I would like to make a straightforward point in this essay. This is: What we call objective science always involves a subject.

On the one hand, this seems obvious. Where else does science come from, if not from scientists? At the same time, scientists are often regarded as standing outside of their experiments. Science is increasingly understood as objective. But this framing unfortunately neglects the subjects who conduct it. The astronomer today sees Jupiter with beautiful clarity, but he does not see himself seeing the gas giant! The cosmos he observes more and more of increasingly is one which he finds himself in less and less. But is this the right way of viewing things? Must more objective science necessarily lead to greater displacement for subjects? Or is there another way of viewing science?

Let us consider a simple statement: This is Asteroid A.

Simple indeed! This basic classification appears to have only one entity in it, the asteroid. How much more refined can something get?

But, it turns out, there are not one but three entities involved in this statement!

1. The name Asteroid A

2. The rock in space to which the name refers

3. The scientist who names this rock Asteroid A

Science is always and irreducibly composed of a described, a description—and a describer. A thing, such as a rock in space, in-and-of-itself is not science. A description, such as the name Asteroid A, is also not in-itself science. A scientist, too, does not alone make up science. Rather, science results from the relation between the observed, the observation, and the observer. The measured, the measurement, and the measurer. The named, the name, and the namer. This triadic relationship is involved in every step of the scientific method. Remove any one or two of these components and science no longer remains.

American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, in the 1800s and 1900s, resolved this blindspot in our worldview—though admittedly his insights have not yet caught on. Peirce realized that there are three modes of being, which he termed firstness, secondness, and thirdness. Firstness is a thing-in-itself independent of everything else. Secondness is two entities in reaction to each other. Thirdness is when a third entity mediates between two others—and this is the mode of being modern science does not take into account.1 When Scientist D makes Statement S describing Collision C, this cannot be described as D causes S which causes C (D—>S—>C). Rather, Scientist D mediates between Statement S and Collision C in what may be irreducibly described as Statement △SCD!

Scientist D—let us call him Jim—who is currently glancing at his watch to see if he will make it home in time for dinner with his wife and kids, is irreducibly part of the scientific process! Jim, looking out from his eyeballs over his partially blurred nose to see sunlit rocks crash into each other, is himself related to the collision. Jim is real. The asteroids are real. Their collision is real. The statement is real. The relation between the collision, the statement, and Jim is real. And this relation between the collision, the statement, and Jim is what makes science, science.

We have come to think of science as only what is observed—but this crucially leaves out the observer. A full account of science, however, should always include the observed, the observation, and the observer. When the good folks of LIGO in Louisiana detect gravitational waves from black holes billions of miles away, we should celebrate this but remember that neither the collision of black holes nor just their measurement is science. Rather, science is the relation between the collision, the measurement, and the scientists themselves. Science is always triadic—it always partakes in thirdness—and the scientist is always a part of this relation.2 Rather than being a transcendent observer hovering outside of the cosmos looking in, the scientist is always in and in-relation-with the cosmos he or she observes.

“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk... If one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.”—Søren Kierkegaard

What should the primary form of transportation be on Mars?

In a word: walking!

This is because:

1. Cities and towns are fundamentally places for people.

2. Walking is the primary mode of transportation for people.

3. Therefore the primary form of transportation on Mars should be walking.

It may seem obvious to say that cities and towns are places for people, but in fact, the majority of cities and towns built the past few decades have been designed for cars, not people! Most Americans need an automobile to carry out their daily tasks, and this is increasingly the case in other countries, too. We may consider this normal, but there is no inherent reason our cities must be designed this way. Car-centric cities are an anomaly in history, and we need not export them to Mars. Instead, we should build people-centric cities and towns there, where walking is the main way to get around.

This is not to say there should be no cars, or trains, or planes, or blimps (!), on Mars. In fact, I think these should be utilized. What I am proposing in this essay is simply that we design our built environment so that it prioritizes human scaled methods of transportation over less human scaled methods. We should use forms of travel removed from the pace and scale of human locomotion only when human scaled modes are unfeasible. We may refer to this as The Radial Principle Of Transport. Using this idea, we might plan our cities such that walking and biking are the modes of travel within a city, while trains are used to travel between cities, and cars are used to travel in the countryside. Cities like Venice, Italy, in fact, already practice this. People can drive to Venice, but the city itself is car-free. Travelers and residents simply park outside the city and walk in. People love places like Venice, but we no longer actually build places like it any more. There is no reason why we cannot again, either on Mars or Earth.

There are a few really important things cities and towns must “get right” from their very beginning if they are to most fully thrive. We have discussed a few of these elsewhere. In The Floating City Of Reef, we explored the importance of borders for a city. In The Tallest Building On Mars, we discussed the outsized impact of a city’s tallest building. In this essay, I believe we are discussing one more of these foundational factors. The primary mode of transportation in a place sets the tone for who and what the place is for. If driving is the primary form of travel, then the city is fundamentally for cars. And in a car-centric city, the population will always feel some sense of displacement, as the people literally live in a place not built for them! This is avoided if from the outset a city chooses to be people-centric.

