​ Metaphorms

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Who is going to Mars?
Thursday, November 16, 2017
8:31 PM

Opinion

I’m afraid if I don’t get this out there soon enough, we will all be left behind, and my seemingly brilliant ideas and intuition will be for naught. I hear a lot about space migration, probably because I am entrenched in it from a curiously intellectual level, but mostly because it is inevitable as human evolution will push us to these extremes. But let us talk about this realistically. Who gets to go? I think the lowest price for a tour of outer space is going for $75000 in today's dollar.  So…to actually travel to Mars and be one of the first settlers will cost much more than that. (I read somewhere an estimate for each settler on Mars would be closer to half a million dollars). Not to mention that I believe there will be, as there should be, a deep and agonizing selection process, a culling of the herd, a cleansing of the gene pool, so to speak, lol. Not to mention, rigorous training, psychological profiling, and testing for susceptibility to biopsychosocial stress due to habitation in extreme environments. I would even think they should be training and acclimating infants now for the travel that won't happen until the estimated 2030 or so so they will be fully conditioned by the time the technology is ready for colonization and actual habitation. Low gravity, low oxygen, low lght, etc. Send them to Antarctica first, see how they fare, hold them under water, isolate them in the dark, see how they react. I just don't see it being as easy as ordering a flight online, packing your bags, and showing up at the gate. Then, of course, we won’t want street urchins, gang bangers, and dirty hippies, we will want scientists, doctors, computer geniuses, astrophysicists, astronauts, engineers, terra-formers and farmers, and the like. Any of you guys go to college for any of this? Maybe there will be some cultural aspects we will want to take with us, some artists, musicians, perhaps. Basically, most of humanity is fucked. But the key question here to remember is who will be our ambassadors for carrying on, and I don’t mean politicians, they can be left on earth, but since they seem to make the big bucks, I defer my opinion. Anyway, more importantly, who will carry on the evolution of this darling race? What adaptive traits do we want to survive in our genes? And I do mean survive, in the Darwinian sense. I only bring this up, because this shit costs money, and who has that kind of money? Survival of the fittest, or most fit, happens to be the man with the most money. Who cares what you look like, or your reproductive capabilities, or how intelligent, or how fast you run, or if you have straight teeth...you know, normal evolutionary traits. The planetary peace contingency, you know, the ones who want massive global humanitarianism, if there was one, is not going to spring for it, load us all up, by lottery, or trade, or first comes first served, or by standing in line for a seat. No, you will pay for that seat, and as I said, it will be an expensive one. So, who can afford one? Well, follow the money. Basically, what I am getting at, is that the civil war is not going to be between the blacks and whites, or between the Republicans and Democrats, or between Communism and Democracy, or between Christians and Muslims and Jews and atheists, or even between man and woman. This here is going to be a goddam showdown between the rich and the poor. And guess what, 99% of us are poor. So, guess who gets to go? Yep, greedy industrialists, elitist bankers, wall street junkies, wired techno punks, and, yep, crooked politicians. The Trumps, and the  Richard Bransons, and Rothschilds, and Rockefellers of the world, and you can bet they are taking their money with them. Apple, and Facebook, and Google, and Amazon, and Exxon, Saudi Aramco, the One Bank, and the Bilderberg’s, and Illuminati, etc. etc. will all have their seats, flying their banners, flying first class on their corporate sponsored space rockets. The common man, the bread and butter of the human race, will be left here to fend for ourselves. I’m not saying that is bad. The meek shall inherit the Earth. But think about it. Will getting rid of that 1% really help save humanity? Will it stop overpopulation, famine, war, crime, climate change, rampant consumerism, jealousy, narcissism, and all the rest of the ills and ilk’s of the world caused by those nutters? Face it, we, us, the poor 99%, are being abandoned. We won’t have the skills, the political savvy, the money, hehe, to establish a new world order, post-abandonment. The economic system will crash. Gangs, warlords. Social disorder, famine, massive migration, marshal law. There will be no medicine, no public services. No communications, no energy, no electricity, no heat. For anybody. It will be the great equalizer, perhaps. We will all have to take care of each other to get along. But, will we? I must say as a species, we are quite resilient. I have faith, good to get rid of those turds. This is where my scientific reasoning turns to conspiracy theory. I think those rich fuckers are already planning this. However, it seems to be a race to stockpile as much cash as possible as fast as possible. That is why so much corruption is coming to light in politics and manufacturing, and basic money-making. Because they don’t care, and they know they won’t be tracked down and convicted. They are laughing at us, and they will look down upon us from their little airtight space cubicles, and say, oh those poor schmucks.

