Diaspora | The Minds that Left Reality

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You could give people a glimpse of this in just three dimensions. Enough to make it clear that there's life in here. This is going to shake them up badly, though. Life embedded in the accidental computations of Wang's carpet, with no possibility of ever relating to the world outside. This was an affront to Carter Zimmerman's whole philosophy. Nature had evolved organisms as divorced from reality as the inhabitants of the most inward-looking polis. Where was the privileged status of the physical universe, the clear distinction between reality and illusion? And after 300 years of waiting for good news from the diaspora, how would they respond to this back on Earth? Greg Egan's Diaspora is one of the most ambitious and mind-bending science fiction novels ever published. It came out in 1997 and originally started as a short story called Wang's Carpets. That story ended up as a chapter in the novel. Diaspora is dense, smart, and way ahead of its time. This is hard science fiction to the core. Egan invents entire new branches of physics. He reimagines life, consciousness, time, space, even what it means to be human. In the spirit of dense epics like Dune, this book does not ease you in. There is a glossary in the back that explains various terms, including Cossack theory, which is a major part of this book. And I'll talk about that in just a second. By the year 2975, humanity isn't one species anymore. It's split into three groups. The fleshers, the biological humans, including the statics, the unchanged baseline humans that most closely resemble original humans. And there are all sorts of other modified humans, underwater people, people who've hacked at their genes, and dream apes who are humans that have given up speech entirely to live closer to nature. These modified humans were known as exuberants. Different exuberants have made modifications to all kinds of characteristics. Some have been simple, pragmatic adaptations for new diets or habitats, digestive, metabolic, respiratory, muscular skeletal, images flashed up from different points on the tree, amphibious, winged, and photosynthetic exuberance, close-ups of modified teeth, diagrams of altered metabolic pathways. Orlando rose from his seat and started drawing curtains. The contrast of the images improved. Often, habitat changes also demanded neural modifications to provide appropriate new instincts. No one can thrive in the ocean, for example, without the right hardwired reflexes. And then there are the Gleisners, who are AIs in robotic bodies that live mostly in space. They care about the physical world and experience time like regular humans. And then finally, there are the citizens, these are digital minds that live entirely in simulated worlds. Some of them might be uploaded humans, but most of them are not. Most of them were born in code. They live in virtual environments, they don't have bodies, and they can think hundreds of times faster than any flesher. In Konishi, every homeborn citizen was grown from a mind seed, a string of instruction codes like a digital genome. The first mind seeds had been translated from DNA nine centuries before, when the Paulus founders had invented the Shaper programming language to recreate the essential processes of neuroembryology in software. Most of the book follows these citizens, especially one named Yatima, who isn't born in the normal sense, but generated as an orphan by the Kaunishi Polis. Yatima grows up in just a few days of real-world time. Everything in this society changes when a Gleisner named Carpal detects a catastrophic cosmic event. A gamma ray burst from a binary neutron star collapse. It shouldn't have happened for another 7 million years, according to the Cossack theory, which we mentioned earlier. But it happens fast. He had to get in touch with colleagues in the asteroid belt, show them the data, and talk through the possibilities calmly. But if he was right, how long did the Fleshers have before Lacerta lit up with gamma rays 6,000 times brighter than the Sun? Carpo checked and rechecked the calculations, fitted curves to different variables, tried every known method of extrapolation. The answer was the same every time. Four days. An attempt is made to warn the Fleshers. They try to get them to either upload into polises or at least get underground, but most fleshers don't listen. Then the gamma ray burst hits, wiping out Earth's entire atmosphere and nearly all life on the planet. This is a mass extinction event. The Gleisner robots and the citizens survive. Their tech was hardened against cosmic radiation. Some of the fleshers survive as well and get uploaded after the disaster, but for the most part, biological humanity is done. The main story kicks off after that. Citizens from a polis called Carter Zimmerman, focused on real-world physics, realize that the Kosic theory is flawed. They launch the diaspora. A thousand copies of their polis are sent out across the galaxy in order to gather data, to learn what they can, and try to understand how the universe really works. From this point on, the book follows different versions of the same characters because each copy of the Carter Zimmermann polis has the same cast at launch, but as they travel, they evolve differently. Some explore exotic physics, some make contact with alien intelligences, some even cross into entirely different universes. It's less about a single story arc and more about the question, how far can intelligence go when it's not limited by biology? One of the wildest parts of diaspora is how it handles time. Citizens experience reality way faster than Fleshers, as I mentioned earlier, about 800 times faster. That means that they can live hundreds of subjective years in just one year of real time, but they could also slow down, stop, or tune their consciousness however they want. One police even slows its perception down enough to watch continents move. General perception is significantly different for citizens. Linear, like language or math, information that's transferred like data packets, and gestalt, like seeing or smelling. All of the info arrives at once and is processed subconsciously. They also use something called tags to instantly share identities, ideas, or entire datasets. In this book, Egan isn't just writing to speculate about future tech. Diaspora is wrestling with what it means to be alive when you're no longer a body. If you can redesign your thoughts, if you can stop time, clone yourself, or become pure code, where do values come from? There's a part in this book where characters discuss why even do a diaspora at all? Why not simulate a diaspora? What does it mean to care about anything? If we don't need to spread our genes, what replaces that drive? Is it curiosity? Is it joy? Is it duty? Egan doesn't hand you the answers either, he just shows you what the questions might look like thousands of years from now. If we survive long enough to ask them, that is. Diaspora is definitely hard science fiction. It's not light reading. As typical of a lot of hard science fiction, especially older science fiction, there are no easy emotional hooks. But in this one in particular, there are also no chosen one arcs, no clear heroes or villains. It's all technical, philosophical. It's not afraid to make you feel small either. But it also shows a future where intelligence doesn't fade. It continues to evolve. It reaches and learns and becomes something totally new. If you've ever wondered what humanity might look like after biology, post-biology, after Earth, and after the universe itself, then Diaspora tries to answer that, or at least map out the first few steps. Transhumanism is a very interesting idea in science fiction. It shows up all over the place, and this is one of the most interesting explorations of the idea that I've read in a long time.