Blasting The Past.

[swestrup]

I've been going through a bunch of old files and stuff today, sorting and discarding and so on. I came across a number of nifty things I had thought lost. Like the url of a strange online comic site, and the following short story by Anders Sandberg <asa -@- nada.kth.se>

I beheld the vague, shimmering outlines of titanic entities rippling in the distance.

Their sentience I could sense immediately; their power and purpose ruptured all human scales. I could no more comprehend the scope of their existence than an amoeba could look back up a microscope and fathom the human mind.

"Are they Gods?" I asked.

"Your descendents," said the Caterpillar. "Several million years hence."

I adjusted the focus to my present time.

Before me I saw the human family, all 6 billion of us, and I saw quite clearly that we were poised on the edge of an evolutionary event as signficant as the Cambrian Explosion.

There would be no "Homo superior." There would instead be hundreds, maybe thousands of new species evolving out of the current human population. The segmentations were already appearing; within 100 years, it would be impossible to speak of "one human race." We would diversify.

Some of us would remain on the planet.... Others would move offworld. Some would go to live on the Sun. Others would migrate to places nearby but invisible. Some would open holes in the fabric of spacetime, and step through doorways where no doors were previously known to exist.

I watched the phantom futures lap over each other like waves; none constant, none fixed, all of them melting and solidifying in a swirl of probability and potential.

Humanity's future was uncertain, but this much I knew: any action I took would ripple out across the eons to have enormous impact.

Entire posthuman civilizations millions of years hence would rise and fall on the choices made by me, now, in the present.

Evolution, I realized, is not an impersonal force. You and I are participating in it at this very moment.

You and I are the butterflies, flapping our wings, only dimly aware of the hurricanes we're setting in motion.

And not one of us is insignificant.

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Errata: Oops! Now I know why the two above bits of info were filed together. That is NOT a quote by Mr. Anders, but comes from the URL above. Namely here. It was an easy mistake to make. Its exactly the sort of thing that Anders would write.