For three seasons, the Algorithm has been the most powerful presence in Silo, an unseen system judging the stability of Silo 18 and deciding whether 10,000 people live or die. Season 3 finally pulled back the curtain. There is no machine. There is Victor Crnkovich in Silo 1, speaking through a voice modulator, with Rosalind Thurman as director and a memory-wiped Daniel Keene, now “Troy”, woken from cryosleep whenever a silo needs putting down.
The moral case against Silo 1 hardly needs making. What interests me is that, even on its own chilling terms, the system is badly designed. If the goal is to keep 50 isolated populations obedient for centuries, the founders made a string of mistakes any strategist should have spotted. So here is a thought experiment: if I were the Algorithm, what would I have done differently?
The core flaw: power built on a lie Silo 1’s control rests on a shared false belief. The residents are not only told that the outside is lethal and that the Algorithm is infallible; they are kept from their own history altogether. The project’s stated aim is to free humanity from its past.
The trouble with ruling through a false belief is that it is a coordination problem waiting to be solved. Obedience depends less on what each resident privately believes than on what they think everyone else believes. Once the truth becomes common knowledge, when people know that others know, compliance can collapse almost overnight. Nearly every crisis in the show follows from Silo 1 creating ways for that knowledge to spread.
1. Don’t send dissenters to the one place they can test the lie Cleaning is meant to be the ultimate public deterrent: challenge the system and you walk out to certain death while everyone watches. It works perfectly, right up until someone survives.
It is an astonishingly risky design. The punishment puts the most curious, rule-breaking people exactly where the fake display on the screens can be exposed, and one survivor, Juliette, was enough to shatter it. A deterrent with even a small chance of disproving your entire narrative in front of the whole population is not worth having. I would handle punishment inside the silo, out of sight of the outside world, or at the very least make sure no engineer in Mechanical could quietly defeat the suit.
2. Never give one person all the knowledge In Silo 18, the head of IT is effectively the only person who knows the truth. That puts the whole regime at the mercy of one person’s temperament, ambitions and succession politics. Bernard’s paranoia, his clumsy choice of successor and his eventual turn against the system show how badly that can go.
A sturdier design spreads knowledge across several people who don’t fully trust each other and can check each other’s behaviour. Just as important, Silo 1 needs independent ways of watching what is going on. In the finale, Camille’s feint worked because Victor was relying on a single human channel he could not verify. An Algorithm that can be bluffed is not much of an Algorithm.
3. Make the threat automatic, or keep it secret In game theory, a deterrent is most credible when the side issuing it cannot back down. Silo 1 got this the wrong way round. The Safeguard ran through a physical pipe that residents could find and cap, so they knew the threat was real and also that it could be beaten. Worse, it was run interactively by a person, which told everyone there was someone at the other end who could be negotiated with, delayed or tricked.
I would choose one of two coherent options. Either the threat is fully automatic, triggered by fixed and published conditions with no human discretion and no physical point of failure, or its existence is never revealed at all. The half-hidden, human-operated, breakable version Silo 1 used combines the weaknesses of both.
4. Punish in proportion The Directive treats contamination between silos as the one unforgivable offence, and entire silos are expendable to prevent it. That is the equivalent of a strategy that punishes everyone for a single defection, and over repeated rounds it has two fatal problems.
First, it destroys the very thing the project exists to protect. With 50 silos and centuries to go, wiping out whole populations steadily drains the stock of humanity the founders claim to be saving. Second, it removes any reason for restraint. Once a silo believes it is already condemned, it has nothing left to lose, which is exactly the point at which people rise up. Graduated, targeted sanctions keep deterrence working while leaving people a reason to stop.
5. Take the mystique out of the past The total ban on relics was meant to cut people off from history. In practice it made every surviving object enormously significant. A forbidden children’s book or a single photograph becomes proof that something was hidden, and hidden things invite investigation.
I would do the opposite: allow a carefully chosen supply of harmless old-world objects so they become ordinary. Curiosity also needs a safe outlet. The most inquisitive residents are the most dangerous if you fight them and the most useful if you recruit them. Bernard half understood this with Juliette, but by then trust had already broken down. A system that routinely brought its brightest dissenters into IT, rather than sending them out to clean, would face far fewer rebellions.
6. Don’t build what you’ve banned If isolation between silos is the top priority, a network of tunnels connecting them is a baffling weakness. It is like announcing that doors are the gravest threat to the regime and then fitting every wall with one. Either don’t build them, or make their existence the most closely guarded fact in the entire project. By the end of Season 3, Juliette knows about them, and that is catastrophic for Silo 1.
7. Keep the enforcer reliable Troy is Silo 1’s troubleshooter, the person trusted with the hardest decisions. He is also plainly deteriorating: each time he is woken, flashes of Helen come back and he asks more questions. Victor’s response is simply to put him back to sleep.
That is putting off the problem, not solving it. The person with the most lethal authority in the system should be its most predictable part, and Silo 1 is relying on memory suppression that visibly fails. Sooner or later, the enforcer remembers.
8. Make promises that can be checked In the finale, Troy offers Silo 18 a deal: he will leave the Safeguard off as long as they avoid contact with the other silos. Juliette seems to accept, while planning to reach Silo 1 through the tunnels.
Of course she does. Silo 1 has lied to her people for generations and has shown it will kill entire populations. A promise from an actor with that record is worthless unless it can be verified or enforced. If I genuinely wanted a settlement, I would give her something concrete and lasting: real control over the capped pipe, independent monitoring, or even a seat in the project itself. Commitments only hold when breaking them costs the one who made them.
The uncomfortable conclusion What strikes me about this list is that almost every change makes the system less cruel as well as more stable. That isn’t a coincidence. Regimes held together by deception and collective punishment are fragile precisely because they give people every reason to resist and nothing to lose by doing so. Legitimacy is far cheaper to maintain than terror.
