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The
Stars
It's 2160.
Mankind has colonized
28 planets between 7 and 40 light years from Earth. It was not done
by sending people or even genomes in space-ships.
Once the principle of quantum transmission based on mass-less particle
states had been discovered in 2030, it became a relatively simple
matter to transmit data instantaneously. All that was required was
a transmitting/receiving station at the remote location. By 2040,
astronomical inter-stellar planetary exploration had established
the existence of a number of planets suitable for colonization (not
by humans, of course, but by organisms with quasi-human brains and
bodies suited to the varying climatic, gravitational and biochemical
environments).
By 2050, the mass of
a remote transmitting/receiving station had been reduced to 350
grammes, and photon-driven motors could propel such payloads at
up to 70% of the speed of light in a vehicle weighing little more
than two kilos in total. On arrival in the neighbourhood of a suitable
planet, the station (with real-time control from Earth), establishes
itself in orbit and surveys the destination planet. About one quarter
of destination planets tend to fall within the range of sustainable
parameters for quasi-human life. Having established viability (vehicles
arriving at unviable planets are simply abandoned), the station
descends to the surface of the planet using a combination of tiny
chemical thrusters (accounting for most of the mass of the vehicle)
and magnetic gravity brakes (first invented in 2015 by Stanford
Ovshinsky at the age of 92). The presence of substantial quantities
of iron or other magnetic materials is a prerequisite for planetary
colonization due to the impossibility of physical descent from orbit
in the absence of magnetic fields. The other unavoidable requirement
is that there should be bodies of surface water and/or certain liquid
hydrocarbon compounds.
Reaching (ideally)
an area of water on the surface of the planet, the hard-shelled,
virtually indestructible station carries out more detailed analysis
of its surroundings, and uses instructions received back from Earth
to begin genetically-driven biochemical construction of self-replicating
cells using local materials which are released into the surrounding
liquid and follow a process of development not dissimilar to the
origins of life on Earth, except that of course it is pre-planned
in the organism's genome and happens very rapidly. There are losses
from local conditions, but most of the implantations are successful,
and within about one Terran year adult organisms will reach land.
They are heavily programmed to ensure the safety of the station,
which is then able to begin production of locally viable quasi-humans
(Remote Cognitive Representations - RCRs), again
based on instructions from Earth, employing locally available chemicals
and minerals.
Once viable quasi-human
RCRs exist the risks of loss from local conditions become small,
and most colonies are then successful. (The
RCRs are fully human in cognitive terms, indeed they are effectively
copies of existing humans on Earth and are directly controlled,
cognitively speaking, by their remote progenitors via the instantaneous
link between the receiving and transmitting stations; local communication
takes place by wireless at the speed of light, so delays are not
significant.) Altogether, about 10% of missions to planets which
have been identified as likely hosts result in successful colonies.
Clearly, the time-scale
of colonization depends on the distance to be travelled by the station
initially, so that the furthest successful colony in 2160 is only
55 light years from Earth. More than 20,000 missions are still in
transit, however, some to destinations as far away as 500 light
years, and it is expected that new colonies will be added at an
increasing rate in future. However, no planet has yet been discovered
which could reasonably be inhabited by humans in their Terran form.
Individuals who 'father'
successful remote organisms inhabit them close to 100% of the time,
and play little part in continuing life on Earth, at least until
a colony is breeding on its own account, and this is something which
has so far happened only in one or two of the earliest cases. Social
life remains as important on colony planets as it is on earth, and
the groupish instincts and institutions which
developed on earth for governance, socializing and recreation are
fully deployed on colony worlds through Remote
Cognitive Collectives (RCCs). Individual RCRs tend to be widely
scattered across a new world in the early stages of colonization
and physical meeting is awkward; in any case, by the late 21st century
when the first colonies began to take shape, most social, business
and governance interaction had long since migrated to RCCs.
