Can Humanity Learn How to Swim?

When a child learns how to swim, it often walks on the bottom until the water is almost above its head. Then it tries to swim, flounders, tries again, looses its footing and gets water over its head, tries again and again, and finally finds the right way of moving to stay afloat without having to rely on the reassuring support of the ground beneath. It no longer has to rely on the solid world, it can now move through the liquid world even beyond the shallow waters the child previously had to remain in.

In the same way, humanity must eventually learn how to rely on itself and not the support from our ancient biological heritage as we move out into the universe of space and knowledge. We cannot just jump into the deep waters and expect to stay afloat, and we cannot stay confined to the shallows. We must learn how to swim, with all the trials and temporary setbacks that it implies, until we find a way to stay afloat without having to rely on our old instincts, perceptions and bodies. Instead we will create ourselves, with no need for a fixed certainty beneath us, just liquid reality that we shape. But we also know that we can return to the dry land when it pleases us.

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Anders Sandberg / asa@nada.kth.se