(This is a brief account of some of my research regarding the literal and figurative death of the human.)
The future holds some interesting things for us. Science fiction imagines great fleets of spaceships and intergalactic wars, super drugs and cloning, cybernetic and bionics, aliens and human-created beings, and a whole list of other fascinating bits that would take a millennia to put down on paper.
But what science fiction likes to keep secret is the fact that we’ll cease to exist. Oh, sometimes it’s not so secretive about it, but it likes to play games with you. You see, the future that science fiction often envisions is ones in which everything we think we know to be true of the term “human” is actually not true at all. Robots look like us, learn to talk and feel, and otherwise integrate into human society with little more than a few kinks (the kind of kinks that you’d find in humanity anyway). Aliens show up at our doorsteps with all but our DNA signifying them as essentially us. And if you want to get really bad: Star Trek, that bastion of SF greatness, actually suggested that we are nothing more than a subspecies of a greater genetic beast. Why? Because humans could produce children with non-humans. We end up with half-Vulcans and half-Klingons, which suggests that whatever it is that makes us human is even smaller than we ever imagined, and might, in fact, be nothing more than a single gene that says we don’t have ridges on our foreheads.
Oh, and it gets better. Battlestar Galactica quite literally destroys everything that defines us as human. The Cylons, for all their hard work to be something distinct from us, are almost exactly like us in every way: they feel, they act, and they look like any of us. And then there’s Hera, who is the genetic Eve of our generation. She is the half-Cylon, half-Human child that reminds us that there actually is no such thing at all as the human in our world. We aren’t human. We’re part machine already. Never mind that we’re becoming more machine every day with our technology; the fact that we’re part machine already means we never were human to begin with.
But that last bit is kind of a fantasy. Battlestar Galactica spends a lot of time tearing down the foundations of humanity without the last few episodes to ruin things. All the human emotions we attribute to, well, the human are discovered to be suspect as human qualities: Cylons love, hate, feel sad, cry, get depressed, and can generally be psychologically damaged in almost every way that a human can (I say almost only because there are some things we don’t know simply because the show doesn’t have time to show them). They can breed with us, have flesh like us, and are, for all intensive purposes, exactly like us. The only exception? There are only a handful of models (twelve, to be exact).
This sort of thing has been going on in science fiction for a while, constantly imagining a future in which the human no longer exists. What the heck are we going to do when that happens? Science fiction says we’ll eventually accept it. What do you think?
Shaun Duke is a graduate student at the University of Florida studying science fiction, postcolonialism, and fantasy. He regularly blogs at The World in the Satin Bag and is the co-owner of Young Writers Online, a web community and writing workshop for young writers. You can learn more about Survival By Storytelling Magazine at http://sbsmag.wordpress.com/.
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Interesting, especially the idea from BSG that we’re hobbled from the start, already being part machine.
The trouble is that, in order to say ‘we’re getting to the point where humans aren’t human any more’, you need to define what ‘human’ is. Biologically, if we can breed with it then it’s the same species as us, but that leads to the Star Trek example you mention where all humanoid aliens are the different sub-species, and also to the rather unappealing idea that we could hook a womb up to life-support machines, have sex with it, conceive a child and have the child be born, and the womb machine would be technically classified as human. Surely we’re more than our gentiles? Science has yet to find the ‘human soul’, so that’s that idea out the window. Did humans die when we discarded that idea, and started to fit people with mechanical pace-makers?
Personally, I’m eager for the future of cybernetically and biologically enhanced humans. If we don’t embrace the artificial evolution of the human species, we’ll create superior machines that will surpass us and leave us far behind with our sense of ‘natural’ superiority. It seems a simple choice of get on board or get run over.