Post-Growth
Imagine thousands of years in the future, when humanity is dispersed across the stars. We are fully actualized and have reached the final leafs of the universe’s tech tree. We are happy and in control of our destiny.
Are the trillions of us spanning many solar systems?
What if there are only millions, or even thousands of us?
It’s tempting to take our history of swarming through continents on Earth, consuming all available resources to scale and grow, and extrapolate it into space. Many planets across many solar systems, each with many billions of people. A lot of science fiction paints this version of the future, but what would it take for us to imagine a different future?
What if we defeated death and could choose to live forever? What if we become cybernetic, melding with the machines we build? What if we tame our minds and upload replicas into digital storage, onto digital simulations, and back into artificial physical sleeves?
What if we transcend life, creating artificial beings beyond imagination? What if we finally achieve alchemy: transmute matter into energy and back again, transporting at the speed of light and reconstructing into whatever physical bodies we want whenever we want?
Imagine a distant species, once human but now anything, which can exist and scale to any shape or quantity on a whim. A species that is confident of its mastery over reality, unneeding of redundancy and excess.
Would there be thousands of us one day, travelling in groups as we wish? Materializing peers and family on another day into billions, only to pack up later into few again.
Would some choose to join their minds into a collective consciousnesses, blurring the line of enumeration?
Will there be one?
For a long time, we have been in an Age of Growth as a society. Growth has been our main metric for success that we optimized obsessively, sometimes to toxic extremes.
Can we imagine what it would take for us to transcend into a post-growth society?
Thank you to John for sending this related audio short story after reading this: Outlasting the Universe