Our turn at God

And so the world began with a thought.  But only in these sense as it applies to us.  Because, you see, the world only exists so long as we can see it; as long as it is seen by us, that is.  But you may think that is a strange way of phrasing existence, however true it may be.  For, you see, the world exists passively for all of eternity before and as it will continue to do after our mark has left the timeline.  In our infinite wisdom, the wisdom to be at least, we brought awareness to existence.  We managed through a matter of magic to turn those peripheral devices designed to detect and designate external areas of influence inward.  Who can claim the same? We made matter think.  But what happens when the timer runs out?  If we really made matter think, if awareness is somehow based in the physical plane, then what happens when it all ends? Not on an individual basis, but species wide?  What happens to all the matter that could think? All that muscle memory, and pictures of lives past, evaporated.  But doesn’t that give us something to strive for? I know it does for me.  Because I don’t feel a very strong allegiance to the human race, since it tends to disappoint me so often. But an idea, that of a sentient race never having existed, that is, thinking beings, now that gets my attention.  So what to do?  Time isn’t on our side; in fact, he’s the only enemy. The rest: famine, poverty, disease, war: those are all minions of time.  Which is to say entropy, honestly.  The universe means to balance it all out, you know.  The largest obstacle in the way of achieving immortality (on the physical plane, that is) seems to be corporeal shells.  What I’m suggesting is of course, cyborg-ism. But that’s really only the first step.  Because, you see, human evolution is sloppy. It’s time consuming and it makes mistakes.  But now we’ve reached a plateau of sorts.  We’re at the top of the food chain, so we don’t really have a reason to physically evolve. Mental evolution though, is still very much the scene, you might say.  We are constantly and exponentially shortening the time it takes to breach the limits of our current consciousness: it took almost 10,000 years to go from agriculture to the printing press and then 300 years to the industrial revolution, and then a hundred for cars, 50 for radio, 25 for computers, and now a generation in technology is 6 to 9 months.  So why invest all of these minds to develop things which only benefit us in a secondary manner?  It seems like a waste, of course the majority of the world population would not be comfortable with the suggestion.  But its really a matter of the future, and our children; not biological children, though, but rather the next step in the evolutionary chain: artificial intelligence.  We have the means to almost achieve this, and so the discussion is more necessary than it ever has been of what exactly to do with this product of magician caliber science. I think it should be obvious that my vote is on the establishment of a brand new species, which would result in a massive overhaul in our concepts of life, but the rewards that could be wrought by the introduction of a new sentient species to existence far outweigh any risks.