N-TALK 丨Han Song: Tomorrow's Humanity

Han Song participated in the N-TALK "Literary Night" in the form of online.

Hello everyone! I am Han Song. It is a pleasure to meet readers and friends online for southern weekend N-TALK "Literature Night". Many thanks to Southern Weekend for hosting this event, which is a newspaper I really like.

"Literary Night" set up a science fiction session, which is a very science fiction thing in itself, because "science fiction is literature or not" is still in doubt. I believe that this special session stems from Southern Weekend's continued interest and attention to sci-fi reality.

Science fiction has really entered the public eye and received public attention for a short time, only about a decade. A lot has changed in the decade. The three-body problem was published in 2010, the same year that China became the world's second-largest economy, a manufacturing powerhouse, and later the largest outbound tourist. Foreigners then said: "China is the most science fiction country, and to pay attention to China's future, we must understand China's science fiction." ”

Now all industries are very concerned about science fiction. Some cities are building science fiction industrial parks, and some cities want to add science fiction elements to the city's transportation card. Many of this year's mooncakes are also made in the shape of "moon landing spacecraft" or printed with the three-dimensional pattern of "moon landing spacecraft". Some real estate developers are also paying attention to science fiction and want to build science fiction buildings. Many entrepreneurs and even leading cadres say they are "science fiction fans." Why is everyone paying attention to science fiction? It has to do with our theme today – tomorrow's humanity.

Modern myths that focus on the fate of mankind

In fact, we don't quite know what "tomorrow's human beings" will look like. Because the world you see now seems to be more and more uncertain, which is not the same as before. For thousands of years, human changes have been very slow, such as the tomorrow of the agrarian society, which is nothing more than repeating yesterday, but then the scientific and technological revolution and the industrial revolution have brought new changes to the tomorrow of mankind.

In 1818, science fiction was first produced in Britain, the first country of the scientific revolution and the industrial revolution.

The 20th century saw many major scientific discoveries, such as relativity, quantum mechanics, and the double helix structure of DNA. Globalization is also developing at a rapid pace, especially with the advent of the Anthropocene, a new geological age. In this new geological epoch, humans became the dominant factor in the changes of the earth, rather than being controlled by nature.

For the first time, humans have the technical ability to destroy themselves and the entire earth, which is not the same as the extinction of the dinosaurs in the past. I think these are the backgrounds to the rise of science fiction and the attention it has received, and it can be said that science fiction is a modern myth that focuses on the fate of mankind.

Science fiction and science fiction movies depict the various human forms of tomorrow, which is very interesting. For example, human beings may become a species of alien planets, on other planets and even other galaxies to survive; for example, human beings may be transformed, become very, very small, only seen under the microscope, because in the environment where the earth has become a disaster and wasteland, such a human being can survive; for example, the use of biological engineering to transform human beings to become what we now call "post-human", some people can live forever, some people even have superpowers, he can fly, can run faster than leopards, Even in the future, it will no longer be a dichotomy between men and women, as if a way out has been found to solve the feminist problem.

There are also machines or artificial intelligence, which will dock with humans or produce a symbiotic relationship, and may even replace humans. One of the questions we've always worried about is: How do we keep machines loyal? There are many works that depict robots waking up and wanting to get a human identity. I wondered, one day the machine will also propose to join the human vanguard?

In addition, there are also science fiction works that envision future humans living in a virtual world, through the upload of consciousness, human beings can do everything in it. The concept of "metacosmology" comes from science fiction, and in my opinion, the "metacosm" may become a "super Internet café" for the poor, which will help us achieve common prosperity. The person who likes to live in the "metaverse" the most must be the old man, because the old man can make himself young, and the young are still experienced at the same time.

There is also an extreme future situation, "the humanity of tomorrow" is the extinction of human beings. As Wells envisions in Time Machine, the future of humanity is without humans.

Science fiction may depict the possibility of ten thousand kinds of human extinction, which was not found in previous literary works. Human destruction is not necessarily the flesh, biological engineering, information technology, nanotechnology can make people extremely happy to "live", but it has also become a walking dead in the sense of physics.

The future is invading reality

We may be more focused on the future than at any time in history. There is a saying that the future is invading reality. In a way, the world is developing according to the construction of science fiction. Philosophically, our world was created by God before, and now the world is created by people and machines.