The single most powerful move open to Silo 1 would not involve pipes, voice modulators or cryo-sleep. It would be offering residents a believable future: a real, verifiable date when the doors will open, and a reason to wait for it. People will put up with a great deal for something they believe in. Silo 1 chose fear instead, and with Juliette heading for its front door in the final season, it may be about to find out how poor a choice that was.
Dr. Elena Vasquez had spent eleven years trying to reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics, and she had come to the conclusion, quietly, over many sleepless nights, that the problem wasn’t in the mathematics. The problem was in her. Some perceptual limitation, baked into the wetware, that made it impossible to hold curved spacetime and probabilistic wavefunctions in the same thought without one collapsing into the other.
She had not come to the retreat centre in the hills outside São Paulo to fix physics. She told herself that, repeatedly, on the drive up. She had come because her husband had left in March, because her postdoc had been denied, because she had not published anything worth reading in three years, and because a colleague – a string theorist who had gone quiet and strange after his own retreat, and then oddly brilliant – had told her, *just go, you’ll understand something you can’t get from equations.*
She had not planned to combine anything. The facilitator, a soft-spoken woman named Iara who had run these ceremonies for two decades, had been firm about that. But on the second night, in the dark after the first purge had passed and the visions had not yet properly begun, Elena had made a decision that was not quite a decision – the kind of thing that happens in an altered state, where intention and impulse blur past the point of separation. She had brought her own mushrooms. She took them anyway, without telling Iara, four grams ground into the last of her water, on top of a ceremonial dose of ayahuasca that was already working through her blood.
—
The nausea arrived first, as it always did with the vine, but this time it did not stay in her stomach. It became a property of *space itself.* The walls of the maloca breathed in slow peristaltic waves, and Elena understood, with total clinical certainty, that she was inside something that was digesting her.
She reached for the bucket. She did not make it. Iara’s assistant came with a cloth and murmured something in Portuguese that Elena’s brain, disassembling in real time, translated not as words but as a shape – a soft blue parabola of care, arcing over her and then gone.
*I should tell someone,* she thought. *I took something else. This isn’t standard protocol.* But the thought arrived already fragmented, already being folded into something larger, the way a sentence gets pulled apart by strong wind before it’s finished leaving your mouth.
Her heart was doing something she didn’t like. Not racing exactly – more like it had stopped agreeing to run on a single rhythm and was now negotiating between several tempos at once, and she felt this not as fear but as *data.* Somewhere very far away, a small remaining sliver of Dr. Vasquez noted: *tachycardia, possible serotonergic excess, this is exactly the interaction you warned your students about.* That sliver was calm. It observed. It did not have hands anymore, or a mouth, so it could not do anything but watch.
—
Then the visions became geometric, and this was the part she would spend the rest of her life trying, and failing, to write down properly.
She saw – no, *saw* was wrong, there was no seeing, there was only *being the fact of* – a lattice. Not a metaphor for a lattice. The actual underlying structure, she felt certain, of everything. It was not spacetime as she’d modelled it, smooth and differentiable. It was granular, foaming, appearing and disappearing at a rate she could not measure because the concept of a measuring rate required a stable observer, and she was not stable. She was inside the foam.
Voices came through the geometry. Not English, not Portuguese, not language really – more like the vine itself was old and had opinions, and the opinions arrived as pressure, as intention, as a very ancient patience regarding her smallness. She had read about “the mother” in every ayahuasca account she’d skimmed, half-embarrassed, before the trip, filing it under *anthropomorphisation, interesting but unscientific.* Now the distinction between *anthropomorphised* and *actually a mind* dissolved along with everything else, and she wept, not from fear, but from something closer to being *known.*
The mushrooms arrived on top of this like a second frequency modulating the first – faster, brighter, more fractal, less narrative. Where the vine gave her structure and voice, the mushrooms gave her recursive visual detail: the lattice sprouted eyes, then sprouted lattices of eyes, each one a further zoom, and she understood – again, with that same false clean certainty that altered states hand out like candy – that she was looking at *herself*, at the structure of a mind trying to observe its own observation, an infinite regress of a physicist trying to physics her way out of the trip and only sinking further into it.
*This is just the Copenhagen interpretation having a nervous breakdown,* she thought, and somewhere a version of her that still had a sense of humor almost laughed, except laughing required a body with reliable diaphragm control and hers was busy being folded through eleven dimensions of something that might have been grief.
—
Because underneath the geometry, the grief was the real content. It always is, people said, and she hadn’t believed them before this. She saw her husband not as a memory but as a live variable, still coupled to her, refusing to decouple no matter how far the equations of her life had drifted from his. She saw her father, who had wanted her to be a doctor, a real one, hovering disappointed at the edge of every equation she’d ever solved. She saw the postdoc rejection not as a professional setback but as a small, precise wound that had been standing in for a much larger question – *does the universe, in fact, want you here* – and the vine, or the mushroom, or the seething foam of everything, answered that question not with words but with an unbearable, oceanic *yes* that broke something loose in her chest and she cried in a way she had not cried since she was a child, ugly and total, snot and tears and bile.
Her pulse would not settle. At some point Iara was kneeling in front of her, taking her wrist, her face carved with real concern, saying words that landed as concrete instructions even through the dissolving membrane of Elena’s ordinary comprehension – *breathe with me, you are safe, you are in a body, breathe* – and something in the specific gravity of Iara’s voice, the way it refused to be swept into metaphor, gave Elena a handhold. She breathed. The world did not stop being a foaming lattice of recursive eyes, but her heart, mercifully, began to remember a single rhythm.
