relations we
see the power of cosmic evolution.
2.3 Three Evolutionary Processes
Cosmic evolutionary theory unifies the narrative of big history by utilizing the idea of
‘evolution’ in a hyper-generalized way (Baker 2013). Evolution in cosmic evolution refers
generally to change over time in any physical system in the universe (Chaisson 2009b).
The changing variation could be developmental, generational, or in real-time, as well as
physical, biological, or cultural (Smart 2009), with non-random selection ‘targets’ in
biological and cultural evolution operating at multiple levels of organization (Corning
2005; Burtsev and Turchin 2006), from genes to superorganisms (Ho
¨lldobler and Wilson
2008; Stewart 2014). The only real constraint placed on evolution in this context is that it
must be applied to open and non-equilibrium systems (Chaisson 2011a). This means that
evolution is a concept applicable to all systems that interact with an environment and
possess ordered or organizing properties. In this sense, cosmic evolution offers a theo-
retical framework that can unify all sciences (Chaisson 2003,2013) and piece together the
cosmic evolutionary connections from particles to people (Sagan 1973; Dick 2009b).
Throughout cosmic evolution physical, biological, and cultural evolution has emerged
in a directional process with the arrow of time (Chaisson 2009a). The first evolution was a
developmental gravitational process that allowed subatomic particles like quarks to bond
as the universe first began its expansion. As the universe continued to expand, it cooled,
and the force of gravity became a universal material attractor creating levels of structural
order in a hierarchical fashion (Springel et al. 2005). Subatomic particles formed baryons,
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which captured electrons to form the first hydrogen, helium, and lithium atoms (Trefil
2013). These simple atoms formed within the structural edifice of dark matter (presum-
ably), allowing for the formation of proto-galaxies (Loeb and Furlanetto 2013). Further
intensification of this gravitational process led to the generation of the first stars, which
provided the densities and temperatures necessary for the generation of more complex
chemicals like carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen (Impey 2007).
The emergence of the first stars ignited a new evolutionary mechanism: physical evo-
lution based on developmental and generational change, not only because of the continued
expansion of space, but also because second and third generation stars had more diverse
chemical materials for the construction of solar systems (i.e. stars with rocky and gaseous
planetary bodies) (Impey 2007). Solar systems represent a new type of order in the uni-
verse due to both the increased diversity of chemical arrangements and also the new
ordered forms that provide a platform for further evolutionary processes (Spier 2011).
The most complex structural entities constructed by physical evolution, i.e. stars and
planets, go through both developmental and generational changes based on gravitational
attraction and chemical variation (Chaisson 2009a). However, with the advent of biological
evolution we see the emergence of a new type of evolution, which encompasses devel-
opmental and generational change, but also generational selection (Corning 2002b)
(Table 3). Individual biological entities change in time (developmental), they change as
they replicate (generational), but the success of the next generation in terms of survival and
reproduction is naturally selected by socioecological environmental factors (Gould 2002).
As a result, biological evolution operates on the fundamental basis of genetic variation and
the selection of that variation in relation to environmental conditions (Ruse and Travis
2009). A population of replicating genes must sustain their own metabolic activity, but due
to scarcity of available energy, there will also be variation in how well individuals within a
population of biochemical entities can achieve this end (Kaplan and Gangestad 2005).
Selection then acts as a computation-like information processor maintaining specified
functional complexity for work related to energy protection, acquisition, and distribution
(Corning 2002b).
Throughout biological evolution a remarkable degree of complex biological organiza-
tion has emerged (Smith and Szathma
´ry 1995,2000; Stewart 2014). This complexity is the
result of billions of years of replicating chemical competition and cooperation structured
within genetic codes (Corning 2005). Although selection itself is notoriously non-direc-
tional in terms of simplicity/complexity only seeking to maximize fitness depending on
environmental context (see Gould 1996), the benefits of synergistic cooperative behaviour
can be selected in certain environments (i.e. cooperation can outcompete competition) at
all levels of biological organization (see Corning 2005). As a result, the evolutionary
process as a whole tends to build and stabilize higher structural complexity over time, even
though selection itself is not biased in any particular simplicity/complexity direction
(Stewart 2014). Biological organizations accomplish higher structural complexity with the
selection for bio-energetic information technologies that increase their ability to efficiently
capture and distribute energy (Corning 2002b). Several theorists have identified that the
major transitions in the evolutionary process (e.g. abiogenesis, eukaryotes, multicellularity,
etc.) can be correlated with significant advances in the functional ability to process and
reproduce information (see Smith and Szathma
´ry 1995), and the structural capabilities to
regulate energy flow (see Niele 2005). These innovations enable the emergence of bio-
logical organizations that drift further away from thermodynamic equilibrium (Aunger
2007a,b), with the use of sophisticated information-based controls on organization
(Turchin 1977; Corning 2002b,2007).
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Throughout the great majority of Earth history, biological evolution alone organized
matter-energy into new functions and structures. This changed with the rise of the genus
Homo *2 million years ago, as early humans acquired the unique ability to engage in the
cultural evolutionary process (Richerson and Boyd 2008). Unlike biological evolution,
which operates on the generational selection of functional chemical information structured
by the genome, cultural evolution operates on the real-time selection of functional sym-
bolic information structured by language (Deacon 1997; Marks 2002) (Table 3). As a
consequence, biological structures like genes, chromosomes, and genomes—as well as
cultural structures like ideas, theories, and worldviews—are subject to evolutionary
selection pressures in humans. This functional symbolic information can produce both
adaptive behaviours and adaptive technology (Caldwell and Millen 2008). Therefore,
culture is code for inner conceptual experience, outward conceptual behaviour, as well as
code for technological structures; in the same way that biochemicals code for inner per-
ceptual experience, outwards perceptual behaviours, as well as code for biological struc-
tures. As a result, organisms subject to cultural evolution are not just in competition and
cooperation for energy based on perceptual sensory knowledge of the universe, but also
conceptual abstract knowledge (Logan 2007). In modern human civilization adaptive
complexity is predominantly cultural, as opposed to biological. This means that for human
civilizations, energy control and distribution primarily depends on forms of cultural
selection, not biological selection (Last 2014a).
Cultural evolution vastly accelerates the speed of the evolutionary process because
cultural beings can ‘save’ socioecological and subjective conceptual knowledge acquired
in real-time, as well as store and transmit information learned in real-time faithfully across
many generations using symbols (Tomasello et al. 1993; Laland 2008) (Table 4). Like
selection for chemical information in biological evolution, selection for symbolic infor-
mation has no inherent direction within individual cultural beings. Instead, change is
always flexibly produced in relationship to socioecologies (and/or socioeconomies).
However, selection for more complex cultural information (experiential, behavioural, and
technical) can collectively take a progressive directional quality within a cultural society.
This will be dependent almost entirely on the behaviour and relationship of societal
controls (e.g. state structures/institutions) on the flow of/access to information, and the
technical medium utilized for the storage and transmission of the linguistic code (e.g.
Table 4 Three evolutions
Physical evolution Developmental
Generational
Biological evolution Developmental
Generational
Selection (generational)
Cultural evolution Developmental
Generational
Selection (generational)
Selection (real-time)
The big history of the universe has seen the emergence of three evolutionary change mechanisms. Each
mechanism accelerates the speed of the evolutionary process, allowing for the emergence of ever-more
complex structures in ever-shorter periods of time
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writing, printing press, telecommunications, internet) (Last 2015). As a general principle,
the more faithfully a society can store and transmit cultural information between cultural
beings and across cultural generations, the less functional cultural information is lost (i.e.
‘backward slippage’), and the easier it becomes for any given cultural collective to build
upon the complexity of inherited cultural knowledge (i.e. ‘ratcheting’) (Tennie et al. 2009).
In this sense, the speed of cultural change is a rough function of the qualitative efficiency
and quantitative number of conversations (i.e. idea sharing/sex) being conducted within
and between individuals and populations (Ridley 2010).
From a cosmic evolutionary perspective, one of the primary differences between bio-
logical and cultural evolution fundamentally remains in the reproduction capability and
pathway (see Last 2014a). Biological evolution is a mature and independent process that
does not require culture to exist. In contrast, cultural evolution is still very much a young
and dependent process, requiring biological mechanisms to exist. This of course makes all
of human evolution biocultural, and not simply biological or cultural (Marks 2012,2013).
There are no cultural beings that come into existence and remain in existence without the
aid of a biological substrate. Consequently, all cultural beings are the ultimate products of
biological reproduction and a chemically based genetic code, as opposed to the ultimate
product of cultural reproduction and a symbolic linguistic code (Last 2014a). However, we
do already see the signs that cultural evolution, or the reproduction of symbolic code, will
not necessarily remain dependent on a biological substrate indefinitely. The future of
cultural evolution could be the attainment of a stage of independent maturity in the same
way biological evolution earned its own independence from physical evolution (see
Sect. 3.2).
The second crucial difference between biological and cultural evolution appears in a
distinction between the fundamental natures of each process. In biological evolution there
is an endless and aimless differentiation of biological subjects whose future struggles and
trajectories are independent. In other words there is a struggle of genes, individuals,
species, etc. within the biological order, but the biological order itself is not in a struggle
towards any ‘common whole’ or ‘common direction’ (Gould 2002). Instead the biological
order is simply and unconsciously becoming more diverse for as long as the cycle is able to
continue (for more: Sect. 2.4), without leading towards any internal closure of the process.
In contrast, in cultural evolution there appears a shared ground between all participating
biocultural subjects whose future struggles and trajectories are not only dependent but
increasingly dependent as if converging towards a common whole. In other words, there is
a struggle of ideas, theories, and worldviews within the symbolic order, but this struggle is
an increasingly conscious struggle for the universality of the symbolic order itself. Thus in
the cultural evolutionary context progressive symbolic diversification does give the signal
of approaching an internal closure of the process itself (the opposite of biological
evolution).