Walking is the most human form of transport. It is the most human-paced and the most human-sized. It fosters silence, wonder, and even joy in the walker. It reminds us we are incarnate creatures meandering through a physical world. It encourages spontaneous interactions with strangers and neighbors. It allows one to most truly know a place—nooks, crannies, and all. And when one more deeply knows a place, one is all the more likely to wish to take care of it and steward it for years to come. If Mars is first and foremost a world for walking, then, I suspect a very good world it will be.

And maybe Earth can become a world for walking again, too? Even if just one street at a time!

Something to ponder!

In the movie adaptation of the book, The Neverending Story, the enchanted world of Fantasia finds itself gradually being taken over by The Nothing: a mysterious, dark force swallowing up the land and leaving absolute emptiness in its wake. Two characters discuss it’s impact on their realm:1

“Near my home, there used to be a beautiful lake. But then... then it... it was gone.”
“Did the lake dry up?”
“No. It just wasn’t there anymore. Nothing was there anymore. Not even a dried up lake.” “A hole?”
“A hole would be something. No, it was nothing! And it got bigger, and bigger.”

I would like to start off this year with a cheery post saying that this is actually what is occurring in our world today! Or at least something very close to it is. The malevolent force in our world today does differ in one important aspect from that of the movie. Whereas The Nothing in the film eliminates everything it encounters, the force in our world today—which we may call The Unness—is reducing our world to a sort of intermediate state. The world today is not being erased, but it is being emptied. Our world is gradually being turned into an unworld.

We may define an unworld in philosophical terms as a world of existentia (existence) but no essentia (essence). With no intrinsic essence, things do not have any inherent nature or identity. They can become anything. But being able to be anything means they really are nothing-in-particular. Our world today—our unworld—is made up of things which exist but are themselves nothing in particular. We may call these unthings. 2

Unthings are tricky. They outwardly look like true things, but they are in fact hollow and may be anything else. In a true world, a warehouse is a building where businesses produce and store goods. In an unworld, a warehouse may be used in this way—but it may just as readily be used in any other way, say, as a church or an apartment building. Its outer form no longer corresponds to any fixed, intrinsic essence. It has become an unwarehouse. In an unworld, everything is like this. A true war involves people from opposing sides fighting one another, typically with weapons. An unwar may take this form, but it may just as readily take any other form: inflaming social media posts, subversive university classes, destabilizing popular music, and so on. An unwar is a total war, in which anything can and does become part of a war, and so a war no longer remains any particular thing or event. We increasingly live in a world of uncities, uncultures, unlanguages and unwords, unwars, unfestivals, and we are at risk of ourselves becoming unmen (to use the C. S. Lewis term).3 An unworld is a world of broken signs, in which things do not signify nothing, but rather anything, and therefore nothing-in-particular. What something looks like tells you nothing at all about what something is.

Whereas in a real world where essences are discovered, in an unworld, essences are constructed. We no longer believe things have pre-given essences, intrinsic to the thing-itself. Instead we believe all essences are assigned to things, from the outside, as it were. This makes our world not one of being but of becoming. Not a world of things-as-they-are but of things-as-they-may-be. The world of actuality has been transformed into the world of possibility. Here, everything in every circumstance “keeps its options open” and never fully commits.4 Unthings are like particles always in superposition. The more they fill our world, the more our world becomes neither fully dead nor fully alive but rather a strange something in the middle (what Walker Percy refers to as a “Death-In-Life”).5 In place of art, we produce content. In place of representatives, we get politicians. In architecture, we build spaces, and not true places. And so forth.

This world has become so empty today, one is tempted to wonder if there is an Emptier. The Unness has spread so far and become so big, it carries us all along with it, whether we know it or wish to go along. Even if one disagrees with The Unness and believes for themselves that essences are real and knowable, this person is like one swimming against a riptide. In each moment they have to reclaim essences which are continuously being drained from things. This is like filling a cup with a hole in the bottom! In a true world, real things—real food, real places, real words—are the default and unthings are the exception. Today this has reversed. Unthings have become the default and real things the exception. It is like we are creatures on a rogue planet, drifting through interstellar space not connected to any star system, where, instead of being infused by sunlight from a nearby star, we have to produce our own warmth and light all the time. We can live this way, perhaps, but it requires so much constant effort.

So what are we to do? Do we have to continue living in an unworld? Did we ever live in a true world? Is it asking for the moon that we might actually live in one? The premoderns indeed lived in a true world (which, to be sure, had many faults of its own). But they did not have to invent everything from scratch. Things not only existed but they also had pregiven essences, which God made and man discovered. The premodern true world, as it were, came pre-made by God. The modern unworld in turn has been self-made by man. My hope is that there is in fact a true world on the far side of our current unworld, which is neither merely a return to the true world that came before it nor merely a staying in our unworld as it is. If there is another true world around the corner, I wonder if it is not too rosy to ask if it might be co-made by God and man? If the world feels empty today—if there is in fact an Emptier—maybe there is also a Filler?

And that is an encouraging thought!

Introduction: The Old World, The New World, & The Orange Orb

“But if we ask what has been the impact of semiotics upon philosophy over the course of the 20th century, early in the 21st century to answer anything beyond ‘marginal’ would be an exaggeration. This situation, as I read it, is about to change dramatically.”
—John Deely in The Impact on Philosophy of Semiotics

What philosophy should we export from Earth to Mars?