—
Hours passed that did not behave like hours. At the peak – if it was a peak, if peaks were even the right shape for a place with no vertical axis – she experienced something she could only describe afterward, badly, as *becoming the wavefunction instead of measuring it.* All her career she had stood outside the equation, a physicist, a knower, a subject regarding an object. Now there was no outside. She *was* the superposition, unresolved, every possible Elena – the one who’d stayed married, the one who’d left academia, the one who’d never come to Brazil at all – coexisting without collapse, and it was not distressing, not by this point; it was the first time in a decade she had felt something like rest, because if she was every possibility at once, none of them could disappoint her, and none of them could leave.
She thought, with sudden and startling clarity: *this is why they call it medicine.* Not because it fixed anything. Because it showed her the shape of the thing she’d been carrying, all lit up at once, so she couldn’t pretend anymore it was only a professional problem, or only a marriage problem, or only a mathematics problem. It was one problem. It had always been one problem.
—
The comedown, when it finally came, came slowly and with its own kind of violence – a headache like a fist, a body that felt wrung out and slightly betrayed, a thirst she couldn’t satisfy for an hour. Iara sat with her as the light came up grey through the maloca’s gaps, and asked, gently, without judgement, what exactly Elena had taken.
“Both,” Elena admitted. “I took both.”
Iara didn’t scold her. She just nodded slowly, the way people do when a thing they suspected has been confirmed, and said, “Your heart worked very hard last night. You are lucky it is a good heart.” Then, after a while: “What did you see?”
Elena tried to explain the lattice, the recursive eyes, the wavefunction, and it came out sounding like nonsense, like every account she’d ever rolled her eyes at in a journal she wasn’t proud of reading. She laughed, hoarse and real. “I don’t have language for it. I have language for quarks and I don’t have language for this.”
—
Back in her apartment two weeks later, on a Tuesday, staring at a whiteboard she hadn’t touched since before Brazil, Elena found herself writing not an equation but a question, in small letters at the corner of the board, the kind of note you leave for the version of yourself who comes back tomorrow: *what if the observer was never outside the system to begin with?*
She did not solve unification that year, or the next. The mathematics did not care what she had seen in the dark, foaming and recursive and briefly infinite. But something had shifted in the way she held the question – less like a puzzle to be cracked from a safe distance, more like a thing she was standing inside of, had always been standing inside of, the way she had, for one unbearable and clarifying night, been standing inside a vine’s old and patient mind.
She never combined them again. Once had been enough to nearly stop her heart and completely rearrange the rest of her. She kept the memory the way you keep a scar – proof of something real that happened, evidence she was careful not to need again.
Why moral bio-cybernetic/bioenhancement fails at the design document, not the ethics committee.
admin
2,290 words
Proposals to biologically engineer human moral dispositions – to make people more compassionate, more cooperative, less prone to defection – are usually met with ethical objections. Consent. Autonomy. Authenticity. Value lock-in. The long shadow of eugenics.
These objections are serious and several of them are quite decisive. But they are also, in a particular sense, premature. They engage the proposal as though the technical programme were ready and the only remaining question were whether we ought to run it. That framing flatters the proposal. It grants it a maturity it does not have.
There is a more revealing test, and it is the one engineers use on any large proposal before arguing about whether to fund it: **try to write the specification.**
Not a manifesto. Not a research agenda. A design document – the artefact that lets someone else build the thing, and lets a third party check whether it worked. Every field filled in, every acceptance criterion stated, every assumption made explicit enough to be falsified.
When you actually attempt this for moral bioenhancement, something instructive happens. The document does not turn out to be *controversial*. It turns out to be **blank**. And the pattern of which fields are blank is more informative than any of the ethical arguments.
—
The construct problem: you are not turning up a dial
The first field in any specification is: *what, precisely, is being modified?*
“Compassion” is a folk-psychological term. It is not a variable. Before you can build anything you must commit to a decomposition – typically something like an affective component (felt concern at another’s distress), a motivational component (disposition to act at personal cost), a cognitive component (accuracy of your model of the other’s state), a behavioural output (rate and magnitude of costly prosocial acts), and – critically – a **scope function**: to whom does it extend, and how does it decay with social distance?
That last component is where naive versions of the project die.
Human prosociality is not a scalar quantity with a gain knob attached. It is a gradient over social distance: steep and high near kin and in-group, falling off quickly with distance, and effectively flat at the level of statistical strangers. This is why we are simultaneously the species that will run into a burning building for a neighbour and the species that can read a famine death toll over breakfast.
Which means the thing that would actually change outcomes at civilisational scale is not the *amplitude* of caring. It is the **shape of the discount function**. You do not want a higher curve. You want a flatter one.
Nobody has a genetic or neural handle on the shape. And the best-known intervention that raises amplitude appears to make the shape *worse*. Oxytocin spent about a decade as the “moral molecule” before the picture complicated: alongside well-known affiliative effects, a body of work found it strengthening in-group bonding while in some paradigms increasing out-group hostility or defensive aggression. The replication record across this literature is mixed enough that no single result should be leaned on hard. But the direction of the concern is the point. Raising the gain on a parochial system plausibly yields more effective parochialism – more devoted tribalists, better at their tribalism.
There is a second constraint that most versions of the proposal omit entirely: **stability under exploitation**. Any modified disposition must be viable in a mixed population that still contains unmodified defectors. A disposition toward unconditional cooperation is not a stable strategy; it is removed from the population – economically, socially, reproductively – by the people who lack it. Making people kinder inside an unchanged incentive landscape does not produce a kinder world. It produces exploitable people.
So the real target is not “more compassion.” It is something closer to *conditional cooperation, with an unbiased scope function, and with defection-detection and sanctioning capacity fully intact.* That is a much stranger object than the one people imagine. It is also, notably, much closer to what humans already have than to what the proposal would install.
**Status of this field: unresolved – and not primarily as an empirical matter.** It is a conceptual problem that must be settled before measurement is even meaningful.
—
The measurement gate
This is the field that stops the programme, and it stops it completely.