© Brett M. Wilbur 2017
All rights reserved
 

Space Colonization and the Resulting Human Evolutionary Condition
By:  Brett M. Wilbur, MS
November 19, 2017

Work in progress.

Keywords: space colonization, extreme environments, human migration, human evolution, human habitation, self-awareness, intersubjectivity, consciousness, social cognition, emergent behavior, chaos theory, quantum theory, classical theories of Relativity, cybernetics.

Note:  The following narrative is a skeletal outline of my current research initiative. It is wholly inspired by the previous research of other more gifted and learned physicists, mathematicians, anthropologists, archeologists, linguists, psychologists, sociologists, biologists, neurologists, and philosophers, to whom I owe my appreciation and eventual citation. It is my first pass at writing down some of the ideas that have been circulating in my mind recently. Given that, I stand on their giant shoulders. My process is somewhat dubious scientifically. I am an architect, questionably an artiste, and I like to consider myself a poetic scholar and arm-chair philosopher, an architectural theorist. As Frank Lloyd Wright points out, architecture is the mother of the arts.[1]  This somehow skeptically and arguably gives me license to include all other arts, and, uh, sciences, in my philosophy. Perhaps not a true visionary, and most probably somewhat of a hack, I tend to take what I need, and leave the rest. Scientific purists will be disgusted by my arrogant bravado, but I leave it them to prove me wrong. As such, I have taken liberty with using their scientific conclusions to my own ends.  I am not trained to do the math and calculations necessary; I have not done the dirt digging and made the discoveries, however, given those conclusions, I seem to be able to reverse engineer the process, on one hand, but mostly I am able to garnish ramifications from those conclusions, on the other. I process through a hybrid form of eclectic logic. Simple though it may seem, if A=B and B=C, then A=C, but A may be made up of X, Y, and Z; I can’t say it is purely deductive since the hypotheses from which I begin with may not be valid, but the conclusion fits with my larger framework, and therefore supports my thesis, and once pieced together with other unrelated data, the logic emerges from the chaos. It is a bastardized form of the scientific method.  I take what they have concluded, I turn it sideways, examining it from multiple angles, reference points, and perspectives, compare it to other unrelated ideas, and I see how the piece fits within the overall puzzle.[2]  In other words, I start with a conclusion, an inspired, perhaps visionary conclusion - one which I have drawn out from the great dark nothingness, or that percolates up from the lower depths of the ocean of becoming[3] – and then I research, seeking out the facts that support that conclusion.  It is an organic process. It builds and grows upon itself as I learn new facts or discover previous research. New ideas emerge, old ones evolve, sometimes spinning me in new directions. All of them are intended to legitimize my own ideas; to add color and flavor to my hypothesis. On the surface, this may seem unfair. It would seem I could take any bit of knowledge, whether true or not, and use it to support the conclusion.  Here I rely on those giant underpinnings of genius. My rebuttal to such criticism is that, though I don’t claim to be brilliant, I am not a dumbass. I just seem to have the ability to “see” concepts.  I too practice the art of the scientific method, and likewise adhere to the Hippocratic Oath.[4]  I aim to be true, as ethically as I can be, to add validity to the conversation, to avoid confrontation, and not to deceive, nor be antithetical. If it appears I am plagiarizing, I do out of dumb luck, ignorance of what has gone before me, not malevolence, nor to steal or covet the ideas or the intellectual property of others. To me, from my point of view, I came up with these conclusions on my own, as I say, plucked out of thin air. As the work progresses, and I begin to build my argument, I may find the ideas to have already been discovered.  To those ideas, I will add citations as required.