The
Earth
No asteroid hit the
Earth. The climate is three degrees warmer on average, and there
have been some very bad earthquakes, no-one is quite sure why. The
worst, in 2085, destroyed three billion original stored human bodies,
nearly 15% of humanity, of which only 200 million were fully backed-up
with current-state copies. Although it was
of course already easy to replicate a human brain bio-electronically
(known as an eclone), the problem was that the brain is not a static
object, and relatively few people bothered to use the repetitive
and quite arduous 'manual' back-up process, required at least every
two hours in order to maintain current state in the eclone. Between
2070 and 2085, people used to make eclones as temporary controllers
for RCRs, and abandon them when the task in hand was finished, returning
their cognitive awareness to their original brains, which would
meanwhile have been receiving streams of sensory and cognitive data
from the eclone. Only a current-state eclone is independently viable.
Technology for real-time
back-up of eclones was commercialized in the 2090s, but maintaining
a fully equivalent copy of a living brain on a continuing basis
whether in an RCR, an RCC or just in a bio-electronic host remained
complex and expensive for a further 10 years. Since then, costs
have reduced and population has stabilized, so that the proportion
of un-backed-up human eclones is now thought to have fallen to around
20%. Probably this is close to the absolute minimum that can be
achieved. There will always be a certain proportion of people who
are too lazy to instal real-time back-up; and about 10% of people
are thought have decided to self-terminate, although not necessarily
immediately, which will cause them not to bother with back-up.
In the 2110s, there
was a move to make back-up compulsory, but civil liberties activists
prevented it, in an alliance with the global population council
(affiliated to the United Nations), as ever,
worried about resources. Nation states were in favour, of course.
Another person = another tax slice.
By 2120, with automatic
back-up having become cheap and easy, few people were using their
original bodies as a permanent base, and now it is almost unheard
of. Again, it's a question of cost. While it is possible to maintain
a legacy human body in close to optimum condition for even hundreds
of years (so they say!) the costs are extremely high compared to
the cost of maintaining an e-clone in a bio-electronic host together
with a separate current-state back-up. Once people had this choice,
it was really amazing how few wanted to stay with their warts, and
most people now choose to use a bio-electronic host as their permanent
'home', keeping their original bodies, if at all, in permanent storage.
A small and declining proportion of people use their original bodies
for physical reproduction, in preference to
so-called 'artificial' reproduction, for the legacy Olympic Games
and a few other antique spectator sports. Evidently, this requires
an upload of a current-state e-clone to the stored body, which then
temporarily becomes the person's cognitive home.
By 2100, people were
in any event choosing to spend most of their time in Remote Cognitive
Collectives (RCCs); once you have experienced
the excitement and incredible fertility and productiveness of working
or playing in a group cognitive environment, being on your own rather
palls.
(NB Appendix Five includes
a description of the development, capabilities and uses of RCRs,
RCCs and eclones.)
The
Planets
None of the other planets
of the solar system is sufficiently similar to Earth to be interesting
as a colony, so that once the technology for inter-stellar colonization
had been developed, development of the Sun's planets rather lagged.
By 2060, when inter-stellar exploration really took off, however,
there were already quite substantial bases on the moon, Mars and
Venus, largely robotic in nature, and they
have continued to expand. Mars and Venus are useful sources of minerals,
while the moon is the main launching-pad for inter-stellar missions
with its orbital platforms, which have close to zero gravity. Each
planet also contains fully backed-up copies (eclones) of most existing
humans as an insurance policy against any terminal event on earth
itself. The active human population of the
three bodies - all in the form of RCRs with human 'fathers' - is
less than 100,000. Since 2070, no 'original' humans have left earth.
There is no point, since they are extremely expensive to maintain
in extra-terrestrial environments, and can inhabit RCRs with full
sensory equivalence. At first it was a specialist activity, requiring
a significant amount of initial training, for an individual to 'inhabit'
fully their equivalent RCR partner, let alone multiple partners;
but as the software protocols for inhabiting became more sophisticated,
and re-organization of human neural structures made it more 'natural'
for humans to work with remote sensory and cognitive input, inhabiting
an RCR or an RCC became as easy as using your own hand.
There is still controversy
over the validity of such 'inhabiting' - why, say the antis, patronize
the RCRs by inhabiting them when they are fully capable of being
independent. What, they ask, is the difference between a human that
happens to be made of titanium and one that is made of mush? But
they provide an escape route from Earth for a large number of people
who couldn't otherwise find anything interesting to do there. Perhaps
one day people and RCRs will stop seeing each other as different
- given the high percentage of bionic components
in people, and the equally high percentage of biochemical tissues
employed in RCRs, it is of course increasingly specious to distinguish
between them. And in RCCs, which almost monopolize
communal activities such as governance, management
and socializing on the planets, as they do on earth, original humans
mingle happily with 'human' RCRs and non-human RCRs.
