This week, as I was hopping airports between Baltimore and Kansas City, on my way to a meeting of scientists, I discovered a new species of human: Homo Sapiens-"Simulant". I became aware of this new stage of human evolution from a news story broadcast on the CNN Airport Network about ranch theme vacations. You know, you go on vacation as if transported backward in time to the 19th century American west and live like a cowboy or cowgirl for a while. This story was followed by another highlighting the surging wave of Virtual Reality (VR) amusement arenas. This recalled to my mind an article I'd read in a magazine describing combat "vacations" you can purchase thru mercenaries who train you and let you tag along with them to some New World Order proxy war somewhere in the third world. I guess there's no limit to the lengths Simulant man will go to in order to evolve to that next stage of development: Homo-Sapiens-"been there, done that". With everyone in the culture clamoring to experience everything that has ever been experienced by someone else, for a price, there is bound to develop a new economic stratification of "have done that"s and "have not done that's" where the notion of original/unique/authentic experience becomes extinct. On the other hand, instead of being a tool of ultimate escape from our naturally evolved virtual reality, the way in which our senses process the stimuli of the physical world, VR and similar technologies may allow us to "walk miles in the moccassins" of others. Will VR technology go so far as to allow a person to experience the reality of someone of another age, gender or race? The common empathic refrain, "I know how you feel", would be elevated beyond mere expression status. Will we be able to alter the mind's perception of the passage of time and live out multiple virtual lifetimes in altered worlds, experiencing as many destinies as can fit on our hard disks?
I get in line to board the aircraft. In front of me is a hip young traveller, a generation Xer (does that letter refer to the drug ecstacy or Malcolm X, or the number 10, or all three?) who produces a boarding pass from the pocket of her jacket, a neoprene rubber shell with the letters S C U B A on the back. I am tempted to lean forward and ask her where she dives but I realize that she in fact may not be a diver at all but might be a human who has effected Simulant status through the cyborg enabling technology of exogenic layering. The jacket simulates the image of a marine savvy traveller.
We are moving from voyuerism to interactive simulation to virtual reality to reconstituted reality. Will the majority of us be creating our own worlds or will we be forced to consume a plethora of mass produced "McLives" of the VR technology? The internet couch potato (WEB TV) will be elevated to the Cyber-Life potato, experiencing stimuli constructed by others. I suppose we are not too far from this even now. Television commercials and print advertisement tap directly into the sentic systems of the simulant emotions, mapping consumption of certain brands of clothing, cars and condiments (i.e. "...do you have any Grey Poupon?") to the psychophysiological parameters equivalent to the experiences of feeling powerful, sexy, fulfilled, wealthy, etc.
When I return home from my trip I quickly unload my bags, run to the bathroom, relieve myself and then plop down on the couch in front of the TV which sits on top of the VCR. I pop in a tape I wasn't able to watch before I left. It is STAR TREK: First Contact. As I watch the crew of the USS Enterprise encounter and save the Earth from the Borg, a race of cyborgs whose motto includes, "Strength is irrelevent, Resistence is Futile. We wish to improve ourselves. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to serve ours." etc., I realize the story is even a greater flight of fancy than the producers realize. The Borg have already won. For they are us.
Ray H. O'Neal Jr. is an astrophysicist at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.