[1] He actually said “The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.”
[2] For example, for decades scientists have haggled over the possibility of proving Einstein’s unified theory, determined to reconcile his classical theory of general relativity with quantum mechanics, the mega-large with the mega-small. I have stated previously there might be an in-between state, the liminal state of becoming hidden in the folds of time.  I speculate this missing state is the state of chaos. I don't mean the previously well studied causal correlation within quantum chaos, I mean another state independent of, though connected by proximity to, both classical physics, and quantum mechanics.  I can see that this might be an issue of cross-scale or multiple scale dynamics. It is possible that the rules of one scale cannot be applied to another. Each state can be measured separately because of their separate scale status but tied together they form a continuity of interaction. A state of infinite probability waves exceeding its limit of order, like ripples on water, it forms a state of chaos. From the state of chaos, given a set of verifiable perturbations, order emerges into matter. This can be shown in the pilot-wave experiments of John Bush of MIT, based on the discoveries of Yves Couder and Emmanuel Fort. The experiments show how an organized droplet walking on the surface of a chaotic vibrating fluid bath is self-propelled through a resonant interaction with its own wave field. This is inspired by de Broglie’s original conception of quantum dynamics.  de Broglie’s theories interpret the deterministic properties of indeterminant quantum mechanics, eventually leading to the Schrodinger’s equation, which involves the rates of change of the wave function in both space and time.  Dynamic wave interference can be interpreted as a chaotic state.  The direction of the walking droplet emerges as a deterministic function of its own influence and interaction with the wave affected by initial conditions, feedback loops, cross-scale interaction, and self-organizing behavior. I question whether the organized droplet itself emerges from, and due to, the turbulence. More on how this might affect gravitational waves later.
[3] Similar to how Gaston Bachelard describes the poetic image as “a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche.”  In, The Poetics of Space, p. xi.
[4] Reference, "primumnonnocere," meaning, “first, do no harm.”

Begin Here

First, the world was invisible, a solitary mass of nothingness. But, then came the quickening. Movement. Sound. Touch. Breathing. Dreams. Pain. From darkness, the prehistoric creature is born into light, from warmth, it bursts into the cold. The experience of separation begins its journey towards individuation but is limited to an instinctive state of interest in others and reflexive reaction to the environment. Nurtured by the maternal gaze, and the sky above, its amalgamated self-image blends with this familial environment, structured only by the forces of gravity, hunger, and need. Though, it is not fully aware of itself as an indivisible being, as an autonomous individual, its feelings, and experiences of self are comingled with the environment as an extension of that environment. Awareness, itself, a misnomer, is limited to attentive interaction, instinctual, and communal. It senses but does not have the capacity to think or to distinguish itself from the group. It knows and understands only itself in terms of its reliance on the other, and of the environment in which it grows. The being exists within the environment and is reactionary to it, just as the environment reacts to it. It cries, and the mother returns, hovering over it, a face upon the clouds. It smiles. It learns. It feels. It experiences, sensing, becomes aware of its body. Painful and gratifying urges – for food, for survival, and eventually sex - leads the being to act directly and intentionally upon the environment. The being discovers it can manipulate the surroundings, thus influencing its advantage to satisfy its own desires. It is not wholly dependent upon the environment alone, an interdependence develops. It begins to recognize other living beings within the environment, and begins to discern the categories of species - some as friend, some as foe, some as food. With friends, it cooperates to fulfill the basic urges of finding food, companionship, and a unified defense against similar enemies. An instinctual quality of distinguishing like species arises.  The error of mating with unlike species produces consternation. It takes an effort to bend others to its will. It learns direct action against others sometimes produces adverse effects, but through negotiation, it begins to commandeer their cooperation, as he begins to allow others to influence him in return. It recognizes this cause-effect-effect relationship, and through it discovers Time. More groups develop, which place him in a larger context of primal entanglement and a false sense of outsiderness, from which he must unravel himself to develop a true sense of belonging. The rudiments of society begin to emerge. Gestures, speech, and eventually symbolic language and ritual emerge. Eventually, he realizes these other beings also manipulate the environment independently to their own ends. Ends which are different from his own needs and desires.  Here, he begins to feel the pangs of otherness and becomes aware of himself as a separate being. A wound from which he must recover. As he gazes across the void which separates him from others, he feels aloneness in the eyes of the other. He realizes, they too, are watching him. His actions become mediated by how others may perceive him. He may or may not realize they too are reacting to him, making decisions based on how it might affect him, as he does for them. To differing degrees, they each become critically self-conscious. In a reciprocal state of other-awareness, the healthy ego begins to experience itself individualistically, as a partner in the production of shared reality, acting out within the space of intersubjectivity, and receptive to the gaze of others.  The less-than-healthy ego shrinks back from the gaze of others and begins to alienate himself away from any meaningful connection. He develops strategies for enforcement of this false self -  digging chasms, building walls, wearing veils, and donning masks as an attempt to keep the primal wound protected. Cartesian duality develops as an overgrown sense of inferiority, a cracked self-awareness that does not overcome the sense of outsiderness.  He begins to break down reality into subject-object, mind and body, I and Thou. The ego isolates, retreating into the shadows, hiding away, as it presents the false self to society. Fear dominates his ability to express and to connect, and he learns to cope throughout life, imitating others with his mistaken concept of normalcy. His ability to engage with society and other people comes in surges and degrees of self-inflicted appropriateness, as he lets society define his level of successes. We are all wounded by this tearing in our interpersonal experience of others, this realization of separateness, this turning away. Many people who have not overcome this traumatic primal wound still develop healthy coping skills and are able to lead productive and rewarding lives, others spiral down into pathology, marginalization, and exist on the fringes in a state of psychic paralysis.  It is here, in the forests and shadows of our septic selves that evil lurks.  It is here that the development of a fit and vigorous society in the silence of outer space may fail to evolve the necessary psychic skills to adapt to the extreme environment. 

