Why These Topics — C.E. Holden

As a child, I was inspired by Hari Seldon — Asimov's mathematician who develops psychohistory, a discipline that can predict the behavior of large populations across centuries. Seldon uses it to try to shorten the inevitable collapse of galactic civilization from thirty thousand years to one thousand. He is not trying to stop the collapse. He understands it cannot be stopped. He is trying to reduce the suffering on the other side of it. Seldon was the hero of that story. I still believe that.

But here is what I noticed, eventually: the Foundation series never really covers the people who caused the collapse. The Galactic Empire falls across thousands of years and billions of decisions and no single person, no single moment, no identifiable villain. Asimov understood something true about how civilizations decline — that it is almost never one person's fault, almost never one catastrophic choice. It is the accumulation of reasonable decisions made by people who were, individually, trying to do the right thing. The collapse happens in the aggregate, not in any individual act.

That is the part that stayed with me. That is what I wanted to write about.

The fertility crisis is real, and largely unspoken. Birth rates are falling across the developed world — in some countries, below the threshold required to sustain population. COVID made viscerally clear that death spreads. Social media has made equally clear that ideas spread, that memes spread, that belief itself can move through a population like a pathogen. We watch things go viral every day without thinking very hard about the metaphor we are using.

I decided to ask a different question: what if something spread life?

Not death — life. What if the thing that crossed between species and populations wasn't a virus that killed, but something that extended? What would that do to the planet, to civilization, to the question of who deserves more time? The fertility crisis tells us that people are already choosing not to reproduce at replacement rates. What happens when they can also choose not to die?

It turns out this is not purely a hypothetical. Bryan Johnson spends $2 million a year trying not to die. He is not alone. The longevity research community — serious scientists, serious money, serious ambition — is working on the problem of human mortality with the same intensity previous generations brought to flight, or computing, or the atom. Aubrey de Grey has spent decades arguing that aging is a disease, and that diseases can be cured. Altos Labs, funded in part by Jeff Bezos, is studying cellular reprogramming. The serious people are taking this seriously. They will probably make progress.

Sam Altman is building systems that learn from human thought at a scale no individual human can comprehend. The people funding and building these systems are, by and large, genuinely trying to help. They are also making decisions that will shape civilization for centuries — on timelines measured in quarters, with accountability structures designed for software products, not for species-level consequences.

Elon Musk is building Neuralink — a brain-computer interface that will, if it works as designed, allow the human mind to merge with digital systems. Musk has said explicitly that the goal is to achieve a symbiosis between human and artificial intelligence, to prevent humanity from being left behind as AI advances. He may be right. It is entirely possible that the merger of human and machine intelligence is not the risk — that it is, in fact, the only thing that saves us. That is not a comfortable thought. It is also not obviously wrong.

Even the Vatican is paying attention. In 2002, Pope John Paul II warned against what he called a "Promethean attitude" — the belief that technology could allow humanity to transcend its own nature. In 2022, Pope Francis issued a document on transhumanism, acknowledging that the Church must engage seriously with questions about human enhancement, digital consciousness, and what it means to be made in the image of God when the image is becoming negotiable. When the Vatican is engaging seriously with a question, the question has arrived.

Becoming More of Less begins with a woman who loved her dog and found something on the internet that worked. The longevity prion at the center of the book is not the product of malice or hubris. It is the product of love. The consequences — ecological collapse, civilizational fracture, the question of who deserves more time — follow from that single act of love with a logic I tried to make as rigorous as I could, across 150 years and three generations.

I am not arguing that we should stop. I do not think we can stop, and I am not sure we should. I am arguing that it matters — genuinely, urgently matters — to think through what we are building toward. Not just the upside. The whole thing.

Nobody caused the fall of the Galactic Empire. Nobody will cause whatever comes next. But somebody is deciding, right now, what the next chapter looks like. It seems worth paying attention.

This is what the trilogy is for. And I'll occasionally write essays here about the world it is trying to imagine, as that world continues to build itself around us in real time.