In 100,000 years an alien ship enters our solar system. The earth has no remarkable intelligent life, but it's a beautiful biodiverse planet recovering from some bad extinctions. The aliens don't notice the traces left by humanity right away, this is just a survey trip and not much monumental remains.
But, they do pick up a signal, coming not from Earth, but from Mars. "How strange?" they think. Mars is obviously the inferior planet for life. Earth is incredible. But they go to investigate. 1/
@futurebird I enjoyed your story, but didn't understand one aspect of it. We're the Aliens saying that via uploading to machines, the Humans negated - completely lost their Humanity?
You conveyed so much in such short prose. Great writing. Kind that haunts for years - in a good way. Thank you.
@futurebird Great story. Reminds me of something a Shuttle astronaut once said. I forget the direct quote, but something like "I grew up on Earth wanting to visit space. After doing so, I realized: a space-born human, seeing Earth out the window, would so desperately want to visit Earth, far more than any Earthling has ever wanted to visit space"
@futurebird@malderi I'd be interested in the full quote. I don't see this mentioned when discussing space colonies, but to me it's the killer point. How many teenagers growing up in a colony of ~10k people would not be looking forward to the day they can move to New York City? Unless you can somehow force them to stay on the colony, of course. There's a special word for that.
@mat@futurebird I think I found it. It was in the final email from David Brown to Earth from the shuttle Columbia before it broke up on re-entry, which makes it all the more impactful to me.
"“If I’d been born in space I know I would desire to visit the beautiful Earth more than I’ve ever yearned to visit space. It is a wonderful planet.”
@futurebird
Thank you! I love the story. Well-written. Nice shifts of interest. I will wonder what humanity did to make this happen. How the aliens travel around. Why the aliens did not want to interact with the AIs. What the truth about uploading is.
Plenty of questions that I can keep pondering about myself nicely.
For me, that is the point about SF & Fantasy: the author does not need to answer those questions for me, they can stay open questions, so I can fill it in with my own fanatasy.
@futurebird It's got me thinking. What was it about uploading their minds that humans didn't get. Perhaps that it doesn't work. Thank you for sharing your great short story.
In fact, most of the aliens do not go to Mars, the least senior members of the team are sent, since tracing such signals is core to their mission. Everyone else wanted to stay on Earth taking in the vast herds of wilder-beasts, the insects and plant life, the remarkable coral reefs.
The junior members of the team lament being back in space suits on a cold dead planet-- but such is the lot of a new explorer. They make their way to Olympus Mons where the signal originates. 2/
At the summit they find a pit. A vast strip mine where robots labor to build more robots. Some of these robots maintain a building, patching and repairing it endlessly against the storms of the Martian surface. The junior research aliens enter the building. Inside they discover more robots and these too are set on maintaining the building in a perpetual shape of a human home, a large one, a mansion of the 21st century. 3/
Though there is art on the walls and books on the shelves, everything has been replaced thousands of times all this effort, the vast strip mine, the fleets of machines have only one purpose: to prevent change.
Inside the house there is no air to breathe, the residents do not need it.
"Greetings Alien visitors! We always knew you would come to find us some day!" Say the three figures seated at the table in the dining room.
"Who are you?" Ask the junior alien researchers.
"We are the people of earth!" The machines proclaim. "It is sad, but we are all that survives."
The aliens share a look of skepticism between them. They saw an awful lot that survived in the little time they got to spend on Earth, and speaking of earth they want to get back so try to rush through their interview with these weird machines.
The machines tell of a civilization, an environmental crisis. How they, the very best of Earth went to Mars so all would not be lost. 5/
The machines of Mars tell the aliens how they "uploaded" their minds.
"Oh no." Says one alien involuntarily, but his friends nudge him to be quiet.
The machines of Mars have many questions to ask the aliens, but the aliens are growing bored. They just saw a video on their ship's social feed of senior officers diving & swimming in jewel blue waters with sea turtles & colorful fish. And there are photos of the remarkable birds-
"uh. We are honored to meet you and all but for now we must go." 6/
Somehow they manage to extract themselves from the Mars machine men... who happily cannot leave their compound-- they needed their maintenance machines.
"Do you think these count as gray goo? Do we need a quarantine?" Asks one alien as they make their way down the mountain.
"Nah! That's only if it's nanotech. I can't believe you almost told a group of immortality AIs the truth about uploading!"
@futurebird is there another story planned that will go into some depth about that truth about uploading? if so, i'd love to read it - i really enjoyed this one!
Having done the least desirable task in the mission the junior alien researchers go back to earth and they have a wonderful time. They never go back to Mars. And other than wondering how anyone could be so clueless, they never even really think about "The best of Earth" again.