 
The Anthropocene, as it has become to be called, the time of man on Earth, is rapidly coming to an end. War, climate change, pollution, erosion, wildfires, discrimination, marginalization of the poor and wretched, famine, religious terrorism, cyber terrorism, outer space alien attack, solar flare, the list goes on…even zombies are a concern, biological contamination of the species.  The CDC has procedures for a coming zombie invasion.  It is not total science fiction conspiratorial fantasy.  Any one of these problems alone is enough to trigger an extinction level event, but together, we have the perfect storm. Most of them have been caused by humanity and our disregard for others and the planet. There is a lot of information, books, journals, presentations, about this issue.  I don’t need to go into it here. It is not a question of if, it is when. A new epoch in the history of humanity is arriving. But, just as prehistoric society succeeded in adapting to other harsh conditions, with less technology, brain-power, and experience, this new cosmic epoch will have to overcome similar struggles.

 
As I have mentioned, the development and recognition of self in prehistoric hominins necessarily implicates a discovery of others within a societal frame of intersubjectivity as a direct reaction to forces in the environment. This conceptual space of liminality, as I call it, reflects the subjectivity of others, in which we see ourselves, which eventually triggers an emergence of our own self-awareness.


Human migration, behavioral psychology, and quantum systems gives us insight into how future colonization of space will affect humanity. Three sets of migration metrics will be examined which provide enough data to allow for an informed speculative analysis of the biocultural and anthropological effects of space colonization. First, prehistoric human migration and habitation will inform us regarding the traits and habits considered primary to early colonization, thus providing a baseline from which further speculation can be applied. Second, studies of survival within extreme environments will provide data concerning the human ability to adapt under extraordinary stresses, most notably, the settlement, or lack thereof, of the continent of Antarctica, will be used as an example. Lastly, and along these same lines, modern refugee internment will inform us regarding endurance strategies for survival under debilitating conditions. The compilation of these metrics provides data concerning the coping mechanisms, habits, rituals, and guiding principles of human behavior under unfamiliar and inhospitable conditions, leading to an analysis of the evolutionary advantages of courage, ambition (greed), and invention (tools), and their effects on species preservation (reproduction), adaptation (variance), and advancement (mutation).  This begs the question, when did humans become self-aware so that preservation, adaptation, and advancement were not just instinctual mechanisms?  Modern archeology places the earliest known H. sapiens somewhere between 320,000 years ago to 50,000 years ago.  A lot happened during that time.  To get a more precise timeframe, we must examine the sociality of the species to determine the emergence of intersubjectivity.  The development of intersubjectivity conclusively acknowledges a casual state of self-awareness – the true point of the evolution and development of a self-aware consciousness which evolved into the development of primitive habitation, and the complex inter-dynamics of society. Dwellings, in general, and the embellishments of caves and the engineering of primitive huts in particular, represent an extension, and perhaps an expression, of the self – a skin within a skin – and, the human need for refuge and security from their relationships to the environment and to others. For the hunter-gatherer living the migratory nomadic life upon the plains and savannas, transitory dwellings developed as an adaptive form of temporary protection, a separation from ensuing climatic conditions, hungry wild animals, angry rival clans, and very likely from the shadows of the night.  