In a word: semiotics.

Semiotics is the philosophy of signs pioneered and formalized by American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Alexis de Tocqueville famously wrote in Democracy in America that Americans are all Cartesians without ever having read a word of Descartes. My hope is that Martians, in contrast, will all be Peircians—or intellectual descendants of Charles Sanders Peirce. His doctrine of signs is the most promising path forward I am aware of in philosophy today, as it offers a way to reconcile the best of pre-modern and modern thought.

One can briefly demonstrate why in this way:

Pre-modern philosophy, broadly speaking, was realist; meaning the people of this time agreed that, in principle, there are parts of reality that exist independently of us and we can, with varying degrees of success, know these parts of reality. These include not only physical reality but also things such as moral reality too. Pre-modern philosophy focused on what we might call mind-independent reality (or ens reale, to use the Latin phrase).

Modern philosophy, in contrast, has primarily been idealist: we have held the belief, either consciously or not, that we cannot know reality directly but only our ideas about reality. We cannot know a thing-in-itself, but only our ideas about the thing. Modern philosophy, then, has focused primarily on mind-dependent reality (or ens rationis, to use the Latin phrase).

So, if we are looking for a way to reconcile pre-modern and modern philosophy, we would need to be find a way to demonstrate that we can in fact know both of these aspects of reality. This is precisely what Peirce’s semiotics, the philosophy of signs, does. The great gift of Charles Sanders Peirce’s doctrine of signs is that the sign, properly understood, is where mind-independent reality meets mind-dependent reality.

We think of a sign as something that stands for something else. For instance a stop sign means stop. Those two things are not intrinsically linked however. There is no inherent reason a red octagon with white letters should refer to anything else. For it to do so, there needs to be a third entity to link them, to mediate between them. In this case, a person is the third entity. And this relation between two entities mediated by a third is the formal definition of a sign! And as Peirce observes, all of our thought is in signs, so this is how we know everything we do! We might experience an orangish planet, for instance, which exists independently of us. But we do not know what it is until it is attached to a symbol (say, the word “Mars”). Through a sign, we can know a real thing-in-itself (mind-independent reality), but only if it is connected to a mind-dependent symbol! We can know both, simultaneously, and only simultaneously! As novelist and semiotic philosopher Walker Percy says, “in order to know anything, one must know it through something else”.

Semiotics has a very long informal history of thousands of years, beginning with Aristotle and continuing through the writings of Ss. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Peirce’s contribution is immense, however, in that he not only realized the nature of signs as inherently triadic (involving three entities), but he realized the sign’s importance in being able to transcend pre-modern realism and modern idealism (as through a sign we can know both mind-independent and mind-dependent reality). This therefore provides the foundation to reconcile the best of pre-modern and modern thought.

This appears incredibly important today, as we potentially stand at the dawn of a multiplanetary age of human history. Just as the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment originated in the “Old World” of Europe yet provided the religious and philosophical underpinning of the “New World” of the Americas, we seem to live in an era in which we have the opportunity to reflect on what religion and philosophy we will export from the Blue Planet to the Orange Orb before we go there. At least as far as philosophy goes, Peirce’s semiotic philosophy appears to be the most promising path forward. While he may have had the first word in this genuinely post-modern, post-Cartesian framework, I do not believe he had the last. The great task of our time in philosophy seems to be to develop and build upon the foundation Peirce laid.

And who knows? Perhaps in developing a philosophy best fit for Mars, we will find that it fits just as well here on Earth, too.

Onward we go!

"It is beneficial to know many things and live correctly. But if we are not capable of doing both, it is better to follow the pursuit of living well than that of knowing many things."
—St. Isidore of Seville in Sententiae

Hello dear Reader! As this publication is titled Saints, Scholars, & Starships, it seems fitting to occasionally explore the life of a saint. Let us today, then, profile our first saint—the Patron Saint of the Internet (and of this publication!)—St. Isidore of Seville.

St. Isidore (560-636 A.D.) lived in Southern Spain at a time when the Roman Empire was collapsing and much of the learning and culture that had been generated in the ancient world was fading into oblivion. In response to this, Isidore—who had succeeded his brother, St. Leander, as Bishop of Seville in Spain—wrote a great number of books transmuting knowledge across many fields. His magnum opus, however, was an encyclopedia titled Etymologiae, or The Etymologies. It was the largest ever attempt at the time to compile all of the world’s knowledge, and it covered an incredible array of disciplines—from God and religion to languages to architecture to war to medicine and beyond.

The Etymologiae preserved a treasure trove of information from the classical world at a time in which much of this was at risk of being lost. The encyclopedia was so influential, in fact, that it remained one of the primary textbooks in medieval Europe for nine centuries! Great figures, from St. Thomas Aquinas to Dante—who included Isidore in Paradise in his Divine Comedy—to Chaucer and beyond, grew up with and were educated by the text. This is no doubt why St. Isidore has been often referred to as “the Schoolmaster of the Middle Ages”.

St. Isidore is very interesting historically as well because he was a figure who straddled the end of one epoch—the classical world—and the beginning of another—the medieval era. He is described as “the last scholar of the ancient world”, and thanks to his writings, he was truly a bridge between eras, even during a period of great turmoil.