Humans
The
tussle between 'improvers' and 'stayers', that's to say, between
those who would allow an unlimited range of genetic and bionic changes
to humans and those who would allow only remedial work for a very
limited range of defined, genetically-transmitted conditions occupied
almost 40 years before an accommodation was reached in 2050.
As might be expected,
governments were 'stayers', although strictly on pragmatic, mostly
cost grounds. Religions, equally predictably,
also lined up with the stayers, ostensibly on moral grounds, but
in reality out of fear for their position. Other essentially conservative
forces included teachers, doctors and the 'multilaterals', each
in its own way defending territory rather than taking ethical positions.
It's difficult indeed
to say whether ethics played any part in the struggle on either
side. 'Improvers' were just as forceful and just as opinionated
as 'stayers', but equally self-seeking. Technologists on the whole
were naturally on the improving side, as was business, for the most
part.
To a great extent the
battle was fought in the arena of public opinion, particularly after
2030 when global electronic opinion polls became universal, and
after language translation was perfected in the late 2010s. 'The
Decade of the People', as it became known (2027 - 2037), saw a rapid
shift in general sentiment against sectoral and doctrinal interests,
and an intensified move of policy-making from national to international
arenas, in a mass reaction against the horror of the Iran/Israeli
nuclear exchange in 2025, which killed more than eight million people.
That was the last shout of nationalism, and
was the period during which people finally emancipated themselves
from 'isms' such as nationalism, religion and political belief systems
such as socialism.
The Decade of the People
saw the final triumph of 'people power'; something which had been
given a name in Poland as long ago as 1985, but which had taken
more than 50 years to become a reality. By 2040 it was a rare event
for a national or even an international organisation to be able
to take a view which was significantly different from prevailing
mass opinion. The introduction of real-time,
continuous global issue voting using direct brain-to-RCC communication
in 2080 merely recognized what was already a practical reality -
the first time since classical Athens, or perhaps ever, that a society
was truly democratic.
The 2051 Human Settlement
was reached after RCRs were already in widespread use, and primitive
RCCs were becoming the subject of much argument. By
2040 there was already general understanding that almost all of
human society had been built on the basis of 'groupish' psychological
mechanisms, and that we should not try to tamper with the collective
underpinnings of our psyches. The argument
about RCCs raged over the issue of whether the individual consciousness
should preserve its isolation from the deep-rooted collective
unconscious when individuals began to take part in collective cognitive
activity, or whether it was better to create pathways to the unconscious
so that a fuller and more explicit version of each individual psyche
could play its part in the collective experience. The
issue of deception (explained in Chapter Seven) played a major role:
there seemed little point in recreating the highly deceptive social
behaviours that characterize most human social groups in new fora
designed to allow closer cooperation between people. Eventually
the 'improvers' won this battle, as they had won others, and a limited
set of additional neural pathways, allowing conscious access to
major parts of the unconscious, was incorporated into the standard
model of the human brain.
Once it had become
clear that there weren't any technological limits to what a human
could become, immortality was available (at a price), and that people
could make choices as to their life-style, appearance, location
and psyche virtually at will throughout their lives, there seemed
little point in tampering too much with the 'people' we were already
familiar with, so that it was widely agreed that it was just much
safer to stick with what we knew, apart from the modifications to
consciousness and some genetic 'tweaking' to reduce the incidence
of anti-social and psychotic behaviour.
The
Settlement therefore prohibited genetic variation outside the existing
genomic range, although some exceptions were made for robotic, medical
and psychosomatic research. And of course there was a long list
of permitted corrective genetic manipulations for the suppression
of disease, known as the Codex Humanicus. The
Codes of Conduct for bionic enhancement and for RCRs include a very
large number of specific exemptions from the basic Settlement rules,
and these grow in number and complexity year by year; but the Settlement
as such has stood the test of time, even when RCCs became the normal
mode of human cooperation. Management of the Settlement, including
enforcement, is in the hands of the Global Genetic Gathering, an
RCC unsurprisingly known generally as G3. It is an affiliated agency
of the United Nations, and all 387 nations are
members. Due to the extreme complexity of genetic evolution, the
G3 is not a universal body, but is effectively a delegate assembly,
with 387 highly expert constituent members. Any change to the Codes
of Conduct require unanimity; but this is much more easily achieved
in RCCs than in previous types of constituent assembly due to the
depth and immediacy of communication that is possible.
