Humans As Mollusks
Humans evolved as planes animals: long-distance joggers surveying a distant horizon for prey, predators, their own kin — anything at all. So all our built transportation betrays this conceit.
Even with the technology of flight, we don’t loose the horizon until we are very high up, and the natural distortion of our height causes it to curve, as if we were exiting a fish-eye lens. But when we finally exit stratosphere, the bubble closes behind us, and we can look at what we were encased in. That flat highlight in the distance, dividing sky from ground, where we are the figure in a figure-ground relationship, is nullified when we are outside the bubble. And we loose out on all its effects that were the original parameters for our evolution: gravity, air, pressure. What prey is there to search for in an endless void? What food?
We’ll feel a deep unease that bubbles up within us, only nearly matching the fear a sailor might have when thrown overboard at sea, and for a moment they glimpse the seemingly infinite bottom beneath them. But the sailor’s experience is merely a simulation. As soon as they bob back up, there is the horizon again, and the domed sky above. They’ve lost the ground only, one of three parts of their immediately personal cosmology. And even that, really, they know, has a bottom. The ocean may be unfathomably deep, but it is not endless.
How do we deal with the cosmic void? How do we grapple with its total lack of figure-ground? The old Norse called this place Ginnungagap, the abyss predating creation. Plato referenced it as khôra: the interlude between the civil and the untamed. The Hebrew word tehom describes the “primordial waters” in Genesis. All of these hint at the true “wine-dark sea,” not just a physicality but a concept, full of potential, but in its nihilistic chaos, fearsome, all consuming, without care for us. It is an eldritch thing, without empathy. And it’s endless as long as we’re light-bound beings. Once we’ve submerged ourselves upward beyond the barrier that divides the sky and the inky, silent heavens, we don’t bob back down. We keep going. There is no alternative to the horizon we had before: no markings but the constellations, and even those will shift the further we go in, albeit it takes a light-year or two. There is no truly static anchor here.
So our whole conception of what is a reasonable ship changes in deep space. We’re no longer building caravels that fly, like airplanes. Even those vehicles are familiar to the sailor: without an immediate ground, but inferring an ultimate bottom all the same. What ship would that sailor fashion if they truly forgot the horizon, had no benefit of a figure-ground relationship at all? What would they build if they lost all preconceived analogies from our evolutionary heritage, but nonetheless had to work within biological limitations?
A human is a squishy thing. It has an endoskeleton, unlike the insect. But where arthropods are ultimately limited in growth scope because they would collapse under the weight of their own skeleton if they got much larger, a human can augment itself, both mentally and technologically. They can build a shell around their body — and it must be around, because by building “around” rather than “on,” they make their own presence the center object, the radial point, the locus of their own externalized logic. They have no ground, physical or metaphorical or otherwise, to build “on.” So they take for a foundation the nearest thing they can predict: their self.
In this way, we should build our new kind of space ship, but we shouldn’t take for granted the new kind of logic this format gives us. The ship is the human city, our own caravel against the gap. And the gap surrounds us from all sides, so we must build the bottom of the ship to face every side. It is radial — without sides at all, and certainly without top or bottom. It is like a shell.
Imagine them like one of those deep sea jellyfishes, or even better, like the Nautilus — a soft bodied thing curled in on itself, only yielding its head at the very end of the coil, where it protrudes a number of sensors like fingers to probe the abyss outside. It is a defensive form — and, interestingly, very ancient.
It’s a romantic irony that humanity’s far future may look more like its distant past than a more predictable progression of its present.