I believe Isidore is very much a saint for our times. For we, just like him, appear to be living at the end of one age and—perhaps!—the dawn of another. In fact, there may even be multiple eras ending and emerging now. We might now be at the close of the modern era in philosophy, for instance, and a truly post-modern, post-Cartesian world could soon be here. Likewise, thanks to the team at SpaceX, we could also be a few years away from exiting the monoplanetary stage of human history for the multiplanetary phase. Perhaps, too, the pre-nuclear-fallout era of humanity is ending, and the post-nuclear-fallout epoch is right around the corner. Any or all of these could occur over the next few years. Regardless of which comes to fruition, however, we at least have in Isidore a saint whom we can look to for guidance on how we are to live in such times.

I would like to close with a few words from the saint himself. Though he was referred to as “the most learned man of the age”, he nevertheless said in his book Sententiae (or, The Sentences)—a real hidden gem of a book of wisdom!—that It is beneficial to know many things and live correctly. But if we are not capable of doing both, it is better to follow the pursuit of living well than that of knowing many things. He was the preeminent scholar of his age, though even he did not consider scholarship to be his highest priority, but rather holiness. Hence why he comes down to us not as Isidore the Scholar, but as Saint Isidore.

Finally, regarding knowledge, Isidore has this to say:

“It profits one nothing to have all understanding but be ignorant of God, and nothing counts against those who know God but are ignorant of the world. A person knows perfectly, however, who knows God first and knows these other things not for themselves, but for God”.

Saint Isidore of Seville, pray for us!

“To create is, properly speaking, to cause or produce the being of things”

—St. Thomas Aquinas

Can we ever truly create something new? Is it possible for us to go “from 0 to 1”?

Peter Thiel famously declares in his book Zero to One that “Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n… But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1.”¹ When someone makes 1,000 copies of a typewriter, for instance, this takes the world from 1 typewriter to 1,000. When someone comes along and invents a computer, this involves an act of creation, according to Thiel, and takes the world from 0 to 1.

I would like to propose in this brief essay that we never truly create anything—we never actually “go from 0 to 1”. Instead, we make things out of what has already been created. St. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest medieval theologian, notes that “To create is to make something from nothing”.² In classical terms this is called creatio ex nihilo—creation from nothing—and it is something only God can do. In contrast, humans are able to combine, rearrange, develop, and mold things that already exist into novel forms and objects. For instance, we do not create fire from nothing; we make fire from wood. We do not create smartphones from nothing; we produce them via clever arrangements of glass, metal, and plastic. And so it goes. Humans do not engage in creatio ex nihilo, therefore, but rather something closer to fabricatio ex aliquo—making from something. The full range of human making, we may say, is from .1 to n.

This may strike the reader as a pedantic point to make. I do believe however that this has quite huge philosophical and religious implications. The most important is simply that, by recognizing our inability to create ex nihilo, this reminds us that we are not gods. This seems like it should go without saying. But alas! This appears to be something that must be restated and understood anew in every age. Even today, there is a tendency towards self-deification by humans. (As an aside, there is also a tendency to sometimes deify our technologies, such as AI. But this is a mistake as well. AI cannot engage in creatio ex nihilo any more than a rock can. Though it may be tempting to refer to AI as a digital “god”, it is even in principle not one!)

While our fabricatio ex aliquo—our making from something—can steer us from self-deification, it can also remind us we are not mere beasts either. We are not limited to just receiving the world as we find it. We can make things that have never been made before. We can design new products, build beautiful buildings, write wonderful poetry, and so forth! We just do so with concepts and materials that already exist.

In this light, we are like writers in a way. The greatest writers all describe how their trade to them feels more like discovery than invention. Stephen King says he believes “stories are found things, like fossils in the ground”³, and J. R. R. Tolkien said of writing The Lord of the Rings that he “had the sense of recording what was already ‘there,’ somewhere; not of ‘inventing’”⁴. To be sure, these writers are not just passive recipients of their works. They actively show up day after day, put pen to paper, & add their own ideas. That said, there is also a real sense in which they are not the sole, or even primary, Creators of their texts either. Likewise, we are not the Authors of the cosmos, but we are not just its readers, either: we are co-authors (or, sub-authors, to be specific). We do not go from 0 to 1, but we are not limited to mere 1-to-n replication either. There is a middle way we can take—the path of co-making—and this involves going from .1 to n.

“Life on Earth must be about more than just solving problems”—Elon Musk

How can fonts help us design a more joyful built environment?

Modern designs tend to be sleek, streamlined, and utilitarian. Consider for instance the featureless glass skyscrapers of our cities, simplified company logos, and even novel products such as the low-poly Cybertruck. I believe the reader will agree with me that while modern designs can be fascinating, they typically lack a sense of character or warmth or joy. I am aware this is perhaps impossible to prove, though I suspect all the same that we sense this to be true. Most people would probably agree for instance that old houses usually have more character than the newer ones built today, even if it is difficult to precisely pinpoint why we feel this way. 

Churchill said that “We shape our buildings, and thereafter they shape us”. Would it not be reasonable then to suggest that by creating more joyful designs, our lives will in turn become more joyful? If so, how can warmth and life and character be added into our designs once again? I believe the unlikely world of typography can offer a guiding principle for doing so.