Non-Humans
The
Settlement of 2051 was made possible to a great extent by the existence
of RCRs, which give humans the ability to experience non-human 'bodies',
stretched or altered states of mind and senses without genetically
or bionically altering themselves. With such a universe of alternative
life-states available to them vicariously, it was easier to agree
not to tamper too much with the basic human genome.
Sentient
robots made their appearance in 2012, although they were prohibitively
expensive until the rapid development of bio-electronics in the
2020s, which allowed robotic brain tissue to be 'grown' in a way
that is analogous to the growth of a human or animal brain. Remote
control of robots or other electronic devices by the human brain
had been demonstrated in 2014, but was something of a solution without
a use until robots themselves could be cheaply equipped with brains
on a par with those of humans. By 2030 the various components for
this were in place, and the following decade saw an explosion of
human-controlled non-human forms in all walks of life. The population
of RCRs soared above the 1 billion level by 2035, and reached 5
billion by 2040 - although that was still only one RCR for each
two humans.
By the time that the
(terrestrial) human population stabilized at 20 billion in 2080,
there were several times as many RCRs as humans.
Only early robots took
on human appearance. Science fiction novels and movies have typically
given human form to robots, but in reality it was agreed soon after
the first sentient robots emerged in the 2020s that it was better
for them to look different from humans.
A catalogue of different
types of RCR (they were no longer called robots after 2020) would
be immense. Initially they had human-like sentience, but by 2035,
when the genomes of most
major animal species had been decoded, they came with a wide variety
of psyches. People didn't want dogs with human temperaments, it
was immediately clear, and when canine RCRs replaced the 'real'
variety (they excrete shrink-wrapped, non-smelly disposable packets,
once a day, don't get lost in shopping centres or attack children,
and bark much more harmoniously) they were equipped with slightly
modified canine brains and alternative, genetically-encoded human
control circuits. You want to be your dog for a day and suckle her
puppies? Go ahead - the smells are awesome!
Governance
By
2030, almost all aspects of economic life were governed by rule-based,
global organizations with attached judicial fora, built on the model
of the World Trade Organization. Progress in
this direction between 2010 and 2020 had been much faster in those
sectors that already had English as a lingua franca. The
advent of effective universal machine transation in 2016 removed
most of the remaining barriers to global cooperation; and availability
of the babelfish implant from 2025 (it was
mandatory for international negotiators, legislators and jurists
from 2028) more or less permanently destroyed national barriers
based on language.
Progress
in cultural and political globalization was slow as long as language
barriers remained, but caught up rapidly in the 2030s. The United
Nations had staggered from crisis to crisis in the 2010s, but as
globalization became both inevitable and accepted after the Iran/Israeli
war in 2025, the much-strengthened UN was the preferred umbrella
organization for global cultural rule-making bodies. The model already
existed in the form of the World Health Organization
(WHO) and the World Intellectual Property Organization
(WIPO), both of them agencies of the UN since the end of the 20th
century, although WIPO itself was transferred to the WTO in 2015
(the WTO had administered the judicial role of WIPO from the beginning).
Other UN-related bodies which were formed between 2010 and 2030
included the World Association of Professionals (WAP), which takes
in lawyers, doctors and architects among other professions, and
the World Educational Organization (WEO), after almost all tertiary
and much secondary education had migrated to the Internet.
A clutch of international
bodies born in the 20th century while the market was still subservient
to central planning were abolished or folded into other organizations.
Thus, the IMF (intended originally to police
foreign exchange) and the World Bank (intended
originally to assist the rebuilding of Europe after WWII), were
merged and made into a financial agency of the WTO in 2012. Private
markets, securitization and disintermediation on the Internet had
made them both irrelevant. The OECD held out
for a while, but became the economic research agency of the WTO
in 2020, joining the World Environmental Agency, which had acquired
global reach under the Washington Accord in 2018 after the USA finally
gave in to Chinese pressure.
