Beyond Earth (ATWG) - Chapter 22 - Space and Humanity's Evolution by John Stewart

From The Space Library

Chapter 22

Space and Humanity's Evolution

By John Stewart

"The most meaningful activity in which a human being can be engaged is one that is directly related to human evolution. This is true because human beings now play an active and critical role not only in the process of their own evolution but in the survival and evolution of all living beings. Awareness of this places upon human beings a responsibility for their participation in and contribution to the process of evolution. If humankind would accept and acknowledge this responsibility and become creatively engaged in the process of metabiological evolution consciously, as well as unconsciously, a new reality would emerge, and a new age would be born."

Jonas Salk, 1983

Movement out into space has the potential to deliver clear benefits to humanity—it has the potential to improve the quality of life for those who remain on Earth, and to also provide enriched experiences for those who go out into space. By themselves, these benefits make space colonization almost inevitable. But the expansion of humanity into space is also of great evolutionary significance, and recognition of this has the potential to substantially increase support for the space effort. Awareness that space settlement is one of the next great steps in evolution on this planet and that contributing to this amounts to participation in the advancement of the evolutionary process has the potential to strongly energize support for the expansion into space.

At present, this is not a major factor - very few humans see their lives as part of a broader evolutionary trajectory, and even fewer draw on the evolutionary process to define their goals and values.

However, this is changing. Increasingly, individuals are beginning to see that their lives and actions are an important part of the great evolutionary process that has produced the universe and the life within it. They realize that they have a significant role to play in evolution on this planet, and that the eventual movement of humanity out into space is a key step in this evolution. Some of these individuals are choosing to dedicate their lives to consciously advancing the evolutionary process. They know that if evolution on Earth is to continue to fulfill its potential, it must now be driven consciously, and their responsibility and destiny is to contribute to this.

At the heart of this evolutionary awakening is the understanding that evolution is directional. This is the unmistakable conclusion that can be drawn from a growing body of interdisciplinary work (for example, see Huxley, 1957 (3); Maynard Smith and Szathmary, 1995 (5); Stewart, 2000 (6); Chaisson, 2001 (1), and Gardner, 2003 (2)). The emerging picture is that evolution is not an aimless and random process, but that it is headed somewhere. The realization that evolution is directional has major implications for humanity—once we understand the direction of evolution, we can identify where we are located along the evolutionary trajectory, discover what the next great steps in evolution are, and see what they mean for us, as individuals and collectively.

Where is evolution headed? Contrary to earlier understandings that emphasized the evolution of selfishness, an unmistakable trend is towards the formation of cooperative organizations of living processes of larger and larger scale.

The significance of this trend towards larger-scale cooperatives is well illustrated by a short history of the evolution of life on Earth. For billions of years after the big bang, the universe expanded rapidly in scale and diversified into a multitude of galaxies, stars, planets and other forms of lifeless matter. The first life that eventually arose on Earth was infinitesimal—it was comprised of a few molecular processes. But it did not remain on this tiny scale for long. In the first major development, cooperative groups of molecular processes formed the first simple cells. Then, in a further significant advance, communities of these simple cells formed more complex cells of much greater scale. A further major evolutionary transition unfolded after many more millions of years. Evolution discovered how to organize cooperative groups of these complex cells into multi-celled organisms such as insects, fish, and eventually mammals. Again the scale of living processes had increased enormously. This trend continued with the emergence of cooperative societies of multi-celled organisms, including bee hives, wolf packs and baboon troops. The pattern was repeated with humans—families joined up to form bands, bands teamed up to form tribes, tribes joined to form agricultural communities, and so on. The largest-scale cooperative organizations of living processes on the planet are now human societies.

This unmistakable trend is the result of many repetitions of a process in which living entities team up to form larger scale cooperatives. Strikingly, the cooperative groups that arise at each step in this sequence become the entities that then team up to form the cooperative groups at the next step in the sequence.

It is easy to see what has driven this long sequence of directional evolution—at every level of organization, cooperative teams united by common goals will always have the potential to be more successful than isolated individuals. It will be the same wherever life arises in the universe. The details will differ, but the direction will be the same—towards unification and cooperation over greater and greater scales.

Life has come a long way on this planet. When it began, individual living processes could do little more than influence events at the scale of molecular processes. But as a result of the successive formation of larger and larger cooperatives, coordinated living processes are now managing and controlling events on the scale of continents. And life appears to be on the threshold of another major evolutionary transition - humanity has the potential to form a unified and inclusive global society in symbiotic relationship with our technologies and with the planet as a whole. In the process, "we" (the whole) will come to manage matter, energy and living processes on a planetary scale. When this global organization emerges, the scale of cooperative organization will have increased over a million, billion times since life began.

If humanity is to fulfill its potential in the evolution of life in the universe, this expansion of the scale of cooperative organization will continue. The global organization has the potential to expand out into the solar system and beyond. By managing matter, energy and living processes over larger and larger scales, human organization could eventually achieve the capacity to influence events at the scale of the solar system and galaxy. And the human organization could repeat the great transitions of its evolutionary past by teaming up with any other societies of living processes that it encounters.

Further extrapolation suggests that the great potential of the evolutionary process is to eventually produce a unified cooperative organization of living processes that spans and manages the universe as a whole. The matter of the universe would be infused and organized by life. The universe itself would become a living organism that pursued its own goals and objectives, whatever they might be. In its long climb up from the scale of molecular processes, life will have unified the universe that was blown apart by the big bang.

As life increases in scale, a second major trend emerges - it gets better at evolving. Organisms that are more evolvable are better at discovering the adaptive behaviors that enable them to succeed in evolution. They are smarter at finding solutions to adaptive challenges and at finding better ways to achieve their goals.