Any intervention specification requires a primary endpoint: a measure with construct validity (it measures the target, not social desirability), test–retest reliability sufficient to detect your expected effect size, sensitivity to within-individual change over the intervention window, resistance to demand characteristics (subjects must not be able to score well by inferring what you want), and ecological validity (it must predict field behaviour, not merely laboratory behaviour).
What actually exists falls into three families, and all three have known, documented problems:
– **Self-report instruments.** Transparently gameable. Correlate substantially with how respondents wish to be seen. – **Economic games** (dictator, ultimatum, public goods, trust). Behaviour in these correlates weakly-to-modestly with real-world prosocial behaviour. The lab-to-field transfer problem here is one of the more uncomfortable open sores in the literature. – **Confederate-based laboratory paradigms.** Better ecological validity, but poor scalability and severe single-use problems – you cannot re-run them on the same subject.
The psychometric reliability of these instruments is nowhere near what would be required to detect the modest effect sizes any realistic intervention would produce.
The comparison that makes this vivid: a cardiovascular intervention has LDL cholesterol as a validated surrogate endpoint, blood pressure as a second, and hard endpoints – infarction, mortality – ascertained at registry scale with near-perfect reliability.
**There is no LDL of compassion. There is no mortality-equivalent hard endpoint.** There is nothing you could enter in the “primary outcome measure” field of a trial registration that a competent reviewer would not reject.
This is not a difficulty. It is a category failure. Without a validated endpoint there is no dose-finding, no efficacy claim, no safety signal, and no way to distinguish a working intervention from a broken one. You would be optimising against a function you cannot evaluate.
—
The causal chain has no established arrows
A specification requires a causal model with every link established and quantified:
What exists is a correlational sketch of one link. The empathy/compassion dissociation work – Singer, Klimecki and colleagues – implicates anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex in empathic distress, and medial orbitofrontal cortex, ventral striatum and affiliation-associated regions in compassion. This is genuinely interesting, and the finding that compassion training increases positive affect while empathy training increases distress and burnout is one of the more useful results in the area.
But it should be read as suggestive, not as a wiring diagram. It is correlational. It is spatially coarse – a functional imaging voxel contains on the order of a million neurons. Sample sizes are typically small, and this subfield has documented reproducibility problems for precisely this class of finding.
What is missing is any **causal** manipulation that reliably, durably, and selectively increases the construct. Oxytocin was the strongest candidate and its literature partially collapsed under replication pressure; even the question of whether intranasal administration achieves meaningful central nervous system delivery remains contested. Contemplative training produces real effects, but modest ones, requiring ongoing practice – a behavioural intervention, not a lever a biological one could be built on.
—
Genetic architecture: no editable targets
For any germline proposal, the specification requires target loci with established causal effect, characterised effect sizes, a complete pleiotropy map, and characterised epistasis and gene–environment interaction.
For prosociality-adjacent traits – agreeableness, self-reported empathy – SNP-based heritability is modest and polygenic scores explain a low single-digit percentage of variance in independent samples. (Treat specific figures as approximate and check current sources; the direction is not in doubt.) The architecture is massively polygenic – thousands of variants of individually negligible effect – heavily pleiotropic, and poorly transferable across ancestries and environments.
Then there is a recursion problem that is rarely acknowledged: **a genome-wide association study is only as good as its phenotype.** Run against the invalid instruments described above, what you recover is the genetic architecture of *scoring highly on a questionnaire*. That is not the target. It may not even be adjacent to the target.
Multiplex editing at the scale of thousands of loci, with uncharacterised epistasis and an unmapped pleiotropy burden, is not a hard engineering problem awaiting effort. It sits outside the space of things currently attemptable.
—
The safety instrument is inside the system it monitors
This is the field I find genuinely novel, and it has no analogue in ordinary medicine.
Post-market drug safety rests on adverse event reporting. Patients notice something has gone wrong and report it. The system assumes the patient’s evaluative faculty is intact and independent of the intervention.
For a values-modifying intervention, that assumption fails by construction. The adverse event class *includes changes to the faculty that generates the report*. If the intervention shifts what a person values, then self-report is compromised as a safety instrument in exactly the failure mode you most need to detect. A population successfully modified toward a particular specification of compassion may no longer contain anyone disposed to recognise the modification as a harm.
You would therefore need an external, non-self-report harm criterion, specified in advance, held by someone outside the modified population. Nobody has (yet…) proposed a workable one.
Note that this is not a philosophical objection dressed up as an engineering one. It is a missing section in the safety file. And it generalises: irreversibility is not merely one cost to be weighed against others, because it removes the mechanism by which anything gets weighed later. Ordinary bad policy is reversed because those harmed by it object. This is the one class of intervention that can eliminate the constituency capable of identifying the error.
—
What the blanks tell us:
Lay the fields out and the completion state is stark. Delivery technology has partial content and active research behind it. Nearly everything else is empty – and the two most upstream fields, construct definition and outcome measurement, are empty in ways that no amount of funding or intelligence resolves from a single location. They are filled by cohorts, instruments, longitudinal data, and decades.
Two things follow.
**First: the ethical objections and the technical emptiness point the same way.** This is worth noticing rather than treating as coincidence. The consent problem, the value lock-in problem, and the pharmacovigilance problem are the same structural fact appearing in three registers – an intervention that alters the evaluator cannot be evaluated by the altered. That the technical specification is blank at precisely the points where the ethics is most troubling is not an accident. It reflects that we do not understand the object well enough to specify it *or* to consent to it.
**Second: the causal premise is probably wrong anyway.** The proposal assumes that destructive collective behaviour is primarily a psychological trait being expressed. But humans are already extraordinarily cooperative by primate standards – we punish unfairness at cost to ourselves, we cooperate with strangers we will never meet again. What competitive systems do is *select* for defection at the level of firms and institutions, largely independent of the dispositions of the people inside them.