@futurebird You think uploads are stuck in a cave, while biolife explores the stars. Is that not what you wrote?
The exact opposite is the case. There's no plausible path for biology to zoom around the Universe diving in alien coral reefs. Why not have Elves if you're just writing fantasy?
@futurebird I think you're being very defensive about criticism of a poorly thought out short story. I'm not being mean, this is a pretty mellow reaction while I get breakfast.
No fictional thing exists, that's why it's fiction, but we can determine how plausible a thing is, how it'd work, and its consequences. SF is about taking the science at least a little seriously.
@futurebird@mdhughes Oh, sorry - initially I mistakenly missed yo you and the other person, then edited it within a minute, but apparently your screen didn't update. _/_
Well if you don't like this story and would rather read one from the point of view of a machine intelligence (and one with increasingly mixed feelings about 'bio life' ) You may enjoy this story I wrote about a robot AI on a job interview:
@futurebird Better (wow I hate the inline editorial on that page!), but still a little anachronistic, how can they have AI robots that mimic Humans, but still be using paper forms, blood tests instead of a scanner at the door if they're concerned about this? When's the last time you filled out a paper form, instead of a web page and sign on a screen? (my finger-writing is appalling)
Maybe more overtly Metropolis would make it consistent?
@futurebird now I'm curious. Is the truth of uploading about how one is actually cloning themselves when they upload their mind and that they are different people from the original body?
That's part of it. But, I think it's also likely that the first experiments with "uploading" will focus on the brain-- not the entire body. But we aren't just brains-- our nervous system is integrated into our entire body, our heart, our lungs, our gut--
I don't think a brain focused upload could even be called a full clone. It's a new version of you without a body. That will change how they think.
The only path seems a multi-year process of integration. If that's even possible.
@futurebird@alexis Yes, we are just beginning to find all kinds of interesting connections we don't understand yet. And "what does your gut tell you" might not just be a metaphor.
@futurebird@alexis “I’m not really me” has always bothered me least about teleporting/uploading b/c it’s the same as aging or even healing.
Nonetheless, developing a whole person artificially would generate a whole person, even if they’re different as a child. The Martian techbros might be as far as the technology got before humanity sputtered out, but an alien that can traverse the stars is SOMEHOW operating on orders-of-magnitude greater timescale than any chemical life we know.
The aliens could be not that advanced and on a generation ship that took forever to reach this promising planet they discovered (Earth) I think it's clear that they are very compatible with Earth's environment. Who knows how far they have come to find a thriving, geologically active, watery, radiation shielded, ecologically diverse world?
They could also be advanced, using tech we don't know about.
I don't think it changes the story much either way.
@futurebird@alexis By the time were talking about a generation ship, they could be delighted to discover the rich biodiversity of their-life-compatible Earth because it’s where their ancestors are from! They could be the civilization spreading from Proxima Centauri who have lost the knowledge that their ancestors (and it’s ecosystem) came from here!
So the techbros were so excited about their 1.0 release that they missed going to the stars because they couldn’t Move Fast & Break Things.
"I'm not really me" in the sense that some "uploading" process would result in a kind of ... fake?
I think first attempts at "uploading" may focus on the machine doing a convincing imitation of the subject. It might involve wearing recording devices for a year, using the data to create a system that responds probabilistically like the subject.
Impressive to see-- but, not immortality (probably not even a 2nd conscious instance)We are more than the sum of our "outputs"
I think a software emulation of my entire brain and body, right down to the atomic level, could reasonably be said to be "me." On this, I agree with the techbro futurists.
Where I disagree with them is whether this is a plausible option, at least within the foreseeable future. The technology just doesn't exist, and may in fact be outside the bounds of physics as we understand it.
Totally agree with this. And the kind of model you describe poses big problems for computing as we know it. So, they are looking for short cuts.
We might not be able to model every neuron... but sphinxGPT has identical responses to sphinx 94% of the time! It's basically the same person! (Please, step into the pod and pay your upload fee.)
Exactly! And this gets into the fuzzy and dangerous area between actual personhood and mere convincing facsimiles of personhood. In other words, the Turing test is bollocks.
A sufficiently-trained LLM might be able to mimic my words well enough to fool even my loved ones, at least most of the time. But it still doesn't THINK or FEEL, any more than a photograph of me thinks or feels.
@futurebird@sphinx Yeah, the question of practicability, even in principle, is substantial. Nonetheless, if you could be close, it could still be a person. No one has ever been the same person before, though, so I’m not sure that’s the bar to choose.
The Techbrobots obviously think that what could continue forward was their egos. I think their failure in the story is a generous interpretation of where they would get to.
