As far as I can tell, we are currently living in a glorious space opera future… for eukaryotes. From their early origins in a hydrothermal vent the eukaryotes have spread across the galaxy (earth), forming civilisations of unbelievable complexity and titanic power (animals and humans). Megastructures (houses) and gigastructures (cities) now exist where entire orders of eukaryotes live out their lives in peace, never feeling the threat of drought or lack of ATP. Generation ships called “planes”, “trains”, and “boats” carry generations from gigastructure to gigastructure at timescales that dwarf eukaryote understanding. Massive galactic empires make peace and war, destroying trillions with weapons of unfathomable power, while science gets ever closer to understanding the fundamental origins of life and the means by which it operates. Recently the empires have even launched expeditions beyond the known universe, seeking to harvest ever more gigantic sources of power to fuel glorious eukaryote replication throughout the multiverse. To an average eukaryote these wonders are beyond their comprehension, but in a very real way they are still making it happen.
More like Lovecraftian space opera a la 40k. The individual eukaryote has no real control over their fate, millions can live or die for purposes far beyond their understanding yet trivial in the grand scheme of things. For the individual cell it isn’t meaningfully better now than it ever has been. Also I kind of sadly LOL @ “never feeling the threat of drought or lack of ATP”.
ie when AGI is created or, if we ban AGI, when we create a mind upload device or something, unless we decide to keep eukaryotic cells around because of the golden rule or conservatism, or set things up so that existing structures generally remain useful, or something
Massive galactic empires make peace and war, destroying trillions with weapons of unfathomable power
This is an underestimate. The oft-cited number for the cell count of a human body is 37 trillion, so it’s enough to kill ~30 to get into the quadrillion range. The global yearly war death count is in the low hundreds of thousands, say 200,000, which gives us 200,000×37 trillion=7400,000 trillion=7,400 quadrillion=7.4 quintillion=.
As far as I can tell, we are currently living in a glorious space opera future… for eukaryotes. From their early origins in a hydrothermal vent the eukaryotes have spread across the galaxy (earth), forming civilisations of unbelievable complexity and titanic power (animals and humans). Megastructures (houses) and gigastructures (cities) now exist where entire orders of eukaryotes live out their lives in peace, never feeling the threat of drought or lack of ATP. Generation ships called “planes”, “trains”, and “boats” carry generations from gigastructure to gigastructure at timescales that dwarf eukaryote understanding. Massive galactic empires make peace and war, destroying trillions with weapons of unfathomable power, while science gets ever closer to understanding the fundamental origins of life and the means by which it operates. Recently the empires have even launched expeditions beyond the known universe, seeking to harvest ever more gigantic sources of power to fuel glorious eukaryote replication throughout the multiverse. To an average eukaryote these wonders are beyond their comprehension, but in a very real way they are still making it happen.
More like Lovecraftian space opera a la 40k. The individual eukaryote has no real control over their fate, millions can live or die for purposes far beyond their understanding yet trivial in the grand scheme of things. For the individual cell it isn’t meaningfully better now than it ever has been. Also I kind of sadly LOL @ “never feeling the threat of drought or lack of ATP”.
poor eukaryotic cells will have the rug pulled out from under them the moment they are no longer useful to the weltgeist :( [1]
ie when AGI is created or, if we ban AGI, when we create a mind upload device or something, unless we decide to keep eukaryotic cells around because of the golden rule or conservatism, or set things up so that existing structures generally remain useful, or something
the real membrane-bound organelles were the friends we made along the way
It’s pretty cool, I guess.
This is an underestimate. The oft-cited number for the cell count of a human body is 37 trillion, so it’s enough to kill ~30 to get into the quadrillion range. The global yearly war death count is in the low hundreds of thousands, say 200,000, which gives us 200,000×37 trillion=7400,000 trillion=7,400 quadrillion=7.4 quintillion=