=1 "Metazoon - A technological dream"

Metazoon: A technological dream

In the beginning all life was unicellular, invisible to the naked eye (only, of course, there was no eye, naked or otherwise), a nutritious milky broth of living cells dividing and feeding and dividing for countless generations. Then one day some cells – still dividing – started getting together, forming groups, little balls of cells. That was the first great step of evolution. The soup cleared up, for a hundred million years or so, and then one might have seen little protozoons, ‘almost animals’, the first living beings with organs, skeletons, feet, or arms, just like us.

For the next billion years life essentially went on simply adding a few cells every year or so, finally producing the whale, the elephant, the horse, the ape and man.

Now a new step has to be taken. As after the protozoon came the zoon, after the zoon there has to come now the metazoon: the ‘beyond-animal’ being.

Man – his culture, his technology and its machines, his communication systems and transportation systems – is the first beginning of the metazoon and the indication of what it will be. In order to understand the metazoon, the first prejudice against it we have to get rid of is the crude image we have of machines. Of course machines are newcomers on our planet, the first intelligent machines having been created only in this century, and they are mere caricatures of what will come. Their intelligence is still elementary, yet each generation becomes more sophisticated than the preceding one. They are the most rapidly evolving species on this planet, and even the keenest imagination, the most optimistic foresight is unable to imagine what machines will be – not only in 5,000 or 50,000 years, but even in a hundred years.

Biological evolution, astonishing in its results through geological ages, is severely handicapped by limitations in size, material and methods. A mammal larger than an elephant or smaller than a mouse simply cannot expect to survive. The material of its bones, muscles, blood, is fixed forever within narrow limits and allows only restricted play. But there are no such limits for electronic machines on earth and even fewer in outer space. A biological being constantly exhausts the energy at its disposal, but with the discovery of hydrogen fusion the only limit in the energy supply of a giant machine is the galaxy. The materials of the machines we have had up to now are mainly wood and iron; in the future they will cover the whole table of elements in all combinations or states. For plasma machines 22,000 different states of hydrogen are theoretically possible. The metazoon will make use of all those states and perhaps invent entirely new ones which do not at present occur even in the centre of the suns or the gas giants. And while the brain of a human being or a dolphin, as marvellous as it seems to us, is strictly limited, theoretically a whole planet could be transformed 100% into a giant electronic brain.

With the development of his technical abilities, man has stopped being purely biological ‘zoon’ and has started to become metazoon – a living being less and less dependent on his biological make-up or his inherited animal capacities. In every domain he is transcending his organic limitations. Artificial muscles and senses can reinforce or replace his inherited ones. He has built himself additional brain power and with a computer everybody can acquire the capacities of a mathematical genius.

Now that man is going to break down, with fusion power, flood gates of unlimited universal energy, where will this trend lead? To more and more brutality as the past technological advances seem to indicate? Or to more and more refinement, intelligence, culture, social coherence and love? That is the question; that is the problem which divides the optimists from the pessimists. But the reason for evolution stands at its end, not in its beginning.

A few observable optimistic trends are: more education for everybody, better health, more food, more hygienic living conditions, electronic teaching by television, the possibility of an electronic world democracy and world civilisation, and a 100% leisure class population devoted to study and research.

The pessimists foresee continuing overpopulation and pollution, the poor becoming poorer, the rich, richer, domination by the computer, etc. And whether you are an optimist or a pessimist depends on your endocrine glands and the general state of your health, not on any reasoning or logic.

There are as many people for the trend as against it, but from a general and detached standpoint, it is always better to hope than to despair. There is no reason why man, a learning animal with unlimited computer intelligence, cannot change his environment (inner and outer) to his satisfaction. In any case, as long as we dream of the future, it is better to have nice dreams than nightmares.

Our biological history would seem to indicate that the optimists among our one-celled ancestors were right and the pessimists were wrong.

Let us look at the end product:

World government, with all the routine work done by computer or robot. No red tape. The old pyramid of command we have inherited from the Babylonians disappears because the computer, connected with everyone and equally available to everyone, is not at the top of the programme but in the centre of a wheel of agreement coordinating and giving to each an access to decision-making. All the cells in our bodies, connected by a central nervous system, are of equal importance, and all contribute their share to the common harmony and health or suffer equally from the neglect or unhappiness of a few. If you have a toothache you are not 99.999% happy and 0.001% unhappy, but you are reduced to a single aching tooth from top to toe.

In the same way the electronic coordination will permit men to live together like a community of cells, a single being without that fatal separation of government, governors and governed.

The only civil servant will be the computer, the most selfless and obedient man has ever had, programmed by common consent to be the only tax collector, the only judge and the most impartial, while all citizens will be equally the executive and legislative arms. For the first time equality could be 100% and liberty entirely guaranteed against personal prejudice, bad humour, old age, etc., and every citizen could concentrate at leisure on the pursuit and realisation of brotherhood.

It is technically feasible to protect a decentralised computer fitted with inaccessible archives against take-over by fanatical tyrants, because there will be no pyramids or command, neither in the police nor in the army nor in the party, as all the organisational activity of the state has withered away in the total electronic decentralisation. Each citizen hold the levers of command equally with all others, and legislative initiation, starting from the village, on the rim of the wheel, progresses inward by electronic control through provincial, national and super-national stages to universal common law.

Perhaps this dream is not merely a dream but our inner programme of which we have at last become consciously aware, and it is not only man's programme but something that existed in the first living cells when they came together mega-years ago. Insects joined together and formed insect societies, sacrificing, perhaps, their individual freedom for a common wealth. But when man comes together and forms a true brotherhood, a commonwealth, a planetary society, by living in a common electronic sphere of communication and interaction of all with all, the only tyrant he will have to overthrow is the exploitation by his own ego. He will exchange his individual poverty and powerlessness for real freedom and the possibility of developing his individuality as no prince or potentate of the past could have done. The metazoon, the ‘beyond animal’, will be born, created by the indomitable spirit of man.

We know that in order to live in an ideal society man has to change. We should also have learned by bitter experience that no amount of preaching changes him. But when we look back on man's history we discover that a changing technology does change him.

Here are a few examples of great inventions, each of which changed mankind as a whole: the stone axe, fire, the bow, lever and wheel, the ship, agriculture, metallurgy, gunpowder. For some of these we might have our doubts as to whether the change was entirely for the good, especially when we look at the more recent additions such as electricity and atomic power. Yet nobody would want to renounce electric light or flight, and sooner or later somebody else would invent them again.

Man the dreamer has been genetically programmed to dream and to invent, and you can't prevent dreams from realising themselves; but you can be careful to have nice dreams, and naturally in the technological age we will have technological dreams.

Perhaps some day we will invent a dreaming machine to help man have pleasant dreams, better than those stimulated by his printing establishments, his television and cinema industries.

Man's spirit created the machine and together they will create the supersociety and its superenvironment in which man's spirit will be the master and machine the faithful servant. And all together they will help man to dream himself anew. Just as little amoeba's best dream was the superemoeba, man, so let our dream be the metazoon, the ‘beyond animal’. Another name for it might be angel.