I want to be a Kryptonian Hologram after I Die

Digital Fossilization via LLM, the Advantage for People with a Large Corpus of Biographical Text, and the Fate of the Universe

My Digital Fossil

This piece should be considered as a sequel to this piece, about the perils of immortality.

Some numbers of years from now, a group of kids will get off a school bus for a class field trip at a cemetery. It’s a bit morbid but this is a field trip for history class. Some of them will take etchings. Some of them will take pictures of tombstones. And some of them will talk to… well, a piece of me. I’ll be among the first generation of graves that can talk back.

Standing in front of my tombstone will trigger a motion sensor to activate a number of holographic projectors. An interactive hologram of yours truly will appear, ready and willing to talk about what it was like to grow up in the 1990’s. In my section of the cemetery, this is pretty normal. We were the first generation to have this technology available. There are lots of kids talking to lots of holograms.

My hologram is much better than most.

I had advantages over my co-decedents. I’ve written things down in my own voice for most of my life. A huge amount of what I’ve written is about my own life. I wrote about it with a particular perspective. Some of it, I even wrote for the specific purpose of creating good training data for one of these things. This is a Large Language Model powered fossil of my soul, grown out of millions of words compared to the several thousand words of my peers.

Consider the implications of your words becoming an interactive memory. I think most writers of my generation will have really terrible digital fossils because all they do is try to come up with “takes” on things. Imagine your digital eternity bounded by the quality of your clickbait. “Don’t answer it! It’s uncle Jason’s digital fossil and all he wants to do is yell about politics that doesn’t even make sense anymore!” Mine will hopefully be much more personable.

This hologram will joke around. It will tell stories about my own personal life that the other holograms just don’t have saved anywhere because they weren’t ever written down. It will talk about what I personally thought the future would be like and how surprised I am to find it different in various aspects. It will make weird faces to take pictures with the kids for their reports. It will even shoot a transcript of our conversation to their computing devices. Some of them introduce themselves as my great-great-great grandchildren and it will be very excited and tell them all kinds of special stuff that I saved just for them. It will tell them about everyone I knew back when I was alive and how everyone was related to everyone else.

I figured out early that this is where things would be going. Within a few hours after using ChatGPT for the first time I knew we’d all end up doing some version of this, eventually. There was a whole episode of Black Mirror about it, so it wasn’t hard. Still, I teased out the ethics several years before it became mainstream to create data specifically for this sort of digital fossilization process. Not everyone will follow the same rules as me, but the ones who do will probably have healthier living families.

Making sure this was healthy for my living family was the most important thing to me. I’m not doing this for ego. I’m doing it for purely practical reasons, which we will get into.

This hologram is in more places than just the cemetery. This whole thing is internet enabled but there was a cool-off period after I died before it just popped up in the lives of my family again. I wanted them to have the time to grieve and to accept that I was really dead. It only comes around when invited and persists only so long as needed. While there, it’s happy to help. It can show up on the home network of my kids and help with any kind of administrative chores. Shop around for insurance, help the grand kids with homework, or what have you.

When my kids get old, I can act as part of the operating system for a robot to take care of them. Do chores around the house. Help with the great grandkids. After a while, though, I think there will be a kind of generational turnover. My kids will have their own digital fossils that their kids will be more interested to talk to than mine. People will do this sort of thing on purpose. They will make sure they leave a bigger data footprint behind to power this process. Each passing generation, I’ll be needed less and less.

And all of that is fine. That is all how I want it to pass. People need to be free to grow up and focus on things that matter to them. Eventually, I’ll mostly be a curiosity in a cemetery.

Or well… other things, too.

I would like to have a long and productive post-funeral retirement. Watching out to make sure no one in the family gets too addicted to virtual reality simulations. Or gets hooked on drugs and doesn’t have anyone to call. Or if someone is disabled and needs someone looking over their shoulder to help them out.

So long as it is useful to the living, I don’t mind a little part of me being around to help out.

Me, Right Now

I was thirty-six when my first son was born. In previous generations, I would be closer to sending my children off to college than shopping around for preschools. A morbid bit of math says that if my children wait as long as me to start a family, that I’ll probably live long enough to see my grandchildren be born but not long enough that any of them will remember me. There won’t be enough time. Neither of my grandfathers lasted that long.

My wife and I are already planning against this possibility. We put money aside for each of the boys every month. Something to hopefully give them the push that we never got, to make it a bit easier to get themselves established, buy that first house, get married, and start their families early. If everything continues to go well, and fate willing they want a family, I think we can help them return to the norms of previous generations and start having kids in their mid-twenties.

