Posthuman Blues

Everyday I get "spam" email: generic ads for Viagra-like products, career-building software, come-ons from nonexistent women who urge me to view their private webcams, etc. Spam is possible because of digital media's ability to reproduce at a staggering rate. It follows that if people eventually colonize a computerized substrate in the form of sentient software uploads, people themselves can be copied at will, resulting in a deluge of (post-) human spam.

Today's overpopulation is a crude but useful analogy. The Earth is spared complete destruction because food and energy are finite. It takes time to produce a human child. Not so with digital "wildlife."

If we decide to live an uploaded existence, will we succumb to the urge to multiply unnecessarily, perhaps out of sheer hubristic fanaticism? Will we inundate the Cosmos with copies of ourselves?

Ken MacLeod anticipates a similar situation in his "Engines of Light" trilogy, in which god-like alien intelligences have an understandable aversion to primitive species that spam themselves. On the other end of the argument, cosmologists such as Frank Tipler -- who believes we are the universe's sole intelligent species -- heartily endorse saturating the universe with our presence . . .