2.4 The End of Order?
The three eras and evolutionary processes of big history help us to organize and understand
vast periods of time that connect seemingly unrelated phenomena into one interrelated
process contextualizing the existence of modern humans in the twenty-first century.
However, what can this insight tell us about the overall trend and patterns of cosmic
evolution into the deep future?
The likely future of the Physical and Biological eras is to some extent well known, or at
least seemingly simple to extrapolate. Of course, Earth’s biological complexity is
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dependent on local physical complexity, and so the Biological era’s future is intricately
dependent on the future of our own solar system. Our home star, the Sun, is approximately
4.567 billion years old (Connelly et al. 2012), and is in the middle of a 10 billion years
‘main-sequence’ phase characterized by hydrogen fusion (Beech 2008). Over the course of
the main sequence phase the Sun’s luminosity and radius will gradually increase on
geologic and astronomical timescales as its hydrogen reserves are steadily exhausted
(Ribas 2009). This process will result in Earth developing a Venus-like atmosphere in
*3 billion years (Franck et al. 2005).
In this hypothesized future, biological life has a gloomy ultimate fate. Throughout the
evolution of life history there have been major transitions towards increased complexity
with the emergence of prokaryotes, eukaryotes, and multicellular eukaroytes (i.e. plants,
animals, fungi) (Stewart 2014). These forms of life evolved in a directional order:
prokaryotes (3.5 Gyr) (Bada and Lazcano 2009), eukaryotes (2.0 Gyr) (Tomitani et al.
2006), multicellular eukaryotes (1–0.5 Gyr) (Knoll et al. 2006; Grosberg and Strathmann
2007). Current models suggest that, as our Sun’s luminosity and radius increase, increased
energy inputs will disrupt Earth’s carbon cycle, causing several intensive, successive, and
irreversible disturbances in complex life’s ability to survive (O’Malley-James et al. 2013).
This is hypothesized to cause the extinction of major forms of life in reverse chronological
order to their original appearance: multicellular eukaryotes (0.8 Gyr), eukaroytes (1.3 Gyr),
prokaryotes (1.6 Gyr) (Franck et al. 2005). Therefore, Earth will possess an atmosphere
with astrobiological ‘Earth-like’ qualities for a relatively brief period of its overall exis-
tence (*2 billion years) (Brownlee 2010). However, depending on prokaryotic adaptive
resilience (which seems to be quite high), these simple life forms could exist as many as
2.8 billion years into Earth’s future (O’Malley-James et al. 2013). That still leaves a couple
billion years for our planet to boil back to a lifeless hell (i.e. gloomy ultimate fate).
The future of the Physical era proves to be even gloomier. In our local universe the Sun
will eventually enter its ‘red giant’ phase largely driven by higher rates of helium fusion
(i.e. our star will finally exhaust its available ‘fuel’) (Beech 2008). Current estimates
suggest that this could occur around 5–8 billion years from the present (Boothroyd and
Juliana Sackmann 1999; Schro
¨der and Smith 2007). In its red giant phase, the Sun will
swell in diameter to *2 astronomical units (AU), eventually consuming Mercury, Venus,
and most likely Earth (Rybicki and Denis 2001). However, the Sun will not explode in a
supernova. Instead, it is likely to enter a short 10 thousand year phase as a planetary
nebula, ejecting ionized gas into its surrounding spatial medium (Bloecker 1995). After
this phase, the Sun will finally settle into a cool white dwarf phase, which could survive for
trillions of years before eventually burning out entirely (Bloecker 1995; Veras et al. 2014).
It is amazing to consider the possibility that the majority of the Sun’s life may be spent in
such an alien form.
During the Sun’s stellar development, our solar system will be undergoing a larger
galactic transformation. Currently our solar system exists within the Milky Way galaxy: a
barred spiral galaxy composed of 200–400 billion stars (Gerhard 2002), at least 200–400
billion planets (Cassan et al. 2012), and a *100 to 120 thousand light year diameter
(Gerhard 2002). However, in *4 billion years the Milky Way will collide with its closest
neighbouring galaxy, Andromeda, producing ‘Milkomeda’ an elliptical galaxy predicted to
be composed of *1 trillion stars (Cox and Loeb 2007; Cowen 2012; Goldsmith 2012).
Throughout the Milky Way-Andromeda collision our solar system should remain undis-
turbed. However, the collision is likely to affect our system’s position vis-a
`-vis the galactic
core (Cox and Loeb 2007).
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In the deeper future of the Stelliferous era (i.e. 1–10 trillion years) most or all galactic
structures in Laniakea, our home supercluster of galaxies (see Brent Tulley et al. 2014;
Gibney 2014) will eventually merge with Milkomeda as an even larger elliptical galaxy
(Adams and Laughlin 1997). During this time all galaxies external to the Local Group will
recede from our local universe’s horizon (Loeb 2011). Towards the end of the Stelliferous
era and the beginnings of the Degenerate era (Table 1) only planets, white dwarfs, and
neutron stars will remain (Adams and Laughlin 1997). This will likely mark the end of life,
and the beginning of the universe’s practically infinite descent into thermodynamic
equilibrium (Adams and Laughlin 1999). Although, it must be noted that this future for
physical evolution is dependent on the nature of the dark universe (i.e. dark matter and
energy): two very important somethings comprising 95.1 % of our universe (Ade et al.
2013), but whose nature(s) remain largely mysterious (see Livio 2010). The range of
speculation on the nature of dark matter and energy is beyond the scope of this paper,
however it is safe to say that a deeper understanding of these currently missing components
of the cosmic picture will affect our understanding of the deep future of the physical
universe, and maybe the living universe too.
Extrapolating our current understanding of the universe leaves little room for optimism.
A future with no structure or available energy is a future with no complexity, no infor-
mation processing and replication, no humanity, and no mind. This has had a profoundly
negative and very real psychological affect on the consciousness of the scientific mind, and
particularly the Western scientific mind. Our vision has been trapped by the abstract
concept of entropy. We cannot imagine a hope in the enterprise of life. Throughout the
modern world, we have had to come to terms with a strange type of cosmic nihilism, a
perspective captured well by philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell (1903, p. 7):
All the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday
brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction…The whole temple of Man’s
achievements must inevitably by buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.
Cyberneticist Norbert Wiener famously echoed Russell’s basic sentiments (1950, p. 40):
It is a foregone conclusion that the lucky accident which permits the continuation of
life in any form on this earth, even without restricting life to something like human
life, is bound to come to a complete and disastrous end. […] In a very real sense we
are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet. We shall go down, but let it be in a
manner to which we may look forward as worthy of our dignity.
But can we say for certain that life has no hope in the deep future? Could the decisions and
actions of agents with purposive knowledge derived from higher goals and values have
something constructive to say about the end of the universe? We often discuss the deep
future as if life and intelligence will not be an active part of it: intelligent thought and
action as shaping and directing the future (e.g. Wheeler 1988). After all: ‘‘life and
intelligence are the wildcards in the universal deck.’’ (McKenna 1994). In this framework,
when we discuss the deep future of cosmic evolution, the most recent emergent era of
human awareness, and the most recent emergent evolution of cultural evolution, must be
seriously contemplated as playing a fundamental role. Cultural evolution is still increasing
complexity in the universe via the development of more advanced information
technologies, and the regulation of denser energy flows. Cultural evolution is also still
capable of engaging in the major trends of evolving complexity towards higher integration
(connections) through higher diversification (distinctions).
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Therefore, if we are going to find optimism in the deep future we can say that cultural
evolution presents us with a process that gives the appearance of the ‘leading edge’ of
complex growth: a process that could still develop into an emergent possibility space that
many have not factored into models of the deep future. However, despite detailed
knowledge of the future biosphere and solar system, we have a remarkably poor under-
standing of the deep future potential of culture as both a creative process and as an
evolutionary mechanism to change the future nature of both biological and physical
evolution (see Vidal 2014b). The way forward is clear: we must develop an understanding
of the nature and potential future of the cultural evolutionary pathway, what is being
termed ‘‘cosmic culture’’ (see Dick and Lupisella 2009). The symbols of the cultural
evolutionary pathway shape our behaviour and conceptions, and allow us to construct
technological product. Understanding cosmic culture could offer us an alternative glimpse
of the future of universe, life, and mind. After all: ‘‘One of the main purposes of science is
to investigate the future evolution of life in the universe.’’ (Linde 1988, p. 29).
3 Human Future
Since the symbols of culture influence our behaviour and our conceptions, an analysis of
the human future related to cultural evolution must start with an analysis of the symbolic
reproduction of archetypal future visions. Historically, the human future has always cap-
tivated our imagination, and has always existed as a temporal conception. However, there
are few historical examples within any pre-modern subculture of archetypal higher
futures—meaning more ordered, peaceful, free—manifesting in the secular domain. For
pre-modern historical cultures, a higher future on earth was impossible (or, more properly,
not seriously representable in symbol) as our world was instead often conceptualized as a
world of material scarcity and brutal violence with no sociopolitical or technological
mechanism of escape. Thus, many pre-modern human societies typically conceived of
civilization as in a cosmic cyclical state, e.g. Hindu-influenced Indian society, or the Maya
of Central America are two classical examples. In these civilizations, there was no clear
directional historical progress in the worldly sense: history was a cosmic trap between
heaven (i.e. higher world) and hell (i.e. lower world). Consequently, many great cultures
reasoned that a higher future was only possible within the domain of supernature and
impossible to realize on secular humanistic terms (e.g. most notably: Christians, Muslims,
etc.). Of course, there are some important exceptions to this generalization about envi-
sioning higher secular futures, but large-scale cultural dedication to a qualitatively higher
future on Earth seems to have been almost completely absent in pre-modern thinking.
