At the end of Alan Moore’s Watchmen series*, the nigh-omnipotent character Dr. Manhattan, having grown weary of this vale of tears, departs Earth. He comments to the villain of the piece that, having grown to appreciate the value of life, he thinks he is going to create some. He does not specify human life, or even sapient life.
Put yourself in Dr. Manhattan’s position, if you can. You’ve gone out and find yourself a nice Earth-type planet orbiting a Sol-type star, and you’ve assured yourself that (a) it does is not currently the home of any life-forms, and (b) it **can **support earth-like life at present, and will be able to do so for quite some time–several billion years.
How do you go about this project? That is, do you arrange for abiogenesis and allow evolution take its course? Do you jump ahead a few umpzillion generations and create humans straight off? If the latter, do you let them know you exist? If not, why not? If yes, what exactly do you tell them.
I’m sure others can come up with better questions than I.
*I phrase it that way because I’m not sure how the movie ends.
If I have the time – if I will live long enough, I don’t know if they ever come out and say Dr. Manhattan is immortal – I’m going to start from scratch. I’d probably just throw a few strands of bare DNA, not even viruses or cells, into a warm sea. Hell, I might even try and get some replicating crystals or something to jump start another, non DNA based, form of life entirely.
However, if time is of the essence and I’ve got the power, I’d probably try to create some smart things right off the bat, after having arranged some sort of food source. I’d probably tell them I exist and be buddies with them, too. I’d have to teach them how to brew beer and invent artificial refrigeration too so that we could all sit back drink some cold ones and I could regale them with my feats of strength… Obviously, I’m not the same as Dr. Manhattan.
PS: Yeah, Dr. Manhattan says he’s going to create some life at the end of the movie, too. Actually, except for the nuke thing, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie that followed the book as closely as the Watchmen. Most of the main characters even look just like their comic book counterparts, especially Rorschach. The only thing I missed was the Tales of the Black Freighter. Otherwise, they pretty much recreated the book page by page.
I’d start right out with a full ecology, complete with intelligent beings. I’d try to create an ecology with minimal suffering; where/if I have to include things that get eaten, they’ll be too stupid to feel pain.
The intelligent creatures would be as close to as physically perfect and as knowledgeable & capable as I can make them. They’d probably look more Lovecraftian than human after I was done designing them, adding all the extra organs and senses and so on.
I would make it clear to them that I’m just a flawed being from the stars with powers and have zero interest in worship. Not that I’d design them with the desire to worship anything in the first place. Once they had a chance to seriously think about it, I’d start taking suggestions as to further modifications to their planet and themselves.
I would design their minds to instinctively conform to what I consider civilized behavior, but leave them at least as much ability to choose as we do. My reasoning is that being imperfect, I’ll make mistakes; as long as they can choose their actions, they can overcome my mistakes. Just as we overcome the less desirable leftovers from our own evolution; the difference is, flawed as I am I’m sure I can leave them a lot closer to being “naturally civilized” than evolution, which wasn’t even selecting for civilized behavior. They’ll have a much easier time behaving morally, since they’ll have to overcome far fewer uncivilized impulses.
I don’t know, but I wouldn’t evolve suffering. Some other carrot/stick tool would be used to ensure survival and encourage life to engage in behaviors that helped it survive and thrive.
Also a bigger emphasis would be put on the subjective experience of the life. Right now that has no value, the emphasis is on survival. If a sentient being was creating and guiding the life the emphasis would move from survival (which would be more or less a given) to sentience and experience.
So I’d probably evolve life with the goal that that life have a range of sentience, experience, capacity, etc. that was totally foreign and very expansive.
So I’d have to engineer an environment that was conductive to those goals, and I would start life with single cells and let it go from there.
Is this even possible? Whatever you choose, it is fundamentally a mechanism for favoring certain behaviors and discouraging others. Pain is necessarily a strong compulsion to alter one’s circumstance; I would say that any impulse away from a circumstance unfavorable to survival is “pain” and will be felt and rationalized as such by a conscious being.
It seems to me that pain is fundamental to the ability to have self-awareness and the sensation of choice. Do you have any particular ideas in mind for what you would try instead?
I don’t think that’ll work. Unless you make all the women exactly identical to one another, differences in appearance which seem tiny to us will be noticed more and a new standard will develop (unless you also engineer an incapacity to notice such differences, which I suspect will also result in an inability to recognize beauty in general.)
In about 2005, I started a job at a certain large corporation. One of my fellow managers had the unfortunate habit of preferring to hire good looking young women for his team. Most of his hires were comely enough so that they always got stared at in public, but even among them a hierarchy of hotness became apparent. Yeah, Alyson was cute, but Ginger was prettier, and Emily was a goddess. The same thing would happen in the case you have described.
I doubt that. It seems to me that a hierarchy of dullness-to-ecstasy would work, instead of one of agony-to-ecstasy. And at worst, I’m quite sure that you could get away with capping pain at “moderate discomfort”. People function just fine feeling nothing worse. For that matter, pain and suffering aren’t the same thing; pain is normally associated with it, but drugs or brain surgery can result in the phenomenon of pain that doesn’t hurt.
And in many cases people in such a state have more of a “sensation of choice”; being able to do nothing other than huddle in a fetal position and whimper doesn’t involve much of a “sensation of choice” compared to being able to sit around and talk to people or whatever. Pain is much more about the elimination of choice; the body coercing the mind.
Simply untrue. There are people born without pain.
Dullness would become the new agony, then, wouldn’t it? We tend to measure things according to our experiences, and motivation for survival that can be acted upon by reason will invariably create a continuum of perceived states from “really don’t want to be here” on up to “happy place.”
A sensation that produces a desire to stop having the sensation is pretty much the definition of suffering. You might say that any desire unfulfilled is a form of suffering. So I suppose it would be possible to eliminate suffering if you also eliminate desire; but then, what do you have left? A creature with no need to think or experience anything. It’s either ruled entirely by instinct, or kept on a leash and fed.
…But maybe it would be a good idea to take this hijack somewhere else? Seems like it might head into GD territory pretty quickly.
Hah! Joke’s on you then; I’ve found the perfect loophole. You can only get brain cancer if you have one!
I was thought about replying with a James T. Kirk quote, but I decided not to be an asshole just this once and to give a serious rejoinder. From CNN.com:
Yes, that’s the most well known and dangerous variety. I know there have been less destructive variants found recently; where people don’t injure themselves ( which is why it wasn’t noticed until recently ). I’ll see if I can find where I read about it.
More to the point; that’s what you get with a human, who hasn’t been designed to function without pain. And the fact is that most people do function just fine with “pain” that is better termed mere “discomfort”.
I’d be more interested in what lifeforms would result from just kick-starting life in a shallow sea, and then leaving it alone for a billion years.
Otherwise, I’d recreate the Pleistocene with all the great megafauna, and a large neanderthal population isolated from homo sapiens, because I’m really curious as to how they’d fare. I’d try to select a world a lot larger and with Australia-sized continents separated by vast stretches of open ocean – just to forestall inevitable exploration and conquest.
Firstly, let’s nix the whole “planet” thing. I’m a god-king, so some sort of ring or dyson sphere will be the setting. Bigger playing field and all that.
Then, I’m just going to churn them out fully-formed, Spore Creature Creature-style. Down to recreating my favourite DnD races.
And of course they’ll know I exist. They’ll be born knowing I exist, and that I made them. I’ll tell them I made them so that they could do whatever the hell they wanted … and the first one that worships me will serve as an example to all the others by its death (thanks, Lucifer comic book).
