Across the eternal multiverse, a few civilizations survive their adolescence, improve perpetually, survive indefinitely, and attain a technology-wisdom synergy that culminates in plasma-being: a super-gas-like communal existence capable of god-like feats. Plasma-being civilizations frequent galactic centers because of the high star-density providing abundant free energy and because of the black hole at the core of most galaxies. Plasma-being civilizations monitor the most massive black holes and periodically compel some of them to shrink to a singularity and manifest themselves elsewhere as white holes—big bangs that begin new universes. Plasma-being civilizations are focused on their technology-wisdom synergy—free from the paradoxes that plague adolescent species like humanity.
As our Sun is one of hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way, and as our galaxy is one of countless other galaxies in this universe, so this universe is one of countless other universes: the eternal multiverse, which has no outside because by definition it comprises all that has ever existed. Furthermore, since successful mechanisms recur naturally (galaxies, stars, heavy elements, rocky planets, watery worlds, RNA, DNA, stereoscopic vision, bipedalism, symbolic thinking, metacognition, advanced culture, technology, and so on), the big bang that began this universe was one of many similar events: black holes that shrink to singularities and manifest as white holes—other universes. In other words,
the eternal multiverse is a multidimensional kaleidoscope, a unitary organic whole—a monistic reality that doesn’t abide by the dualisms that plague the human mind: beginning/end, mind/body, and so on. As a result, wondering about what supports the multiverse, what lies outside of it, what came before it, who created it, and so on amounts to projecting human attributes onto an immortal reality.
Before we proceed, let’s address creationists’ objection: Since universes result from black holes’ turning into white ones, and since successful mechanisms repeat themselves, shouldn’t the multiverse itself have a cause? From Plato to Einstein, creationists concluded the existence of a supernatural creator. However, infinite regression is much more likely because we see it in nature (from macroscopic superclusters to solar systems to microscopic particles resembling star systems) and because infinite regression is much less presumptuous and thus more likely, according to scientific parsimony: The simplest explanation is almost always the most likely. In addition, quantum mechanics suggests that on the smallest scales, strange phenomena occur, such as particles appearing out of nowhere and disappearing without a trace, and the same thing is probably true at the grandest scale—the multiverse, which by definition doesn’t abide by binaries: in/out, beginning/end, body/mind, and so on.
For a variety of reasons, such as favorable natural conditions and some good luck during their adolescence, a few civilizations in the eternal multiverse mature, synergize wisdom and technology, spread across their native galaxy and to others, improve perpetually, and survive indefinitely. Adolescent civilizations’ basic life-extending implants and prosthetics (teeth, defibrillators, pacemakers, hips, spinal-fusion hardware, traumatic-fracture-repair hardware, and others) mature into cybernetic technologies (cloning, consciousness-transfer, and others) that make individuals essentially immortal and enable societies to heal the individual/community rift that plagues adolescent civilizations. Thus, advanced societies become increasingly more communal. The next step for them is to refine their physicality and make it more ethereal, so they can travel more easily across their native universe and perform all kinds of increasingly more impressive feats culminating in plasma-being, which continues to evolve.
In fact, as ultra-advanced civilizations continue to evolve, during its initial stages, plasma-being is precarious and depends on the ordinary-matter technologies from which it emerged. However, as time passes, plasma-being matures into an independent, ethereal, communal intelligence increasingly free from the vagaries of spacetime—immortal when it matures. As humans developed the technology to escape Earth’s gravity and venture into space, so plasma-being can escape the constraints of natural forces and universal laws. As a result, advanced plasma-being can travel at near light-speed, manipulate ordinary matter without being affected by it, access wormholes, and move easily among universes. In other words, plasma-being is similar to the missing dark matter, which comprises about 27 percent of the physical universe, and dark energy, which comprises 69 percent of the visible universe.
As adolescent civilizations use increasingly more natural energy sources more efficiently for more applications, so plasma-being uses the energy of stars, galaxies, and supermassive black holes. As millions of years pass, plasma-being figures out how to regulate black holes, wait for the opportune time, and hasten their contraction to a singularity, which disappears from its native universe and emerges elsewhere as a white hole—a big bang that results in a new universe that plasma-being can continue to monitor and maybe even help to become viable.
The motivation is creativity: the universal force of conscious beings’ labors of love and necessity that introduce more beauty, justice, and order into the natural world, which is unconscious and amoral.
In other words, plasma-being is the culmination of intelligence in the eternal multiverse, which is primary, however—contrary to panpsychism, the belief that consciousness is a universal force akin to the four fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force. In fact, panpsychists argue, one, that since the multiverse is eternal, consciousness must also be eternal; and, two, that the multiverse had a beginning and therefore a creator or some instigating intelligence, so consciousness is universal. However, that argument presupposes that which it asserts and doesn’t account for the qualitative differences (symbolic thinking, metacognition, and free will) between humans and the other species on Earth. In other words, human consciousness is fundamentally different from whatever awareness other species possess. Atoms, chemical elements, viruses, flora, fauna, humans, solar systems, galaxies, and universes (the imaginals that the divine allegedly creates by imagining them, according to theosophists) have vastly different internalities.