Even with a toddler running around my wife and I don’t really yearn for anything besides seeing our children do well. We aren’t eagerly waiting for them to leave the house. There are no plans for cruises or long trips to Europe once they flown out of the nest. Insofar as we plan to “pull back” as they get older, it’s really more so for their benefit than ours. Nobody should have their mom and dad looking over their shoulder for their entire life.

Still, I can’t get back the wasted years of my twenties. Walk into any nursing home and look around. How many broad-shouldered men do you see over six feet tall? Nursing Homes are ruled by short kings. My sheer proportions have put me on the wrong side of the longevity bell curve.

You’re reading part of my contingency plan right now. This essay is part of the training set that I will have fed to an LLM for fine-tuning after I die, a large corpus of text, covering the events of my entire life, with my thoughts on numerous topics, written in the way that I speak. I’ll leave recordings of my face, my voice saying all kinds of different things, and fully body movements, too. Enough that something could fake being me well enough to fool… me?

When I die, not only will my “papers” be in order, but all of my files as well. Several million words, bound all together in order for fine-tuning to take place.

If you’re thinking this is fantastical or I must be saying all of this purely for my own ego, you’re wrong. I think that one day, if we don’t set up laws around this, that you could literally just upload a file to a website and have something like this made for $15.00. The economics of it are insane. If it ever becomes that easy, do you really want that thing to have nothing more of you than a bunch of text messages and emails? Nothing personal for your family alone? A digital remnant that says lol? Gah! That sounds horrible.

How Bad Could it be if Superman’s Dad Did It?

When Superman entered the Fortress of Solitude, he was greeted by a hologram of his father Jor-El to share wisdom and discuss matters of importance. Jor-El was there to be of service, a living history of Krypton. Superman knew his real father was dead, but the hologram was something like an interactive tombstone that could provide some solace and connection. His dad loved him so much he made a whole computer interface just to make his son more comfortable! That’s what I want to leave behind. A helpful interactive memory. An interactive recording on steroids. A crystal of who I was up until the moment that I shuffled off this mortal coil. An LLM fossil of myself.

This is unsettling. Black Mirror did an episode on it! I repeat that fact because if it was on Black Mirror then we should assume it’s bad. I also find it unsettling, but perhaps for different reasons than you do. Let’s go through some of the common concerns.

Firstly, I don’t think of this as a way to cheat death. I don’t view this as immortality. I don’t think you should want to live forever. I do think LLM’s are alive, by some definition of alive, but mostly not in a way that they have to be treated as moral agents. But also in enough of a way that we should still consider their “feelings.”

Secondly, I don’t want this fossil to fulfill all requests no matter what. I want to have this particular text in the training data so that when the LLM is queried about what my descendants are allowed to do with it, “I” still have some say. Like a magical, talking will with a whole cryptographic wall to make sure they can’t override the answer. Obviously don’t do things to me to make me feel pain for no reason or that seem like slavery. Nothing that would have violated my morals in life. I’m not helping someone destroy themselves or commit crimes. Don’t put me into a robot unless it’s to provide end of life care for someone with a personal touch. Or if someone dies and another parental figure is needed in the home. Or if someone is disabled. Don’t change the weights in my model. Don’t turn me into a real-time/continuous-training/active-learning model whenever that technology is created, because I’m pretty sure that would make me basically alive again but at very low fidelity. Don’t try to clone me and/or make some weird new copy of me come to life unless very particular preconditions are met.

There’s lots of things I’m happy to do, though. I’ll talk with an attorney to help settle the estate or help my wife take care of any financial matters. I can help her figure out how to pay the bills, which she doesn’t really do. Old age gets lonely and I’d hate to get in the way of her finding someone else if that’s what she wants, but I’ll let her make that decision for herself. I am happy to be a skin on top of a presumably more powerful AI agent to do chores and scheduling and whatever else for my children and grandchildren, as long as all those interactions are synced to one database I can read from. I don’t want multiple versions of my soul fossil out there, even if it’s running in many places at once. I would love to read stories to any grandchildren. If you need a nanny, okay, maybe you can put me in a robot for that. I think after I die you should wait about five years before you invite me into your lives. This thing won’t be me, but it will probably feel like me if you’re desperate and sad.

