Anti Transhumanist Wisdom on Battlestar Gallactica

In Marshall McLuhan’s vast television wasteland that is getting vaster and more wasted with each passing year, there are a few shining examples of true excellence. Perhaps the best show on television today—and one of the best ever—is Battlestar Gallactica, a program that like the best science fiction explores the most meaningful issues of human existence and societal complexity.

For those who don’t know: the premise of the show is that human beings made millions of robots known as cylons that developed artificial intelligence. The cylons decide to wipe out the human race because of our defects and all but succeed in a suprise nuclear attack.

The last 40,000 humans escape in a ragtag spaceship fleet led by the obsolete war “battlestar” called Gallactica. Eventually, in desperation, the fleet strikes out for their mythical planet of origin—Earth—their enemy hot on their tails.

The cylons were able to infiltrate into human society—and the escaping fleet—because they developed 9 “models” that look and feel human—with the women super hot in order to attract the teenage boy (and middle age man) crowd. What’s more, the “human” cylons can’t die. If one is killed, it is resurrected, memories intact, in a vat on a resurrection ship: A transhumanist’s most devout fantasy! Come to think of it, cylons are transhumanists: They are post human, fully conscious, enhanced, and immortal.

One of the latest twists in the tale has been a civil war breaking out among the cylons, with the rebels now working with the humans. A plan is afoot to destroy the core resurrection ship, meaning that cylons will become mortal, just like us. To sell the plan to a doubting governing council, “Six” one of the cylons, gives a short speech. It struck me that it was worth transcribing and posting here, because shades of Leon Kass, it rebukes the transhumanist fundamental goal of material immortality:

In our civil war, we’ve seen death. We’ve watched our people die: Gone forever. As terrible as it was, beyond the reach of the resurrection ship, something began to change.

We could feel a sense of time, as if each moment held its own significance. We began to realize that for our existence to hold any value, it must end. To live meaningful lives, we must die and not return.

The one human flaw that you spend your lifetimes distressing over—mortality—is the one thing; it’s the thing that makes you whole.

This is hard but true, isn’t it? I know that as I approach my 59th birthday, my focus has certainly sharpened. My father is dead. My grandmother is dead. My mother is almost 91 and my heart trembles. But Six is right. Death’s awful shadow gives corporeality its magnificent power. And as we struggle to delay that awful day for ourselves and those we love, death also gives us a reason to grasp the joy and search for transcendence and ultimate meanings—even among those who deny there is any meaning to be found.

Death is important for what it gives us as well as what it takes away. And that is where the transhumanism goes so badly off the rails. There may be an immortal existence, but it isn’t—and shouldn’t be—here.