In science, there are many people who make new inventions through science fiction imagination. Literature has also produced a new aesthetic, which has both the magnificent beauty of space and the dark beauty of cyberpunk combined with man and machine. In a social sense, science fiction also acts as a searchlight and early warning device.

Science fiction vividly depicts a possible future, it convinces people that it is real, and to create it. This is the difference between science fiction and magic.

Thanks to the existence of science fiction, we have in fact become "tomorrow's human beings", living in a future world. Many people grow up watching science fiction and using science fiction thinking to shape the world, such as Musk, Zucker Berg, Bill Gates, they are all science fiction fans. In China, there are also the first generation of "science fiction fans", watching movies such as "Jurassic Park", "Ghost in the Shell" and "Dune", and playing "Cyberpunk 2077" this group of children, they have become a different "new human".

There has never been a greater anxiety than now, because there has never been such a confusion as it is now – what kind of humanity will we be tomorrow? Where do we go from here? We are often worried about the wind and grass, worried about the misfortune of the future, and do not know what tomorrow will be.

What kind of human beings should we be in the future?

It will be like the science fiction writer Tintin Bug wrote in his novel "Death Examination", in the future we will all be immortal, and only by participating in and passing the national unified death examination can we get the right to die. Because you can only create social value if you are alive, society needs you to live.

Or as another science fiction writer Diptera envisioned, in the future, everyone will use bioengineering to tattoo their own faces, through which people can communicate with the world and others, re-establish culture, or inherit culture.

Or as Liu Cixin described in the famous novel "Supporting Mankind", technology has an impact on common prosperity, first of all by forming a minority of "super" rich people, so that the difference between minorities and other people becomes greater than the difference between humans and dogs, or do we need such elite human beings?

Science fiction writer Xiao Xinghan's human beings are actually machines, and Wang Jinkang proposed in his works that in the future, there will be a "World War 2.5" between human beings that is completely different from previous wars.

Or as science fiction writer Cai Yutian wrote in the novel "Blue You", after the death of a loved one, we no longer put it in the urn, but upload his consciousness to the child's toy, in this way to maintain a very strange-looking family affection.

Or as Zhang Ran said, in the future, human beings can automatically replace all dangerous and harmful factors in reality through technological means, so that everyone thinks that we are living in an incomparably safe and beautiful world, no longer thinking wildly and no longer acting arbitrarily.

Or as Jiang Bo wrote in "The Heart of the Galaxy", after human beings entered space, the concepts of human race and nation disappeared. So, what will we do if we can't find the identity of "Chinese" in the future?

Or, as Teng Ye described in The Ladder of Time, man can only escape to the deepest recesses of history, even at the expense of turning himself into an ape man, in order to find value, freedom, and truth.

Or as written in Sugar Bandit's Odyssebo, we will return to a world where everything is going backwards and entropy, and we are all going through a process from old age to death, so that we can achieve the glory of the future.

Or as Ighyan envisions in the novel "Zero Degree Separation", in the future, human beings choose to give up human identity and even emotions because they feel that it is too boring to be human, and they will put an artificial neurobiotic creature in the brain, which will allow us to integrate into other creatures.

The future of these human beings can all happen in the logic of science fiction, because they are based on so-called science, so-called technology, and so-called engineering. And from the past, most of the predictions predicted by science fiction have become reality, or are becoming reality.

In the face of the future described by science fiction, can we choose what kind of "human beings of tomorrow" we become? In whose hands is this decision-making power? Can ordinary people decide what kind of person they will become tomorrow?

Probably many people will think that there is no way to decide. We can only go with the flow and cede the power of the Lord of Destiny. Some people try to take power in the past who wielded their destiny, but eventually gave up trying.

However, it is very necessary to think about what kind of person to be tomorrow. If we can't stop the future from coming, then we need to make some preparations for its arrival. I think that like the mammals that came to the stage of history after the extinction of the dinosaurs, tomorrow's human beings must strive to survive in a new environment. We're also trying to make future generations live better, and I think that's probably a meaning of the existence of science fiction, and the meaning of our "literary night" today.

If science fiction is really literature, then it, like the literature of its predecessors, faces the most realistic and ultimate problem, and it is precisely because of this that literature and science fiction can return to its nature - playfulness and curiosity, which are even more scarce qualities than ideas.

(Finished by Southern Weekend Intern Yang Jia)

Han Song