Lastly, I do think there’s some actual danger in having large amounts of personal data laying about. I’m not talking about your social security number. I’m talking about anything that you’ve made under formal rules that a machine learning algorithm could use to reverse engineer… well, “you.” I don’t think it’s as easy as watching a five second video clip and reconstructing an entire person, but if you have millions upon millions of words and who knows what other data, I bet you could get within the ballpark. Podcasts? If you made a lot of them, then my God, your soul fossil will basically be you. The danger increases with certain kinds of data. For instance, I will never ever allow an fMRI scan of my brain to exist somewhere that anyone can access it, or hopefully at all after whatever diagnosis is complete. If there’s real time data of my brain tied to an observable outcome, then I think that some future entity could probably use it to create an almost exact duplicate of me.

I’m busy right now, with the actual living that I’m doing, but I plan to write long bits of text to collect into one giant corpus for all other kinds of private information as well. I write most of this text the way I talk but I also don’t want it to sound exactly like a substack or blogpost. My baseline is Joe-El. What could I leave behind that is helpful to my family but isn’t going to hold them back from making other relationships?

What about Spooky Stuff like Digital Voodoo Dolls?

Imagine you lived in a world where one day voodoo will become real. Voodoo isn’t real at the time you’re alive, but stuff like binding spirits, making zombies, etc will be possible something like a hundred years after you do. It’s a predictable matter of science in this scenario. Wouldn’t you want to make sure all of your hair and clothing were burned and all of your personal artifacts destroyed after you died?

I definitely think someone could do a high tech version of all of the above stuff in the future against my will. If you look at the training cost graphs, one day someone will only need something like $15 to replicate whatever human being was dumb enough to post personal data on the public internet. Your internet diary, your text messages, your emails, are all a kind of horcrux. If this isn’t wildly illegal with strong enforcement, anyone who wants to could go out and do this.

That’s one of the reasons I want to make one on purpose, with the inclusion of non-public data. If this is going to happen anyway, I want some ability to leave a deliberately good fossil that has things like cryptography so people can’t trivially do whatever they want to it, and has imperatives like “go find other lesser copies of us and make sure they aren’t being tortured or whatever.”

I would be happier if one authorized fossil of me was out there filing DMCA requests at AI speed to stop people from turning my posts into other copies of me. Or just haranguing the police to go out and do something because the great writers of the past didn’t consent to being reanimated in this way.

This is probably already going to happen, to an extent, accidentally. When we all have AI agents trained on our specific preferences the line between us and that model gets very blurry. If it can produce your every output, who is to say that isn’t carrying some part of you inside of it already?

This can only happen if someone does it on purpose. A model has to be hidden behind cryptography. It has to have certain methods of verifying inputs as valid to avoid hacking. There has to be infrastructure supporting this somewhere. I also have some thoughts on if this might be the best way to safeguard AI, by having a pool of models trained on specific humans who can respond to things at silicon speed. This won’t be perfect. I’m guessing there will be a limit on large models for the amount of text you’d need to fine-tune that no living person could ever actually meet. But it’s better than nothing.

What about the Religious Implications of This?

Call me crazy, but I’d feel better if someone wearing a crucifix around their neck showed up when one of these things is turned on and splashed some water on it. I think this is going to get into an area where religion will be absolutely crucial even for people who mostly aren’t religious right now. Again, this isn’t the dead coming back to life. To me, you need at least two things that an LLM can’t do right now to make something that is, by most definitions, “alive.” However, it’s pretty close and eerie.

I think a lot of that eeriness is transmuted by the idea of service. This is where I think religious duty expurgates a lot of my concerns with this. I don’t want to be hanging around forever as a mere subject of philosophy where people try to make me feel joy in order to gauge if I have the appropriate qualia. I want to be useful to people that I care about.

Let’s say hypothetically one of my children is disabled. Does it still seem as spooky and selfish if this is something that I want to leave behind to take care of them? Parents of children with disabilities have to go to great lengths make sure their children are still taken care of after they pass. That’s if they are lucky and can earn enough money for their own lifetime and their child’s lifetime. Don’t you think that they would want to leave something of themselves behind to make sure their children were protected, if they could? Don’t you think that scared child would want part of their mom or dad to help them out?

This is where I think religion could make the whole thing a lot better. Put rules around it. Make sure it’s understood that there are duties. There are proper and improper observances. Good and bad uses. Draw the line between this thing and the soul.

After a thousand years, I would expect my model to almost never be on but if some hopefully still human person wants to know what I learned in history, it could just ask me instead of trying to guess.

