From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sun Jul 13 2003 - 22:58:04 MDT
At 02:23 PM 7/13/03 -0700, Hal wrote:
>Our minds are the crowning achievement of natural biological evolution.
>Our goals should ultimately be to fill the universe not with Life,
>but with Mind. We should transform the entire universe into a cosmos
>full of consciousness.
I tried to catch something of this many years ago in the novel that
eventually appeared more than a decade later in 1982 as THE JUDAS MANDALA.
That was when we still thought the universe was heading for a Big Crunch,
and hadn't yet guessed quite how soon a technological singularity might
occur. Here's my epiphany, warts and all, from that novel.
Damien Broderick
==============
The galaxies wheeled in the immensity of cosmic night, stars spending their
substance in an orgy of radiance, sucking hydrogen from the frozen void and
spewing back neutrinos, X rays, light, radio noise, the megaparsec pulses
of gravitation, and finally the ores and dense evanescent metals forged in
their bellies, hurled out in the cataclysm of stellar explosion; and in the
midst of spendthrift fury, on the tiny motes of rock and soil and ocean
that were the planets, life trod forth blinking from the slimy pools of its
birth, ate hungrily of the prodigal outpourings of its suns, and changed
under that same lash into forms strange and wild and beautiful, diverse
beyond number, swarmed and preyed upon each another's flesh and cooperated
in the intricate dance of shifting ecologies; and grew wise, at last, wise
and murderous and choked with dreams, yearning for the unnamable, taming
that very energy which mindlessly had brought them into being; and killed
with it, and healed and built with it, went beyond it to now unimagined
energies created in the convoluted structure of brains and ganglia complex
beyond precedent; and came, finally, to command their own brutality and
greatness...
[...]
The wise beings strode from star to star, galaxy to galaxy, but not to rape
and pillage. That eon of conquest was now no more than a regretted episode
in their immense history. They went in joy and respect into the glory that
extended, it seemed, beyond limit. Eyes of flesh were now eyes of fire, yet
still flesh; bodies met in the passion of love, and in those meetings made
new bodies to populate the multicosm and cherish all that lay and moved
within it. They no longer died; death was a clumsy expedient of random
evolution, and they had taken evolution into their own charge. Ennui, too,
was vanished-that specter which once had seemed to spoil the promise of
utopia-for how is boredom possible in a universe rich with other souls? So
they went to the curving edges of the universe, learned its physical limits
and measured and cherished them, learning the infinity within themselves...
[...]
Already more than forty billion years had passed since the first one-celled
creatures struggled for life in their soupy ponds. The wise ones had
altered themselves so radically that none of their early planet-bound
ancestors could have recognized them. They had merged in gestalt unities
huge as stars, their senses extending across the entire radiation scale and
into the domain of pure psychic energies. Even now their evolution was not
complete; the metamorphoses continued. Only the essential qualities of
humanity remained unaltered: love, joy, creation, reverence. The expansion
of the spacetime manifold achieved its greatest dimension, faltered; the
long contraction began. Stars dimmed and died, or faded to a steady ember
glow. The entity that was Sentience welcomed into its totality the few
remaining isolated members of the cosmic fellowship. Purpose and
consciousness infused every energy structure in the multicosm. A hundred
billion years after it had coalesced from incandescent gas, the universe
had become a single sentient organism...
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http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/eBook8404.htm
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