The third member of
the governance triumvirate alongside the WTO and the United Nations,
the International Olympic Committee (see below)
gained power during the 2010s and 2020s as the relative importance
of sport, entertainment and recreation grew in relation to 'work'.
Individual sporting bodies such as FIFA became
affiliated agencies of the IOC, and a series of judicial bodies
grew up to administer rules of conduct in the various recreational
fields. For the IOC, the summit of its importance was reached when
non-human sports were given their own Olympiad in 2037.
It took longer for
the regional political organizations such as the European
Union and Nafta to merge into a world political
body, not so much because of economic boundaries (the
world was 100% tariff-free by 2020) or because nation states (see
below) resisted the process, but because of language and cultural
barriers which were only finally demolished in the 2030s. The EU
incorporated Turkey, the Ukraine, Belarus and European Russia, Morocco,
Tunisia, Egypt and Palestine by 2020; NAFTA merged with the Free
Trade Area of the Americas and CARICOM in
2026; and APEC, excluding China, by then incorporated most of Australasia.
India and China, due to their size, remained standouts.
Negotiations towards
a final, global economic and political association accelerated after
the Iran/Israeli war in 2025, but it was not until the widespread
adoption of RCCs in the 2040s and 2050s that
final agreement was reached. All 387 nations, while retaining their
national identities and a number of reserved powers, collaborated
in the World Union of 2057.
Between 2030 and 2057,
the Directors-General of the three governance organizations, the
WTO, the UN and the IOC, amounted to an informal world governing
council, although there was no such body, and they had no power
separate from what was provided by the rules of their individual
organizations. They were joined only in 2057 by the Leader of the
World Union, becoming known jokily as the Four Horsemen. From 2060
onwards, real power resided in the four RCCs which matched the four
global governance bodies, flanked by judicial fora of various stripes.
Nation
States
Nation
states, which had so implacably and impersonally imposed themselves
on their citizens during the 18th to 20th centuries, offered almost
no resistance to the process of globalization that between 1980
and 2040 made them nearly irrelevant in the wider scheme of things.
The reasons for their
quite rapid exclusion from power are various, but certainly include
the fulfilment of their original purposes, the breaking down of
national boundaries through better communications, travel and the
Internet, and eventually the
eradication of language as a cultural marker. The early stages of
this process have been documented in previous chapters.
The heyday of national
relevance, during the 19th century, saw an international land grab,
especially marked in Africa. Even in the first half of the 20th
century, nations behaved as if they could still acquire territory.
By the end of the century, though, existing countries had largely
accepted their boundaries as being permanent, and competed or cooperated
with one another in other respects.
The growth of supra-national
bodies such as the European Union offered politicians
the chance of success at a grander level than national affairs,
again militating against nationalism, which is normally seen as
selfish on the larger canvas. It was always politicians who were
at the forefront of aggressive nationalism; so if they are kept
busy elsewhere, the nation can stay calmly within its boundaries.
Nationalism requires
nationalistic citizens, something which nation states were historically
keen to foster through appropriate education, the use of 'national
print languages', and judicious re-writing of history. From
the beginning, the Internet was an effective weapon against compartmentalized
beliefs, and during the early 21st century it became harder and
harder for national governments to use traditional methods of brainwashing
their citizens into subservient patriotism. As
universal communication through English and cochlear implants became
established in the 2020s the task became hopeless.
During the second half
of the 20th century and in the early years of the new century, ethnically
united groups of citizens began to become aware that 'nationality'
as such was a largely invented concept, and that they would be going
with the grain of history if they assaulted it. Nation states which
had been compiled from disparate elements began to break up. An
early example was Ireland, and of course the process of decolonization
in the mid-20th century saw the emergence of dozens of new countries,
corresponding more or less to ethnically-defined cultural areas.
This process continued during the first half of the 21st century,
and by 2060 the United Nations had its final
complement of 387 member states, including Kurdistan, formed in
the redistribution of Middle Eastern territory along ethnic lines
after the Iran/Israeli war in 2025, and the Basque Republic, dating
from 2017. Many of the new nations arose in Africa, as that unhappy
continent followed out its bloody fate during the first quarter
of the 21st century. By 2025, even Africa had reached a kind of
stasis, as aid agencies, charities and rich nations poured advice,
drugs, education and assistance into the continent.