Moreover, the grandest of scales entail paradoxes that the human mind’s binarism can’t explain. Paradoxes are figments of the mind or consequences of epistemological ignorance stemming from the binary nature of perception and the dualisms thereof: start/finish, mind/body, and so on. Truth is a matter of degree depending on the number of facts available. If all facts are available, a wise intelligence can ascertain the entire truth. Unfortunately, in most cases in adolescent civilizations, not all facts are available, hence the paradoxes of God, quantum mechanics, and so on. However, plasma-being intelligence doesn’t bother with paradoxes, for many reasons: One, plasma-being civilizations are supremely wise, or they wouldn’t be able to survive and improve for billions of years, so they are free of the hubris and ignorance of adolescent species like humanity. Two, plasma-being civilizations are practical and seriously engaged in long-term projects that benefit the communal intelligence as well as the multiverse.
Unfortunately, despite the progress humans have made (from cave-dwelling to space-walking and from feudalism to feminism), the scientific establishment lacks wisdom, wasting hundreds of billions of dollars on boondoggles like particle-accelerators instead of building the requisite lunar infrastructure to mine helium-3, which could supply us with clean fusion energy for 10,000 years and prevent the imminent runaway greenhouse effect that may extinguish humanity. In fact, particle-accelerators’ quest for fundamental indivisible particles posits atomism, an ancient belief. However, the more deeply scientists delve into matter, the more they realize its elusiveness while quantum mechanics posits a wave-particle ambiguity. The most likely reality is that the multiverse is multidimensionally kaleidoscopic: extending forever in all directions—an eternal reality beyond morality, without ego or will, beyond primitive minds’ ability to grasp in its totality.
Being unable to understand the cosmos, humans invented mysticism, panpsychism, esoterica, and the sectarian religions responsible for war, genocide, and atrocity. In other words, since prehistory, after millennia of observing the cosmos, realizing how insignificant and ignorant we are, humans created and have been worshiping a vast abstraction that defies understanding: Tao, animism, pantheism, polytheism, monotheism, and panpsychism, which even scientists embrace today in their attempts to explain consciousness and other elusive phenomena. This surrender to the unknown pervades humanity. Buddha, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Jung, Einstein, self-described neo-Platonists like Penrose and Hameroff, and the countless religionists eager for Paradise are essentially back-to-the-godheaders: transcendentalists—escapist cowards. After all, the purpose of The Tibetan Book of the Dead is to help people escape the natural cycle of rebirth into the alleged six realms of illusion (gods, demigods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts, and hell) that Plato divided into two categories: the ideal world and the world of copies.
However, truly-wise people focus on humanity’s survival. Perpetual improvement and indefinite survival will enable our species to mature and understand the multiverse progressively more deeply. An adolescent species flirting with suicide, humanity can’t currently resolve the paradoxes that have haunted us since we attained symbolic thinking and embarked on afterlife fantasies. True wisdom brings longevity—not cowardly escapism into the bosom of God, the Absolute, and other delusions.
Elementary logic dictates that instead of wasting time and resources on projects that don’t help humanity survive, such as particle-accelerators, we should focus on preventing the imminent existential threat of a runaway greenhouse effect, by reducing drastically global carbon-emissions and embracing renewable resources as soon as possible. Moreover, we must build the infrastructure to mine the Moon for helium-3 and establish an independent settlement on Mars to double our chances for survival.
The journey from cave-dwelling to space-walking and the fact that history is the record of progress from feudalism to feminism prove that humanity has the potential and duty to do all it can to mature into a spacefaring civilization that spreads across the Milky Way, to other galaxies, and other universes. That should be our focus: the guiding principle from which to derive the policies of government, research, business, education, and so on. Our cybernetic era has already begun; our gene-therapy technologies are promising, and human cloning will extend our lifespan increasingly more as we become progressively more advanced cyborgs.
Species maturity is possible. The next step will be consciousness-transfer into increasingly more advanced clones: Stage 1 immortality. By then, humans will live across the solar system and others, so if some societies perish, others will survive and continue to improve toward plasma-being.
Powered by the instinct of survival, eager for freedom from the vagaries of spacetime, haunted by visions of a wondrous afterlife but unwilling to die, intelligence culminates in plasma-being: a type of communal civilization distilled into an ethereal medium that performs acts of God, which the prehistoric human mind invented to understand the world, appease nature’s fury, survive for as long and possible, and then go to a better posthumous place. Theists despise their memories of sin in allegedly illusory worlds and yearn for non-consciousness in the bosom of the Absolute. However, wisdom-seekers cherish our memories in the eternal multiverse and yearn for super-consciousness in predation-free worlds. Plasma-being bridges the abyss between mortal civilizations and immortal forces, and it has already happened many times across the eternal multiverse because enough time has passed and because successful mechanisms (cells, RNA, DNA, stereoscopic vision, bipedalism, symbolic thinking, metacognition, cybernetic technology, cloning, consciousness-transfer, and communal civilizations) recur naturally. Thus, Sophia kills Thanatos and reigns supreme for eternity.
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Appears in
Athanasia: Humanity Across The Multiverse, Published in 2021
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Likides is a guardedly-optimistic freethinker who shows that with creativity, patience, and some good luck, humanity can survive endlessly and improve perpetually. The wondrous trip from cave-dwelling to lunar-walking has been impressive, and far greater things await: expansion across our solar system, the Milky Way, other galaxies, and other universes, ad infinitum. MFA in English, CUNY. Books: Athanasia: Humanity across the Multiverse (2021), God Is a Heartless Recluse: A Novel-Essay-Screenplay Synergy (2017), Foundations of Meaning: Stories and Essays on Being in the Eternal Now (2013), Eros Triumphant (2010), Infinite Sustain (2007), and Out of the Labyrinth (2003).
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