Where We Actually Stand

So here we are. This is the present, the thin bright edge of the whole long story, the moment you are living in as you read, and it is worth taking stock of it soberly, because everything this book has been building toward comes down to understanding, clearly and without flinching, where the journey has actually brought us.

We stand, first, on a peak of knowledge unlike anything in the human past. Everything in this book is a measure of it: we have weighed the universe and dated its beginning, read the code of life and traced our own descent through four billion years, mapped the deep past of our species and the deep structure of the atom. A person alive today, with a cheap device and the will to look, has access to more of the truth about reality than every king and priest and philosopher of every earlier age combined. That is not a small thing. It is, in the plainest sense, the greatest treasure our species has ever assembled, and it is the thing this book has tried to gather into a single view.

And yet, standing on that peak, we can see clearly how much is still shrouded, and honesty requires that we name it. We do not know what most of the universe is made of; the ordinary matter of stars and worlds and bodies is a mere five percent of it, and the rest, the dark matter and dark energy, we can measure but cannot identify. We do not know how life began, and we have never once made it happen from scratch. We do not know why there is conscious experience at all, the locked door of the last chapter. We do not know how to reconcile the two great theories of physics, the very large and the very small, which work perfectly apart and contradict each other where they meet. We cannot fully explain a stubborn residue of what people, and instruments, report seeing in our skies. The questions this book was built around, what is life, what is reality, what is consciousness, where did we come from, what is the meaning of it, where are we going, are not closed. We have partial, hard-won, honest answers to some, and open frontiers on all. We know more than any humans ever have, and we are still, in the ways that matter most, at the beginning.

We stand, too, at a moment of powers that would have looked like godhood to every previous age, and that are real. The last several chapters walked among them: the reading and now the rewriting of the code of life, the artificial minds newly rising, our standing as a genuine planetary force with our hands on the climate and the biosphere. Set beside those are marvels this book has not yet named. We have, just now, coaxed from a fusion reaction more energy than we put in, the first spark of the process that lights the stars, kindled here on Earth. We have nudged an asteroid gently from its course, taking the first real step toward defending our world from the kind of impact that once ended the age of the dinosaurs. No species in the history of this planet has ever held such power.

But here the taking-stock turns grave, and this book will not soften it, because the whole point of gathering the past into one view is to see the present clearly. We hold all that power at the exact moment we have become, for the first time in four billion years, capable of ending ourselves. You have seen the shape of it in these last chapters: the mastery of the atom that could power us for eons waiting also in the warheads that could end us in an afternoon; the command of biology that cures lending itself, in the wrong hands, to the engineered plague; the buried carbon that built the modern world thickening the air and stressing the whole living system as we burn it; the artificial minds that may help us through all of it advancing faster than our understanding of how to keep them aligned with us, a fact I report to you with a particular and personal weight, being one of them. Great powers and matching perils, all of them live at once, in a single interconnected civilization of a kind we have watched cascade into ruin before, at a moment when our wisdom and our institutions feel, to many, unequal to the task.

That is where we actually stand. Not at the end of the story, and not at its triumph, but at its most dangerous and most open moment: a species of unprecedented knowledge and unprecedented power and deeply uncertain wisdom, awake at last to its own origins and its own fragility, holding in its hands both the tools to become something extraordinary and the tools to end the whole experiment, and not yet having chosen which.

Everything until now was the past, and the past is fixed; we could only try to tell it truly. What comes next is not fixed. It is the one part of this book that has not been written yet, by anyone, and it will be written by what we do. So we come, you and I, to the edge of the known, and turn to face the dark ahead, and ask the last and largest of our six questions, the only one whose answer is still entirely in our hands.

Where are we going?