As
the outlines of global economic and cultural governance began to
emerge during the period from 2010 to 2040, a consensus on national
prerogatives also took shape, culminating in the Rio Declaration
of 2028, which established clear boundaries for national power.
The earlier Harbin Accord of 2023 had established
a universal taxation regime after the financial power and attraction
of 'offshore' territories had begun to threaten the revenue models
of 'onshore' countries; but Rio added national prerogatives in the
criminal, military, transportation and energy sectors, among others,
although they are all heavily circumscribed by global environmental
and human rights agreements.
Food
'Artificial' food replaced
'real' or 'natural' food between 2020 and 2040. This change was
driven partly by population and environmental pressures, and was
expectedly resisted by many groups of primitivists. Their concerns
were misplaced, however. The word 'artificial' does not do justice
to cultured food, which is grown using the same genetically-organized
biochemical processes that operate in natural animals or plants.
It's just the shapes which are different: at first, there was demand
for leg-shaped chicken pieces, fish-shaped Dover sole pieces, and
grains of barley. But it is quite uneconomical to manufacture, store
and distribute such odd shapes, and more practical shapes soon took
over.
Early on - in the 2020s
- there were frequent blind tastings of artificial v natural food,
and the artificial versions soon began to win, as manufacturers
became more adept at fitting taste and texture to human preferences.
It wasn't long before new tastes were developed, even better than
existing ones, and by 2040 the food industry resembled the perfume
industry, with ever-changing fashions in the shape, colour, taste
and texture of food.
RCRs
of course do not require food as such, except when alimentary functions
are deliberately built into them (in some pets, and for early colonial
environments, for instance). Although they were bio-electronic in
nature from 2025 onwards, tissue maintenance requirements are very
simple. It is usually easier to replace tissue body parts on a preventative
maintenance schedule rather than worry about complex dietary optimization
aimed at longer cell life. Most RCRs are electricity-fuelled, and
generate sufficient electricity themselves from photovoltaic coatings.
By 2035, an RCR required charging only if most of its time was spent
in dark environments. They do however require the equivalent of
vitamin pills to provide a minimal supply of elements and compounds
required in addition to oxygen and nitrogen (on earth - on other
planets the equation is obviously different), and excrete small,
pill-like bundles of waste products.
Between
2050 and 2070 the developing RCR and RCC technologies made it possible
for humans to spend prolonged periods inhabiting them in electronic
form. Initially the technology for 2-way
cognitive communication between an RCR or an RCC and a 'host' brain
was complex and imperfect; adequate systems were not in fact developed
until the mid-2060s. Eclone technology, which emerged in the 2070s,
went a step further, permitting people to maintain their permanent
'homes' in miniaturized bio-electronic assemblies rather than in
their legacy bodies, which could remain in a 'passive' state. This
was a very necessary development since population pressure at the
10 billion mark was becoming insupportable. The final increase to
20 billion required that a high proportion of actual human bodies
should be in a passive state at any given moment, with minimal dietary
requirements.
By 2085 about 30% of
the population were living in this way, although, as noted above,
back-up procedures for maintaining equivalence between eclones and
passive 'legacy' brains were unsatisfactory. The 2085 Japanese earthquake
led to rapid improvements in 'maintaining state' technology, and
by 2040 fewer than 10% of people were bothering to retain their
original bodies.
Animals
The 20th century must
probably be seen as the most disastrous period for wild animals
since the Great Extinction, although domesticated animals had a
good time, with substantial increases in their numbers, their health
and their treatment. The 21st century began with the same pattern,
but went sharply into reverse during the 2020s and 2030s due to
a number of main factors:
- Environmental concerns
took centre stage in the early years of the century, and the invention
of 'trelectricity' (transparent, photosynthetic coatings on leaves
which generate electron flow in plant or tree stems) in 2015 led
to a rapid increase in forest cover worldwide.
- The perfection of
large scale manufacturing of cheap, cultured food substitutes
in the mid-2010s meant a rapid diminution in the acreage devoted
to farming, although at least until 2040 this was partly offset
by burgeoning human populations.
- RCR
pets began to supplant 'legacy' pets in the late 2020s, and by
2040 had completely driven out the original forms, which were
represented by their genomes, held in electronic form, of course,
for possible use in the colonization of planets.
