Special thanks are due to Paul Gilster for publishing this, my longest contribution to Centuari Dreams to date, and, at about 10,000 words, I am probably testing the patience of even the most devoted Centauri Dreams reader. It isn’t my intention to produce such long essays when I start on a project, but, like my last post on Centauri Dreams, Who will read the Encyclopedia Galactica? it grew in the telling.
This post is an attempt to bring an historiographical synchrony to futurism by taking up both transhumanism and interstellar travel, in order to examine how each will influence the other. As long as this post is, it could have been much longer. I haven’t done justice to the idea of “The Great Voluntaristic Divergence,” but at least the ideas are out there now, and I can work at improving my exposition and adding detail to the picture over time. I find that I am still, several years later, both fleshing out and refining many of the formulations of my “The Moral Imperative of Human Spaceflight” from 2011 (from my presentation at the first 100YSS symposium in 2011) and I imagine I could easily spend the next several years drawing out the implications of this and the previous Centauri Dreams post, Who will read the Encyclopedia Galactica?, both of which were already quite long, but suggestive of many ideas and attempting to extend the reach of futurism into the very far future, which is where these Centauri Dreams posts began, with an examination of far future existential risk (cf. Existential Risk and Far Future Civilization).
I have already made progress in expanding upon and elucidating the planetary constraints discussed in section 1 of this essay. Here on Tumblr I have been writing an ongoing series on planetary constraints (planetary constraints 1, planetary constraints 2, planetary constraints 3, planetary constraints 4, planetary constraints 5, planetary constraints 6, planetary constraints 7, planetary constraints 8, planetary constraints 9, and planetary constraints 10) and I will continue to work on this particular idea at least until I have given a summary of the nine planetary constraints upon the development of civilization that I initially sketched out, as well as examining some of the consequences of these constraints and their mitigation or elimination.
In this essay I was particularly pleased with the application of the reflection principle from set theory to humanity as a way to define transhumanism. I note at the end of the essay that what I have said in regard to transhumanism in relation to the reflection principle suggests parallel formulations of infinitistic historiography and infinitistic cosmology in terms of the reflection principle. Again, this is a mere suggestion that might be fleshed out over time.
In the past I saved most of my more exploratory and experimental ideas for manuscripts I once imagined I would put in a big and important book. Since the post several years of my life have been spent writing blog posts, no book has been written. Thus with these two long posts to Centauri Dreams I am pleased to give an exposition of some of my more unusual ideas, and that way I have a certain consolation that even if I cannot discipline myself to finish another book, some of these ideas will still be “out there” and have a chance of passing into circulation. A philosopher can hope for no more than that his ideas will be taken up by others and become the inspiration for further ideas.