There are three general classes of fonts, which we may describe as Simple, Serif, and Dingbat. The first type tends to be sleek and reductionistic, keeping only what is essential to communicate a text. The letter I for instance is often represented in this style as a simple vertical rectangle. On the opposite end of the spectrum are Dingbat fonts, which replace letters with random symbols. The letter I in this style may be represented by something like an icon of a raven—something that has nothing to do with the letter it represents. Whereas Simple fonts tend to be utilitarian, Dingbat fonts are completely useless to the general reader. Finally, situated in the middle of these two styles are Serif fonts. In typography, a serif is a decorative stroke added to a letter. This is the technical name for those tiny lines that jut off the top and bottom of the letter I, for instance, in some fonts. Serif fonts combine both function and form, the useful and the useless, utility and beauty.

Similarly to fonts, we may define Simple designs as designs that have no unnecessary ornament and Serif designs as those that are composed of both useful and decorative elements. These terms can be used to describe the design of anything—whether cars or buildings or cities or websites or household products or robots or rocket ships.

Simple designs are the rule in the modern era, and Serif designs are the exception. I believe, however, that the world will be much happier if Serif designs become the norm and Simple designs the outlier. Serifs are an easy way to bring a design to life and infuse it with joy. While functionality can make a thing useful, a few serifs can make it worth using. Good engineering can make a house able to be lived in, and architectural serifs can make a house enjoyable to live in. Further, by including functionless serifs in our designs, this reminds us that so many things in life are good in-and-of-themselves and not merely because they serve some use or can be exploited. They communicate that the purpose of life is not to solve problems, but to live.

This could be something to consider as we enter an era of robots and possibly seasteads and space stations. All of these are currently on a Simple design trajectory (consider the Optimus robot from Tesla or the SeaPod from Ocean Builders). Could it be possible, even desirable, for these to be made instead in a Serif style?

Something to ponder!

“The soul by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from body… and can exist without it.”
—Descartes

Is a person simply a brain within a body? A mind in a meat-mech? A soul in a skeleton? And what does this have to do with AI?

To put it briefly: how we think about ourselves will greatly influence how we interact with AI in the coming years. Elon Musk’s company Neuralink, for instance, hopes to connect computer chips to people’s brains to bring about a human-AI symbiosis. Whether we choose to get neuralinks, and to what end they will be used for, will depend greatly on who and what we consider human beings to be.

Our modern view of the human person comes to us, philosophically at least, from Descartes. He famously declares in his writings that he is a thinking thing (a Mind) inside of an extended thing (his Body). Whereas the medievals before him regarded humans as a united composite of both body and soul, Descartes separated the immaterial part of man from the physical. Today, we similarly hold this dualistic belief that while we have a body, we are not our body. We consider our true essence instead to be something like our mind or soul or self, and we view our body as more of an organic vessel that carries around this true essence. We consider our brain to be a captain, and our body its ship. In principle, we could alter the ship, replace the ship, or even get rid of the ship entirely, and our real self could still be intact.

Here we begin to see how our view of humans can influence our approach to neuralinks. If our true essence is simply just a Mind, it matters little if we drill a hole in our skull to insert a computer chip. Altering our biological form to achieve superhuman memory is no issue, as we are simply “upgrading” our true selves. If, however, we consider our body as a fundamental and essential part of who we are—not the captain’s ship, but part of the captain himself—the idea of drilling a hole in one’s skull could raise some questions and give one pause.

Neuralink currently has two aims for its device: restoring and enhancing. The company is presently working on the former, seeking to help people with conditions such as paralysis regain motor function. In the future, however, their chip could give humans incredibly improved capacities for memory and thought, and perhaps even telepathy. Users could communicate with others merely by thinking rather than speaking. In principle as well, it may even be possible to achieve a strange sort of “immortality” with their device. By engaging in the sci-fi practice of mind-uploading, one’s thoughts and feelings could get uploaded to a computer chip, which could then be replicated or even transferred to another body when one’s original body breaks down. A digital version of one’s mind could conceivably survive indefinitely this way.

Elon Musk says that we are already cyborgs because we outsource some of our thought and memory to computers. If I may suggest here, this is one of the primary errors of our modern mind: our habit of reductionism, or reducing a thing to its parts. The Sun, for instance, is made of a bunch of particles, but that is not what it is. The Sun is, quite simply, The Sun, in-and-of-itself! A person may have a mind and body, but what they are is a person! Whole and intact! Similarly, using computers does not make us cyborgs—it is something we do, not who we are. We are, simply, people. Getting a restorative neuralink could help us become fully-functioning people. Getting an “enhancement” neuralink, however, would trigger a phase change: we would no longer be people, we would be cyborgs. By reducing the human person to simply a Mind, therefore, Descartes unintentionally laid the philosophical foundation for the replacement of humans by cyborgs. Adopting neuralinks for enhancement purposes would bring this philosophy to its logical conclusion.

Whether we choose to continue along this path is up to us. But we do in fact have a choice!

Something to ponder!

