Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey traces the development of man from his nascence, learning to manipulate and create tools, and posits mankind's future with the rise of the Starchild.
My God, It's Full of Stars!
According to the logic of evolution, there's no endgame to evolving. Our deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) doesn't hold some final form that we're headed to. We're making this crap up as we go along. Our current level of development as--homo sapiens--is not the final form of Hominina. The only certainty is that if we survive, we will change. We will develop.
Some of our development has always been artificial, the result of genocide, one group selecting their own traits over and against the traits of others. Anthropologists suspect that the reason that homo sapiens is the only surviving member of Hominina is that competing groups were killed by homo sapiens.
Some of our development will come as a result of small changes over the great epochs of time. We can expect, for example, that as generations of man live longer lives, late-stage genetic problems will slowly disappear as a result of natural selection.
Here Comes the, uh, Starchild, Little Darling
But what is the likelihood of Clarke's Starchild emerging? Can mankind ever take on the form of energy? If so, is it possible that what we believed was inert matter might have consciousness? Could stars and black holes have the capability of self-reflection? Is the universe crowded with sentient energy? Maybe every particle of light is a thought shed from the great but not understood mind of our sun.
Clarke's Starchild, if realized, could leave the solar system, leave the galaxy, could seek new worlds and greater intelligence. Under the right conditions, the Starchild could even travel through time.
Indeed, Einstein's Relativity theory predicts that particles exceeding the speed of light would experience a negative time warp, effectively sending the particle backward in time.
Indeed, Einstein's Relativity theory predicts that particles exceeding the speed of light would experience a negative time warp, effectively sending the particle backward in time.
Consciousness turned into energy could, then, be in all things at all times.
Consciousness as energy traveling faster than light would not be bound by time and space. The billions of years and fathomless expanse of the universe would become as free for the Starchild to move through as our childhood memories.
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