Posthuman Blues

I alternate between grave misanthropy and chomping-at-the-bit optimism. If the human species is destined to fail -- wiped out by its own toxic excesses or slaughtered by warfare -- I see no real point in continuing; an extraterrestrial biologist could argue that we're simply taking up time in which the planet could excrete a new biosphere from which a more promising intelligence might arise.

But of course we don't know where we're headed. So we make educated forecasts and hope that our warnings are heeded before it's too late. All too often this seems like an exercise in futility. Sometimes I fear that we've reached a critical threshold, that the human population will be decimated before we can ensure a meaningful, abundant world for ourselves and our descendants (who may well not be human in the contemporary sense). For Earth and its teeming billions of passengers, the end is always nigh; for too long we've relied on blind luck and narrow escapes. Despite brushes with cataclysm and the rigors of evolution, we've survived -- but only barely.

Although I harbor serious reservations about humanity's ability to make the evolutionary cut, I'm not without hope. I sense great things in the making. I enjoy experiencing this dire, ever-accelerating point in our species' history; our potential as genuine cosmic citizens challenges the imagination and stretches conceptual boundaries to dizzy extremes.

I'm willing to embrace transcendence or endure extinction. I must perpetually concede either possibility, no matter how dramatically different, regardless of how exciting or dismal. I walk a fine existential edge, fearing and cherishing, enlivened by a vertiginous sense of astonishment and horror.