But it certainly wasnt going to be my first choice, if and when I got to make one.
Forty-Five
Wonderland
Alice Fleury candidly admitted that shed never had the opportunity to take Davidas route into the hinterlands of superhumanity. She had not long passed puberty when she had been frozen down along with her father and elder sister, but she was long past it now. On the other hand, she said, she did understand Davidas frustrations with the anatomical and biochemical fudges of Earthly natural selection. On Tyre where evolution had proceeded at a more leisurely pace necessity had not hastened quite as many awkward improvisations.
Alice used the windowscreen from the very beginning to illustrate her pitch. At first she used it as if it were indeed a window looking out into the strange purple glasslands of Tyre. She showed Adam Zimmerman Tyres native fauna, including its intelligent humanoid natives as they had been when her father first displayed them to the world and to the home system. Then she showed him the cities of Tyre, tracking their growth over time. She showed us the pyramids that were the reproductive structures carefully employed by the Tyrian indigenes as a substitute for the kind of sexual reproduction that served the purposes of Earthly creatures.
All this was, however, a mere prelude to her discourse on the potential of genomic engineering. Once she got stuck into the technicalities of this new technical field Alice moved on with remarkable rapidity to matters of ferocious complexity. Adam Zimmerman must have been left floundering as soon and as badly as I was, but Alice had the look of a teacher working under pressure, who had no time to make her explanations clear. The reason she was sprinting through the fundamental biochemistry in this casual fashion, I supposed, was to establish her scholarly credentials. She wasnt blinding us with science so much as trying to build our confidence that she really could deliver on the promises she was going to make.
Alice conceded that Davidas arguments had a lot going for them, but contended that they were fatally flawed in two understandable respects. The first was that Davidas notion of winning free of the follies and foibles of natural selection was unnecessarily restricted.
Natural selection, Alice said, had not made as bad a job of adapting human anatomy to the environments of Earth as Davida made out. Yes, there were flaws in human anatomical design, and the messiness of human biochemistry cried out for intervention in the name of order and economy but it was a blinkered and narrow-minded approach to the solution of such problems to imagine that the goal was merely to achieve a better adaptation of human physiology to the environments of Earth. Nor was it sufficient to take in the kinds of modifications that fabers had found convenient to equip themselves with for life outside gravity wells.
The solar system is a very small place, Alice reminded Adam Zimmerman. There are four hundred billion stars in the home galaxy, and there are more than a hundred billion galaxies. Other solar systems are not like ours.
Other life-bearing planets are not like ours. Even those which qualify as Earth-clones in terms of such elementary measures as gravity and atmospheric composition harbor exotic ecospheres. If you want to think of the future in terms of thousands or tens of thousands of years you must stop thinking merely in terms of the future of the solar system, or even in terms of the future of the galaxy. The Afterlife may limit our options severely, at least in the short term, but we must begin thinking, even now, of our future in the universe .
The limitations of the philosophy of terraformation are obvious even within the solar system. Even if the present projects can be brought to a satisfactory conclusion, Mars and Venus will never be Earth-clones. Tyre could be terraformed, but nobody who lives there wants to do that now that they realize what it would cost. We cannot and should not attempt to expand into the universe by exterminating existing ecospheres and substituting copies of our own. It isnt practical and it certainly isnt right. The better option, from every point of view, is to adapt ourselves to the environments offered by other worlds. Yes, of course we should construct new life-bearing environments where none presently exist, within the home system as well as without, but we should be prepared to exercise our creativity to the limit in so doing. We need not and should not carry the imprint of Earthly evolution wherever we go.
We could, of course, produce colonists for alien environments in Helier wombs, inventing at least one new species for every new world. That will undoubtedly be the initial pattern of our procedure as we become citizens of the galaxy and citizens of the universe. But we may also become more versatile as individuals, especially if we make the fullest possible use of the lessons in genomic engineering that we have learned on Tyre. Even if we are to design and produce populations of colonists narrowly and specifically designed to inhabit alien environments, it will be necessary to bridge the gaps that exist between those species and their differently adapted kin. The first generation of each specialist species will benefit considerably from being raised and educated by foster parents who can simulate their form, and subsequent generations will benefit from trade conducted through intermediaries who can do likewise.