The Technological Eclipse of the Individual

In the so-called “Xeelee Sequence” of the science fiction author, Stephen Baxter, we meet alien races who are known less by their physical forms than by their technological artefacts. Bearing in mind that I personally still have a few books to go before I have completed the reading of the Xeelee Sequence, so far I have personally had the pleasure of being introduced to…

The Qax: an alien race who subjugate humanity, who are known by their ships (being the adapted physical bodies of the whale-like Spline, who swim through the oceans of intergalactic space) and their actions (the aforementioned subjugation, etc). Very few humans come into contact with or even know the form that individuals of the Qax race take (which happens to be a consciousness distributed through cells of turbulence in the liquid water oceans (or separated portions thereof) in which they dwell).

The Xeelee themselves: the god-like super-race who “own the universe”… whose individual forms (I suspect) never become known to Baxter’s fictional humanity or indeed to the readers of his works… over whose discarded technological artefacts genocidal wars are fought.

And this has made me wonder whether us humans (in the real, factual world) will, at some point (inevitably?), be superseded by our technology? I am speaking not (necessarily) about some Terminator- or Matrix-like scenario, where humans are (virtually) wiped out by the machines we created, but rather… It could probably already be said that, if we are being observed from afar by an alien race of a roughly equivalent level of technology to ours, they are probably “getting to know us” not by our individual forms, but by our far more significant and indeed relevant cultural, social, artistic and technological artefacts. What does it matter what shape our physical form takes? Also, how much more difficult would such a thing be to discern or calculate, at a distance of (probably) tens or hundreds of light years, than the aforementioned artefacts, particularly the technological, which leave a far more measurable impact upon our environment?

Of course, get closer to planet Earth, and you see that we are not our buildings, our vehicles, our satellites, our radio waves, our Information Superhighway, etc, etc, etc (or are we?)… upon physically landing upon our world, an alien race may actually be surprised to discover who we are…

But that aside… what about the future? What will we (“we”) become? Will our physical forms (like those of the Qax or the Xeelee) become (relatively) insignificant? When we have downloaded our souls into computers, when we exist not in a physical space but at a URL of a future version of the Internet, what becomes of the individual? Will the physical walls of the “I” collapse into incoherence, as our consciousness spreads further and wider amongst the nodes of an Information Universe?

A chilling thought… or…

Liberating???