Pax Techne

In the days of man's innocency, it is believed that there was little or no war, because there was always some new land to settle. New lands could be settled, and while there might be confrontation, real killing seems to have been rare. This stage lasted tens of thousands of years before the world was so full people were squeezed to the margins and space became a matter of life and death. (This discounts the extinction of early hominids as non-war.)

Is there now, in a transition to an information age, a new landscape to subdue? Is the possibility space of humanity a new frontier, a new world? Might it extend away to infinity and give living room to everyone?

Information is tricky stuff. I rather like Claude Shannon's information quantification. He suggested that each bit informs to the extent it confirms or expectation, and a sequence of bits as much as it confirms or denies the combined probability distribution for messages. The quantity is a log of the number of bits (assuming each bit is unpredictable - probability 50% of 0 or 1) - this seems to catch the way information multiplies as it aggregates.

Being is a matter of ways, a subject for 'hows'. It is something that technology fits perfectly. The practices we learn should make us a little more capable, the knowledge of ways to be allowing the living room on actual, scarce earth to grow. The possibility of transition to a new background, a substantial one of the base material of the universe, no longer mediated through a biosphere, of knowledge taking us into a future without war is desirable.

But we'd have to get comfortable with Us. And for that, Techne is a false god.

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