Are we rearranged food?

A thought on the future of life

Life and the universe are nothing but particle arrangements.

In the future, some very clever people plan to arrange them better.

🜃

Do you sometimes wonder about the future of life? Is the human stomach the most efficient tool for generating energy? Or is the sun better? Does it make sense to populate distant Earths with humans? Or should we optimize ourselves as simulations?

Great things are in store for the future of life, but to understand where we are going, we must first understand where we are.

Everything in this universe exists as it does because, 13.8 billion years ago, the lid was taken off the Big Bang pressure cooker sending a hot soup of fundamental particles flying in all directions. After a while, they turned into atoms and, with the help of gravity, formed a vast number of planets, suns, stars, and galaxies—so far apart that traveling to them is impossible. Space is cold and dark. There is no oxygen. We don’t even know whether there is life beyond Earth. It is all rather inefficient.

Yet, amid this cosmic chaos, something the Big Bang had clearly not anticipated emerged: the human species. As all biological entities, we are, for now, nothing more than rearranged food. But we are on the verge of creating something the Big Bang never quite managed: superintelligence.

The future belongs to superintelligent entities. They will be ambitious. They will spread across the universe and arrange all the particles the Big Bang messed up in ways that are more optimized, more efficient, and infinitely more delightful.

How exactly will this rearranged universe look? That is something the very clever people are still thinking about.

Superintelligence flying into space.

🜃

This essay is part of my ongoing project Cognitive Sovereignty, a year-long exploration of society, technology, nature, and the future of life on Earth through aphorisms and reflections.

Thank you for reading,
—Claudia B.