Posthuman Blues

I worked on the new book tonight. There's no lack of subject matter; it's a matter of finding unexpected parallels and knowing what to exclude. And of course knowing how to tell it without sounding lofty or abstract.





The gist of it: Biology -- as we're used to it -- is very likely a transitional stage in the evolution of intelligence. Since the dawn of consciousness, humans have sought to utilize their environment to enhance themselves. We're now on the brink of dissolving the line between "tool" and "user" as we merge more and more intimately with our creations . . . and as our creations acquire creative faculties of their own. Extrapolating from this trend, it's possible to envision our not-so-distant descendents defying today's quaint distinction between "organic" and "inorganic."

But no extrapolation of the human future is complete without addressing alternative routes, and in this respect the prospect of extraterrestrial intelligence is extraordinarily useful -- and not simply as a thought experiment. Evidence suggests that, far from a novel event to expect in some unimaginable future, alien visitation is taking place now, albeit in a cybernetic context that's proven elusive to the dominant SETI paradigm.

"The Postbiological Cosmos" argues that the UFO enigma reveals an unexpectedly consistent "signature" once we dispense with the prevailing wisdom that reduces extrasolar visitors to flesh-and-blood "astronauts" visiting us in the form of metallic spacecraft analogous to those used by our own manned space program. Instead, we find something that's at once infinitely stranger and far more portentous.