This pre-modern notion of existing in a historical trap changed dramatically with the
emergence of the ‘early modern’ (*1500 to 1750) and ‘modern’ (*1750 to 2000) periods
of human history. Modernity is a traditional period of historical classification generally
defined by the emergence of a social and intellectual reliance on the scientific method,
empiricism, and rationality (Baird and Kaufmann 2008). Modernists believed that utilizing
science and building a worldview around evidence and reason, were essential for con-
quering the natural world, superstition, and the ultimate secular goal: freeing humanity
from biological and material constraints (Tucker 1972). From this tradition, the idea that
the human world may not be a world of scarcity and war forever, started to become a
humanist dream increasingly tethered to the possibility of realization.
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This development is by necessity a Western-centric construction of history, as advances
in technology (e.g. printing press, industry) within specific European contexts, enabled the
flourishing of modernist thought. In big historical terms, new information and energy
dynamics provided a higher possibility space for the flow of new cultural ideas and theories
identifying an emerging secular direction. This direction was/is often measured in terms of
acquiring increasing objective knowledge about the cosmos, increased material abundance
for society, and increased individual freedom from authoritarian sociopolitical structures. It
is in this context that the concept of utopia acquired a persistent and influential presence as
an attractor (e.g. More 1516), functioning to propagate future visions and new ideas for
creating a more ideal society here on Earth (i.e. the human-world relation as an unfinished
project).
Therefore, from the perspective of cultural evolution, the stable emergence of modern
science, as well as a religious-like cultural reliance on empiricism and rationality, repre-
sented the emergence of an imaginative signal in the symbolic code that a higher state was
in principle possible in this world. Philosopher Francis Bacon—a pre-eminent intellectual
figure of the scientific revolution—succinctly captured the goals of the ‘modern scientific
project’ when he articulated the nature of science as a force that could radically alter the
human future, potentially bringing about ‘‘things which have never been achieved’’ and
alter being in ways that ‘‘were unlikely to ever enter men’s minds.’’ (Bacon 1620, p. 103).
Bacon and his contemporaries dreamed of a science that, when combined with human
imagination and rigorous experimental methodology, could allow for what we may refer to
as a ‘maximum possibility space.’ He explored this idea in his own utopian novel New
Atlantis (Bacon 1626, p. 19):
The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things;
and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things
possible.
Since the scientific revolution, the modern attempt of imagining and actively creating a
higher human future here on Earth has always been an inherently scientific and rational
project. However, this project directly contradicted, and is still contradicting, traditional
theology and traditional culture more generally. Traditional cultures have tended to
imagine a higher human future only in a supernatural sense, i.e. not on Earth but in some
transcendent domain, typically post-death: life with death, not life against death. This
emergent contradiction in futures and the meaning of worldly human goals, values, and
existence has caused an ongoing intellectual tension throughout the modern period because
imagining a higher secular future required a fundamental re-organization of human thought
in regards to the relationship between humanity and God (e.g. Spinoza 1677; Leibniz 1710;
Feuerbach 1841), humanity and the cosmos (e.g. Copernicus 1543; Newton 1687),
humanity and life (e.g. Lamarck 1809; Darwin 1859; Wallace 1871), and the fundamental
structure of human society itself (e.g. Rousseau 1762; Condorcet 1795; Marx 1844); all
relationships with specific conceptualizations in Western theology (Brown 1981).
From a big historical perspective, the symbolic emergence of the modern project has
occupied almost no time at all: less than 1 s on Carl Sagan’s ‘cosmic calendar’ (Sagan
1977). In this cosmic sense, the modern project can thus be conceptualized as a type of
intellectual explosion without historical precedent. However, we can also say it is an
explosion that is still an incomplete project. The central goal of the modern project was to
completely ‘flip’ the dominant human narrative from a world where humans understand
themselves as trapped in an immutable state in relation to the rest of nature, subservient to
God(s) (or the supernatural generally), towards a world where humans understand
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themselves as in the process of overcoming nature through reason and measurement (i.e.
nature as incomplete), and ultimately towards a higher state of being and organization
(Tucker 1972):
The criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism. It culminates in the percept
that man is the supreme being of man. By exposing the God-illusion, it frees man to
revolve around himself as his real sun: ‘Religion is only the illusory sun that revolves
around man so long as he has not yet begun to revolve around himself.’ What would
it mean for man to revolve around himself?
Thus this reconceptualization of humanity took on the dimensions of a secular eschatology,
i.e. human will, as exercised through a full exploration of science and technology, was
going to produce the conditions for an ‘end’ to the state of the world and nature as modern
humanity had experienced it: the human self would be overcome and the full force of our
imaginative desires would be actualized. In other words, history became a prologue to the
main show, and the main show’s stage shifted from the heavens to the Earth (Frye 1947;
Abrams 1963; Tucker 1972). For some it would culminate in an aesthetic and transcendent
freedom of the will (Kant 1781), for others rationality would allow for the achievement of
the omniscient self and ultimate planetary human organization (Hegel 1837), for others we
would achieve biological, social, and intellectual perfection (Condorcet 1795), for others
nature would be usurped by humanistic creativity that would reveal new foundations for
experience (Blake 1810), and for others the modern project would eventually abolish all
facets of historical adult human life, including labour, money, property, and institutions
(Marx 1844). Human civilization was no longer a trap of unending and perpetual war and
scarcity, but a process of inspired suffering that would lead towards a true secular
apocalypse (Frye 1970, p. 130):
The vision of the end and goal of human civilization as the entire universe in the
form that human desire wants to see it, as a heaven eternally separated from a hell.
From these foundational humanistic thinkers the future was becoming a real utopian
attractor state with specific discernible properties. The socioeconomic nature of the
historical process became a phenomena that could be modeled, and materially or
idealistically grounded in science and philosophy, pointing the way towards a world with a
far higher experiential possibility space (Abrams 1963). Thus, whether the emphasis was
on the transformation of human psychology and biology, or on a transformation of human
material conditions and structural organization, we would have our new world by
reclaiming the Earth as Universal Humanity and re-making nature in our own imaginative
image (Shelley 1813, p. 30):
A garden shall arise, in loveliness, surpassing fabled Eden.
Throughout this modern period various political ideologies (i.e. liberalism, progressivism,
conservatism, fascism, anarchism), economic ideologies (i.e. capitalism, communism,
socialism, libertarianism), and philosophical ideologies (i.e. humanism, naturalism, deism)
have arisen claiming to point the way for humanity. Clearly no ideology has yet achieved
the lofty goals of the modern project, as a divine higher state of humanity has proven
illusive, whereas political-religious institutional structures and God as an invisible
symbolic structure of necessity have proven difficult to kill, emerging in many odd yet
powerful pseudo-modernist forms. For example, the invisible symbolic structure of
necessity in communism became the ‘State’ (i.e. the State will save us and guide us
towards the ‘End of History’), ‘money’ in capitalism (i.e. circulate finance capital at the
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expense of all else and everyone will experience ‘–insert country-Dream’), and traditional
culture generally (i.e. preserve the old historical pathway at the expense of science,
evidence, and reason and ‘Jesus’ or ‘Allah’ will eventually save/reward us, etc.): pseudo-
modernist government, market, and religious fundamentalisms, where faith rests on
bureaucratic, financial, and supernatural structure, respectively. From this perspective, it is
more important than ever to point out explicitly that demonstrating the scientific
implausibility of God (e.g. Dawkins 2006), does not kill God, but just causes the symbolic
structure of necessity to change form.
More disturbingly, the modern project, as manifest in industrial civilization, has also
generated an ‘age of extremes’ fraught with competitive and militaristic international
division (i.e. ‘War War I and II’, ‘Cold War’) (Hobsbawm 1994), humanitarian catastro-
phes (i.e. ‘Great Leap Forward’, ‘The Holocaust’) (Leitenberg 2006), as well as tension-
filled global development characterized by mind-numbing levels of socioeconomic
inequality (Oxfam 2014), and several interconnected planetary ecological crises (IPCC
2013). These properties of contemporary global development make continued social,
economic, and ecological stability within our current organizational structure simply
impossible (Glenn et al. 2014). Not exactly the vision of Shelley’s ‘Garden of Eden’, and
this is where the intellectual tradition of ‘post-modernity’ emerges (e.g. Anderson 1998).
Post-modernity is a system of thought that fundamentally questions the notion of progress,
emphasizes the ambiguous role of technological advancement, and rejects the notion that a
‘master scientific narrative’ can guide the direction of the human species. Post-modernists
claim that the beliefs of the modern project are nothing but wishful thinking, a secular fairy
tale, and replacement of God with a ‘human religion’ (i.e. a new transcendent universality).
They point to the facts of the modern world: that in reality it has been a world of large-
scale state violence, socioeconomic inequality, mass slavery, colonialism, neo-colonialism,
ecological devastation, and western sociocultural hegemony. For post-modernists these are
all clear proofs that the notions of modern progress represent a tempting but dangerous lie.
From this tradition of thought some academics now claim that in fact the pre-modern
notion of humanity as in a sociopolitical cyclical state of unending scarcity and violence,
hierarchy and exploitative labour, is a better way to understand the human condition in
civilization. These criticisms are important and often valid, but at the same time, the
historical process is not over. Even in the face of overwhelming global obstacles (or even
because we face overwhelming global obstacles), we cannot forget the hope for a higher
world: a world where the structural conditions of civilization enable the highest flourishing
of the human creative imagination; or even: the distributed emergence of a collective
common goal that does not rest on an external necessary God [either religious (/super-
natural), governmental (/bureaucratic), or market (/financial)] but on an internally gener-
ated intersubjective value system supporting collective freedom and immortality (a true
universality).