- The last years of
the 20th century and the early years of the 21st century had seen
great advances in understanding of the habitats and behavioural
characteristics of wild animals, and successful breeding of endangered
species in many zoos worldwide. 'Electric forests', as well as
providing ample, clean energy for humanity, also made wonderful
habitats for wild animals. The seas also quickly recovered their
diversity and fecundity once it was no longer necessary to catch
fish.
By 2040, therefore,
there were virtually no domestic animals other than pet RCRs (although
some types of racing animal maintained their position until as late
as 2050), while populations of wild animals on the other hand were
growing back into the new electric forests which by then covered
more than 30% of the earth's land surface.
Sport
and Entertainment
Already in the first
decade of the 21st century entertainment and sport were perceptibly
merging into one another. This process continued at a rapid pace
during the decades in which elective activities gradually came to
replace more and more of what had been known (for only 400 years
after all) as 'work'.
By 2080, despite leaping
populations, the range of GDP per head derived from the accumulated
wealth of individuals and governments was from EUR20,000 per annum
to EUR200,000 per annum (yes, the humble Euro became the global
currency, in 2041), varying according to country of residence. Even
at the bottom end of the scale, income-earning work was economically
unnecessary, and a person would be able to afford RCRs to carry
out all unavoidable domestic chores. The
desire to pursue economic activity (to trade) is however one of
the main driving forces of the human psyche (see the Introduction
and Chapter One), and most people choose to participate (for economic
reward) in governance, social development, business or recreational
management, almost always of course through the groupish form of
the RCC. Given the intellectual power of an
RCC, an individual trying to participate on her own is at a hopeless
disadvantage. There still are outsiders who pursue independent roles,
particularly in the arts, but they are more than ever exceptions
to the general rule.
'The poor are always
with us', it is said. But genetic improvement has removed most of
the impediments to living a productive life. Although in 2060 there
were still some family lines who had somehow escaped the compulsory
inter-generational savings schemes which supplanted state welfare
and pension provision in the 2020s and 2030s, they were sufficiently
few in number that they could easily be provided with minimum incomes
from global wealth holdings.
The switch from a 'work
ethic' to a 'play ethic' took place gradually, between 2030 and
2060, as it became clear that increasing proportions of mankind
were going to become rich enough not to have to 'work'; but every
carrot has to be backed up by a stick, and for humans the stick
after 2051 (the Human Settlement) was the requirement to contribute,
with the sanction of isolation and withdrawal of reproductive rights
in the event of failure. The definition of 'contribute' was however
so wide, and becoming endlessly wider over time, that a person has
to actively want to fail in order not to contribute.
It will be easier to
understand this in the light of an example. Until 2010, there was
a fairly rigid dividing line between professional entertainers and
their public. Amateurs might indeed sing at karaoke bars, but only
professionals got paid for singing. This distinction broke down
during the succeeding 20 years as content became universally available
through the Internet. Early examples of universal providers such
as YouTube (2005 - 2013) ran into copyright problems, not surprisingly,
but by 2020 KISS technology (Kontent Identification and Subscription
System) was in universal use, even in China, with the value of any
given piece of content, regardless of its origin, calculated in
real time based on its audience, and charged to the (compulsory)
account of the user.
Content providers (call
them musicians, writers, artists, or what you will) were still able
to put their own price on a work, and to withhold it unless the
price was paid, but hardly anyone did so, due to the difficulty
of marketing what cannot be seen or experienced in advance. Under
the KISS system, the cost of experiencing a piece of content is
incurred incrementally during the experience, so that if after two
seconds you know you hate what you are experiencing, you just switch
it off, and it has cost you very little or even nothing.
KISS technology was
applied to all forms of entertainment, including music, books, magazines,
blogs, news, football, painting, and a range of new art-sport-forms
which developed under the stimulus of the new media, such as virtual
beach volley-ball, which can be either watched (you pay), or participated
in (you get paid).