“When forced to work within a strict framework, the imagination… will produce its richest ideas” —T. S. Eliot

Part I—On Sea Walls and Acres

If we create a seastead city soon—let us call it The Floating City of Reef—what should it look like?

Besides the obvious question of what the tallest building should be (haha!), what style of architecture should be built in Reef? Should it be futuristic or traditional? Could it somehow be both? What general shape should the town take?

Let us state from the beginning that the town should in fact have a shape. It likely matters little whether the town is a circle, square, hexagon, a non-regular multisided polygon, or even some wavy organic form. It may matter greatly, however, that it does at least have a defined border. How permeable or non-permeable this boundary is will be a political question for the inhabitants of Reef to debate (or for their monarch to decide!). We can simply say here that without this clear line demarcating Reef from Non-Reef, the City will not long remain a city, but will instead devolve into a sort of urban sprawl spread across the surface of the ocean. Perhaps floating sea walls, which may act as wave breakers, can also be of aid here to prevent sea sprawl. In the past, city walls were built to keep people out; in the future, they may also be needed to keep buildings within. 

One could essentially select any of the great cities throughout history to illustrate that having a well-defined boundary can increase the vibrance of a city. Just as the chambers of an engine direct combustion forward to propel pistons, so city walls can contain and channel the energy and life of their cities to great heights. Furthermore, by reducing sprawl, these walls produce the interesting effect of keeping cities, in the overwhelming majority of cases, human-scaled. Renaissance Florence was famously only 120 acres! The island city of Mont-Saint-Michel in France is only 17 acres, and even the historic City of London came in at only around 720 acres. If Renaissance Florence could be no more than 120 acres, we would need great justification indeed for why the Floating City of Reef should be any larger. As all great artists say, “creativity comes from constraints”, and we would be wise to consider this regarding the size and shape of Reef.

Finally, one may raise the objection: it is all well and good to talk about keeping Reef small and within its sea walls, but what if the population grows? I defer here to the great architect Léon Krier who, in his book The Architecture of Community, distinguishes between unhealthy and healthy urban growth. In the former case, whenever a city reaches its limit, it continues to increase in size and spills out into the surrounding area. In the latter case, however, when a city becomes full, people can simply break off and found a new city! In this way, urban growth on the ocean can mimic healthy cells which grow via duplication instead of hypertrophy. The solution, in general, to overcrowding is not to build larger cities, but rather more cities.

City boundaries can therefore be treated as something all-important, very important, or not important at all. At least in the U.S., we seem to have swung from the all-important end of the spectrum to its opposite. The happy city of the future, however—the happy Floating City—will be one in which city walls are neither all-important nor completely unimportant, but rather appreciated as something in the middle. 

“But where is everybody?” —Enrico Fermi, Physicist

Part I—The Great Filter

If the universe is so big and so old, where are all the other lifeforms? Did they go extinct? If so, what from? What—or Who—did they miss?

These questions are what has come to be known as the Fermi Paradox, the great riddle posed by the physicist Enrico Fermi in the 20th century. The paradox is that, given the age of the cosmos and the overwhelmingly large number of planets, we should be able to see the presence of at least one other species written across the stars by now. But we do not, currently. This has many strange implications the further one thinks about it, and nearly all potential explanations of the paradox do not offer much optimism for the future of life here on Earth.

Proposed solutions to the paradox range from the seemingly obvious to the bizarre. The most straightforward of these is the idea that maybe life and intelligent organisms are simply very rare—and intelligent beings with rockets (or interstellar physics) are even rarer. The Firstborn Theory suggests we here on Earth might be the first lifeforms to have arisen in the cosmos. Somebody had to be number one! Other solutions are much wilder. The Zoo Hypothesis, for instance, wonders if life elsewhere exists, but it intentionally avoids us to let us develop on our own uninterrupted. The unsettling Dark Forest Hypothesis proposes that the universe is silent now because other civilizations are hiding—perhaps from bigger and fiercer civilizations, or even Something Else. All the planets that made a lot of noise in the past… simply may have not lasted long.

These theories are endlessly fascinating to think about. In this essay, however, I would like to focus on one solution in particular to the Fermi Paradox, namely The Great Filter Hypothesis. Its general idea is that there are many obstacles lifeforms must overcome to become an interstellar species, though there may be one hurdle in particular—a great filter—which is much harder than all the others to pass.

It is quite possible that we on Earth have already long since passed our great filter. Perhaps it was simply that life itself is incredibly rare; but once the jump from non-life to life is made, then the rest is easy! The more troubling thing to consider is that maybe everything that has come before us has potentially been the easy part, and we have yet to face—or perhaps are very close to facing—our great filter.

In this scenario, we here on Earth have already made it past many little filters, such as going from non-life to life, from single-celled to multicellular life, from signal-using to symbol-using life, and so on. This implies that we may soon be up against late filters—obstacles that multicellular intelligent lifeforms with advanced technology get to face. The ever-looming threat of nuclear extinction comes to mind, but there are also very mundane possible filters too, such as being unable or unwilling to travel beyond one’s home planet.

So! This is where we currently seem to be! Stumbling through the darkness of time, not knowing if we’ve passed the great filter or if it’s right around the corner, equipped with technological powers far outstripping our wisdom, with bills to pay, fending off diseases and injuries, distracted by endless entertainment online, searching for meaning, and all-in-all just trying to get by through life with family and friends, occasionally even enjoying a nice pint together on a warm summer evening.