Here I will concede that the assumed markers of progress traditionally associated with
the modern project are in need of serious revision and that, at the present moment, we are
at a genuine historical crossroads towards the end of our modern ‘‘ideological constella-
tion’’ (Z
ˇiz
ˇek 2011). In other words, if the symbolic direction of history in the modern world
(i.e. ‘the project for humanity to finish’) was imagined to be increasing objective knowl-
edge of the cosmos, material abundance, and individual freedom, this overall logic in 2015
seems questionable at best. In our quest to understand the cosmos, we have failed to
understand each other; in our quest for material abundance, we have failed to properly
distribute resources; in our quest for individual freedom, we have forgotten our duty to the
common space we all share.
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The objective rational capitalistic individual operating within a bureaucratic or financial
hierarchy—the mythological Homo economicus—needs a make over. Or said in another
way: the ‘American Dream’ (read today: Neoliberal Dream) cannot be the ‘Global Dream’,
even as it is being symbolically outsourced to developing countries (e.g. China, India,
Brazil, everywhere) in concert with depersonalized large-scale structural violence against
the poorest people and communities (Springer 2012). The ultimate consequence of con-
tinuing down this socioeconomic road is not only more ecological destruction towards
unlivable conditions and disenfranchised masses with no hope for a brighter future, but
even worse: ‘‘Universal Alienation’’: a world where you cannot trust anyone (Harvey
2014). That is not exactly the universality the modern project envisioned: instead of
Universal Humanity co-creating an egalitarian international organization, we are building a
world of Universal Aliens centrally controlled by global corporate oligarchy.
In the twenty-first century we need a realistic Global Dream that can lead us towards a
real Global Village, and here it is important to remember the modern project and explicitly
reject and attempt to overcome government (/bureaucratic), market (/financial), and reli-
gious (/supernatural) fundamentalisms through a commitment to a higher democratic and
egalitarian Universal Humanity (in cosmic evolutionary terms: integration through dif-
ferentiation). For the modern project the dream of a transcendent mature, abundant, and
egalitarian human state was to be expected with a spirited and poetic confidence (Hegel
1837, p. 447):
Never since the sun had stood in the firmament and the planets revolved around him
had it been perceived that man’s existence centres in his head, i.e. in thought,
inspired by which he builds up the world of reality…not until now had man
advanced to the recognition of the principle that thought ought to govern spiritual
reality. This was accordingly a glorious mental dawn. All thinking being shared in
the jubilation of this epoch. Emotions of a lofty character stirred men’s minds at that
time; a spiritual enthusiasm thrilled through the world, as if the reconciliation
between the divine and the secular was now first accomplished.
Now this dream seems distant, even terrifying. If we still hold these modernist and
humanist values, we should not remember the modern project to repeat the mistakes of the
past, instead we should remember the modern project to remember that we should demand
and strive for what now seems (socially, economically, politically) ‘‘impossible’’ (Graeber
2015): a world built for people instead of non-people, i.e. governments, corporations,
religions. Neoliberal economic theory, which emphasizes self-reliant competition in the
marketplace, is not a grand unified physical ‘‘theory of everything’’ (see Mirowski 2013)
destined to transform all of us into isolated individuals fending for ourselves within
insanely inhumane structures towards Universal Alienation. Yet in our postmodern
universe we cannot imagine a modernist Universal Humanity anymore: the mindless
circulation of global capital presents us with an unconquerable obstacle destined to
homogenize and reduce world culture to corporate culture. Thus for all intents and
purposes the general sociopolitical zeitgeist of our moment has become a distorted return
to pre-modern thinking: ‘‘we’re trapped’’ (Sirius, R.U. in: Lebkowsky 1997, p. 20):
Anybody who doesn’t believe that we’re trapped hasn’t taken a good look around.
We’re trapped in a sort of mutating multinational corporate oligarchy that’s not about
to go away. We’re trapped by the limitations of our species. We’re trapped in time.
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Even the science fiction of our age—dominated by cyber-punk mega-corporate
dystopias—concedes defeat and cannot find imaginative optimistic constructions of an
abundant, sustainable, and democratic world, built on a humanistic foundation (Wernick
2014). The old dreams are still just dreams, in need of a dramatic revitalization and re-
tethering to the possibility of realization: a serious representational symbolic vision for
common actualization.
In this sense, it is important to repeat that the modern ‘act-of-becoming’ has presented
us with titanic obstacles in the twenty-first century that were severely underestimated by
the intellectual founders of the modern world. Specifically, when it comes to achieving a
higher Universal Humanity, we underestimated the levels of complexity that would be
produced by our species emergence onto the global stage (San Miguel et al. 2012) in what
geologists are calling the ‘‘Anthropocene’’ (Zalasiewicz et al. 2008). Ideally, a new form of
‘‘global systems science’’ is needed to make sense of ‘‘the whole’’ in a new way (Helbing
2013a), and provide a new general perspective of complex systems thinking for the
Anthropocene epoch (Niele 2005). Most modernist thinkers thought science and technol-
ogy would bring ‘god-like’ absolute human control over nature (Tucker 1972). However,
the reality is that science and technology have created a complex world radically out of
control (Kelly 1995).
Consequently, we need different modes of sociopolitical governance. Complex systems
science teaches us that local, bottom-up, and distributed coordination are typically the most
effective and capable mechanisms for enabling emergent global order in highly complex
environments. This is because, in complex systems, there are just too many differentiated
parts for effective external top-down mechanisms of coordination (read: coercion) to stably
function and synergize the whole. Thus any global systems science and serious sociopo-
litical global development agenda must understand how to maintain a new planetary
organization with dynamic and distributed mechanisms that lead to self-organization (as
opposed to static and hierarchical historical mechanisms that produce centralized organi-
zation) (Helbing 2015). Here we need most urgently renewed critique of power and ide-
ology: until we challenge the very structural foundations of our world, we are not serious
about globalization (Graeber 2004, p. 77):
The effacement of national borders. This is genuine globalization. Anything else is
just a sham.
Here it is my contention that in order to move forward with a clear global direction towards
Universal Humanity we must find a way to revitalize the modernist spirit with some type of
‘new modernity’ for the twenty-first century: a new ‘offer’ of eschatological universality.
Modernity began when humans started to experience their human-world reality as
unfinished: as a project to be completed with the application of science and technology
with humanist-atheist goals and values (i.e. there is no God, we have to build heaven
ourselves). But what would be ‘new’ in ‘new modernity’?
I think that the potential beginnings of a new modernity can be designed (and indeed are
in many ways already being designed) with the link between traditional modernist
humanist-atheist dreams and the emergence of contemporary transhumanist-atheist dreams
for both life extension and life expansion (see Vita-More 1983; More 1990; More and Vita-
More 2014) (i.e. higher possibilities through longer collective life and higher collective
perceptions/conceptions). In other words, the core of new modernity would explicitly
recognize that in order to complete modernity (i.e. there is no God, we have to build heaven
ourselves) we must challenge our traditional notions of ‘human nature’ and become re-
sponsibly but still curiously open to an exploration of what humanity can be (i.e. what are
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the farthest reaches of human sociocultural and technological possibility?). This pathway is
something that Charles Darwin himself realized was open to both speculation and eventual
achievement after providing the foundations for a view of an evolving universe (Darwin
1871, p. 492):
Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his
own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus
risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hope for a still
higher destiny in the distant future.
For many transhumanists Darwin’s ‘higher destiny in the distant future’ has become the
development of a near-term evolutionary transition produced from the accelerated
evolution of information and communication technologies (ICT) that will enable a higher
state of ‘trans’ human existence (for historical and analytical overviews, see Sandberg
2010; Heylighen 2012). In these future evolutionary conceptions, a modernist Eden will
emerge (Shelley 1813, p. 30), but unlike the vision of many early humanist-atheist
thinkers, it will be an Eden enabled by advanced, revolutionary technology (e.g. robotics,
artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, etc.), which will allow us to forever abandon a
crippling historical order characterized by violence and scarcity, but also conformity,
repression, and authority.
Transhumanist predictions of a technologically mediated utopia have taken two main
dimensions, one local (i.e. enhancement of the psychology of the human mind) in ‘tech-
nological singularity theory’, and one global (i.e. the emergence of a higher planetary
entity) in ‘global brain theory’. Many of these theorists predict that a near-term techno-
logically mediated event and/or process (near-term on the scale of the next 50–200 years)
will fundamentally transform the foundations of human individuals and civilization as a
whole (Goertzel 2002, pp. 1–2). Technological singularity theory posits that the human
individual will achieve superintelligence through technological modifications (Vinge 1993;
Schmidhuber 2012). This paradigm understands the future of human civilization through
the perspective of the advancement of artificial intelligence and robotics (see Kurzweil
2005; Blackford and Broderick 2014), and perhaps most importantly, through the per-
spective of the possible emergence of artificial general intelligence (AGI) (Pennachin and
Goertzel 2007; Bostrom 2014). In contrast, global brain theory posits that human society
will achieve a globally distributed organization through the emergence of a higher meta-
system mediated by the self-organization of the Internet and the technologies we use to
interconnect on a planetary scale (Turchin 1977; Goertzel 2002; Heylighen 2015). This
paradigm understands the future of human civilization through the global perspective of
how information technologies affect the fundamental structural possibilities for societal re-
organization (Helbing 2012; Last 2014b).
Technological singularity and global brain scenarios are ‘utopian’ (in the sense of being
attractors towards a higher state/universality) for the future of humanity. These visions
have been proposed throughout the twentieth century from academics mostly connected to
the physical sciences (see Adams 1909; Ulam 1958; Good 1965; Moravec 1988; Glenn
1989; Vinge 1993). These theories have attracted increased academic attention in recent
decades (including the establishment of future-oriented university-based institutions, e.g.