'Contribution' is measured
by lifetime earnings from participation, and the bar is set very
low. An evening around the karaoke machine with a group of quite
moderate performers will likely earn about 8 Euros for each participant
(20 billion people can choose to experience it, remember, and they
all speak the same language); participation in an RCC committee
on community design on Altair 9 (colonized in 2070), at the other
extreme, will be time-consuming but will earn as much as EUR20,000
per annum. Stars still exist, of course, with astronomical earnings,
in fact, more than ever. Lifetime participation earnings begin to
be judged after 50 years of adult life, with a required minimum
of just EUR5,000. Average participation earnings at that point are
EUR100,000, so that failure is hardly an option unless you are very
determined; and even then you have another 50 years of full citizenship
before compulsory isolation, lasting 100 years before you get another
50-year chance (or you can choose transportation, to some unpleasant
planet 40 light years away).
Business
During the 20th century,
governments had frequently 'gone into business', either through
socialist 'ownership of the commanding heights of the economy',
or through the overt support and attempted control of national champions,
or just because politicians love power and interfering. But
by the turn of the century, public ownership had been largely discredited
on simple economic grounds - it doesn't work - and privatization
had returned almost all state-run business activities to the private
sector, which they should never have left in the first place.
Almost without exception,
the technological advances of the 21st century were driven by private
business endeavour, although of course national governments and
the global bodies that increasingly took over regulation and supervision
of business were ever-present.
This was not just because
people had stopped believing in the economic efficacy of government,
but in many cases simply because most governments did not have the
financial resources to compete against the multinationals, and even
when they did (as in the case of the USA and Japan) were hamstrung
by fractious legislatures. Russia and China provided exceptions
for a while, but by 2030 even these countries had given up the unequal
fight. The last major investment activity at nation state level
was the establishment of Moon and Mars bases by the USA and China
respectively in 2020-2025. Even inter-stellar exploration, beginning
in 2050, was a privately-financed venture.
With
standard-setting on a global basis (already a de facto reality in
2010, and legitimized in 2017 when the International
Standards Organization became an agency of the WTO) the focus of
governmental involvement with corporations became competition law:
reining in, or even just understanding the immense power of corporations
was one of the major preoccupations of early 21st century governance.
For example, financial power-house Goldman Sachs made profits in
2006 of US$6bn on net revenues of US$30bn, and had assets under
management of more than US$700bn. By 2015, having absorbed a number
of competitor organizations, banks and other types of financial
institution, these figures had risen six-fold. The firm's profits
in 2015 were US$30bn, net revenues were nearly US$200bn, and assets
under management over US$3 trillion. In 2015, Goldman Sachs's revenue
stream was larger than that of all but 12 countries; and many other
companies were even larger, particularly in the energy, electronics
and consumer manufacturing sectors. The angst of increasingly cash-strapped
nation states faced with immensely rich corporations was only increased
after the abandonment of corporation tax under the Harbin Accord
of 2023.
It's
not right, though, to see the triumph of private enterprise over
the State as in any sense a victory of Mammon over the individual.
Although the private (or publicly-listed) corporation has remained
the dominant form of economic organization during the 21st century,
and has become largely independent of nation states, it has had
to accommodate itself to the mushroom growth of global Codes of
Conduct, Treaties and Accords, and a truly bewildering variety of
global supervisory bodies.
Early
21st century cases in which business people were held to account
by national prosecutors for the supposed sins of their corporations
became more frequent in the decade from 2010 to 2020, to such an
extent that chief executives almost stopped travelling to foreign
countries. Although the nation states themselves almost fell over
each other in their efforts to attract investment from corporations,
they all also transposed regional and global law and regulation
into national judicial codes - a process pioneered by the European
Union but which became the norm for all countries as time went by,
giving local prosecutors the power to detain and question executives
in respect of offences which might have been committed by the local
subsidiary of a major corporation.
A lot of not-so-innocent
fun was had by national-level prosecutors in this way, but businesses
were able to retaliate by avoiding countries such as France which
were much given to tormenting business-people, and eventually, as
with corporation tax, the nation states had to give up their nice
game. The founding of the World Commercial Court (WCC) in 2020 established
a clear divide between 'business' behaviour and 'private' behaviour,
giving supervision of the former to international bodies while leaving
supervision of the latter to nation states. From then on, any business
which elected or was deemed to have international status was to
be held to account in the WCC, which has branches in most countries.
Errant businesspeople remained subject to the panoply of international
business regulation, but were accused, tried and if necessary imprisoned
in their country of domicile.
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