At 06:58 PM 5/09/00 -0500, Barbara Lamar wrote:
> I'd be interested to know how others feel about the prospect of being
>among the last members of the human species.
In a way, the title of my most recent book on >H topics could have been THE
LAST HUMAN GENERATION (rather than just THE LAST MORTAL GENERATION). I do
repeatedly make the point in these books that current-model humans are
likely to be extinct within a century: not by death, but by enhanced
transformation. It's funny to see how uncomfortable this suggestion makes
the traditionally religious, who insist the rest of time that just such an
outcome (but only *their* authorized version, naturally) is on the cards...
It's also apparent from sf that deals with transcendence that the reader
(and writer) usually has very mixed responses to the prospect. Arthur
Clarke's CHILDHOOD'S END is almost unbearably poignant as the children of
humanity transcend into unity with a kind of cosmic Ur-Mind. Greg Bear's
BLOOD MUSIC has some of the same regretful feeling to it. Only Greg Egan
seems free of sentimentality in his embrace of the posthuman, and his work
is almost always rather too chilly for comfort. (My own novel THE JUDAS
MANDALA, written so long ago that these notions were fairly new to me, was
off the mark: I approved of a transcendent Omega Point universal Mind at
the end of time, named as such before Tipler had the same idea, but I
proposed that history would be a contest between such an entity derived
from organic life and another drawn from `cold' machine or cyborg
consciousnesses. Of course this is still possible, but I now believe such
crude dualities miss the point.)
Damien Broderick
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