@futurebird I’m not convinced of the existence of consciousness anyway. If it means having a model of the self with proprioceptive feedback, we’re at best c-grade. We hold inaccurate models (sometimes wildly) of what we’re like all the time.
The kicker for me would be an inability to change (which is why I think humans struggle to be conscious). These robots, despite working for a length of time comparable to all humanity, haven’t evolved despite reproducing.
@futurebird@JoshuaACNewman I keep thinking about the concept of qualia, the aspects of an experience you cannot describe and can only know through the experience. And I'm getting to think that it's a fundamental mistake to think that you can truly describe something completely. It's like we're bees, dancing, to indicate the path to an experience. It only makes sense if you follow the path and find the experience.
@futurebird First of all, thanks a lot for the read! Re „uploading“ there‘s an interesting philosophical aspect as most people want to „escape death“ by uploading. Let‘s suppose that works, it would still be a copy operation, meaning that the original still dies and experiences this. Your self will vanish. @JoshuaACNewman
@Linkshaender@futurebird By coincidence, I just finished writing a thing where you can take on others’ experiences, and a character accidentally takes on the experience of someone else dying. It’s a trauma no human has ever had to live with. But it’s a part of every human existence.
They think they’re escaping death when — assuming success — they’ve just made others experience it for them. Over and over.
@futurebird Ah, they don‘t remember it (English ist not my first language). Every consciousness (be it based on carbon or silicon) basically performs a „backup“ (uploading), then the soure consciousness will end. Basically no one can ever remember dying IMHO.
If you can upload in parallel you‘d have to be two consciousnesses at the same time (which would make for an interesting story idea) and stay sane. ;-) @JoshuaACNewman
@futurebird@Linkshaender Sorry, overedited. In my story, the shock is that you can have other people’s human experience, which includes dying.
But in the “upload my mind before I die or even experience endemic inconveniences I don’t want to carry forward” model, the subject is not preventing suffering. They’re just continually asking their former selves to experience it in the hope that somehow they’ll avoid that fate in the next generation.
@futurebird@alexis my favorite idea lately is the “mind of Theseus”; if we eventually develop a way to replace natural neurons with synthetic ones, we’d start with controlling prosthetics, work our way through peripheral repairs into replacing individual cerebral nerves to cure things like seizure disorders, slowly extending life by being able to replace more neurons individually as they go bad, and eventually there’s someone with an entirely synthetic brain
I thought about this a lot when I was writing the 2nd edition of Sufficiently Advanced. Like, a lot a lot.
I'm gonna go into some Deep Physics Shit here; skip if not interested.
Human bodies are a Ship of Theseus situation. We lose and replace cells. You can't say "that's my arm" in any kind of technical sense because the arm you had 10 years ago is in small piles around the world.
Some brain cells stick around forever, but... quantum tunneling is a thing.
But more to the theme of the story I suspect the first people to try to "upload their mind" in an attempt to become immortal will make a lot of mistakes we can't even anticipate. Our understanding of the brain is very shallow. The complexity is immense. It may not even be possible to simulate minds efficiently on digital computers.
We may need totally novel hardware. I think there is a lot of hubris and nonsense floating around of late.
@futurebird@alexis
The first superwealthy pioneers will experiment with new mind-cloning technology
They will complain about safety culture slowing innovation, and fire any scientist or engineer warning of the dangers
And once they've cultivated their compliant teams of young inexperienced but absolutely loyal technology soldiers, they will convince themselves to take the plunge
and their brains will catastrophically implode under the weight of their folly
@futurebird@alexis also there is the point of stagnation - with immortal hierarchies, a social/cultural/technological mistake might not just die and become a dead end
death is the reprojection onto humanity as an organism
Aliens will be able to find us for millions of years. The Lunar Landers are still on the moon and though they will be peppered with tons of micro meteorites they will still be recognizable as being man made.
@futurebird Hehe, a really, really nice story! Thanks! 🙂
Speaking from experience working with machines all my life, may I suggest a small change to your story, when the explorers get to Earth?
They won't find a signal beacon and if, by chance, they go to Mars, they'll find a dusty quiet place with heaps of dusty, greasy machines and three broken humanoid robots. Nothing works because some cheap fuses burnt out, killing a few other ICs, disconnecting the AI from its sensors and actors. The machines were not able to react and the station was understaffed anyways to keep the systems going. The End. ;-)
@futurebird It's not widely known, but when John Von Neumann found out he was dying of cancer he conceived a plan to upload his consciousness into a computer. At the time, there wasn't enough hardware in the whole world for this, but maybe now ...
