The Future History of Uplift

The active pursuit of uplift really took hold as a scientific field during the great flowering of transhuman culture, an era that also gave us the widespread settlement of space, extensive human genetic modification, nanotech, cognitive science, and the digital emulation of consciousness. It is in fact the convergence of these fields, and the feedback loops spawned between them, that enabled the uplift project to make so much headway so quickly.

It’s easy to see uplift as a breathtaking cultural and technological revolution, but the truth is the idea at the heart of uplift is as old as Homo sapiens itself. One doesn’t have to look too hard to find the seeds of the future being sown in the distant past.

It began in small ways. The first men who lured hungry wolves into the circle of firelight with scraps of meat. The cultivation of wheat and corn, barley and rice. The domestication of cattle and swine, sheep and poultry. The breeding of canines, equines, and other animals into a thousand different shapes for a thousand different chores. And then, as if controlling the sex lives of the world’s flora and fauna wasn’t enough, reaching into the very genetic repository of the planet and re-engineering it for the pleasure of humanity. Plants first. Then animals. And finally, mankind itself.

The history of civilization is merely the history of humanity bending living things to its will. Control. That’s what a human is. Uplift is merely the logical extension of millions of years of “progress.”

So once humanity had the technological tools to investigate and pursue uplifting in earnest, there was no reason to pause. Despite its many achievements, if there is one thing humanity is terrible at, it is foresight. There was relatively little discussion and debate about the consequences or ethics of uplifting animals, at least in the public sphere. The momentum of progress made uplift all but inevitable.

Notes:

Recognizes we have been manipulating the evolution of life on Earth for thousands of years.

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Entities:
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 Eclipse Phase - Panopticon
Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book:  Boyle , Rob and Cross, Brian (2011-06-15), Eclipse Phase - Panopticon, Retrieved on 2013-06-17
  • Source Material [books.google.com]
  • Folksonomies: futurism rpg