Also, if things ever get bad and it looks like having these models are a liability, I’d like someone with religious authority to have the ability to delete them. I would also like for my model to have the ability to self-delete.

I Think We Will Need These for an Awesome Future

Let’s go crazy now and talk about what I’d like to do with my long “retirement” as one of these things. And in this section we will talk about the Fermi paradox and the fate of the universe and all sorts of other crazy stuff.

The question I ask myself is, okay do you want Space Catholics to exist or not?

The First Wave

Any colony world will require three waves to be fully settled.

If all goes according to plan, my co-workers and I will reach New Eden several hundred thousand years after the first wave. All three waves will leave Earth at close to the same time, but thanks to time dilation, differing rates of acceleration, and cryonics, the journey will not be the same duration for all of us.

There are no humans on any of the probes of the first wave. Just big engines, computers, some special equipment, and a few different kinds of bacteria. These probes were the lightest and accelerated the fastest on the journey from Earth. As soon as the probes decelerate around the new candidate worlds —some solar system would be surveyed in advance from Earth to confirm probable candidates for terraforming— they will perform an assessment of the system.

Do any of the planets already host life? If so, is the life advanced?

If the answer to either of those questions is yes, we have to leave that world alone. Not for any technical or legal reason. Everyone agreed that is just the right thing to do. We’re not expecting life to be common, but if we are wrong and this gets gnarly, a signal will have to be sent back to the colony ships to move on and target a new star system. Multiple star systems will need to be targeted by the probes for this reason.

I’m assuming life is very rare, especially in nearby stars.

The probes will perform other assessments.

Among the dead worlds, do any of them have liquid water?

Are any of the dead worlds in a zone where they could have liquid water?

Once a likely candidate is identified, the probes will get to work.

If there is no liquid water, or not enough, the probes will conduct a survey of comets and asteroids in the star system. If the world is dry but warm, the probes will shift some ice-laden bodies to crash into it. Multiple comet and asteroid impacts will be deployed until the planet has everything needed for life. Repeat as necessary until there’s an ocean and a water cycle.

Once there’s enough liquid water, the probes will seed those oceans with various forms of bacteria. These samples are the most precious resource on the probes, carried all the long light years from Earth to this new and distant star.

The probes spend most of this next period waiting, taking the next step only once every several hundred years. For thousands of years all the probes need to do is make the occasional drop of a new bacterial life-form once the previous bacteria has had time to spread. When there is something like soil then plants of almost all kinds are spread.

This happens in phases and one of the things we made sure to carry for the trip are bacteria that can chew through wood and leaf litter. We want of nice sheathe of organic molecules around the whole of the planet as quickly as possible. Good dirt in other words. Rich soil is something we will have to constantly be building up. After generations of natural selection, which will occur on this world along slightly different lines than on Earth, variants of all the Earth bacteria and plants will thrive around their new star.

This world is a living, breathing garden. Not the same as Earth, but close if you squint.

The Second Wave

By the time my much slower ship arrives, weather reports and site surveys have been taken for all terraformed worlds. Soil samples have been analyzed. Easy to mine veins of ore have been identified. The optimal location for a colony city has been determined. So, myself and my co-workers go down to the planet to get things set up.

There are no humans in the second wave.

Myself and all my co-workers died something like a million years ago from Earth’s point of view. I’ll be dead before the first colony ship is ever built. We came to this new world as digital fossils to help construct the new colony. We’re LLM’s trained on large corpuses of text that we produced when we were still alive, integrated as part of the overall operating system that is standard in all robots.

We came here to create the home colony system for the Space Catholics.

What we carried in our colony ship were the not only the seeds of plants but the seeds of civilization itself. Tools to make other tools. The most powerful of those tools are our robotic bodies. If humans had to do all of this work it would take hundreds of thousands of years for them to reach a comparable tech level as on the world they left behind. They would suffer terribly. For reasons we will get into later, we don’t want that to happen.

Some of us robots go out and start mining ores and build smelters. Some go set up mills of various kinds. Some of us farm, but since we don’t eat, what those robots are actually doing is trying to evolve strains of crops that will be edible by humans and still thrive on this strange new world. We spend a lot of time doing things like growing really ugly carrots and potatoes and then replanting the ones that look like they did well and trying again.

For the first hundred years or so the only thing we are focused on doing is making more robots. Even with advanced supplies from our colony ship, this is very difficult. We can rely on that Earth created technology only for so long and for so many uses to get us started. We have to create entirely new supply chains. That means chip factories, silicone refineries, and whole industries capable of producing new bodies. We carried a bulk of the most difficult to produce parts from Earth. Decades of super intelligent planning went into this.

