The Lifetime Asymptote–a Parable

Once upon not far from now a rogue computer designed by a brilliant yet crazed paranoiac hacked onto the cybereverything. Its master had given it the mandate Maximize the Survival Probability of Humanity. Soon world markets were heavily into space colonization via a modification of Gerard O’Neill’s L-5 Society as interpreted by Joe “WORLDS” Haldeman. Smart Alecks were renditioned into little rooms where they grew new technology under threat of death. In less than a decade and a half the sky glittered with protoplasm-bearing life modules.

“Live and let live” was the Golden Rule amongst the space colonies. Proselytization was permitted within the hulls of individual colonies, but forbidden in inter-colony intercourse. Meanwhile, on Earth, there were more renditions, these of geneticists. The human genome was cleaned up and trifurcated. Laissez-faire with world markets then resumed, and an airborne sterilization vector conceived long ago by P.J. “Seventy Years of Decpop” Farmer did in future generations of non-modified-genome humanity.

In the year 2345 the work of that long-obsolesced computer was complete. Not only had Humanity survived, but hundreds of versions of it headed to the stars, and some of them would survive the red-sun-death of the Earth. But they sure were funny-looking, according to the aesthetos of the crumb of Original Humanity left, out of sentimentality, intact.

The End