Lunar travels, earthly travails: from our fictional science correspondent. What different choices will our technology offer us?

I recently traveled to the moon to get a better view of things. Not with Space-X or Virgin Lunar or other such transport, but by a method I cannot specify. What I mean is I cannot explain it precisely, and physicists and engineers would only quibble at my lack of attention to details.

It was not my first trip to the moon, either. And like any regular visitor to distant places, I have my familiar haunts, the corners of the city, so to speak, that have become comfortable to me and where I am recognized and can start up a conversation.

It may surprise you to hear of inhabitants of the moon, but I assure you they are there and have learned a thing or two about humanity. Whether they are rational beings or rational animals, as we sometimes consider ourselves, it is hard for me to tell; they simply know how to ask good questions and listen attentively. Perhaps in these respects they already trump our kind, but I have begun to digress.

During this recent visit, they asked me what people were excited to know about. In this exchange, I mentioned the TED talks that folks consider to offer cutting-edge ideas. What does TED mean? they asked. I had to think for a minute – in fact, I had to check my smartphone – before replying that it stood for Technology, Entertainment, Design, a venue for the world’s leading thinkers and doers. How curious, my acquaintances said.

“Why so?”

“For is the world mainly thinking about these things?”

“Why yes – and no,” I said, somewhat uncertain. “These are subjects one mainly sees advertised, or are considered popular.”

My lunar colleagues were disappointed. They had thought our earthly interests far more varied. Tell us some poetry, they demanded. I had come to expect this request — it had become a regular part of my visits — so I recited the sonnet, “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought”:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancelled woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanished sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor’d and sorrows end.

When I had finished, there was a long silence. Then one of them said, “I like the phrase, ‘for precious friends hid in death’s dateless night.’ For even though we do not know death, it must be on your main preoccupations on earth.”

“Indeed it has been, but there are those aiming to overcome it.”

My listeners looked astounded, first at me and then at one another. Who are these people, they asked? They’re called transhumanists, I said. And at this point they all began to laugh. Laughter is very common on the moon, another of its distinguishing features. After they calmed down, they said, “Do you mean there are humans who aim to be more than human?”

“Why no – and yes,” I said again, to my embarrassment. “They think that humanity is perfectible, malleable, able to overcome its own nature.”

“Is this a new idea?”

“Why no, a thinker named Rousseau spoke of human nature this way more than 200 years ago. What’s different is the transhumanists’ belief that technology can extend our lives, make us live longer in greater health, perhaps indefinitely.”

“They should give TED talks,” one of them said.

“I’m sure they have.”

“But,” another asked, “has any of your philosophers or poets declared the end of death’s dateless night, or even considered it possible?”

“Not that I know of,” I said. “In fact, they have called death ‘Life’s high mead,’ its finest drink, or have spoken about learning how to die as the key philosophical lesson, or wondered, as did the Greek hero Achilles, whether to choose a short brilliant life over a long undistinguished one.”

“So,” they asked after a pause, “for these technologists and transhumanists: are these writers and thinkers still important? And what of your earthly religions: does it still make any sense to speak of life after death?”

I no longer recall what I said in reply. I do remember their laughter ringing out again, and my promise to visit them again soon.