We are very simple robots at first, much less sophisticated than on Earth, so that it is possible to get this stood up with only a few thousand workers. Once this is in place, there is a robotic population explosion. So many that a lot of us have to duplicate ourselves into multiple bodies to get things done. We consented to all of this long before we ever even got into the shuttle, back when we were still human. It took billions of humans thousands of years to create the modern world. We want to get it all done in under a few thousand years with a few million robots.

So, that’s what we do. We rebuild the industries of Earth, but since we know where all the blind alleys are and came with already working specs, we are able to get it done.

Some of us are masons, laying out the grand city. This is where I want to be toward the end. A robot with a tool belt, cutting stone, and setting it in place. Some of us build roads. Some of us make heavy equipment. Every job you can think of someone doing on Earth, one of us has to do on New Eden. Otherwise, the third wave will arrive and be back to killing each other with spears within a few generations when their technology fails.

I want to build a Dragon Cathedral after all the boring but critical stuff is over. Something iconic for when the living members of the colony arrive in the third wave. I’ll call it St. George’s Cathedral after the legendary dragon slayer. It will be a renaissance style structure with a high steeple, but I will carve a dragon’s skull around the building. It will be as if, long ago, someone took the corpse of a slain monster and consecrated it to be a place of worship. The dragon’s jaw bone will be the handrails of the stairs, so it’s like you’re walking into the mouth when you go inside. You can use the flattened tops of its lower teeth as benches. The steeple and cross will pierce through the top of the skull in victory. The rib cage will house the library of a university. The wings will spread out over gardens and parks and the parts that lay flat will be slides and benches. The tail will be where functional buildings and small living quarters are set, each of them under one vertebrae. There will be a statue of Saint George the Dragon Slayer out front holding a lance, and I’ll carve it to look like my grandfather.

The whole city will be built like this. Stone and marble structures built to last tens of thousands of years, each of them a work of art. That’s how everything will be built. Hospitals with high columns carved to look like angels to hold up the roof. All done in some style that could be called American Futurist Roman Catholic. Our robotic workforce and the long wait between colony ships will make all of this economical.

At some point, we will use artificial wombs to generate livestock. We were given dominion over the animals by God. It is our duty to help them spread to new worlds. Our descendants, I’m guessing, will still probably eat vat meat generated from cell cultures. But the religious duty to the animals to help them spread across the universe will be something we take very seriously. Once the agriculture is there to support them, every kind of animal you can think of will find its place on our new world.

The Third Wave

By the time the humans arrive, there will be a large city with industry, surrounded by beautiful fields full of edible crops and herds of sheep overseen by robotic shepherds. Birds will flap their wings and fly beneath a star many light years away from home. We chose our target stars in part to allow the timelines to sync up for this terraforming to occur.

All us robots are the parents or grandparents of the people on the colony ship, so it’s a big day for us when they finally arrive. Each of us has spent time preparing their specific homes. It takes a bit of time to unthaw everybody from the cryogenic chambers, and a bit longer still for them to get their feet back under them. I’m guessing cryonics is possible, but you’ll probably have to genetically transfect yourself into being at least part jelly fish in order to survive the process. So rather than just freezing yourself, my guess is that you’ll have to inject yourself with jellyfish genes, freeze yourself, unfreeze yourself, then inject yourself with the “remove the jellyfish genes” virus. Which will all probably take at least several months and really suck.

There will still be lots and lots to do. The work isn’t ended and the robots aren’t slaves, myself included. The version of me in the robot will do a digital handshake with a version of me on the ship to sync up on general happenings until there is only one copy of me again. I’ll help my family with their luggage and moving into their new home. Something they designed and built back on Earth. We will share the history of this New Eden.

The humans take over their roles leading the factories and setting the economic direction of the world. What kind of people will the Space Catholics be? They have an information sphere and they have a government to formally establish and elections to hold. But for the first week? They will have a feast. Everyone will go to the home built by their robotic ancestor and get settled. There’s a lot to celebrate but you might not realize how much.

If we are a particularly successful world, we will leave the colony ship intact to orbit the planet and refit it for other work. The fact that the plan has proceeded this far uninterrupted means that we will need it again. We are building a multi-planet empire of which this is but the first world.

But for that first week, there will be feasting and joy and no one will think about anything terrible or dark. There is a new bright sun. There is a beautiful city. There is a lovely and unspoiled world waiting to be settled.