Initially living processes discover better adaptations by trial and error. They find out which behaviors are most effective by trying them out in practice. Initially this trial and error search occurs across the generations through mutation at the genetic level. An important advance occurs when this gene-based evolution discovers how to produce organisms with the capacity to learn by trial and error during their lives.

In a further major transition, organisms evolve the capacity to form mental representations of their environment and of the impact of alternative behaviors. This enables them to foresee how their environment will respond to their actions. Rather than try out alternative behaviors in practice, they can now test them mentally. They begin to understand how their world works, and how it can be manipulated consciously to achieve their adaptive goals.

Evolvability gets another significant boost when organisms develop the capacity to share the knowledge that they use to build their mental representations. Imitation, language, writing and printing are important examples of processes that transmit adaptive knowledge. These processes enable the rapid accumulation of knowledge across generations and the building of more complex mental models.

Eventually organisms with these capacities will develop a theory of evolution - they will acquire the knowledge to build mental models of the evolutionary processes that produced the living processes on their planet, including themselves.

In fact, on any planet where life emerges, this trend is likely to eventually produce organisms who awaken to their evolutionary history and its future possibilities. They will begin to understand the wider-scale evolutionary processes that have produced them and that will govern the future of life on their planet. The organisms will begin to see themselves as having reached a particular stage in an on-going and directional evolutionary process. They will know where evolution is headed, and what they must do if they are to advance evolution on their planet.

On any planet which reaches this stage, some individuals will begin to undergo a critical shift in consciousness. Increasingly they will cease to experience themselves primarily as isolated and self-concerned individuals. Instead, they will begin to see and experience themselves as participants and actors in the great evolutionary process on their planet. The object of their self-reflection will change. When they think of themselves, they will tend to see themselves-as-part-of-the-evolutionary-process. Their conscious participation in evolution will increasingly become the source of value and meaning in their lives. Key realizations that will contribute to this shift in consciousness are:

• they have the opportunity to be conscious participants in the evolutionary processes that will shape the future of life on their planet and its movement out into space. They can play an important role in the actualization of the next great steps in evolution;
• the successful future evolution of life on their planet depends on their conscious participation. The most successful planetary societies will be consciously designed and envisioned, as will their successful expansion out into space;
• their actions can have meaning and purpose insofar as they are relevant to the wider evolutionary process. To the extent that their actions can contribute positively to evolution, they are meaningful to a larger process outside themselves that has been unfolding long before they were born, and that will continue long after they die;
• the evolutionary perspective therefore provides them with an answer to the great existential question that confronts all conscious individuals: What should I do with my life?
• their awakening to the evolutionary perspective and the awakening of others like them is itself a critically important evolutionary event on their planet. The emergence of individuals who undergo this shift in consciousness equates to the evolutionary process on the planet becoming aware of itself. Through these individuals, the evolutionary process develops capacities for self-reflection, self-knowledge, and foresight. It will use these abilities to continually redesign itself to accelerate its own advancement.

Individuals that embrace the evolutionary perspective will set out to align their personal goals with evolutionary objectives. They will attempt to free themselves from pre-existing motivations and needs that conflict with evolutionary goals. They know that this will be essential if their species is to continue to contribute to the advancement of the evolutionary process—the organisms that play a significant role in the future evolution of life in the universe will not be those that continue to stay on the planet on which they emerge, masturbating stone-age desires forever.

Individuals that develop the psychological capacity to transcend these motivations and needs will actualize a further major transition in evolvability. They will be self-evolving beings - organisms that have the ability to adapt in whatever directions are necessary to advance the evolutionary process, unrestricted by their biological and social past.

Humanity has reached this major evolutionary threshold. The next great steps in social evolution on Earth are the formation of a unified, sustainable and creative global society and the expansion of this society into space. On Earth, individuals and groups are beginning to emerge who have decided to consciously contribute to the evolutionary process by doing what they can to actualize such a global society and its expansion. They are energized by the realization that their evolutionary awakening and activism is part of a significant evolutionary transition on Earth. When larger-scale cooperatives of living processes have emerged previously in evolution, they have undergone a process of individuation. The unified and expanding human society can be expected to follow a similar evolutionary path. It will progressively develop internal processes that enable it to act, adapt and relate as a coherent whole—eventually humanity will be able to speak with one voice. For the first time, there will be an entity that other planetary societies could relate to and interact with. There will be an entity at the same level as other planetary and trans-planetary societies. If humanity is successful in reaching this level, a new universe of possibilities and experiences will open up to humankind.

As documented throughout this book, some kind of movement of humanity out into space seems inevitable. But this great step is likely to be far more successful and meaningful if it is guided and energized by awareness of the wider evolutionary trajectories that will eventually determine the significance of humanity in the universe.

References

• (1) Chaisson, E. J. (2001) Cosmic Evolution: the rise of complexity in nature. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
• (2) Gardner, J. N. (2003) Biocosm: The new scientific theory of evolution: Intelligent life is the architect of the universe. Makawao, Hawaii: Inner Ocean Publishing.
• (3) Huxley, J. (1957) New Wine for New Bottles. London: Chatto and Windus.
• (4) Maynard Smith, J., and Szathmary, E. (1995) The Major Transitions in Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• (5) Salk, J. (1983) Anatomy of Reality: Merging of intuition and reason. New York: Columbia University Press.
• (6) Stewart, J. (2000) Evolution's Arrow: the direction of evolution and the future of humanity. Canberra: The Chapman Press.

About the Author

Extracted from the book Beyond Earth - The Future of Humans in Space edited by Bob Krone ©2006 Apogee Books ISBN 978-1-894959-41-4

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