Chapter VIII - How To Get Human Society To Reproduce

Now those more skeptical among you may think that taking people cheaply and affordably into outer space is a sensationally complicated thing, like making a cake that looks like Shrek.

But if you thought that's complicated, then how about what it would take to take human society to establish a colony on Mars and thus reproduce? That would be the equivalent of baking a cake that looks like a Chef that looks like Shrek.

For to reach Mars, you first have to build a rocket that can ride about 1000 times the distance between Earth and the moon. Then you have to deal with cancer inducing radiation along the 6 month trip, during which your body would experience all kinds of weakening effects due to zero gravity, like bone density loss, muscle loss and for guys, an inability to get an erection. What?

Ok, I'm out!

Then you have to land on Mars after reaching speeds like 4 miles per second along the way, but because the Red Planet only has a light atmosphere in which parachutes don’t work very well, it won't be easy. Just ask one of the 4 crash landings out of the 13 landers sent to Mars by human society.

Which is why when the rover Curiosity made is successfully on the planet in 2012, the serious scientists at NASA jumped out of their seats like they were die hard soccer fans witnessing their team winning the World Cup.

Then if you do land a manned crew on Earth, there is the little task of surviving, which won't be like building a tent on the beach, considering that temperatures average -60 degrees Celsius but can fluctuate wildly, from +20 degrees on a summer day to -90 degrees once nighttime sets. Also, because of the thin Martian atmosphere, your saliva, tears and the lining of your lungs will boil if in contact with Martian air, all of which means that people will need to stay indoors, or wear spacesuits when traveling. But for there to be ‘indoors’ someone would have to build accommodations, and for the people to survive they would also need food, and water, and fresh underwear, and power, which is a whole other story in a place where dust storms can take over the entire planet in a flash, wiping out any view of the sun for endless stretches of time – and also covering any freshly hungout-to-dry underwear with dust.

And these are just some of the challenges that what we can foresee, but since we've never done it before, we can't foresee everything, can we? I mean, unforeseen things can happen from baking toast. Just ask the owners of this one:

What this all means is that reproducing human society on Mars is a hugely, bewilderingly complicated task. A task that requires a lot of human innovation for answers like: What kind of engine will drive the spacecrafts traveling from Earth to Mars? What kind of coating would we need to develop for the people onboard the spacecrafts to not get radiation poisoning on the way? How will we land the people on Mars? How will the people survive on the planet - what kind of food, of housing, of transportation will they have? How will they have clean water? What kind of system of organization will they have? How will they not just survive, but thrive on the Red Planet? How will they build the things they need, like tools and machines and buildings and factories? How will they handle all of the violent dust storms that will cover the Martian surface? How will they be able to handle the situation of waking up in the middle of the night with a serious case of needing to use the toilet?

These are just a tiny fraction of the questions which will have to be worked out while preparing for the colonization of Mars, and looking at them it becomes clear that it won't just take one brilliant mind, or two brilliant minds to achieve. It will take countless healthy, well-developed human minds from throughout human society cooperating to have this happen. People working on all of the various nuts and bolts that would go into such a mission.

Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX put it well when he said “What a lot of people don’t appreciate is that technology does not automatically improve. It only improves if a lot of really strong engineering talent is applied to the problem.”

Luckily, if our assumptions from the last chapter are correct, once we will be able to take our own trip on the smooth ridin’ KissMyBum 200 and see human society from space, there’ll be a lot of enlightened minds ready and willing to help with these engineering problems. In fact, reading this book might make you so motivated to get involved, that you might feel like picking up a hammer and chisel right now, and start engineering a reliable martian toilet for future settlers out of the tree in your backyard. Unluckily, there’s just one little problem: time.

Statistically speaking, most people are already occupied with other stuff, like how to survive in a world where you have to spend most of your time making money to pay for your rent or mortgage, pay your bills and buy food, with a little left over for your hobbies if you're fortunate, whether they are watching your favorite miniseries, spending time with your kids, partying, writing or eating furniture.

That's while you might have to deal with the mental baggage that comes from childhood trauma that's prevalent in our world, whether it's war, poverty, abuse, neglect, having one of your dolls come to life and try to kill you, all of which can leave you seriously fucked up in the head when you're older, unable to form healthy relationships, to experience healthy love, to deal with everyday stresses, to visit doll shops....basically, a huge obstacle in having someone reach their full potential, that requires a lot of time and mental energy to overcome.