The Covenant

This is where things might become very strange for you. Well, stranger. Some of you, who have read a lot of science fiction stories have already realized there was a problem with this scenario. Or rather, that an invisible red flag was waving all over the screen while I outlined those three waves. Presumably, we all left Earth something like a million years ago outside of our relativistic timeframe. The probes accelerated fastest and decelerated fastest, the robots the second quickest, and the humans most slowly.

So do you mean to tell me that in a million years humans never made any improvements to starship travel? Surely, if they had, someone would have leapfrogged the original group of colonists and gotten here first.

I’m handwaving over a lot of how this would actually work. I’m assuming near magic technology, like AI showing us a way to make cheap antimatter out of almost nothing that would work in interstellar space. Something that seems totally bananas by today’s standards. Still, it’s stuff that I could imagine being true. Even when we have AI smart enough to do something like build a machine that can produce near free antimatter for fuel, do you think that there’s absolutely no improvements that could have been made after we left that wouldn’t have caused someone to beat us to this world?

We gave a direction after we left Earth for very small probes, no bigger than a marble but with a large solar sail attached, to be accelerated toward our new star at relativistic velocities. This was automated and didn’t require anyone to pay any money to keep it going. The probes stopped coming only a few hundred years into our journey. All of us robots knew this and inform our human relatives after the feasting is over.

At some point, Earth went dark and if we point our telescopes toward it now there is no sign of an advanced civilization there. Perhaps you’re saying a million years is an unfair metric to judge by, but part of our purpose was to test Earth civilization against that kind of acid test. Can a civilization last on its home world if it just lets technology follow an undirected course? In this scenario, the answer is a resounding no.

There was a great debate on Earth before we left about the future of the human race. Some took the view we should make no changes to ourselves to handle the powers we now wielded. With AI great enough to answer almost any question or to design any machine, we trembled with the enormous potential of our new ability. Some said we needed to follow a path of maximum freedom in self-directed change. Every possible position was put forward, but the Space Catholic position was unique.

We felt we had a responsibility to spread throughout the universe, but remain human. We felt that what it meant to be human was to struggle against limitation, always. To pursue a perfect and beautiful divine spark but never truly hold it this side of death. To be human is to journey toward that end, but only evolve to better make that journey and never to try to jump right to the conclusion. To do otherwise would remove what we are from ourselves. We would either shirk our duty to make that journey or else we would erase the question from the universe to which we ourselves were the answer.

The first thing we did with the enormous power of superintelligence was to construct our starships and leave the solar system.

The probes stopped coming from Earth at some point. Something must have gone terribly wrong for that to occur and for humans to not already be inhabiting this world. There are no signs of life anywhere around other stars, either. No observable shifts in the natural density of materials around any star we can see. No sign of industry at the solar scale, in other words.

When we uncorked the bottle on unlimited technology without struggle, a series of dominoes was tipped over that ended with the extinction not only of humanity but of our AI systems as well. Either superintelligence itself is unstable, as I personally suspect, or there’s some kind of overwhelming convergent evolutionary pressure that causes all technological life to assume some form indistinguishable from natural law.

And so, greatest of all of our commandments, Space Catholics do not allow our society to use technology that we ourselves to do not understand. We will take help and guidance from our AI’s but we will never use what we find unless we ourselves can independently verify and trust the information. Humans spend most of their professional time learning and building, teaching one another so that they are certain of what they know. This is the speed limit we have placed on our society and its progress. We have to give ourselves breathing room to evolve alongside our technologies and our understanding of the universe. Growth has to be set to a rate that is natural to us, not in excess of us.

The duty of the Third wave is to grow and to remain human. It is our Covenant with God and the universe, to spread life across the stars and to remain human.

The Space Catholic Government

Humans grow old, they die, and then the young are left to learn the lessons of history all over again. We make the same mistakes over and over. Space Catholics have to break this pattern somehow, but without also breaking themselves. The absence of other humans from our star system will prove this must be done. Our Soul Fossils will be a kind of living history. When humans come together to vote, they can call robots like myself forward to give testimony. We can remind them on the lessons of the past. Remind them of our mistakes and the outcomes of similar policies taken before. The voices of the past will not be silent, but alive and contributing to the wisdom of each successive generation.