Singularity University,Future of Humanity Institute,Institute for the Future,Future of Life
Institute,Global Brain Institute, etc.), influenced many recent popular science books (e.g.
Kelly 2010; Diamandis and Kotler 2011; Kaku 2014; Bostrom 2014), and have also
spawned the aforementioned philosophy of ‘transhumanism’ focused on the development
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and eventual transcendence of humanity on cosmic timescales (see Huxley 1968; Vita-
More 1983,1992; More 1990; Bostrom 2005).
From this perspective transhumanism (or the transhumanist-atheist axis) explicitly seeks
to become the formal successor to the modern project’s version of ‘humanism’ (or
humanist-atheist axis). However, its ability to achieve this goal can only be accomplished
if the movement is able to find a renewed commitment to the connections between tech-
nological progress, social egalitarianism, ecological sustainability, and radical democracy
(Hughes 2004) (i.e. technological progress measured on collective human-planetary terms,
not on individualistic capitalistic terms). The contemporary transhumanist community
mostly focuses on technological progress and specifically technological progress related to
individual right to freely enhance human biology to ‘superhuman’ levels—enabling
superintelligence, super well-being, and super-longevity (Pearce 2014)—via the applica-
tion of various forms of genetic manipulation, nanotechnologies, robotics, and artificial
intelligence (Stock 2002; Hughes 2004; Kurzweil 2005; More and Vita-More 2014).
This traditional transhuman emphasis on individual superhuman enhancement has often
led to naı
¨ve form of libertarian transhumanism [most prominently expressed by futurist
Zoltan Istvan’s so-called ‘First Law’ of transhumanism: ‘‘1. A transhumanist must safe-
guard one’s own existence above all else.’’ (Istvan 2013)]. However, future transhumanism
is going to have to become more socially, ecologically, and economically responsible, i.e.
what sociologist James Hughes has labeled ‘techno-progressivism’ (Hughes 2004). This
techno-progressive version of transhumanism is more critical than ever now that the
transhuman movement is formally emerging internationally within the political arena (for a
critical leftist three part series on the dawn of the age of transhumanist politics, see
Benedikter 2015). If transhumanism can become more socially and ecologically conscious
there is enormous potential for its philosophical foundations to be applied within
sociopolitical context. Ideally this would result in the attempt to practically realize the
original foundations of the modern project, which emphasized ultimate historical progress
as ‘‘humanity to superhumanity’’ (Brown 1981, p. 60), or in our big historical foundations,
historical progress towards higher sociotechnological diversity and connectivity.
Thus in the context of any type of ‘new modernity’ or a re-symbolized modernity we
should make the link not just between people fighting for progressive international issues
in the socioeconomic (i.e. equality, egalitarianism, etc.) and ecological (i.e. sustainable
development, renewable energy, etc.) domain but also with contemporary transhumanists
fighting for responsible progressive technological change: a new version of the iPhone does
not change the structure of our world, but ‘science fiction like’ technologies could (Graeber
2015, chp. 2). If we were to ever seriously re-establish a collective new modernist political
direction, then something ‘impossible’ in contemporary sociopolitical life, like legitimately
discussing collective life extension or eliminating/automating all mundane labour (agri-
cultural, industrial, bureaucratic, etc.), would become legitimate and normalized goals to
strive towards (i.e. a world of dramatically extended youthful energy and play). In other
words we will know that a new modernity has been successful the day when substantive
geopolitical debates sound like Arthur C. Clarke meditations on the future limits of human
possibility (see Clarke 1973).
Therefore, ultimately, the logic here is that in the same way the humanist-atheist axis
challenged and overcame (politically castrated) pre-modern religious (e.g. church) and
sociopolitical (e.g. monarchy) fundamentalisms consequently producing modernity (i.e.
separation of church/state, increasing rights for people, etc.); now the transhumanist-atheist
axis must emerge to challenge postmodern relativistic thinking by positing a higher
transcendental Universal Humanity dedicated to forming its own ground (humanity self-
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organized in the commons, or: ‘Religion is only the illusory sun that revolves around man
so long as he has not yet begun to revolve around himself.’). Faith in our own ability and
our own mind is the only way to overcome our postmodern tensions and cynicism pro-
duced by contemporary government (e.g. United States of America), market (e.g. Inter-
national Monetary Fund), and religious (e.g. Islamic State of Iraq and Syria)
fundamentalism/historical traps (i.e. instead of all power to the State, the Market, or a
supernatural God: all power to people and the imagination).
When we think about modernity in this way perhaps it is also time to think about the
‘humanities’ in a new way. The humanities as a general academic pursuit are most
enlightening and useful when they provide humane critique of historical and contemporary
sociopolitical processes. However, with the emergence of transhumanism, and especially
the more recent emergence of a politically engaged transhumanism, perhaps what we need
now is the emergence of the ‘transhumanities’ to produce a new way of thinking about
twenty-first century human development and evolution. At the moment we have many new
academic institutions (mentioned above) focused on the science of transhumanism (i.e.
robotics, artificial life/intelligence, genetics, complex systems, engineering, cybernetics,
etc.), but we do not have a place for thoughtful transhumanist sociopolitical critique. This
century we will need such critique, as ‘science fiction like’ ‘transhuman’ topics will likely
play a larger sociopolitical and geopolitical role in the coming decades (i.e. between now
and 2030–2050) (e.g. Google is attempting to become God, United States of America is
testing telepathic army and secret military robotics program, United States of America and
European Union are attempting to produce whole brain emulations, DARPA is working on
technology that could connect our brains directly to the Internet, China is considering
future generation of genetic designer babies, most jobs can be technologically automated,
nanotechnology could revolutionize production, artificial intelligence could revolutionize
health care, and so forth).
These developments force us all to confront the fact that there is really one political
question within which all other political questions should be nested (Brown 1967, p. 81):
There is only one political problem in our world today: the unification of mankind.
This converging universality is something that both the global corporate oligarchs and
radical Islamic groups recognize as obvious (which it is). However mainstream
sociopolitical ‘humanist’ discussion in our postmodern universe simply cannot imagine
a human universality, and therefore cannot represent one seriously. Consequently, if
humanists do not fight for a common space on behalf of all humans, we will keep losing
our common space to either corporate or religious lunatics. From my perspective achieving
a new global (trans-)humanist universality would be the long-term aim of the
transhumanities. This would be an ongoing project to understand subjective and
intersubjective humanity with the implications of uniquely twenty-first century issues
that can only be analyzed within a transhuman and global frame (see Sect. 3.3). My
intuition is that the result of this activity will help to create a new vision of the human
species (already emergent) that progressively revives our cosmic image after the ego
beating we have endured over the past 500 years (Z
ˇiz
ˇek 2012, p. 266):
The true trauma lies not in our mortality, but in our immortality: it is easy to accept
that we are just a speck of dust in the infinite universe; what is much more difficult to
accept is that we effectively are immortal free beings who, as such, cannot escape the
terrible responsibility of our freedom.
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Again I will repeat: even in the face of overwhelming global obstacles (or even because we
face overwhelming global obstacles), we cannot forget the hope for a higher world: a world
where the structural conditions of civilization enable the highest flourishing of the human
creative imagination; or even: the distributed emergence of a collective common
sociopolitical goal that does not rest on an external necessary God [either religious
(/supernatural), governmental (/bureaucratic), or market (/financial)] but on an internally
generated intersubjective value system supporting collective freedom and immortality (a
true universality).
Finally, I do not want to be read as a cheap anti-Statist anarchist. The goal should not be
to childishly smash the state, but instead to radically democratize the state until, eventually,
no human is struggling over basic animalistic desires (food, water, shelter). Then perhaps
the original modernist dreams of achieving an abundant, egalitarian state of universal trust
(brotherhood/sisterhood) where everyone is free to strive toward innate human desires and
dreams (love, creativity, community) without external hierarchical institutional coercion
(state, corporate, or religious), could be accomplished in practice. The true tragedy of our
neoliberal world is that this state of being now seems as distant from us in the sociopolitical
imagination as the galactic clusters of the Hubble Deep Field. In this sense we are not
simply being assaulted by a global economic class war, but also by a much more dangerous
global war on the popular imagination, which anonymously and violently dictates to us
what is possible and what is impossible within our collective sociopolitical space.
3.1 Technological Singularity
Here we have to return to our big historical perspective to explore the future of humanity
within the larger conceptual framework of cosmic evolution as higher states for individual
and collective humanity now seem at least technologically feasible (see Bostrom 2014;
Kaku 2014). What are the implications of transhumanism for the eras of big history? Is it
actually realistic to believe that some form of ‘(new) modern project’ would culminate in a
transcendent higher state and a completely (trans-)human world with the capability to
overcome contemporary sociocultural and political tensions? In order to begin to answer
that question we must further explore the history and theory related to the idea of tech-
nological singularity and global brain.
The original essence of the ‘singularity’ idea is simple: (1) science and technology
drives change in human civilization, and (2) due to its cumulative nature advancing sci-
entific and technological development will eventually reach a stage where change happens
faster than the human mind can comprehend (Ulam 1958). Therefore the ‘singularity’
originally and essentially represented a point in the human future where human cognitive
capacities driving science and technology became superseded by entities with higher
cognitive capacity, i.e. robots and/or artificial intelligence as ‘‘our last invention’’ (Barrat
2013). Formally, this idea was first inspired from research in the physical sciences and
specifically the pioneering work in computer science and cybernetics (e.g. Shannon 1948;
Wiener 1948; Turing 1950). Many researchers quickly realized that the emergence of
advanced computation represented an important turning point in the history of scientific
and technological progress, as computers could now be designed to solve mental problems
that only humans had been able to solve in the past (see Wiener 1948,1950,1963).
