At a Transhumanist conference in the Bay Area, one of the
attendees stopped by to chat with me. During the conversation, he noted that my
biography was very strange.
“Spinning, raising goats and chickens, homesteading, these
things don’t sound very Transhumanist or futuristic to me," he said.
“Understanding nature and the way it works is the most
powerful way a Transhumanist can shape the future,” I replied.
I then went on to explain that while we can learn a lot from
our technology, in reality, most technology directly interacts with nature and by understanding the way the world works, we can become better designers and inventors. We
humans are known to try and force our hand upon nature in an attempt to bring
order to what appears to be chaos in our minds, but this impulse isn’t
logical. This way of thinking is what leads a scientist to invent plastic bags
without ever understanding the environmental impact they would eventually have
on our marine life. Thinking that we’re above nature and don’t need to
understand it, gives us the false sense that we know better, yet when the
hurricanes come and destroy the levees, we’re left wondering why.
I took up my homesteading hobbies as a direct compliment to
my technical education. I knew how a radio system worked, but I didn’t fully
understand how life itself worked. Learning how to knit a sweater from animal
to end product taught me so much—how goats behave, what they need to eat, how
to shear them, card the fiber, spin it using a rather elegant, yet ancient
technology, and finally knit it. By the end I truly understood why we invented
the machines we did to make this process so much easier. Spending time with
nature in this case gave me a fuller appreciation of our technology.
By spending time in
nature and learning to do things for ourselves, we learn the necessity behind
the invention and we grasp and appreciate our technology in entirely new ways.
Yet there’s another reason to become intimate with nature—it
can show us solutions to the problems we’re trying to solve. Nature has certain cycles and systems
within it that we as humans can mimic. After all, we are a part of nature ourselves.
Some people believe nature is chaos. Others believe its
order. I’m of the camp that nature fluctuates between the two. There is chaos
and then it tends to order. Then back to chaos. Then back to order. Take a bee
hive. When it swarms, the bees go flying out of the hive in a messy bunch,
loudly buzzing and scaring most humans away. They flood the sky in complete
chaos. And then, something amazing happens as they begin to swirl around one
another and what was once frantic becomes an organized funnel, similar to a
tornado, as they follow their queen to a tree and form a perfect ball around
her. Then they wait, as quiet as can be, until their scouts find a home and they
fly off once more.
Chaos to order. Order to chaos.
We fear change and this is often what holds us back
technologically. Our imaginations are capable of seeing what needs to be done,
what new technology or process could be developed, and how we can bring
solutions to the world’s biggest problems. But we fear change and chaos so
much, we often march at a snail’s pace when it comes to implementing our big
changes. Yet we managed the agricultural revolution and then the industrial
revolution. We can navigate change as a
group.
We’re now entering the technological revolution. At the beginning
of each of these stages, we live in chaos. Roles, work, family structure, governments,
everything is in play. The type of leaders needed to bring about the true
information age are very different than the leaders we’ve had. Yet we keep
electing people with a 19th century mindset because we fear the
change that’s happening around us. Why the 19th century? Because
that’s when the industrial revolution truly hit its high point. Society had fully
integrated the factory based economy and life was good. But guess what, like
nature, we’ve moved past that stage.
Society now is falling apart precisely because it must in
order to integrate the information age economy. Until we get there, we’ll
experience pain. But when we’ve made the change, things will settle into order
and a whole new way of living will become natural to us.
This is what living
in nature has taught me—that it’s useless to turn away from chaos. It’s going
to happen, structures must break down. Yet there’s the promise of order right
around the corner. Everything in nature works this way. The redwood was
once a little seed that underwent extreme chaos to form a root and eventually
become a tree. Yet for two thousand years after that chaotic event, the redwood
is still standing in an orderly, peaceful manner.
We will transition to the information age and with it will
come many new opportunities. The changes on the way won’t be easy, and many
will go kicking and screaming. However there’s a more logical approach—accept the
change that is part of evolution, imagine solutions, technologies and
opportunities, and turn to nature to show the way to order once more.
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