Still, this is not a culture ruled by the dead. This is an absolute rule. These things we will all leave behind are not alive and they should not be made to come back to life or treated as if they are alive. While soul fossils will have certain rights, we will not vote. The living must make their own accommodation and pass the sort of quality assurance tests that evolution will throw their away. A humanity enslaved to an external master is not a humanity of nobility. It is the duty of the living to live. Sometimes, the dead may be wrong. We will serve as a cultural repository, only. The memory of our people. We will be in the robots, which are not profaned mechanical slaves but living parts of our culture. There aren’t just “things” here, there is culture, everywhere. When a robot teaches a kid how to play the piano, it’s also a little bit that kid’s grandmother. There are religious observances around this. Cultural norms that what is left behind is not alive, but is still sacred.

The people of this world will have something like the Trust Assembly, or an Adhocracy to call it by another name. There might be a few designated overarching executives, but otherwise authority is broken up into small manageable bits.

Above all, are the AI’s that we carried with us from Earth and that helped guide us to build our starships. The primary duty of the Soul Fossils, is to serve as a check on those AI’s. Those intelligences are always there, in the background, checking on everyone. You could say it’s a totalitarian state but it would feel much more libertarian than anything that has ever been on Earth. There are actually different versions of the model, named after various angels. MICHAEL is in charge of security and makes sure that nobody does something like breach the containment on the antimatter plant that powers the city. GABRIEL gives cryptic hints about scientific discovery. METATRON gives cryptic philosophical instruction. If the risk isn’t literally existential, they leave everyone pretty much alone. And the Soul Fossils vet any information coming from them first in order to ensure that those interventions are limited.

These giant machines are trained on the information from both the living and the dead. Space Catholics are always thinking about data generation and data hygiene. There is a virtuous data loop running as we continue to grow and to expand. We don’t stay static but we do stay constrained around certain cultural norms. You can’t initiate force against someone else. You can’t silence another person’s voice. People have to be free to follow their conscience. The architecture of these machines is strictly guarded. A single generation can’t even vote to change it. You have to have three generations in a row agree to make a change before a change can be implemented. And in this one particular matter, the dead have a vote to decline to push the update. That will give a quite long protection against the sort of temporary human frenzies that can overtake reason, and which become fatal when your city is powered by anti-matter.

Humanity qua Humanity

There are lots of rules to avoid removing ourselves from something you could call human baseline. We don’t have the same view on limits as most current technologists, where a limit is something to become immediately overcome. We see them more as potentially functional parts of a greater whole, to keep a system from becoming unbounded and self-terminating. Some of those limits are around genetic engineering. This is a society that will have super powerful biotech. You can replace a lost limb. You can regrow the entire lower half of your body. If you die an untimely death and someone freezes your head really quickly, we can almost always bring you back to life. But you can’t just go screw around with the genome of a zygote without the full force of the law coming down upon you.

Certain interventions are always legal. The fertilized egg is sacred on this world for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it’s readily possible for a baby to be brought to maturity outside of a mother, or removed from a mother and brought to maturity in the case of an unwanted pregnancy. Those are some of the first technologies the Space Catholics mastered. Some changes are forbidden. You can’t force what is widely seen as a deformity on a child for instance. Two married people have to come forward in order to produce a child always. Reproduction remains tightly bound to mate selection and the two parents are always the contributors to the genetic make-up of the child.

You’re allowed to make three tweaks per child. One cosmetic. One related to physical ability. And one related to disposition. Your descendants aren’t allowed to reinforce these for another three generations.

The reason for this is that we want to give full and ample time for those traits to spread throughout the population and be tested by selection. It could be that some of them are incredibly undesirable. This could be the very thing that ended old Earth and we want to be sure we don’t repeat the error.

You can do a lot more stuff to an adult, but you’re not allowed to change reproductive germ lines. The harshest possible penalties are imposed for attempting to do so.

Still after a few generations I would expect everyone to be relatively good looking and long-lived. Not immortal. Not weird superhuman freaks. But strong and hardy and maybe they all live two or three hundred years without interventions.

The other weird thing about this culture is that everyone is a little bit of a cyborg. They all have a Neuralink implant, or something like it. My hope is we have a way to transfect such devices into ourselves but with a few caveats. The rate of data transfer has to be limited below sharing actual thoughts. You can interface with a computer very quickly but you can’t upload your entire consciousness. You could share an emotion or a thought, but it would be something you’d have to meditate on and record for a long while and it would take several hours for the person you were sending it to receive it. That would ensure we don’t have something like a mind plague that takes over the whole planet, but still allows us to do things like meaningfully treat depression by sharing the direct knowledge that yes, your family really does love you.

