Your Lordship, Madame President, my esteemed colleagues, ladies and gentlemen: You have by now read the report of the field team assigned to observe Species 287B, and I do not wish to take up the valuable time of this conclave in further discussion of the recommendations of that report. I ask indulgence, however, to draw your attention to some of my own observations of the subject species and to ask you to consider the broader question of the relevance of our Charter to this particular case.
As you are aware, our evolutionary anthropologists theorize that every race of beings that approaches sentience does so by developing, through well-understood evolutionary processes, a primary feature that distinguishes it from its competitors in the environment, creating an advantage for its survival. Our field team observed the evolutionary advantage of Species 287B to be a keen ability to recognize patterns. Over the course of our study, we watched as 287B leveraged its capacity for pattern recognition into an awareness of its surroundings that hadn’t existed among its competitors. In the relatively short timeframe of a few thousand generations, it moved up the food chain to dominate all other predator species in the environment. In typical evolutionary fashion, it developed a large and adaptable brain capable of language, abstract thinking, and all of the other higher cognitive and cultural processes we expect to find in sentient races.
What we didn’t expect to find, however, was that in this instance, the same evolutionary advantage that led to the development of sentience contained the seeds of the species’ destruction. In short, Species 287B, besides having an extraordinary capacity to accurately recognize patterns in nature, in mathematics, in technological development, and in its own history, possesses a disturbing tendency to see patterns where none exist. We have never before monitored a subject species so plagued with wishful thinking, flawed belief systems, irrational fears, and superstitions as those that torment 287B. We are concerned, frankly, that this species’ distinctive and acute imagination may one day soon bring its development to a cataclysmic end.
I draw your attention to Figure 14. The red line represents Species 287B’s technological capability, as a function of time, with particular attention to those technologies with the potential to destroy the ecosystem, the health of the race, and the macrocultural conditions of the planet. The blue line is a complex function representing the continuing evolutionary progress of the subject species. It takes many factors into account, including the manifestation of advanced philosophies, the emergence of quantum-mechanical theory, and development of the integrated psyche—trends we have seen in every species that survived such a period in its evolution toward what we regard as “true sentience.”
As is apparent, the two functions are on a collision course. Barring some leap forward in consciousness that our calculus cannot foresee, the subject species will not survive this period of perturbation. With its unparalleled imagination, Species 287B lives in fear of a thousand demons, creatures of its own invention. It has dreamed of and made real a thousand ways to kill itself. Can it probe its imagination more deeply to find one compelling reason why it shouldn’t do so? I fear that it will not.
I implore you to contemplate Species 287B as if it were a child trapped in a terrible nightmare. I ask you to set aside, for a moment, the first precept of our Charter, and to imagine yourself the parent of this childlike creature. What is our responsibility to Species 287B? Do we remain detached and mute while the child aims a loaded weapon at the ghosts of its imagination? Or is it time to lay a gentle hand on its shoulder and say, “Wake up! There is nothing to fear!”?
Note: The assignment was to consider one of the many meanings of the word threshold. It seems to me that we are approaching—or perhaps already standing on—a critical threshold in our history as a species.
© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick
A recurring theme for you – looking out over humanity from above/beyond/afar and seeing all its ailments and flaws. You have spoken as God and all number of aliens – invading or otherwise. So this is the next version of alien observation. Interesting to give the evaluation a Charter context as well – an unusual interpretation of threshold too. I wanted to hear the rest of the speech.
I suspect that the speaker eventually gets shouted down, and the conclave passes a resolution approving the use of Species 287B as a food source.
🙂