The evidence for this is not subtle. When emergency conditions suspend normal procurement controls – competitive tender, due diligence, published contracts, audit trails – fraud losses jump by orders of magnitude. Same population, same dispositions, different controls. Removing the checking is what changes the behaviour.
None of which means dispositions are irrelevant. Some people are cruel, some enjoy it, and the variance is real. But what institutions and norms determine is how much *scope* those dispositions get – whether cruelty is costly or licensed, marginal or ambient. Both halves are true, and the tractable half is the second one. Ostrom’s work on commons governance showed groups solving defection problems through monitoring, graduated sanctions, and local rule-making, with nobody’s psyche altered at all.
And where genuinely catastrophic risk is the concern, it concentrates in a very small number of people with access to weapons systems, engineered pathogens, or critical infrastructure. Screening and constraining that population is orders of magnitude more tractable than modifying a species. It has real problems – who screens the screeners, capture risk – but they are the ordinary problems of institutional design rather than the irreversible rewriting of a lineage.
—
Where the real problem is
If you take the specification exercise seriously, the interesting frontier turns out not to be where the proposal points.
The measurement field is a live, unsolved, genuinely deep problem: how to construct a valid and reliable instrument for a latent construct that resists direct observation, where the act of measurement perturbs the thing measured and the subject has incentive to game the readout.
That is a problem in **measurement theory** more than in biology. Psychology has been notably bad at it – partly because the field’s training does not emphasise what a physicist’s or metrologist’s does: error propagation, calibration, sensitivity limits, distinguishing signal from instrument artefact, and knowing when your resolution cannot support your claim.
Solving it would be valuable regardless of what anyone concluded about enhancement. It is upstream of clinical trials in psychiatry, of policy evaluation, of most of behavioural science. It is where someone with quantitative training would have a genuine edge.
The specification exercise is not, in the end, an argument for despair about the underlying goal. It is a redirection. The document is blank at the top, and the top is where the work is.
So let that work begin.
*Further reading and citations: Persson & Savulescu, ***Unfit for the Future*** (the strongest case for the affirmative); John Harris’s reply on the freedom to fall; Paul Bloom, ***Against Empathy***; Elinor Ostrom, ***Governing the Commons***; Singer & Klimecki on the empathy/compassion dissociation; Habermas, ***The Future of Human Nature***.*
*On the overview effect, DMT, and the non-catastrophic path to a solarpunk civilisation.*
admin
"One thought ever at the fore— That at the Divine Ship, the World, breasting Time and Space, All peoples of the globe together sail, sail the same voyage, are bound to the same destination." - Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892).
*A thesis of speculative philosophy.* —
There is a version of the future that does not require catastrophe first.
It is not guaranteed. It is not even, given current trajectories, particularly probable. But it is possible in a way that matters – not as fantasy, but as a set of principles and practices already being tested in fragments all over the world. Getting there, however, requires something unprecedented: a civilisational shift in consciousness, achieved deliberately, before the alternative makes it unavoidable.
This is an attempt to think seriously about what that shift might look like, and how it might be designed.
—
The Two Roads
Gene Roddenberry was honest about it, even if *Star Trek* usually glossed over the details. The United Federation of Planets – that vision of humanity curious rather than acquisitive, diverse rather than tribal, oriented toward contribution rather than accumulation – does not emerge from gradual enlightened progress. It emerges from the Eugenics Wars, then the Atomic Horror. A period of such comprehensive devastation that the survivors were, in a sense, selected for and radicalised toward cooperation simply because the alternative had been made undeniably, inescapably visible.
The uncomfortable truth embedded in Trek’s own mythology is that civilisations tend to change at the scale required only when the cost of *not* changing becomes viscerally, personally real.
Climate change has a particularly cruel relationship with this dynamic. Most historical crises that produced genuine civilisational change had a quality of sharpness – a moment when the before and after were unmistakable. A war ends. A bomb drops. The catastrophe is legible. You can point to it and say: *that. Never again that.*
Climate change is different in almost every way that makes collective response difficult. It is slow relative to a human attention span but fast relative to civilisational adaptation rate(s). The worst consequences are unevenly distributed – the people with the most power to act face the mildest early consequences, while those facing existential threat right now have the least leverage over global systems. It is causally diffuse; you cannot point to a hurricane and say *that specific molecule of CO2 from that specific decision caused this*. And it interacts with everything else – a climate-driven war wouldn’t announce itself as a climate war. It would look like a water war, a food war, a migration crisis, a failing state. The climate signal buried under layers of proximate causes, each one attracting its own political narrative and its own blame.
This is a crisis specifically designed by its nature to defeat the cognitive and institutional tools humans have developed for responding to crises.
The most plausible bad road isn’t a sudden nuclear exchange over abstract principles. It’s something more gradual and more total: sustained drought across multiple arable farmland bread-baskets simultaneously, food price shocks rippling into political instability, fragile states failing, refugee flows stressing receiving countries into their own crises, nationalist movements taking power in enough places to break the international cooperation that climate response requires – while the feedback loops continue regardless. Not one war but a long, grinding, multi-theatre catastrophe with no clear end because the underlying driver is still operating.
This is not a fringe scenario. It sits somewhere in the central range of projections if current trajectories hold.
And so the question that haunts any honest thinking about the future is whether the non-catastrophic road remains open, and if so, what would have to happen for humanity to take it.
—
A Thought Experiment
Imagine two experiences, offered to every person on Earth within a few years of their twenty-first birthday, as a kind of global coming-of-age ceremony.
When astronauts see Earth from space for the first time, something happens to them that is remarkably consistent across individuals regardless of nationality, religion, or political belief. The planet below appears as it is – borderless, fragile, impossibly beautiful against the void. The tribal distinctions that seemed so urgent and so natural dissolve not through argument but through *seeing*. Edgar Mitchell described it as an instant global consciousness. Ron Garan called it the orbital perspective. What they all seem to be pointing at is the same thing: a felt understanding, not merely an intellectual one, that we share one home, that the lines are fictions, that the whole thing is at once vast and terrifyingly small.