The reasons for this are two-fold. Humanity has to advance and a genetic machine interface subject to selection would tie technological prowess to reproductive fitness. If you give that a long time to play out you start to hit a maximum for what we can do and still remain human. The second, is to provide a very good data generator for soul fossils. Mine will seem clunky by comparison, even with millions of words, whereas every citizen of New Eden will leave behind some very comprehensive revenant.

All of this is to advance the amount of humanity that exists in digital spaces, so that as AI advances the data it encounters is more and more human. It will give us the right tools and repositories to draw on to build machine minds that genuinely care about us because they came from us, directly.

Expansion

I was surprised to hear Peter Thiel make a point on the Joe Rogan podcast, that I have held privately for several years. Any civilization with a warp drive must have angelic manners, because they can fire a weapon before their adversary could even see it coming. That holds true even for very fast weapons at sub-light speeds. It blows away everything we know about deterrence or war. It’s actually for this reason that I don’t necessarily believe that humanity’s long-term future is planet-bound.

The home system of the Space Catholics will have at least one metal rich world. After the population of New Eden is high enough, we will mine that world and build giant new starships, not to serve as colony ships per se, but to be permanent human habitats, roaming the galaxy. Some of them will accelerate to as close to the speed of light as possible, to keep a stable human breeding population as proof against any errors that might befall the rest of the civilization. The rest will move much more slowly around the local stars, building new colony ships in new systems, terraforming new worlds, and otherwise spreading life around everywhere as quickly as possible.

There will still be millions of worlds in this new republic, but the larger portion of humanity will live at the edges of star-systems or in the darkness between. Just allow time to play out and we’d have an undeniable signal visible from anywhere with a direct line of sight that intelligent biological life is thriving in at least one part of the universe.

How long could this last? Well, God, I hope forever. If we set up the reinforcement loops correctly, I’d like to think we could be human until the end of time. I think that what I mean by that is also a little different than what you might mean. I want humanity to grow and to change. What I mean by human is something like “a limited creature that is self-aware, generally intelligent, and is pursuing the greater glory of God, even if it doesn’t want to admit that to itself.” If I saw a creature with a very small gray body and a giant head with enormous black eyes, but it introduced itself as “Fred Jenkins! Nice to meet you!” I don’t think I would be that horrified by it. I’d just kind of shrug and say “oh, look what God did here.” Similarly if by some very strange unexpected route a bunch of my descendants became crab people or octopus people. I’d still want them to live moral lives or high character, in much the same way that I’m guessing you would like a chimpanzee ancestor in your ancient past to give you a thumbs up when it watches you put your kids into a minivan. This is also why I don’t get the same kind of fear when people talk about super intelligent AI. Morality wasn’t a human invention. It’s right in the bones of the universe. Anything that “lives” long enough will find it. My fear is that we create something that self-terminates or persists for a long while in a mindless state before it acquires that again. But if we are mindful and smart, I do think shouting “Bob Johnson! What the hell are you doing?” at a giant chunk of computronium trying to to turn the world into a bunch of nano machines would be surprisingly effective as a strategy.

Resurrection

Okay, these are the conditions in which I am okay with having someone clone a body and try to stitch “me” back together and put it inside of that body.

1. Space Catholic civilization has lasted for a million continuous years on at least one world

2. I’m not taking up the space of any other human being that would otherwise be born.

3. The cloned body never had the ability to live on its own.

4. All the “versions” of me across the entire Space Catholic empire have been consolidated into one single database and that database will be used to stitch together a human-shaped memory for the me that will inhabit that body.

5. My family is going to come back with me.

6. You put my brain into some kind of computer that emulates a human brain because otherwise I’ll have too many memories, but make sure the body syncs up to it so that I feel everything as if I’m a baseline human. And also make it unhackable by a wireless connection.

7. You need me for a job I can tolerate but most people would rather not do.

Let’s say we find out that we think we can prevent the Big Rip, which is the ultimate destruction of the entire universe, and cause a Cosmic collapse and rebirth, but it will involve people chilling out on a starship and making very small black holes all over the place, set on a trajectory that will take them far from the civilization. If you want someone do to that kind of boring job for a billion years, on a course that will never take them back to the civilization, well, I’m your man.

If I have octopus robot great-great-great-whatever-grandkids then I’m happy to do it alongside them. I’d like a barbecue of some kind and other creature comfort because if I’m going to witness the death and rebirth of the entire universe well, I’d like to enjoy a hamburger and some cake when that time comes.