This possibility of human-level machine intelligence immediately inspired theorists to
think of the singularity in terms of beyond human-level machine intelligence, what would
now be called ‘artificial general intelligence’ (AGI). Humans have a general intelligence in
that we can flexibly learn to solve most any problem we put our mind to with the aid of our
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symbolic code. However, if humanity was that close to designing a machine with human-
level problem solving capabilities, was it not possible for that machine to either increase its
own intelligence by re-programming its source code, or to start programming an even more
intelligent machine, which could then program an even more intelligent machine, ad
infinitum?
This conception of the future, of machine intelligence unleashing a strong positive
feedback loop, has most popularly captured the imagination of singularity theorists since
its introduction throughout the 1950s and 1960s (e.g. Good 1965). To this day the pos-
sibility of a machine ‘‘intelligence explosion’’ is still being seriously discussed and debated
at length (e.g. Barrat 2013; Bostrom 2014; Goertzel and Goertzel 2015). In this singularity-
based vision, emergence of the first AGI will be followed closely by the emergence of an
AI?, and an AI??, and an AI???, etc. (Chalmers 2010). Therefore, from our big
historical perspective, this event has historically represented and been prophesized as a
period when the universe would move on to beyond human level information processing
and reproduction, and presumably, new domains of subject/object relations unknown to the
biocultural human (Kurzweil 2005).
Scientific, philosophical, and popular interest in the ‘‘singularity’’ has increased since
computer scientist Vernor Vinge first introduced the term ‘‘technological singularity’’ in a
now famous paper of the Whole Earth Review (see Vinge 1993). Vinge originally likened
the singularity to a fundamental evolutionary event comparable to the evolution of apes to
humans. Since its introduction, singularity theory has become a key theoretical component
of predictions related to the advance of ICT, and specifically the advance of computation,
related to the aforementioned ‘‘transhuman’’ era (see Kurzweil 2005,2012; Sandberg and
Bostrom 2008; Loosemore and Goertzel 2012). Singularity theorists have emphasized the
predictive power of ‘‘Moore’s law’’ (e.g. Moore 1965,1975), according to which the speed
of microprocessors doubles every *18 months due to shrinking transistor sizes, conse-
quently increasing the computer hardware capabilities utilized by artificial intelligence
researchers (see Schaller 1997). According to models constructed using Moore’s law,
computer hardware will continue improving exponentially (or superexponentially) many
decades into the future (Nagy et al. 2011), eventually allowing for the construction of
technology utilizing femtotechnology (i.e. computers built by organizing subatomic par-
ticles) (Garis 2012). Thus far models built utilizing Moore’s law have proven reliable and
accurate when applied to many forms of information technology (e.g. Kurzweil 2010), thus
making the concept of ‘‘exponential technological acceleration’’ a very useful and pow-
erful tool in forecasting twenty-first century technological possibility (see Kurzweil 2001,
2010; Bostrom 2006; Ford 2009; Diamandis and Kotler 2011; Ismail et al. 2014).
The twenty-first century ramifications of exponential growth in computing complexity
are truly overwhelming. For example, the most advanced supercomputers in 2013 could
run at 50 petaflops (i.e. a thousand trillion calculations per second). This already
astoundingly high level of computation only has the capacity of simulating the entire
human brain at sometime between 2030 and 2050 (Pennachin and Goertzel 2007). It is this
specific prediction that has resulted in many researchers believing that the technological
singularity will occur before mid-century (see Vinge 1993; Hanson 2000; Kurzweil 2005).
This predicted date now appears to be in-line with the majority of the artificial intelligence
(AI) research community’s belief that human-level or beyond human-level AI will be
possible before 2050 (see Klein 2007; Baum and Goertzel 2011), and highly probably
before 2100 (see Baum and Goertzel 2011; Sandberg and Bostrom 2011;Mu
¨ller and
Bostrom 2014). According to many researchers who share this singularity vision of the
human future, the process of advancing computation is fundamentally inevitable (i.e. ‘the
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immanent singularity’), and will result in currently unimaginable advances in genetics,
nanotechnology, and robotics (Stock 2002; Kurzweil 2005; Drexler 2013; Kaku 2014).
Therefore, according to these theorists, although the type of singularity we experience may
be subject to moral debate and influenced by sociopolitical decision-making, the eventual
emergence of a transhuman and/or posthuman technological era is something that cannot
fundamentally be prevented, regardless of how some critics view it as dangerous (e.g.
Fukuyama 2003) and undesirable (e.g. McKibben 2003).
However, there is of course tremendous diversity in opinions when it comes to the
specific timing of singularity predictions (Armstrong and Sotala 2012). There are theorists
like philosopher Nick Bostrom and mathematician Stuart Armstrong who believe artificial
general intelligence is possible and will develop, but do not believe we can predict when it
will occur with any reliable degree of accuracy (Armstrong 2014; Bostrom 2014). There
are also theorists like technologist Kevin Kelly and computer scientist Jeff Hawkins, who
acknowledge that advancing artificial intelligence will fundamentally disrupt contempo-
rary societal organization in the coming decades, but do not believe that this advance will
prove ‘singularity-like’ in regards to the development of beyond human-level AGI
prophesized by futurists like Goertel, Kurzweil, and Vinge by mid-century (Hawkins 2015;
Kelly 2015).
This brings us to a traditionally important division in singularity theory more generally,
which is between those who argue that it is more likely that we will experience an AGI-
singularity before mid-century, and those that argue that it is more likely that we will
experience a global brain-singularity (GB-singularity) before a true age of aware techno-
logical minds with beyond human-level intelligence (Heylighen, personal communication,
November 3, 2014). Although Vinge explored the possibility of a GB-singularity in his
seminal technological singularity paper (see again: Vinge 1993), the concept has mostly
been overshadowed in the singularity literature due to an overemphasis on AGI (e.g. Barrat
2013; Bostrom 2014). From a historical perspective this is hard to explain since, over the
past 20 years, the Internet has proven to be a more revolutionary force in socioeconomic
affairs, not AI. In GB-singularity theory, emphasis is more heavily placed on a systems
framework and thus a ‘metasystemic singularity’ where the collective coherence of our
sociotechnological networks develop to produce higher levels of consciousness and
intelligence. Thus, the emergence of a ‘global brain’ is itself seen as a ‘singularity’ because
it would be difficult to predict what such a collective mind would do deeper into the future
(re: thoughts, actions, goals, values, dreams, etc.).
The idea of humanity as in the process of forming a global superorganism has been
suggested since at least the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (e.g. Spencer 1896;
Wells 1908). In fact, Charles Darwin made a brief commentary on the possibility of the
global union of humanity in The Descent of Man, suggesting that ‘‘only an artificial
barrier’’ prevented the human community from extending to ‘‘all nations and races’’ (1871,
p. 96) (i.e. humanity as reaching some higher universality). However, paleontologist,
futurist, and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin may have been the first theorist to
propose a concept and system of thinking for humanity forming an emergent higher-level
brain-like organization: noosphere (Teilhard de Chardin 1923). Teilhard de Chardin sug-
gested that a ‘‘noosphere’’ represented an emergent level of consciousness analogous to
(but above) the ‘‘biosphere’’. Whereas the biosphere is the cumulative organizations of
Earth’s flora and fauna, a noosphere would be the cumulative organization of a mature
humanity ‘‘woven by all intelligences at once on the surface of the earth’’ (1966, p. 230),
producing ‘‘unimaginable’’ effects intimately related to conscious ‘‘reflection’’ and ‘‘in-
vention’’ (1966, p. 63).
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The first scientific model explored to realize a higher human level of organization was
the theory of metasystem transitions (Turchin 1977). The ‘‘hierarchical levels’’ discussed
above (Sect. 2.2; Table 3) are good examples of metasystem transitions, i.e. the origin of
life as the transition from the molecular to the cellular organization (Table 3). Metasystem
transition theory (MST) is a general systems-level approach to understand the control of a
higher level of complex organization and also a potential future singularity towards con-
trolling a global superorganism (Heylighen 2015). According to MST, higher levels of
control organization can emerge from the coordination of less ordered subsystems (e.g.,
A
1
?A
2
?A
3
?B) (Last 2015). This type of higher coordination is hypothesized to
emerge from the selection for more advanced information processing and communications
(i.e. the Internet), which enables previously disparate entities (i.e. nation-states) to syn-
ergistically coordinate their activities (i.e. global organization) (Turchin 1977). Conse-
quently, such systemic transitions change the relationship between the parts they are
composed of, and (if successful) lead towards new emergent and stable characteristics of
the whole (the ‘meta’ part), through the exploration of (in our context) new (sociotech-
nological) connections, new (sociotechnological) distinctions, and consequently, new
(sociotechnological) possibility spaces (i.e. a boundary-less whole or ‘distributed
singularity’).
From the metasystemic singularity perspective the question of global control orga-
nization then becomes an issue of coordination between contemporary power structures
towards a higher level. In contemporary global brain theory control organization for a
future global sociopolitical collective rests on a functional and structural metaphor with
biological brain control organization (e.g. Heylighen and Bollen 1996). GB theory thus
stresses that the neuronal structure of biological brains give the appearance of a
‘globally distributed society’ (a ‘‘society of mind’’, see Minsky 1988) that literally
mirrors the structural coordination activity of individual humans using the Internet in
an open and free environment (i.e. free of centralized information control). Thus it is
argued that, in the same way that biological brain’s distributed collective neuronal
activity self-organized to produce emergent consciousness and intelligence, the key to
our global control organization is similar, and that we should foster more distributed
coordination mechanisms built on local trust and support networks, which could pro-
duce a self-organizing emergent global consciousness and intelligence via sociotech-
nological mediation.
