Super Sapiens: Day 13

Lucky number 13! (13,277 / 1,000,000)

Humans are crazy. All of the other animals just kind of live their lives; they eat, poop, reproduce, and die. I don’t mean to totally bash all the other animals, some of them have the capacity for complex thought and deep emotions. But humans are still different (take a step back, dolphins). We’re tireless tinkerers, and more curious than the infamously curious cat. We painstakingly dragged ourselves from naked screaming primates to space-faring (but still screaming) wielders of powerful technology. What makes us so special is our ability to combine our efforts towards common goals, sometimes even over many generations.

I would make the claim that combined human effort is the single greatest force that has ever existed on our planet. Empires, countries, religions, and corporations are all entities which channel that combined human effort; and all of these entities have vastly affected the shape of our world today. What’s interesting about these entities is that, while they are composed entirely of humans, they are decidedly not human. Yet they have many of the same traits that make us human: values, motivations, and aspirations. A country may have an ideology or identity that unites it’s people, but a country is not a person. A corporation may have a set of values, and a goal that it’s employees pursue together. Yet still, a corporation is not a person.

So, if everyone agrees up to this point (it’s not required), let’s put the puzzle pieces together. Humans are crazy. Through working together, we extricated ourselves from the food web, and dominated our planet. Then, we created a bunch of non-human entities, and put them in charge. No, really, think about it. The greatest forces in the world are not humans, but the representations of human effort like countries, corporations, and religions. Now let’s think, are these entities, which have their own values, goals, and motivations, interested in the betterment of human existence?

I think, originally, the answer was yes. Humans banded together into societies for safety and comfort. These greater-than-human entities were created to make life as tolerable as possible for as many people as possible. But nowadays, these entities are so far removed from their origins; abstractions on top of abstractions, which have little resemblance to the small tribes of our roots. Think about it this way: there are non-human entities that exist today, whose sole purpose is to create and disseminate weapons, so that humans can kill each other.

I don’t mean to be all doom and gloom, there are tons of non-human entities that do amazing things for humanity. It’s these same entities which produced the polio vaccine, Apollo 11, and Oreos. But let’s be honest, I’m trying to be a writer, I look for things that generate conflict. There’s no interesting story about the development of the Oreo. I’m sure there’s an interesting story in the destruction of the Amazon. Even the great Brandon Sanderson once said, “Stories are made up of plot, character, and setting, but they’re glued together by conflict”¹.

You may be asking, what is the point of all of this? I bet you won’t expect this one… It’s worldbuilding! These entities have been very compelling subjects for me while I’ve been researching worldbuilding. They are powerful actors, with global reach, who can alter the very way we live our lives. When it comes to these entities, tiny changes could have echoing repercussions on the shape of reality.

A thought exercise that I find interesting is to take a significant event in time, oftentimes a particular invention or maybe a war, and change the outcome. I’ll try to work out how our timeline would look with this alteration. It’s a lot of fun, and I know I’m not the only person, let alone only aspiring writer, to do this. I mean there are whole books written on premises like this. What would happen if you went back in time to the medieval era with a cache of AK-47’s? What would the world look like if the Persian forces overwhelmed the Greeks during the Battle of Marathon? You know how it goes.

I try not to alter the space-time continuum too much - butterfly effect and all that. So I explore other interesting topics regarding these powerful entities. Take, for example, the dynamics between these entities. Countries, corporations, and religions alike share an aversion for symmetric conflict. It makes sense, why waste significant resources trying to oust your “near-peer” competitor, when there’s such a small chance for success? Asymmetric conflict however, is another story. It makes a lot of sense (if you ignore morals, ethics, and all that) for an entity to utterly annihilate a potential competitor while it’s small, reducing the chance for self-annihilation in the future. This an historically observable phenomenon.

Okay, I'll admit that today I'm flying by the seat of my pants. I'm currently writing this on my phone, in the backseat of a car. Not my ideal writing conditions. So, I think I leave it at that today, knowing that I probably didn't hit a thousand words, but that I got close. As always: thanks for reading, have a good week, value humans, and…

Totally nailed it,

Michael

1. YouTube: Lecture #2: Plot Part 1 — Brandon Sanderson on Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy 00:00:25