Intergalactic Summit

"Aliens... they don't exist, do they?"
"Well, you could call the sleepers..."
"No. Wrong. Sleepers are posthumans. As are the Takmahl, Talocan, and Yan Jung. Ancient races, yes... but humans. There are no aliens."
"Jove?"
"Another posthuman example. They're strange, and have transcended the capabilities of humanity... at a cost of nearly going extinct. But, they were still evolved from humans."
"Where are you going with this?"
"Where I am going with this... is that Humans are Gods. Just look at us. Look at the capsuleers. We have travelled further than anyone. Our capsuleer empires are larger than that of the four main Empires, and we have been in existance for much less time. We are now immortals, and we are the very few going beyond where the Empires stopped, and we call those places our home."

"But to call ourselves Gods is going a bit far. Almost megalomaniacal and the Amarrians definately will brand you a heretic if you voiced this in their regions. But I do agree we have grown much faster and stronger than anything. In a way, you could also call us a virus, don't you agree?"
"A virus? No. Evolution. We are the next step. We learn from the Empires. We learn from the Ancient Races. We learn from the Jove. We learn from THEIR mistakes, and it is bringing us further than we could have hoped for."
"But we only existed for a few hundred years. What are the odds that we will also make that final mistake that all other races and empires have done before us, and exterminate ourselves, only to be an example for the next 'Gods' as you call them?"
"Infinite probability. But we will live on. Eventually we, or our descendants, will master the stars as our mysterious benefactors from eons ago also did. Stargates."
"We know how they work. We just can't build them."
"And that... my friend, is exactly what I am expecting. But the final question will be... will it be our mistake that will destroy us, to be an example for the next generations and remembered for millennia... or will it bring us further than anything we have ever known? Who knows what lies beyond this next... or last frontier. "



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Transcript between two unidentified intellectual capsuleer pilots, from a viral video that's going across intergalactic networks right now.

We are, however, the next step in human development. Well, one of many different but similar steps. Augmentation for everyone is where the future lies. Can you imagine the entirety of humanity benefiting from our level of technological advancement, in a safe and controlled manner?

The dangers are great, the benefits are greater.

There's no such thing as an "apex" in evolution. It's not a process with a vector to it, it's just a process.

And there are still selection forces at work in humanity. Certain groups of people are more likely to interbreed than other. Devoutly religious Amarr are unlikely to have children with Gallentean atheists, for instance. Brutor/Civire couples are much rarer than Civire/Civire and Brutor/Brutor. the kind of mate you attract is just as much of a selection pressure as whether you're good at not being eaten.

Just because we've largely overcome being selected against by predation and disease doesn't mean there aren't still forces which will guide our genetic path in the future, they're just less grand and obvious.

Besides, change on such scale takes hundreds of thousands of years. The mere handful of centuries since we invented antibiotics is nothing next to such time scales. Don't write us off as a stable genome just yet - for all we know, in a million years' time our descendants will be an unknown number of very different species with a common ancestry.

To my grossly limited understanding, a species' evolutionary path is covectored with the selection pressures of its environment. The vector is a variable.

As for humans no longer evolving, I would suggest that the good sir read a couple of issues of State Immunology Review, or a comparable journal of choice. We're fairly dynamic, all told!

that's... not even slightly how it works. There IS no "up" or "down" in evolution.

Kariola's Bones, man, if you're going to prattle on about this stuff at least strive to have enough of an education in the subject so as not to appear like a complete idiot.

I formulated my words wrongly, what i meant was that evolution really moves in all directions at once, even back and down. Due to random mutation. It is the environment that cuts off the evolutionary branches that just don't fit the circumstances. If we make it so that none of these branches get cut off by compensating for their shortcomings with technology, we have effectively stopped evolution from going in any direction at all. Meaning that we technically have stopped evolving. The only way to achieve anything major is to do it manually, just like the Jovians did.

It means that we might evolve to what we used to be (back), if we ever end up in the same environmental circumstances for to long. We might for all sake evolve to something less intelligent in order to survive some environmental circumstances.(down)

That's because the words "back" or "down" aren't relevant.

Evolution refers simply to a change in frequence of any given allele within the gene pool of a species. That's it, that's the whole definition. A given allele may become more common or less common, new alleles may enter the pool and increase in frequency due to having some benefit to their carrier, but terms like "more", "Less", "up", "down", "Back", "Better", "Worse" and so on are all nonsense. It's like discussing the marital status of the colour blue. The terms are just not applicable.

And as has already been said, allele frequence IS changing in humans. constantly. The forces driving that change may not be obvious ones like predation and disease, but to say that humans have "stopped evolving" is absurd. We can't see big changes happening because the time scales involved are by definition spread across several generations. But we can watch average allele frequencies in populations alter with time.

Part of that, yes, is genegineering. I myself was spared lactose intolerance and short sight thanks to some judicious in-utero genetic modifications, and because such pre-natal modifications are commonplace in Caldari society, our ancient predilection for lactose intolerance is indeed rapidly vanishing from our gene pool, which is a form of evolution. But we're not exclusively evolving solely thanks to medical technologies, nor is it sensible to say that we have stopped evolving, nor that we are evolving in a particular direction. It's impossible for there to BE a direction involved other than "continuing".

"Backwards evolution" does exist, by the way. It's called selection, and sometimes, mutations which were present in the past, may come back again in the future, and thrive there under different circumstances. Not all mutations in creatures will go permanently extinct if they are not useful when they were introduced to that species. They might still be there, hidden in the genetic song of that species.


Either way, intelligence is, I believe, the final stage of evolution. A stage which, as far as we know, is only achieved by us; humans.
Through intelligence, we now created technologies that can bring us further into the stars than we would be able to normally.
Through intelligence, we are now immortals, even death has no meaning for us anymore.
Through intelligence, we became nothing less than that exact thing that created us in the first place: evolution.
Calling ourselves gods for mastering the evolution of our own species is only righteous.




Jump bridges need another jump bridge to connect to. Jump drives need cynos.
Stargates, I think, are currently only in pairs because our ancestors wanted to travel back and forth reliably. I don't think we really need a pair of stargates to operate. One could be enough.

Imagine an accelleration gate, but which uses stargate technology. A stargate that leads into the unknown, breaching the final barrier, and opening up all that infinite and unknown space for us.
Oh, look at that. A Micro Jump Drive. Babysteps, yes. But it's there, isn't it? the ability to practically teleport 100 kilometers without warp drives?

Scale it up a few notches, in the following years. I have no doubt that scientists are working on that right now.
Scale it up to a level that allows us to jump between stars without requiring a second object like a cyno, or jump beacon. Then scale it up again... and again. Eventually we'll be able to build this into a stargate that does not require anything else on the other side.

And then what? What will we find? The sleepers? They already settled in what seems to be an entirely different galaxy which we, the Gods, can now only access with natural wormholes. A galaxy that is hundreds of thousands of lightyears away from us. And they are everywhere in that Anoikis galaxy
Yet Sleepers are also human.

How did they get there? It can't really be wormholes, else we would have seen more destroyed planets and ruins because of such a cataclysmic event like what happened in Seyllin in YC111.
I think that sleepers mastered the intergalactic travelling... able to travel between stars, even entire galaxies, with some sort of stargate or jump drive.


And once we master THAT. Then what's next? What will we find... or... what will find US?

Verin, you know I'm divine. Mmmmmhm.