Of course, nobody knows just what ‘critical threshold’ of networked self-organization
needs to be reached to produce a qualitatively higher level of human society, and in a world
of growing sociopolitical tensions, it is hard to imagine a near-term coherence or inte-
gration. However, the rate at which we are interconnecting all of humanity to the Internet,
as well as the even faster pace at which we are interconnecting all of our technological
artifacts to the Internet (i.e. Internet of Things initiatives), we should not be surprised by
the future potential for a concomitant qualitative emergence of something ‘global brain-
like’. In other words, just as the contemporary Internet is qualitatively different than our
twentieth century telecommunications systems, the future Internet (20, 30, 50 years into
the future) will also be qualitatively different in ways that we may not be able to predict
with great accuracy due to likely emergent future applications like virtual reality and
artificial intelligence, etc (Table 5).
However, on this pathway human decision-making matters; if our present sociopolitical
reality and conversation is any indication we could be living in anything from a form of
global authoritarian ‘capitalism’ to technologically automated luxury ‘communism’, and
anything in between, within just the next 20–30 years. But if we truly want to build a
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‘planetary society of mind’ we need to work towards breaking down centralized control
structures through radical democratization and start building local distributed connections
that exhibit a form of spontaneous self-organization (i.e. human societies organized
internally as opposed to externally organized by a central government, bank, corporation,
or religion) (as discussed in Sect. 3). In this attempt, the global brain concept and theory of
metasystem transitions can potentially give us a way to understand the nature of our
planetary structure and help us direct it towards new models of global governance, inte-
gration, and organization more generally (Last 2015).
Thus, if we are able to figure out the problems of global distributed governance and
global distributed economics, it is possible for humanity to endure the coming wave of
technological ‘megachange’ (present-2050) in a way that is more utopian than dystopian
(see Diamandis and Kotler 2011; Franklin and Andrews 2012). Cyberneticist Francis
Heylighen, one of the original pioneers of global brain theory, recently articulated a long-
term vision of a metasystemic singularity within a holistic evolutionary context given
expected advances in artificial intelligence, 3D printing, machine learning software,
robotics, and other digital technologies (see Heylighen 2015). In this vision, Heylighen
proposes that the global brain could eventually develop properties similar to omniscience,
omnipresence, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence: traditional metaphors for God or God-
like entities (Wierenga 2003).
The global brain could become omniscient in the sense of possessing all practical
knowledge necessary to deal with humanity’s global challenges, omnipresent in the sense
of having a coherent view of what is happening everywhere in the world at the moment,
omnipotent in the sense of eliminating waste and maximizing efficiency in regards to
Table 5 Potential of a global brain-singularity
Omniscience Whether we are interacting with artificial intelligence via a semantic web, or constantly
being guided in our education by highly advanced MOOCs, our future experience
within a global brain should be one in which billions of highly educated intelligent
agents are closely interacting, communicating, and collaborating with an omniscient
knowledge base. In such a world the testing of new hypotheses, the development of
new theories, and the discovery of new laws, should be straightforward as the
formulation of a sentence is for humans today
Omnipresence With full specialization and integration of advanced information technology (e.g.
wearable computing, internal computing) and the full implementation of the Internet
of Things, all agent and ‘‘things’’ will have the ability to wirelessly communicate and
coordinate activity—anything and anywhere—enabling omnipresence. As a result,
any perturbations within our system (i.e. damages/disasters affecting infrastructure/
people) will be solved through the distributed and self-organizing activity of our
wireless communicating network
Omnipotence All industrial processes for delivering products and providing services will become
informational processes via 3D/4D printing and nanotechnology integrated into the
Internet—allowing any physical object to be designed, shared, and constructed for
negligible cost and produced with negligible waste. This omnipotence will allow the
global brain to be a system of abundance
Omnibenevolence A global brain would be built on abundance and cooperative distributed organisations
attempting to maximise the potential of all of its ‘‘neurons’’—allowing for a type of
omnibenvolence. This system can already be seen as emergent as better education,
greater wealth, and longer lives seems to be correlated with dramatic decreases in
things we consider ‘‘evil’’ on a global scale (i.e. murder, war, slavery, prejudice,
suppression, dictatorship, corruption)
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energy, transportation, and control, and omnibenevolent in the sense of attempting to
maximize benefit and reduce harm inflicted on all individuals (Heylighen 2015). However,
of course such an entity cannot emerge unless we in some sense co-create the common
space, but if such a higher entity were to emerge from our collective activities, we would
also have reached a new era of humanity and a true metasystemic singularity in terms of
surpassing a level of change possible for the human mind to comprehend (Table 5).
Despite the large differences between conceptions of an AGI-singularity and a GB-
singularity, the similarities are greater. The most intense theoretical debate between the
two visions is mostly over issues of the nature of future socioeconomic and political
disruption regarding superintelligent computers and computer networks. Currently, what
seems most reasonable to say is that continued socioeconomic driven complexification of
computation via Moore’s law and continued quantitative and qualitative growth of the
Internet as a global medium, gives us good reason to expect computer and computer-
network related progress before 2050 that could fundamentally transform the nature of
human beings and human society. Specifically it seems reasonable to suspect a quickly
intensifying transition from contemporary AI systems that can solve specifically pro-
grammed problems towards AI systems that can solve a multitude of problems (Pennachin
and Goertzel 2007), as well as large networks of AI systems that become increasingly
important components of the Internet, consequently changing the way we relate to our
information technology, and the way we relate to each other (Goertzel and Goertzel 2015).
The most obvious change in our lives as a result of these processes should come from a
shift or complete elimination of mundane labour. Artificial intelligence pioneer Hans
Moravec claims that this will occur ‘‘like water slowly flooding the landscape’’ of work
(1998, p. 11) until all work that was once the sole domain of humanity could be outsourced
to computation. Indeed, you only need to take a quick look at the type of jobs that employ
the most people in contemporary society to start to realize that, there are virtually no large
industries in manufacturing, social services, farming, transportation, etc. whose labour
force could not be completely replaced by artificial intelligence and robotics within the
next 20–30 years (Ford 2015). Even industries that have traditionally been hallmarks of
professionalization and high education, like professors, doctors, and lawyers, could see
their jobs outsourced to computation in the longer-term picture. This means that the first
half of the twenty-first century could be characterized by the emergence of a world in
which machines will be able to solve most of the problems that were once the sole domain
of the human intellect (for a video presentation of this possibility, see Grey 2014). In fact,
many scientific reports and forecasts for the future of work reflect this reality, as the
process of outsourcing problems to computation is already under way (see Frey 2011; Frey
and Osborne 2013; Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014; McGinnis and Pearce 2014; Rifkin
2014), albeit in an early phase.
Of course, such a transition in the nature of work allows us to imagine a world with no
mundane labour and no scarcity, a long-time dream of the late global systems theorist and
visionary utopian Buckminster Fuller (1981). This would transform the human condition
from its historical organizational limitations and dramatically alter contemporary socioe-
conomic dynamics, particularly in relation to work and money (Rifkin 2014; Ford 2015). If
we are to take these radically optimistic possibilities to their conclusion, one potential
ramification is that play and genuine self-motivated work could replace work stimulated
purely from scarcity and societal expectation (i.e. the end of alienated labour). In this
sense, the interests and activities that consume the childhoods and young adulthoods of
many individuals today could become lifelong pursuits of exploration well into adulthood
(Brown 1959; Graeber 2015). This may seem an impractical vision, but all of human
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history has been characterized by mundane labour (i.e. agricultural, industrial, bureaucratic
work), and if that labour vanishes within a few short decades, new creative opportunities
and freedoms may present themselves to adult existence that simply have no historical
precedent.
Another potential ramification is that the importance of financial capital could be
replaced by a shift towards the importance of ‘social capital’ (i.e. psychological self-
actualization and community building). In this potential future direction our adult
socioeconomic lives could become increasingly dominated by finding important ways to
interconnect and relate to each other as social and creative beings, as opposed to our
current reality of finding ways to interconnect and relate to each other as economic agents
(Rifkin 2014). Such a transition would necessarily require a shift in the dominant
microeconomic foundation of humanity as Homo economicus (i.e. individuals interested in
their own personal financial success) towards humanity as Homo socialis (i.e. individuals
interested in the personal welfare of others/communities) (Helbing 2013b). The most
obvious macroeconomic policies that could safely bridge the gap between the worlds of
Homo economicus and the worlds of Homo socialis would be the implementation of an
unconditional basic income (UBI) and the enforcement of a maximum income limit in
concert with dedication to commons technological automation (i.e. technological
automation that benefits our shared social, economic, and ecological space) (Cottey 2014;
Hughes 2014). This would at least be a start towards building a more egalitarian world and
a world that allowed for healthier adult social and psychological development (Standing
2002,2011), which is currently (and has always been) seriously debilitated by economic
scarcity (Mullainathan and Shafir 2013).
In the short term, we could imagine that such a fundamental planetary shift could occur
without the simultaneous rise of technological minds with independent thoughts, feelings,
emotions, and autonomous will. After all, supercomputers are now the world’s best chess
players and Jeopardy! contestants, soon they will be the best doctors and lawyers, but they
can accomplish this without awareness, and without any emotion or feeling (Broderick
2014). Moreover, if the future socioeconomic structure experiences a shift toward finding
new ways to interconnect and relate to each other as social beings, this experimentation
may involve a high degree of transhuman mind-interconnection as the century progresses.