And what people usually spend their time on is important, because human time is what gets things done, whether we’re talking about the goal of reproducing human society or the goal of building a humongous slingshot that can propel a beaver into a tree hole half a mile away. In fact, everything that you see around you…the buildings, the cars, the books, the computers, the TV’s, the clothes, the words, the choo choo trains, all of it is a product of human time. It’s the result of people investing their time into inventing, designing, perfecting, building those things, countless people from all around the world, over generations. And the more human time is put into something, the more diverse and sophisticated that something tends to become. Just think of one of the things that all humans invest their time in: Food. How many things related to food are there in the world to experience? Or think of sex. How many things related to sex are there to try out? Or think of housing. How many housing types are there in the world? Or think of music. How many different genres, songs, symphonies, musical instruments are there? All of these possibilities when it comes to food, sex, housing, music come from people all around the world putting human time into it, and from the human creativity that naturally buzzes around whatever human time gets invested in. Human time is the most precious resource human society has, it is literally the moving energy of human society.

Even money is not valuable in and of itself, it’s valuable because it influences what people spend their time on. When someone gets paid to do something, they are basically asked to invest their human time in whatever their “work” is, whether it’s flipping burgers or flipping themselves in mid-air at a circus or flipping people off in a movie as actors. That’s money’s role as a multizoa hormone. In classical biology, hormones are defined as something that “stimulates specific cells or tissues into action,” and money stimulates humans and human networks into actions that are required for them to earn that money. That just means that it stimulates them to invest their precious human time into those activities.

Bringing something into the popular eye of human society - that is, into human society’s consciousness - is just one way of saying that we are investing human time into it. Because in order for that something to become popular, people would have to talk about it - which is human time. Works of art that are created by people would have to include it - from news articles to movies to documentaries - which is human time. People would have to strip naked and dance around their house while thinking about it, which is human time. Wait, is that just me? Anyway, the more human time would be invested in that something, the more the creativity that naturally buzzes around whatever human time is invested in would develop it, would make it more sophisticated; The more resources would be concentrated around it, and this is true whether we’re talking about the popularity of a famous person, the idea that Y am a multizoa organism, mY reproduction, or cheesecake - Popularity is human time, and human time is the fundamental growth agent within human society.

That being said, if most of people’s time is occupied with the basics, like working to pay the bills, then the amount of human time people have to invest in whatever popular subject is floating within human society will be limited. It’s one thing to go into space and see human society, experience the overview effect then come back to an 8 hour job that takes up most of your time and energy, and it’s another thing to go into space, see human society growing on the surface of Earth, experience the overview effect then come back and be able to put your precious human time into a field relating to the reproduction of human society for example without having to worry how you are going to pay the bills next month or put food on the table or buy tickets for that movie you’ve been waiting to come out.

The more human time each person has available to play around with on their own terms, the more of that time can be directed to whatever would benefit human society as a whole - such as human society’s reproduction - once human society’s self-awareness kicks in, bringing in the unique skills, abilities, possibilities that person has into the field.

So, it seems that one of the things that we need to do in conjunction with developing human society’s self-awareness via the overview effect is to look at how we can free up human time. That’s because with human society becoming self-aware, people would choose to invest at least some of their freed up human time into fields that will benefit human society as a whole out of their own free will, including its ability to reproduce. As we’ve hinted before, much of human time is currently occupied with:

a. Doing repetitive labour - whether we’re referring to kids in Congo mining cobalt for 12 hours a day, farmers in China tilling the soil every day, or clerks at fast-food restaurants in the UK and USA preparing hamburgers for 12 hours a day. A lot of this repetitive labour is done because for one, doing that sort of work is the only option a lot of people have available to ensure life’s basic necessities: food, a home, clean underwear. And also, it’s done because somebody’s got to do it - for example, if there would be no one working at fast food restaurants, fast food restaurants couldn’t function, and then where would Fred buy his super extra large meal every morning on the way to his own nonglamorous job?

b. Dealing with the psychological issues that mostly comes from childhood trauma such as poverty, war, neglect or parental abuse, whether we’re referring to the locked up murderer or the psycho ex-girlfriend. Much of time people waste on arguments, on addictive behaviors, on self-destructing rampages where people suddenly stop their cars in the middle of the street, take out their baseball bats and start hitting everything in sight is due to that.