@futurebird fun and thought provoking. Seems clear to me if you could upload your mind... most likely the mind would wish it hadn't been and would end up turning itself off assp
In a way you reminded me ofthe stories in love death and robots where three robots with a personality explore the ruins of earth to try and figure out what happened.
@futurebird The aliens are losing their minds over oceans -- gaseous water and liquid water just sandwiched together, yet stable. Absolutely ridiculous.
"Wait until you hear this -- if you go toward the poles, there's solid water too, just floating there!"
"In the sky? What keeps it up?"
"That's the craziest thing, it floats in the liquid water!"
Sometimes I have nightmares about one day something ripples through the universe... and from then on ice contracts rather than expands when freezing...
and all the glaciers sink to the bottom of the ocean.
100,000 years is not enough to restore the loss of species diversity completely, or for the most pernicious poisons to dissipate. But, it's more than enough time to erase all obvious traces of human built environment. Nature is powerful. Shocking how quickly a forest can gobble roads and buildings.
I'm certain the aliens in the story will find traces of humanity eventually- but, if you discovered earth wouldn't you be so distracted by the biodiversity that you might not get to that right away?
My money has always been on the Earth for the win. This magnificent piece of rock that is billions of years old will rid itself of what ails it. We are what is ailing it.
@futurebird
We live in rural america and the farm next to ours has been vacant for about 20 years. If you just drive by, you may not notice the building site due to the vegetation growth. It is indeed amazing how quickly things can disappear. See also the recent Mayan City discovery in the Yucatan.
@prdan@futurebird Walking in the woods in New England you'll often come across low stone walls. They are reminders of the not-obvious fact that less than 200 years ago the region was heavily deforested for farming. 100,000 years? I think a casual observer wouldn't notice much.
@prdan@futurebird For anyone interested, just looked it up and New England in 1850 was 25% forested. Nowadays it's close to 75% forested. For anyone familiar with the area, imagine it with only 1/3 of the trees currently. That's how much has changed in the last 170 years.
Somehow we manage to both underestimate the delicacy of ecological & climate systems essential to humanity thriving but also overestimate our destructive power against Earth in the long term.
Many think if we set off all of the nuclear bombs we could erase life from earth. Not even close. The Siberian traps couldn't do it! Our weapons are toys in comparison.
It it cold comfort to think: if humans die we'd at least leave a scar?
In reality? over deep time? It won't even be a scratch.
I once had a colony of Nylanderia sp. ants. They were tiny, golden brown ants with lovely shiny gasters.
I put a water feeder in their outworld which was the size of a silver dollar and connected to their nest, which was a little larger than a quarter. The ants used sand to try to block the water- but instead released a flow-- the next morning I found them all drowned.
THAT's what it's like for Humanity on earth. They altered their environment! It was catastrophic, but also still very tiny.
@futurebird tiny colony? was Nylanderia used to be called paratrechina? i mighta had a colony liveing in an acorn once (from central park). everything so long ago.
@futurebird
I’d venture maybe a scar like one of history’s other mass extinctions? Because this is a mass extinction, and one of the fastest in the planet’s history. (Even the K–Pg Extinction may have unfolded over centuries or millennia.)
The outcome of those past extinctions: Earth filled with life again, but different life. The scar remains in the evolutionary history and its outcomes, visible in contrast (but only in contrast) to what came before.
@futurebird
hm, way back in 2005, David Archer did some science on the long tail of global warming, and found that after 100,000 years, about 7% of the CO2 industries have added to the atmosphere would still be present. If anyone knows how the last 18 years have treated this work, that would be wonderful.
Climate CHANGE is bad for us since we would need to move everything, grow different crops, etc.
On a long scale the earth has endured and blossomed under far more destructive pressures than humans. We are more of a danger to ourselves than to the Earth in the long run.
So, I don't think this contradicts the idea that with humans gone for 100k years the earth would probably be in much better shape than it is even today in terms of biodiversity.
The question is how long would it take for Earth to "recover" from the impacts of humanity.
Perfect recovery is impossible. But, for the rainforests to come back? For the reefs to heal? For the planet to gain in biodiversity (barring an astroid or extreme event of volcanism) it's not all that long. IDK it's not a very precise conversation I guess.
If we time traveled to such a future earth it would be HARD to find any evidence that humans existed at all just from walking around.
@futurebird
I'm no expert, but I'd say for the rainforest, I'd say relatively quick. The damp heat and plentiful rain make the vegetation very lively in tropical regions, so fields and cities would get overgrown just a few years, maybe add one or two centuries for the biggest trees to regrow. Coral reefs... I don't know if they'll regenerate at all. They're attacked on multiple fronts between the acidification of oceans and the ever more violent storms... @llewelly
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