The eternal concept of home grew from these first evolutionary encounters with the self and others. The first human rituals, the use of ochre, ceremonial burials, and painting, shows us that at this point in evolution man had become aware of himself, and the experience of others and perhaps deities, and demons, within his surroundings.  As they became more agriculturally reliant, they eventually developed more permanent structures for comfort and status, and for rudimentary forms of sociality. Thus, gestures and vocal sounds evolved, and eventually, speech and language, the formation of the FOXP2 gene, emerged as a by-product of a reflexive notion of other and a requirement for communication of impressions and feelings of the self within the greater context of society and culture. At the far reaches of this study, we will hesitantly and trepidatiously, examine, with fear of postulating a demeaning fictional futurism, the possibility of a next-stage evolutionary human – that of the machine-modified human being.  With the development of quantum artificial intelligence, genome editing, and advanced prosthetics, humanity’s next evolutionary adaptation will be to the frontier of outer worlds, which will produce evolutionary beings of a synthetic, interconnected nature. Intelligent environments, future habitations, literally, will become extensions of the electronic hybrid self. Intelligent prosthetics with integrated biological hardware, now in experiemntal stages, will connect directly to the environment - the phone, the internet, the car, the house, etc.. The quest for humanity will survive cybernetically within the circuits and hardware of a bioengineered living being. Consciousness will endure within the neural networks of artificially created organisms, and the quantum self will evolve into a multi-dimensional expression of a cosmic god – the universe itself.


Though new discoveries change our perceptions regularly, it is believed that primate evolution occurred throughout Africa, Asia, and Europe from a period between 1 million and 200,000 years ago.  These are modern human’s distant ancestors, which included H. erectus, H. neanderthalensis, and H. heidelbergensis.  A common scientific consensus states that anatomically modern humans, H. sapiens, migrated from Africa several times between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, to settle in these distant lands.  Recent paleogenetic sampling indicates interbreeding among prehistoric humanoid species likely occurred leading to early humanoid development throughout Eurasia. Modern humans eventually migrating from Africa to Asia and Europe subsequently encountered these earlier predecessors before migrating to locations previously uninhabited; i.e. the Americas. The colonization by anatomically modern humans of newly discovered territories beyond the geographic boundaries of earlier predecessor settlements gives us insight into the bio-psycho-cultural issues involved with future off-planet developments. The exact measurement of human influence on the habitable areas of Earth varies, but suffice it to say, very few areas remain that would be hospitable for human settlement. Therefore, it is impractical to examine the effects of migration on modern societies for comparison to future habitation off-planet.  It is required to go back to a period when human ancestors first colonized Earth. A baseline for the biological, cultural, and psychological effects of migration into uninhabited space then can be established. For the purposes of our study, we shall examine the first migration of humans into Australia, where DNA markers are sufficient to allow us to conclude that they are of the original out-of-Africa anatomically human beings encountering a new and undeveloped hostile environment in which bravery, adaptation, and a fight for survival ushered in the modern age.  This original migration will inform us of our next migration endeavor, that of colonization of outer space.

However, with that said, colonization of extreme environments is conducive to our theory. Furthermore, migration to, and subsequent settlement of, distant lands causes stress – the stress of uncertainty, of crossing the liminal void into the unconscious, into quantum potential. Environmental and psychological stressors have been shown to boost evolution.

 Incomplete - To be continued

(Need citations throughout)


© Brett M. Wilbur 2017
All rights reserved