How do we free up human time from these kinds of activities? Well, by using the new tool that we have at our disposal, of course: human society’s consciousness, or the popularity of subjects within human society. We know that popularity brings with it human creativity and resources. Yes, for now the consciousness of human society may not have reached its full potential with human time being so filled. You may know exactly what I mean when you think about what takes up most of your own time. But even at this stage human society’s consciousness can be very powerful, extremely powerful. And by focusing it on works of art that have the potential to eliminate the two factors that are taking up human time described above, it may very well free up that time via the resources and the human creativity that human society’s consciousness brings.

So what works of art are we specifically referring to? Well, for the repetitive labour the problem seems to be twofold. First, we need to find a way of providing people with their basic necessities

• food, water, shelter, electricity, without much need for human time to be invested in maintenance. Earthships for example are a good option for that as a first step - they are homes built from recyclable materials that can be off grid and use solar panels, water recycling and even a greenhouse to provide those basic necessities.

Of course, as human time would be invested in them during their rise to popularity if they would become the focus of human society’s consciousness, the resources and human creativity that would accompany it would likely improve them and make them even more self-sufficient and reliable then they already are, so think of the current design as step one.

Second, we need to remove repetitive labour without the human pleasures that come as fruits of that repetitive labour. In other words, this isn’t about not eating at a fancy restaurant because you don’t want human time to be invested in the repetitive labour of waitering, this is just about not having human time invested in the repetitive labour of waitering, whilst still being able to eat at a fancy restaurant.

For that, we can simply have robots take over the job. The field of robotics has already come a long way. I mean, a robot developed by Boston Dynamics was able to do a backflip in 2017, for God’s sake!

What do you think the human creativity and resources that accompany human society’s consciousness will be able to do in the field of robotics if that conscious focus would be directed towards it with the aim of removing repetitive labour? It may take a bit of time, that’s true, but before long you’ll find robots that would make a shake at your nearest bar, or robots that bag your food at your nearest check-out counter, or robots that make your clothes from start to finish. In fact, robot bartenders already exist on some cruise ships.

So let’s focus our time and energy on these robots, on this field, and see it grow and develop in the direction of removing repetitive labour for people.

For point b., dealing with psychological issues, much of which comes from childhood trauma, I suggest bringing into human society’s consciousness Mr. T’s motivational video “Be somebody….Or be somebody’s fool,” a production whose aim is to put a young audience on the right track.

Of course, childhood trauma is oftentimes an indirect result of other issues such as the ones we’ve mentioned: poverty, war and neglect. Poverty has a lot to do with a lack of basic necessities, of course, which we’ve somewhat tackled in point a. We will be discussing war in the next chapter.

What does bringing things such as Earthships and robots into human society’s consciousness mean? It literally means making them popular. The more popular they are, the more resources will be focused on them and the companies that make them, the more human creativity will buzz around them. And popularity means many things: From it being shared on social media, to it being on the news, to it being a part of human art such as songs, movies, documentaries, to it being talked about among friends or family, to people generally getting involved in activities that are around it, being creative with it. We each decide how much human time we have at our disposal to invest in that popularity, but what makes these things special is that the more time is invested in them, the more there is a possibility that more human time would become available, which could then be centered on freeing up more human time, or concentrated around human society’s reproduction and other themes that concern humans society as a whole.

Now this chapter wasn’t about minimizing the amazing work coming from teams already engaged in developing the technological innovations that would allow human society to establish a colony on Mars, from Elon Musk's SpaceX, to NASA, to MarsOne, Mars Direct to a few other teams. In fact their work is a godsend. We need better and more efficient rockets that could travel into low-earth orbit. That would allow people to cheaply and reliably experience the overview effect, an important step in the development of human society’s self awareness. The work of these teams will undoubtedly add to that, even if indirectly.

Beyond that, sure, given enough time these teams of people might even succeed to establish a Mars colony, with great strife.

A few thousand people working on getting humans on Mars and succeeding, despite many of the other 7.5 billion people on Earth not doing very well and thus not having the time to help with this monumental task. And that's a big if, considering the magnitude of challenges we barely scratched the surface of earlier. But even if possible, would we even want it to happen this way?

