Our Venusian descendants were designed by the small minority of species-minded Earthlings to share a hive mind; they do not suffer from the selfish propensity for seeking individual happiness that led to Earth’s destruction. Two new senses contribute to the hive mind: at every moment they sense “the voice of the community,” and they also have a sort of built-in radio that can be turned on or off at will. They are also genetically predisposed to look to the future more than the past, unlike Earthlings whose strange backward-looking propensities are illustrated not only by their failure to act in the face of their destructive tendencies, but by their religious beliefs. The Venusians’ forward-looking characteristic also makes them more willing to sacrifice themselves.
The net result is that the Venusians see their potential extending far beyond anything humans ever could have accomplished; “we have settled down as members of a super-organism with no limits on its possible progress.”86 They plan to breed a version of themselves that will be able to settle Jupiter. Foreseeing in 250 million years an improved opportunity for interstellar travel, they think they can take it “if by that time the entire matter of the planets of the solar system is under conscious control.”87 Only a few of the millions of projectiles they send out might succeed. The Venusians are undaunted:
But in such a case waste of life is as inevitable as in the seeding of a plant or the discharge of spermatozoa or pollen. Moreover, it is possible that under the conditions of life in the outer planets the human brain may alter in such a way as to open up possibilities inconceivable to our own minds. Our galaxy has a probable life of at least eighty million million years. Before that time has elapsed it is our ideal that all the matter in it available for life should be within the power of the heirs of the species whose original home has just been destroyed. If that ideal is even approximately fulfilled, the end of the world which we have just witnessed was an episode of entirely negligible importance. And there are other galaxies.88
In his commentary on his story at the end of “The Last Judgment,” Haldane acknowledges that he is not really trying to predict the future—he is just engaging in an imaginative thought experiment, a “valuable spiritual exercise.”89 The future will certainly not conform to our present ideals, but thinking about it can illuminate “our emotional attitude towards the universe as a whole” that presumably is one source of those ideals.90 Traditionally, that attitude has been the province of religion. But modern science has taught us that the universe is far vaster in size and possibilities than religions ever knew, and so it is necessary to start using our imaginations in connection with these new realities. In effect, then, science fiction stands in for religion. The new scale of things we can begin to imagine should call forth a greater ambition among the most creative humans to develop (and for the rest of us to cooperate in) a plan that goes beyond traditional ideas of salvation, such as the assumption that the purpose of creation is to prepare some few for “so much perfection and happiness as is possible for them.”91
We can “only dimly conjecture” what this plan might be, but Haldane wonders whether it might be the “emergence of a new kind of being which will bear the same relation to mind as do mind to life and life to matter.”92 As we can already envision the end of our own world, some such transformation will be necessary. Only if the human race proves that “its destiny is eternity and infinity, and that the value of the individual is negligible in comparison with that destiny,” will “man and all his works” not “perish eternally.”93
The tension within this edifying conclusion is not hard to spot. In Haldane’s scheme, an eternal and infinite destiny can only be achieved by making man himself into one of the works of man, such that in fact human beings do perish eternally. Furthermore, the imagination of this superior progeny is really an exercise in elucidating all the reasons for which, by and large, we should not be missed. So Haldane’s substitute for religion embodies an “emotional attitude towards the universe as a whole” which is predicated on the assumption that whatever human beings do, “man’s little world will end.”94 The real choice is between ending it ourselves and having it ended for us, or perhaps between ending it accidentally and ending it deliberately.
MANKIND REMANUFACTURED
Haldane may have claimed he was not trying to predict the future, but our final author certainly was—and in the process, he lays out a rather specific path toward what he calls “the progress of dehumanization,” integrating many of the themes that our other authors developed.
The Irish-born J. D. Bernal (1901–1971) was, like Haldane and Flammarion, a scientist by training. He is probably best known for the development of the mathematics of X-ray crystallography, which quickly became a key technique of chemical analysis.95 (It was this technique that allowed the double-helix structure of DNA to be discovered, for example.) He did research that helped facilitate the D-Day landings, and made serious contributions to the sociology of science.96 A public intellectual of some note, Bernal was a dedicated communist and admirer of the Soviet Union; in 1953, he was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize, a prominent Soviet prize for the country’s international supporters, and from 1959 to 1965 he was president of the World Peace Council, a Soviet-funded international activist group.97
Bernal’s first popular publication was a thin volume called The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Inquiry into the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul (1929).98 In it, he proposes an objective effort to predict things to come. Bernal acknowledges that this task might be easier said than done, partly because it can be difficult to distinguish prediction and desire, partly because of all the complex interactions that make the world what it is, and partly because “all evidence” points “to ever increasing acceleration of change.”99 Nevertheless, it is reasonable to start by looking at what the trends are. Bernal projects the future in three areas: “the world,” or our power in relationship to the material world; “the flesh,” or our power over life, particularly our own bodies; and “the devil,” our power over our own psyches. He concludes his volume by attempting to see what might come of developments in these three areas taken together.
In each realm Bernal expects remarkable things. His chapter “The World” focuses primarily on “the conquest of space.”100 He anticipates some developments that we have only recently achieved, like the use of huge sails to propel ships using solar wind,101 but his most extended discussion is of what it would take to create ten-mile-diameter spherical habitations with tens of thousands of inhabitants.102 With the necessary propulsion systems added, these communities in space would eventually allow for the long voyages that interstellar travel would require—voyages that will be necessary as our sun begins to fail.103
The chapter “The Flesh” starts from the bald assertion that “modern mechanical and modern chemical discoveries have rendered both the skeletal and metabolic functions of the body to a large extent useless.”104 Bernal expects the increasing substitution of mechanical for biological systems in the human body, with all the augmentation of physical and sensory abilities that implies—for example, “we badly need a small sense organ for detecting wireless frequencies.”105 People have always wanted longer lives and more opportunities “to learn and understand.”106 But achieving such goals is now in sight:
Sooner or later some eminent physiologist will have his neck broken in a super-civilized accident or find his body cells worn beyond capacity for repair. He will then be forced to decide whether to abandon his body or his life. After all it is brain that counts, and to have a brain suffused by fresh and correctly prescribed blood is to be alive—to think. The experiment is not impossible; it has already been done on a dog and that is three-quarters of the way towards achieving it with a human subject.107
Bernal expects that once some men were thus transformed, they would be most able at transforming others.108 Humans will have a “larval” stage of six to twelve decades in our current bodies, then we will pass into “chrysalis, a complicated and rather unpleasant process of transforming the already existing organs and grafting on all the new sensory and motor mechanisms.”109 Of course, unlike a butterfly,