Another weird question stemming from thinking too much about fiction. This one at least exists almost solely in that realm (unlike nautical terms for space), but I’ve heard a few people express this as a genuine sentiment.
The sentiment is that at the pinnacle of technology one would convert the entire populace into energy, normally it’s Sci-Fi (Galactic Civilizations II had this as the result if you got to the end of the Science tree, thereby winning the match), but I’ve seen it peppered elsewhere (Family Guy joked that Ireland was the most intelligent place before they found out about alcohol, the cutaway showing one scientist saying “Ladies and gentlemen, we have finally found a way to convert our entire population into pure energy!” before trying a “new beverage” and devolving everything into a bar brawl).
Where did this originate? And furthermore how does it differ from self genocide? Is the energy supposed to (somehow) retain consciousness? Is there any school of thought believing that this is the ultimate goal of science in a few thousand years (or whatever), or any (credible) papers on this? Or is it another branch of fiction that evolved into a fringe pseudoscience 16 people believe?
It is a fictional construct with roots in ancient religious belief - basically a form of Gnosticism. Some gnostics believed that the perfect non-physical spirit was trapped within the imperfect and corrupt physical body, and that the body should be denied (kind of like Scientologists, who believe that the abstraction of vast amounts of corrupting cash from your physical situation improves your eternal spiritual situation :smack:).
This sort of thinking influenced the christian ascetics as well - the purging and denial of the flesh. This was supposed to make people into better beings.
Sci-fi writers have included this fairly pervasive human meme, and turned it into the ultimate end-goal of future evolution/self advancement - the freedom from the desires of the body will make us smarter and better and eventually we will not need them any more, through technology or evolution.
It’s all hokum, although there probably some real current belief systems with gnostic tendencies (like scientology).
It’s pretty much the favourite plot device for the Star Trek franchise - one week, members of the crew will be converted to energy beings - the next week they change ends and alien energy beings will possess members of the crew, then back the other way for the following week.
But yes, as si_blakely says, it’s a religious notion that people will transcend the physical - you see it dressed up in all kinds of pseudo-technological ways now (‘energy’ instead of ‘spirit’), but it’s more or less the same thing.
The earliest mention of this that I can remember was in Arthur C. Clarke’s short storey the Sentinal IIRC (or it could have been 2001: A Space Odessy), so I don’t think that the idea is particularly old, but the idea of immortality as “frozen lattices of light”, able to explore the Universe, peer into the heart of stars etc, is an appealing one.