This is due to the fact that although AGI may encounter major theoretical stumbling blocks
(as has been the case historically), the potential future of internal computing/nanotech-
nology will likely provide humans with the opportunity to expand our cognitive capabil-
ities in unexpected ways (see Chorost 2011; Nicolelis 2011). In such a landscape deeper
levels of collective thought, feeling, and action could become a commonplace possibility,
and blur the line between biological and technological thinking (Kaku 2014) (for more see
Sects. 3.2,3.3).
Table 6 Nature of technological AGI-singularity
Artificial intelligence (AI)
scenario
Superintelligent technology replaces biocultural humans
Intelligence amplification (IA)
scenario
Humans transform themselves with technology and become
transhuman/posthuman
Human-Technology Merger
(HTM) scenario
AI and IA scenarios occur simultaneously manifested from evolutionary
pressures and positive feedback loops generating biology-technology
symbiosis
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First and foremost: if we undergo a fundamental posthuman transition, what will be the
transition’s nature? (Table 6) (For more see Goertzel 2007; Vinge 2007; Sandberg 2010).
Of course there is just no way to test the AI, IA, and HTM hypothetical scenarios and
therefore there is no general consensus as to which scenario is most probable among
singularity theorists (see Sandberg and Bostrom 2011). However, some theorists tend to
emphasize the dangers of an AI scenario and have advocated for a moratorium on artificial
intelligence research to increase the probability of the IA Scenario (e.g. Antonov 2011).
Others have suggested that we actively ‘‘delay the singularity’’ or ‘‘guide the singularity’’
by constructing an ‘‘AI Nanny’’ until we better understand the potential evolutionary
ramifications (e.g. Goertzel 2012), and others have suggested that we focus on ‘‘confining’’
artificial intelligence so that we can benefit from its development but avoid extinction
(Yampolskiy 2012).
This issue of artificial intelligence as an existential risk has also received far more
popular attention recently due to the controversial statements by high-profile scientists and
technologists like Elon Musk who claimed that we are ‘‘summoning the demon’’ with
artificial intelligence (Musk 2014), and Stephen Hawking who claimed that the ‘‘devel-
opment of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race’’ (Hawking
2014). Concerns of this extreme existential variety have probably been most thoroughly
envisioned in the work of artificial intelligence pioneer Hugo de Garis who has popularized
the notion of a coming war between ‘‘Cosmists’’ and ‘‘Terrans’’ (Garis 1999). In Garis’s
future vision an intense global dichotomy will emerge towards the end of the twenty-first
century between humans that want to build ‘‘God-like’’ machines (i.e. ‘‘Cosmists’’) and
humans that want to forever delay their creation (i.e. ‘‘Terrans’’). Philosopher Nick Bos-
trom recently explored the sociopolitical dimensions of confining such ‘‘God-like’’ entities
claiming that, if we do not confine them or figure our how to align their value system with
human value systems, our fate will be in the hands of machine superintelligence that vastly
exceeds our own (Bostrom 2014). From our big historical analysis, it is interesting to note
that in these visions, just like in the original futuristic secular visions of the modern project
(see Sect. 3), humanity is part of a process that will birth ‘God-like’ entities, but in this
dystopian conception, we become superseded and replaced (e.g. Garis 1999; Barrat 2013;
Armstrong 2014) (history as a horrible cosmic trick for the emancipation of technological
Gods?).
Despite these radical apocalyptic speculations, there are also more radically optimistic
theorists who speculate that the technological singularity will be characterized by some
variant of the IA/HTM scenarios, i.e. humans will survive and transcend, ushering us into a
new era of opportunity and possibility for the exploration of posthuman mind (Hanson
2000; Kurzweil 2005; Kaku 2014; Rothblatt 2014). For these thinkers we should all strive
to be ‘posthuman’ when we ‘‘grow up’’ (Bostrom 2009). Here it is reasoned that there will
not be a strict dichotomy between the biocultural nature of the human and technologically-
based artificial intelligence, as suggested by Garis (1999). Instead, it is suggested that
biocultural humans will willingly transform themselves as technology emerges, allowing
us to radically upgrade our intelligence, consciousness, lifespan, and general state-of-being
(More and Vita-More 2014).
In these conceptions of the future the line between human and robot, or human and
artificial intelligence, will simply start to become ‘blurrier’ (i.e. not a strict dichotomy) as
the twenty-first century advances. Therefore, by 2050, these theorists reason that it will be
difficult to differentiate between different forms of conscious intelligent beings and we will
be fully immersed in a hyper-technological society (Glenn 1989). Consequently, the rad-
ical techno-optimists reason that we should boldly and optimistically move forward with
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research related to equaling or surpassing human intelligence with technology (Kurzweil
2012; Blackford and Broderick 2014; Kaku 2014; More and Vita-More 2014; Rothblatt
2014).
3.2 Theory of Atechnogenesis and Technological Life
In the above section I considered the possibility of ‘technological singularity’ from both
the artificial general intelligence (AGI) and global brain (GB) perspective. However, the
term ‘singularity’ in particular is problematic from the point of view of understanding the
evolutionary nature of this future transition on scientific terms. As stated, the technological
singularity concept was originally conceived and developed in the physical sciences in
reaction to the possibility of encountering a prediction horizon resulting from the emer-
gence of machine minds. The term singularity was borrowed from the mathematical notion
of singularity where a radical material discontinuity in a physical system results in infinite
values in a finite amount of time (i.e. gravitational density of black holes). However, many
contemporary futurists and computer scientists are beginning to shy away from the concept
of technological singularity (e.g. Dvorsky 2014; Naam 2014; Bostrom 2014). Computer
scientist Ramez Naam explained most succinctly why many academics are breaking away
in a conversation with futurist George Dvorsky (Dvorsky 2014):
‘Singularity’ in mathematics is a divide-by-zero moment, when the value goes from
some finite number to infinity in an eye blink. In physics, it’s a breakdown in our
mathematical models at a black hole. Smarter-than-human AI would be very cool. It
would change our world a lot. I don’t think it deserves a word anywhere near as
grandiose as ‘Singularity’. It wouldn’t be a divide-by-zero. The graph wouldn’t
suddenly go to infinity. Being twice as smart as a human doesn’t suddenly mean you
make yourself infinitely smart.
Moreover, philosophers and futurists have noted that the singularity concept appears to
have developed many techno-utopian connections and similarities to the Christian rapture
(Cole-Turner 2012) (i.e. ‘rapture for the nerds’) and other religious future beliefs (Hughes
2012). This may not in-and-of-itself be a bad development, as it simply demonstrates an
archetypal continuity in human culture for a higher state, however it is still questionable
whether the term ‘singularity’ lends itself to serious scientific inquiry regarding the human
future (Bostrom 2014, p. 40). Even inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, arguably the most
well known singularity theorist and leading popularizer of the term ‘‘technological
singularity’’, admitted that the future of technological evolution did not present us with an
actual singularity in The Singularity Is Near (2005, p. 34):
Of course, from a mathematical perspective, there is no discontinuity, no rupture, and
the growth rates remain finite, although extraordinary large. But from our currently
limited framework, this immanent event appears to be an acute and abrupt break in
the continuity of progress. I emphasize the word ‘‘currently’’ because one of the most
salient implications of the Singularity will be a change in the nature of our ability to
understand. We will become vastly smarter as we merge with our technology.
In short, although when it comes to the ‘singularity’ we can still be ‘Vingeian’ or
‘Kurzweilian’ in the sense that we are approaching a qualitative transition in our nature, the
term singularity itself is more a by-product of our own limited level of biological
intelligence, as opposed to a description of an actual singularity.
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This results in a tremendous conceptual tension within modern futurist theory because
the singularity concept is rooted in physical and mathematical theory, when it is attempting
to describe a process (not a single event) that is inherently evolutionary in its nature. Our
civilization does not face a ‘‘black hole of intelligence’’ as the concept of technological
singularity suggests. Instead, when properly framed in big historical terms I believe it is
clear that we face the full emergence of a new evolutionary pathway: the true birth and
independence of cultural evolution. As we covered when discussing cosmic evolution (see
Sect. 2.3), networks of cultural symbols code for inner conceptual experience, outward
conceptual behaviour, as well as for technological structures. This can be seen as analo-
gous to the way that networks of chemicals code for inner perceptual experience, outwards
perceptual behaviour, as well as for biological structures. Consequently, the biocultural
human lives in both a perceptual and a conceptual cognition landscape, and the tech-
nologies we produce are an integral aspect to the cultural evolutionary process.
Therefore, when approaching the notion of singularity I will instead be proposing and
applying a theory of biocultural evolution within a cosmic evolutionary framework that
may give us a different perspective on human evolution and enable more specific pre-
dictions about our future. Specifically, technological singularity theory appears to be an
attempt to describe the emergence of technological life, and in particular, the emergence of
technological intelligent life, as stemming from our own accelerating scientific (symbolic)
activities [i.e. ‘when humans transcend biology’ (Kurzweil 2005)]. And if our symbolic
activities either A) allow us to merge with our technologies and design our own substrate,
or B) allow us to create self-producing self-maintaining technological life from advances in
robotics and artificial intelligence (see Sect. 3.1), this would be a process whereby sym-
bolic code produced technological structures with evolutionary-cybernetic properties
analogous to biological living systems.
In the domains of evolutionary-cybernetics today there are many researchers that have
been referring to the emerging ‘life-like’ properties of our machines with concepts like
‘‘postbiological life’’ (Dick 2008,2009a), ‘‘machinic life’’ (Johnston 2008), ‘‘artificial life’’
(Aguilar et al. 2014), or ‘‘living technology’’ (Bedau et al. 2009). I prefer to think of these
systems as natural and technological, while also sharing the same properties and processes
as biological systems, so the names that make the most sense to me are ‘living technology’
or ‘technological life’. Furthermore, many astrobiological theorists now also assume that