So then, what—oh what—shall we do? How shall we proceed? Where do we even begin?

Part II—The Great Dilemma

One thought that immediately comes to mind is Douglas Adams’ famous injunction from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “DON’T PANIC”.

The absolute worst that can happen is that the great filter is truly just around the corner, and we don’t pass it. In that case, you, everyone you know and love, and maybe even all life on Earth (and perhaps in the entire universe) will go extinct forever. That’s it!

Jesus says “He who wishes to save his life will lose it”, so perhaps it is only by actually being willing to go gently into that good night of species extinction that will we be capable and worthy of passing our great filter. If we panic and grasp onto life, white-knuckling our way to survival, we will likely do something rash—like launching all of our nukes at once or releasing a bio-engineered virus into society. Even if we avoid these and make it to space, we will simply export our restlessness from Earth to the rest of the cosmos. As observed in the great novella Ad Limina, we will fill “the emptiness with our emptiness”. If we flee from death, we may remain alive, yes, but we will not be really living. We will end up ensnared in what novelist and philosopher Walker Percy refers to as a sort of death-in-life!

Knowing what not to do, then, we are now able to consider positive actions that might get us through a great filter. I believe a hopeful path is suggested in The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, a collection of sayings from early desert-dwelling Christian monks. In the book, there is a short story that points to a potential pathway. In the tale, one monk asks another, named St. Antoni, to pray for him. To this, St. Antoni replies, “Neither I nor God will have mercy on you unless you do something about it yourself and ask for God’s Help.”

Funnily enough, an example of this in modern times comes from none other than Elon Musk himself. He and his SpaceX team worked long hours for many years to build their Crew Dragon spacecraft. After the vehicle safely launched and carried astronauts from Earth to the space station, Musk remarked: “I’m not very religious, but I prayed for this one”.

It strikes me as at least worth observing—one can of course do whatever one wishes with the observation!—that Musk did all he could, asked for Help, and was successful. Perhaps he should try that more frequently? Perhaps we should all try that more frequently? Perhaps there used to be other lifeforms elsewhere in the cosmos, but they never asked for Help? If this sounds too woo, I pose to the reader a question: have you tried? Have you desperately needed to find a way forward in some area of life, done what you could, and asked for Help? And if Help came, did you accept it? It strikes me as a rather great wager to make and is perhaps something that can make a real difference in our efforts to get to space (amongst many other things, like growing in virtue). If no Help comes, there is no extra downside; if Help comes, all the better!

Part III—The Great Synthesis

It is possible in fact that there is no such thing as a great filter. Maybe very soon, thanks to new and improved telescopes, we will discover alien civilizations all over the universe. At the very least, maybe we will find microbial life. But even if aliens are abundant in the cosmos, it is likely that there are many more species which never quite “made it”.

It is currently estimated that over 99% of all species that ever lived on Earth are already extinct! Even if there are no great filters on other worlds, there certainly seems to be at least one here. In reality, this is probably the case throughout the rest of the universe, too. Even if some organisms have thrived, nearly all other creatures have likely been… filtered out.

It may be the case that other lifeforms did not pass the great filter because they never built starships. It may also be the case that they did not pass the great filter because they never asked for Help. It may even be closest to the truth to say that they did not pass the great filter because they never did both.

St. Isidore of Seville, a 7th century Spanish bishop often referred to as the Schoolmaster of the Middle Ages, once wrote: “It is beneficial to know many things and live correctly. But if we are not capable of doing both, it is better to follow the pursuit of living well than that of knowing many things.”⁸ We might similarly say today: It is good to be a saint. It is also good, indeed very good, to build starships. We should try to do both, and I think we can. If we are unable to do both, however, it is better to be a saint than to build a starship.

But we should really try to do both!

Asking for Help (and accepting Help if it comes!) may be the key to doing so.

“A bad plan is better than no plan.”
—Peter Thiel in Zero to One

Part I—Our Pre-Launch Opportunity

While most people consider outer space to be the next physical frontier, I stand instead with the good people of The Seasteading Institute and agree that seasteading (the idea of creating floating homes, towns, cities, and countries on the open oceans) is truly the next physical frontier. This is for many reasons, though the facts that it is vastly easier and cheaper—and in many ways even more exciting—than space travel are chief among them (I suggest the book, Seasteading, by Joe Quirk and Patri Friedman for more information on this).

Regardless, whether we expand first to the sea then to the stars or do both simultaneously, I would like to call attention in this brief essay to a very important aspect of our current moment that I have not yet heard addressed elsewhere, and it is this:

As the first seasteads begin to trickle into the waters (a huge congrats to Ocean Builders!)and reusable rockets begin regularly to hop between space and Earth (a very, very large tip of the hat to Elon Musk), we stand presently in a sort of Pre-Launch Era, in which we have a unique—and temporary—opportunity to seriously consider how we wish for these expansions to unfold before they really take off. The clay is still quite wet, and we can make big adjustments to its form before it hardens. Just as there were many ways that the American Expansion could have gone, there are likewise a great number of directions that sea- and space-steading can develop.