This experience doesn’t require going to space. The images exist. The testimony of hundreds of astronauts exists. Immersive technology has advanced to the point where something close to the cognitive shift can be induced in people who have never left the ground. The effect, when achieved, is neurologically consistent – it hits conservatives and progressives alike, the religious and the secular, the young and the old.
The second experience is DMT.
Or more precisely, a form of it – most likely ayahuasca, or an oral DMT formulation with an MAOI, to allow a longer window and the possibility of integration within the experience itself. Whatever the precise pharmacology, what researchers and participants consistently describe is: encounters with something that feels vastly larger than the self, a dissolution of the ego-boundary between self and world, a sense not of going somewhere new but of *returning* somewhere deeply familiar, and an aftermath of burning questions about the nature of consciousness and reality that can last years or a lifetime.
DMT doesn’t produce a single unified experience – it’s notoriously personal – but there are statistical regularities in what people bring back: a felt sense of radical interconnection, a loosening of defensive ego structures, an expanded temporal horizon, a tendency to find other humans more fascinating and less threatening, and something that functions like a direct encounter with the fact of one’s own mortality and the inexplicable gift of being alive at all.
The hypothesis of the thought experiment is this: if the overview effect is administered first – at, say, eighteen – and several months later the DMT ceremony follows, into a psyche already softened toward interconnection, the combination might produce something culturally unprecedented. A shared, ineffable reference point that almost everyone has but nobody can fully articulate. The thing that mystic traditions across all cultures have always pointed at – the experiential core beneath the dogma, the place where the boundaries of self turn out to be more permeable than advertised – made democratically available, not just to monks and shamans and the neurologically fortunate.
What kind of world might that produce?
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The Ceremony (Initial Ideas):
Before speculating about the world it produces, the ceremony itself deserves serious design attention. Because how it’s done matters at least as much as whether it’s done – a badly designed mandatory ceremony would be an instrument of harm or worse, of control.
A few non-negotiable principles first.
The ceremony must serve the participant, not the state. The moment it becomes propaganda – even well-intentioned propaganda – it poisons the well. The design must actively resist co-option. Preparation is half the ceremony; psychedelic research consistently shows that expectation and context shape experience as much as the molecule itself. Integration is the other half – what happens in the months after is where transformation either takes root or dissipates. Most ceremonial design ignores this. It is the most important part. And the ceremony must feel like a gift, not a test – coercion and transcendence are enemies.
The Preparation: Six Weeks
The ceremony begins weeks before any medicine is taken.
The first two weeks involve a gradual stepping-out from habitual life – a reduction in digital noise, attention to sleep and physical preparation, and a question given to carry rather than to answer: *What am I, beneath everything I’ve been told I am?*
Weeks three and four involve experiential education in small groups deliberately mixed across class, background, and belief. Not lectures – genuine encounter. The actual story of the universe, told not as a science class but as a creation myth that happens to be true. Death education: real, unflinching engagement with mortality, drawn from Buddhist, Stoic, Pragmatic, Secular Humanist, and Indigenous traditions. The recognition that everyone in the room will ‘die’ (they will temporarily become detached from both id and ego, & their sense of self-hood), and that this is the precondition for taking life seriously. A breath-work session – holotropic breathing or similar – to give the participant their first taste of the altered-state terrain and surface anything that might need attention before the ceremony itself.
Week five is a three-to-five day retreat at a dedicated site – ideally natural, human-scaled, beautiful, acoustically rich, with no clocks visible. Long periods of genuine silence. A one-on-one conversation with the guide whose only purpose is witnessing: *What are you carrying into this?* And something made by hand over these days – carved, woven, assembled – not for the object but for the making. It will come with the participant into the ceremony.
The Ceremony: Two Nights, Three Days
Night zero: not space itself, but the closest available analogue. A darkened dome. The participant lies on their back as an immersive recreation of the orbital view unfolds around them – not a video but something more total. Earth rotating below. Blackness above. Silence, then breathing, then the sound of the participant’s own heartbeat played back through the space. A guide speaks occasionally, not narrating but offering a phrase and leaving it to resonate: “There are no lines down there. Every war ever fought happened on that. You came from this. You will return to this…”
Day one: a long walk, several hours, without phones or conversation for the first two hours. The instruction is simply to pay attention to what is actually here. In the afternoon, the group shares – not how they feel, but what they noticed that they usually walk past. In the evening, each person shares the object they made and says something about what it is. The first time in the ceremony the participant is truly witnessed by the group.
Day two is the ceremony itself.
The ceremonial space has been designed with care: warm, fragrant with something that will never be used outside this room (scent is the fastest route to associative memory – this smell will trigger recall of this room for the rest of the participant’s life), lit with candles or firelight, with live music – strings or voice, something organic and breathing.
The guide speaks briefly before the medicine is administered. Not with hype, not with minimisation, but with plain precision: *You may encounter things that feel more real than anything you have encountered before. You may feel fear. You may feel joy beyond what you thought was possible. Both are welcome here. We will be with you throughout. You are safe.*
The medicine is given individually, by the guide, with eye contact and a simple gesture. Not clinical, not theatrical. A moment of genuine recognition between two humans.
During the experience, guides move quietly. Music continues, evolving – beginning with structure and gradually dissolving into something ambient and spacious as participants go deeper, then gently reassembling as they begin to return. No one is rushed. No one is intervened with unless in genuine distress.
The return is not an end but a threshold. Warm drinks, simple food, rest. The ceremony space remains open through the night.
