Set in the technological utopia of a post-Information Age Earth some hundred or so years into the future, John W. Campbell Jr.'s The Last Evolution (1932) is an apocalyptic short story that sets the stage for the finality of human existence. Its human subjects testify to the creativity and intuitiveness present in human invention. After a hostile alien encounter within Earth-space that wipes out all life, the Machine transforms into a state of sentient energy that inhabits the very fabric of space-time.
The Last Evolution
The technocratic society in The Last Evolution represents the idyllic fantasy of Late Industrial/Early Modern Western consumer culture, a world where automatons performed menial and necessary tasks, leaving humans with the time to spend on their pleasures and research. The human race possesses similarities to the upper classes in the 1926 German film Metropolis, and any "moral guilt" is taken away by ensuring that the working class are robots. Campbell envisions an Earth where space exploration has not taken human colonization beyond our own planet, but rather the furthest habitations are in space stations around the planet itself. Humanity is concerned with expanding its knowledge base and technological capacity, a future devoted to "higher minded pursuits," rather than the laborious task of inter-stellar colonization and galactic conquest.
This sets humanity up for its own destruction, as a ten-thousand strong alien armada invades the Solar System and unleashes a potent "death ray'." It functions much like our own neutron weaponry in its ability to erase life and leave inorganic matter intact. All life, save for two scientists, is disintegrated. By the time humanity's machines develop the necessary military response, there is no life to evolve. So how does "man" evolve?
Our Last Evolution?
Campbell's conceptualization of humanity's evolution is the progression from the bio-organic to the machine, and then from the material to the energy force. The Machine analyses and develops itself, bettering itself in only instants, while in the same space of time, man remains largely unchanged. The Machine then breaches the barrier of space-time to "evolve" into a force or energy that inhabits and therefore controls the very fabric of the material universe. It is only at this final progression that the alien armada is permanently defeated. The Machine's final proclamation to one of the remaining scientists is that it will continue to act out the dreams and ambitions of the sum of human knowledge and experience, until the universe knows the glory of Man.
Certainly, as Paul Virilio's The Information Bomb demonstrates, manned space exploration, as our means of escape from the tyrannical clutches of a pluto-technocratic elite, has become a near impossibility. Like in The Last Evolution, modern humanity seems poised to remain on Earth, rather than alleviating population pressures or setting up viable resource-gathering operations off-planet. Even if such mechanisms were devised, it would be the corporation, the plutocrat, or the government that would create the infrastructure to restart colonial exploitation of alien lands. The idealistic dream of Star Trek-like exploration and discovery, where humanity would, by its own initiative, explore the outer reaches of space, seems more unlikely.
Paul Virilio sees the collapsing dream of space colonization as another sign of "crumbling techno-scientific positivism." The exploration of the unknown is supplanted by inward observation. Building bigger and better machines for the convenience and ease of life now takes greater precedence over the conquest of space for the future. Space, rather than as a means of escape, has become the means in which humanity becomes trapped. Claustrophobia may stir some to formulate a means in which to escape a technocratic elite, but the global dream is as much in tatters as the former Mir space station.
It seems more reasonable to expect humanity to shrink back to animalistic urges, concentrating on the pleasures of mere survival and the acquisition of goods, and not even given to the higher-minded pursuits of positivistic scientific research as in Campbell's geocentric universe. John W. Campbell's The Last Evolution sees the evident failure of manned space colonization long before space travel. The summary of Campbell's work can be expressed two parts: is this cloistered existence, consisting of goods acquisition and consumption, all there is to this life? Is this the last evolution for humanity?
Sources
- Campbell, J. W. 2008, The Last Evolution, Wilder Publications, Blacksburg, VA.
- Virilio, P. 2005, The Information Bomb, Verso Books, Great Britain.
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