The overwhelming majority of efforts regarding sea- and space-steading so far have been relegated to the engineering and even legality of these endeavors (and for great reason too, as it matters little what one thinks Martian architecture should look like, for instance, if one can’t get to Mars in the first place). So as I now propose in this essay that we should also perhaps revisit our philosophy and theology too before rapidly expanding, I suspect the record will scratch a bit and readers may regard me as if I have two heads or three eyes. But I do not have two heads or three eyes, and I am quite in earnest in my proposal.

For, as the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment laid the theological and philosophical foundations for the “New World” of the Americas, we have now in our hands a chance to reexamine and even recalibrate these assumptions before simply exporting our current philosophy and theology from the mainland to the “Blue World”. I suspect this has been given very little thought so far, at least in the U.S., because, as the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville in his famous and incredibly prescient book Democracy in America notes about our nation, “There is no country in the civilized world where they are less occupied with philosophy than the United States. The Americans [had] no philosophic school of their own, and they worry very little about all those that divide Europe; they hardly know their names”. But just because we rarely think of philosophy or theology, does not mean that we don’t have a philosophy or theology. As he continues, “America is... the one country in the world where the precepts of Descartes are least studied and best followed”.

This short essay is not quite the place to delineate a full “Summa for the Third Millennium”—a grand, all-encompassing, updated philosophical and theological framework (or, if you will, a wondrous philosophical and theological “house” in which sea- and space-steaders can reside for the centuries to come)—but this is the place to say that we could benefit greatly if we had one.

Part II—Launch Trajectories

I should like, in this last page or two, to succinctly describe what is truly at stake regarding this updated philosophy and theology, and I shall start with observations made by Peter Thiel (cofounder of PayPal, primary investor in Facebook, Tesla, SpaceX, & The Seasteading Institute, and the closest thing to a true philosopher-king we have in the U.S. today). To summarize his thoughts briefly from his obscure and remarkably cryptic essay from the early 2000’s, “The Straussian Moment”, essentially he notes:

1) In the ancient and medieval world, the Big Questions (“What is a well-lived life? What does it mean to be human?... How does culture and religion fit into all of this?”, etc.) were considered seriously, and the answers were taken seriously. Though people disagreed, often violently, on the answers, there was a shared assumption that the questions were worth asking and had answers that we could know.

2) After decades and even centuries of violence over these Big Questions, we in the West “agreed to disagree” in the 1648 Peace of Westphalia (a treaty to end the religious wars of the time), and have since relegated these questions to the private sphere of the individual, where they have often ceased even being asked at all. In the place of asking these Big Questions, we instead turned our focus and energy to Capitalism and Technology (note: these are observations from a technologist billionaire, not a Communist rant).

3) While this shift in focus unleashed impressive creativity and produced overwhelming material abundance, it has led to more of a “self-stultified” existence and a world in which we now find ourselves, more often than not, “amusing ourselves to death” (“Instead of violent wars, there could be violent video games; instead of heroic feats, there could be thrilling amusement park rides; instead of serious thought, there could be ‘intrigues of all sorts’”).

So, “we are at an impasse” concludes Thiel. On one hand is the direct return to the older tradition of asking and taking seriously the Big Questions; but simply doing this with today’s technological weaponry would lead to the previous violence over these questions being raised to a world-ending pitch. Behind Door Number One, then, is Death.

On the other hand, we could carry on in our current state of avoiding these Big Questions, at least in the public sphere, focusing instead on improving our material state, but this leads to a much less meaningful and fulfilled life. Behind Door Number Two, then, lies what novelist and philosopher Walker Percy describes as neither Death nor Life, but rather “Death-in-Life”, which he (and I) consider to be worse than Death.

Both Death and Death-in-Life are options, however, that we may really choose. We must’t disregard them until we face them head-on and honestly ponder them. That said, we may also wonder: is there Life as well? Might it be possible to export not Death nor Death-in-Life, but Life—real, honest, bona fide, actual, can-you-believe-it! Life—to the seas and stars? Might we reconcile the best of both ancient and medieval philosophy and theology on one hand with the best of the modern and post-modern thought on the other?

I suspect that it is possible, and I further suspect that we will be much more likely to do so and export Life beyond land if we give it some serious thought before launching. Of course, we will not think through everything, and much will surely change as people take to the oceans and planetary orbs, but it seems wise to do all we can before striking out, to make as straight as possible our paths before this Sojourning Age commences.

After all, as Peter Thiel rightly says, “A bad plan is better than no plan”.

Part III—A (Short) Hopeful Epilogue

Finally, I believe I would be letting the reader down if I did not propose even a glimpse of what a plan might entail or where there I think there may be a real opportunity to help reconcile the best of the four ages of understanding (ancient, medieval, modern, and post-modern). I will simply leave here a signpost pointing in a direction that I believe is really worth looking into, at least for philosophy: and that is the largely hidden, yet wonderful, world of semiotics (the study of signs, symbols, language, and meaning). This field has a rich history dating from the ancient world with Aristotle through the Latin Age with Ss. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas all the way through the first truly post-modern philosopher, the American Charles Pierce, and beyond.

More on this to come in future writings!