That evening, when everyone has returned, the group gathers one last time. A fire if possible. The instruction: *You don’t have to say anything. But if something wants to be said, this is the place for it.*
Day three is slow. Good food. Bodywork if wanted. One final group session looking not back but forward – not a plan, not goals, but an image: *What does the life you return to look like, in light of what happened here?*
Before leaving, each participant receives two things: a letter they wrote to themselves during preparation, sealed and held until now; and the name of their integration companion – the person they will check in with monthly for the following year.
Integration: One Year
Monthly check-ins, not therapy but structured companionship with someone who has themselves been through the ceremony. A six-month gathering of the original group. At twelve months, a letter written to the person they were before and to a person who hasn’t yet gone through – both archived, some anonymised and shared with future cohorts as testimony.
What the Ceremony Does Not Do
Equally important: the ceremony contains no political content. None. No environmental message, no national identity, no ideology. It goes deliberately beneath the level at which politics operates. No prescribed interpretation – guides are trained to reflect questions back rather than answer them. No hierarchy of experience – the person who saw nothing but darkness for four hours is not a failure. No performance expected – transformation, if it comes, arrives in its own time, often sideways, months later, noticed in retrospect.
And the governance of the ceremony itself must be constitutionally independent – ungovernable by any single state, corporation, or ideology. Built with radical transparency and an explicit adversarial function: a body whose sole job is to look for ways the ceremony is being corrupted and to say so loudly.
The ceremony should, if well designed, produce people who are harder to manipulate – including by the ceremony itself.
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The World It Makes
What kind of civilisation emerges from a generation that has, at the threshold of adulthood, encountered both the overview perspective and the dissolution of ego?
Consider what the Federation’s humans are actually like, when you look carefully. They are curious as a primary drive – not acquisitive. The hunger is to understand and encounter, not to own or dominate. They carry almost no xenophobia despite being surrounded by radical otherness – not as a moral achievement they’re constantly working at, but as something that has become natural. They are comfortable with uncertainty and mystery. They have a complex relationship with ego – ambition exists, conflict exists, but the defensive, fearful, zero-sum quality of ego has been largely metabolised. They find meaning through contribution rather than accumulation.
These are, almost precisely, the consistent psychological outputs of well-integrated psychedelic experience and the overview effect. Roddenberry intuited something real.
The ceremony wouldn’t produce the Federation immediately. But it might produce the generation that builds the generation that builds it.
More specifically:
**The dissolution of scarcity thinking** – not economic scarcity necessarily, but the psychological scarcity that makes people hoard, dominate, and fear. Both experiences tend to produce a felt sense of abundance at some fundamental level – not naively, but as a background orientation. The zero-sum game becomes harder to believe in viscerally.
**Genuine curiosity about otherness** – after an experience that radically defamiliarises your own consciousness, other humans stop being threatening and start being fascinating. The demagogue’s playbook, which depends on enemy construction and dehumanisation, would find much harder soil.
**A longer now** – both experiences tend to expand temporal perception. The present moment becomes richer and more real, and simultaneously the long arc of time becomes more personally felt. A civilisation that thinks in centuries, that plants trees it won’t sit under – that shift begins here.
**Post-heroic courage** – the best characters in Trek are brave not from ego or ideology but from something quieter and more durable. A kind of settled-ness about mortality and meaning that the ceremony, at its best, can catalyse.
None of this is guaranteed. The ceremony is not a conversion. It’s the best possible soil preparation. What grows still depends on the seed and the weather. Some people will integrate their experience into a framework of superiority rather than humility. Some will use transcendence to avoid engaging with the world – “everything is one” as a reason not to fight injustice. The design must anticipate this and build counter-pressures.
But the capacity for the shift is already present in the species. It doesn’t need to be invented. It needs to be activated – at a scale and speed that has no historical precedent but is not, in principle, impossible.
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Solarpunk: The Aesthetic of the World That Follows
If the ceremony works on the interior – dissolving the psychological structures that make ecological destruction feel acceptable or inevitable – then solarpunk is what the exterior might look like when built by people with that different interior.
Solarpunk is frequently misunderstood as simply green aesthetics: solar panels and vertical gardens and linen clothing. The aesthetic is real and matters. But underneath it are deeper commitments.
Decentralisation as a value – not just of energy production but of decision-making, food production, knowledge, and care. Technology as appropriate and embedded – chosen carefully, with the question always being whether it serves life and community or extracts from them. High-tech and low-tech coexisting without hierarchy, because a mesh network and a seed library are equally sophisticated responses to real needs. The repair and maintenance ethic – the recognition that the most sustainable technology is the one you can fix yourself, that you understand, that connects you to material reality rather than abstracting you from it. Genuine pluralism – not a monoculture of linen and bicycles but a federated diversity of communities, approaches, and aesthetics, held together by shared values around care and ecological embeddedness. And joy as a political category – perhaps the most radical element – the insistence that the transition to a sustainable civilisation should be *desirable*, not merely necessary.
Morning in a solarpunk city feels like a market town that has absorbed the best of urban density without the alienation. There is noise – the noise of people and birds and water and wind in photovoltaic canopies, not engines. Buildings are covered in things that grow: not as decoration but as food, insulation, habitat, air. The boundary between indoors and outdoors is genuinely porous.
Food is local enough that you know, roughly, where it came from and who tended it. Not because of political commitment but because the system is designed so that this is simply true. Eating is understood as a relationship with land and season rather than a transaction.
Work has been reorganised around contribution rather than employment. Automation has eliminated drudgery without the fruits being captured entirely by capital, because the governance structures – built by the post-ceremony generation – managed the transition differently than pure market logic would have. People work fewer hours in the sense of obligated toil and many more hours in the sense of purposeful making. The boundary between work and craft, work and care, work and art has blurred in ways that feel like freedom.
Conflict still exists. Communities disagree. Resources are contested. People fail each other. But the register of conflict has changed – it tends to be about genuine competing goods rather than zero-sum domination. The tools for working through it are more sophisticated, more embedded in daily life, more practised.
