The Future

A research entry by Melville-

I've noticed that the Noema system is full of ideas for space travel and colonization. Designs for launch pads and ships, sketches of cities, even an unfinished design for large-scale teleportation between distant planets. An interstellar or even intergalactic civilization of the kind writers like lain Banks imagined is entirely possible, if we want it.

Which leads me to another thought. These bodies we have are so carefully designed to look like our ancestors. But they don't really have to be. In his novels, Banks has intelligent minds like ourselves controlling entire ships, or drones, or even stations. If Alexandra Drennan was right, then it's not our shapes that make us human, and what it means to be human can be expanded if we maintain our creativity and our curiosity. With the Theory of Everything, we could transform ourselves as well as the world.

The only question is: can we be trusted to build a society that actually works, just for once in our long and stupidly bloody history? Is something like the Culture actually possible, or is it just a daydream and well we always end up with another dystopia? Maybe Athena finally found the answer to that question.