Because freeing up human time is not just about reproducing human society. It’s about increasing the “thinking power” of human society. A human society whose people can choose what to spend their time on without having to worry about their next meal can become a nimble society, one which can adapt to new circumstances and quickly shift its conscious focus to overcome whatever new challenges its environment throws at it - be it an incoming asteroid from space, a volcano eruption or an invasion of flying tricycles that have lied dormant in Earth’s crust for eons. In fact, humans are arguably the most successful life form on Earth, if you don’t count chickens, and this is a direct result of their “thinking power” enabling them to adapt to almost any environment. Where does that thinking power come from? Brain cells. The human has been found to possess the most number of neurons out of all the animals in the animal kingdom. ¹ And neurons are cells notorious for their ability to “reorganize”, something which they wouldn’t be able to do if they had to worry where they would get their glucose from the next day as a consequence. Luckily, thanks to the efficient nutrient distribution system of the human body, they don’t have to.

By freeing up human time in the manner we’ve laid out in this chapter, we would start providing people with the possibility of reorganizing around whatever they see of importance without them having to worry that they’d be losing their house or won’t have anything to eat the next day, leading to an adaptable multizoa organism due to its “thinking power”.

And now, we’ve talked earlier about the fact that multizoa organisms inherit the traits of its parent organism, just like it happens with people. That crooked nose that you have looks just like your dads, and so too would the colony on Mars resemble our human society in a lot of ways, especially at first. Wouldn’t we want for the colony on Mars to inherit a maximized “thinking power” from our society when the time comes for our society to reproduce? That would make the Martian colony more likely to survive in its harsh environment, it would give it more of a chance to develop and thrive, like a human would be more likely to survive in a new environment than a chimp due to a difference in intelligence. Otherwise, without automatization, without efficient housing the colony on Mars would likely develop an “upper class” of wealthier people not doing repetitive labour and a “lower class” of poorer people doing it just like it currently is on Earth, and that would be not just mentally inefficient for the budding multizoa organism, but a sad precedent to set for the multizoa tree of life, especially when there is a different option.

Not to mention that everything that we enjoy doing in our society was created by human time being invested in it. Whether it’s video games, movies, basejumping, chess, participating in marathons, all came from people putting time into coming up with things. Even the slinky didn’t just come out of thin air, people made that too! And the more human time there is, the more human time and the creativity that comes with it can be free to explore new paths and come up with new things that we all might enjoy, like the finger skateboard. And whether you’re rich, poor, whether you have all the possibilities in the world open to you or you’ve never left your home town, this benefit of freed human time applies to you, because you never know what new, amazing thing people’s creativity can give birth to that you would could have never even conceived of had you not heard of it, and had there not been human time to develop and popularize it. Like helium beer.

So, I would argue that even if at some point multizoa reproduction could theoretically take place by having a small group of people like the amazing guys at SpaceX just pushing through until they manage to establish something of a colony on Mars while the rest of human society is left dealing with the status quo, it would still not be anywhere near as evolutionarily successful for multizoa organisms nor as socially rewarding as going about it by first freeing up human time.

And I have to say, if aliens do exist and are just monitoring us from afar, how do you think they'll feel about a type of multizoa organism which hasn't gotten its shit together in its own home learning to reproduce and spread the culture of "not getting its shit together" throughout the universe? It would be like the multizoa version of allowing a virus to emerge. That'll be a good theme for a story actually, where after people establish a colony on Mars without freeing up human time on Earth first, they begin to uncover remnants of a past colony on the Red Planet that appears to be very much human as well. Only to eventually have aliens descend on Mars to see what kind of culture human society would spread by reproducing this time, and say “No, this is not good either. Still too divisive. Try again!" And wipe human society on both Mars and Earth "once more", like it turned out they had done in the past...taking humans back to the Stone Age on Earth. We don't want that, do we? Also, at least one alien should be played by Catherine-Zeta Jones, which would indicate that aliens are beautiful, and ultimately mean well for the universe. So in regards to the amazing teams mentioned that are looking to get on Mars ASAP, by all means, yes! Build better, more efficient rockets. Do it even with the long term goal of taking people to Mars. Aim for the stars to reach the moon. Think of how a Mars colony would work.

But once human society’s self-awareness develops in part as a consequence of improved spacecrafts, perhaps a sensible move would be to first turn our attention towards Earth before a serious attempt to colonize Mars, and help develop every square inch of our society into a place that people can flourish in, where humans have freedom with their time so that the technological innovations that will lead to human society reproducing will arise naturally from people in all corners of the world, as effortlessly as new musical genres spring up nowadays. I mean, freak folk? Brostep? Scottish pirate metal? THAT’S how much human creativity human time can bring. Reproducing human society will be a piece of cake.