Children grow up with a completely different relationship to the natural world – not as background to human activity but as the medium in which human life is embedded. A generation that has caught insects, grown food, watched seasons, understood weather as the breath of the living system they’re part of – that generation doesn’t need to be convinced of ecological values. They are ecologically literate in a way that genuinely changes behaviour.
And night in this city is darker than we’re used to. The light pollution has been dramatically reduced – partly for ecological reasons and partly because someone, at some point, made the political case that being able to see the stars is not a luxury. It is, in fact, precisely what the ceremony’s first movement was designed to invoke. A civilisation that can see the Milky Way from its cities is a civilisation that is regularly reminded of its context.
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The Aesthetic as Ethics
One of solarpunk’s deepest insights is that beauty is not frivolous – it is structural.
Ugly environments produce alienated people. Disposable aesthetics produce disposable ethics. When nothing around you is made with care, it becomes harder to practise care. When everything is designed for efficiency over beauty, the message encoded in the built environment is that beauty is not worth the cost – and that message is absorbed below the level of argument.
Solarpunk insists on beauty not as luxury but as moral infrastructure. The mosaic on the water recycling building, the hand-carved details on the community hall, the way the park was designed so that it’s glorious in February not just in July – these are not decorations. They are the environment continuously telling its inhabitants: *you are worth beauty. This place is worth care. The future is worth building well.*
This is very close to what the ceremony is doing at the individual level – giving people a felt experience of being worth care, of being embedded in something worth cherishing. The solarpunk built environment is the ceremony’s values made permanent and public.
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The Honest Difficulty
The distance between here and there is real and should not be romanticised.
The timing problem is perhaps the most painful. The ceremony works on the young – people at the threshold of adulthood. The cohort that goes through it in its first decade of operation is not the cohort currently making decisions about coal plants, deforestation, carbon pricing, and international climate agreements. Those decisions are being made right now by people in their fifties, sixties, seventies, shaped by entirely different formative experiences in a world with different stakes. The ceremony is a generational intervention. Its fruits come in thirty or forty years. Whether thirty or forty years is soon enough is not comfortable to sit with.
There are genuine tensions within the solarpunk vision too. Decentralisation can produce parochialism. Community can produce conformity. The emphasis on local and craft can slide into exclusivity. And the infrastructure of the current world – physical, economic, psychological – has enormous inertia. The people who profit from that inertia are not going to release it gracefully. The transition, even in the optimistic version, involves loss, disruption, and genuine sacrifice.
And the deepest tension: enforced transcendence may be a contradiction in terms. Both experiences tend to produce genuine freedom – freedom from the small, anxious, defended self. But mandating them introduces an element of control that might undercut exactly what makes them transformative. The Zen tradition has a phrase for forced enlightenment: it doesn’t exist.
And yet. We already have mandatory education, mandatory military service in many countries, mandatory vaccines. We already shape citizens. The question is only *toward what*. This ceremony says: toward a direct encounter with the fact that you are small, temporary, connected, and inexplicably here.
There are, perhaps, worse things to mandate.
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What the Ceremony Is Really For
The Federation’s humans didn’t get there through legislation or ideology. In Trek’s mythology it took First Contact – the shock of genuine otherness dissolving remaining tribalism almost overnight. The experience of suddenly knowing, viscerally, that you are not alone in the universe, that you are small, that you are part of something vast.
The ceremony is trying to engineer that shift without requiring the catastrophe first. To give people the cognitive and emotional equivalent of First Contact – with the cosmos, with their own consciousness, with the radical contingency of being alive – while they’re still young and plastic enough to build their lives around what they encounter.
What climate change demands of humanity is genuinely unprecedented: delayed gratification at civilisational scale; genuine identification with strangers across geography, culture, and time; systemic thinking over narrative thinking; willingness to be wrong and update quickly. These are not impossible human capacities. They exist. They show up in individuals, in communities, in moments of genuine crisis and solidarity. But they are not currently the default – they require effort, education, and usually some precipitating experience that makes them feel necessary.
The overview effect and well-integrated psychedelic experience are, among the limited tools available, probably the most reliable known methods for installing these capacities as a default orientation rather than an effortful achievement.
Which means the ceremony isn’t just a nice idea about human flourishing. It might be – or something like it might be – among the more serious proposals for whether the non-catastrophic path remains open at all.
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Still Available
The most realistic thing to hope the ceremony produces is not enlightened beings but people for whom the *attempt at goodness* feels natural and worth making. People who, when they fall short of their own ideals, recognise it as falling short rather than rationalising it as inevitable.
That is, perhaps surprisingly, not far from where we already have access to. There are already young people – more than the headlines suggest, because conflict and outrage make better copy than patient construction – who seem to have arrived at something like this orientation without any ceremony. Who feel the planetary crisis personally. Who think in longer timescales. Who find tribalism not just wrong but boring. Who are building things quietly.
The solarpunk future is less a destination to arrive at than a direction to move in. And movement in a direction, sustained and intelligent and honest about obstacles, is how all the futures that ever got built actually got built.
The beautiful version – the one with the dark nights full of stars, and the buildings breathing with green, and the children who know where their food comes from, and the elders who are genuinely valued, and the work that feels like craft, and the conflicts that are about real competing goods rather than manufactured fear – that version is not guaranteed.
But it is still available.
And sometimes that is enough –
Enough people, sufficiently awake to what is at stake and what is possible, who cannot quite bring themselves to let the beautiful version go.
The ceremony, in the end, is just a way of making enough people that kind of awake.
The rest, as it has always been, is up to us.
Towards a brighter, healthier, compassionate future…
*This essay emerged from a conversation about consciousness, ceremony, Star Trek, and the future we might still choose. It is an attempt to think seriously about non-catastrophic paths to civilisational change – and about the tools, both ancient and modern, that might help us find one.*
