Is the future a male or female superorganism?
And the different means of getting off the planet
This might be the most important question nobody’s asking. For better or worse, this post might be the most bizarre you’ll read in a while. Read this as a piece of theory-fiction.
To Elon Musk, we are male. According to this view, humanity is collectively masculine. We embody this maleness when we fly inside long metal tubes toward Mars like spermatozoa swimming toward an egg.
The Christian view is we’re female. More specifically, Christ’s followers collectively become his bride. You might even say the cathedral is the wedding gown.
Which view is right?
Christ’s bride, and the next stage of evolution
The Christian view doesn’t stop at just the bride. The story of Jesus is like Musk’s plan, but in reverse. Instead of us landing on Mars, God comes down to earth to give Mary a child. At the end of his life, Christ is buried in a tomb. Metaphorically, it’s a double conception. The first being with Mary, and the second being with the earth. And in this case, the earth is the metaphorical egg, not Mars.
When Christ talks about his bride, he’s talking about a body made up of many people—a superorganism. When he talks about a rebirth, you could say he’s talking about his own second conception, and the re-birth that happens through it.
My reading is that Christ’s goal is to get us to get humanity to make a similar jump to the one that tool life on earth from single cells to multi-cellular organisms.
It’s a big jump, and his claim (imo) is this all starts with him. And from the second conception, the next stage of evolution will unfold. It’s not merely a story of individual salvation, a speciation event, or finding the divine spark within, but the creation of new kind of life form.
I hope you’re seeing how significant this idea is. I might not be the only one to see it this way, but I haven’t seen this idea posited anywhere (not that I’ve looked).
If the earth has been implanted with a superorganism by none other than Jesus himself—that’s a pretty wild claim, right? And the ramifications of this claim are vast.
If the future of humanity is a superorganism, then we start asking: what does this organism want? Who’s part of it? Can there be more than one bride for Christ? What principles does it live by? Does it reproduce? If so, how? What are its organs? How are they built and repaired, etc?
I won’t get into these questions in this post, but you get the idea.
Once you conceptualize Christian religion as creating a superorganism, you start asking yourself a very different set of questions than if you’re talking about individual salvation. The wheat and the chaff become (potentially) the skin cells or the embryonic sack. Christ’s message starts to have a visceral, literal, and embodied interpretation. Heaven and hell are no longer abstract places, but come to life in brilliant 4K HDR. We can begin to actually map out both heaven and hell, and are no longer constrained by a veil of ignorance.
Getting off the planet (space, or interdimensional travel?)
Say we’re thinking of heaven literally, as up (outer space). The Musk view would tell us that we send our seed out into the universe, and if there is a “heaven”, it’s among the literal stars. Very simple.
In the Christian view, if anything leaves earth, what would it be? It could be the newborn superorganism. Or it could be the adult form (a bride). Or even, a child of the bride. So there are a few ways it could play out.
The standard Christian view is that heaven is supernatural. If that’s the case, then we can still imagine it in somewhat natural terms. Maybe this heaven is something like teleportation, a wormhole, or some kind of multi-dimensional whatchamacallit.
Eric Weinstein seems to subscribe to this view. He wants to get off the planet, but doesn’t want to do it with rockets. He believes maybe new physics will get us there. If he’s right, then maybe we can open the womb and push ourselves out into this new world we might call heaven.
Heaven as outer space
The other possibility is that there is no escape to another dimension. Instead, heaven is just outer space. I have two branches to this view.
One possibility is a body starts forming on “Mother Earth”. And when we go to space, this could be seen as some kind of birth. The problem with this view is that we don’t get a full body going into outer-space. Instead, it’s a small number of people. If we go out to Mars, you might say that food and supplies sent to this colony would be like mother’s milk.
Another possibility is that earth is not exactly a womb. Maybe the earth is seeded like before, but the “bride” grows up over time, and when she’s ready, Christ comes back to earth to “separate the wheat from the chaff”, and his bride is this metaphorical wheat. In this view, the planet may not be a giant egg at all. Instead, earth is a place for the wedding.
According to this view, the collapse of the Roman Empire could be the prophesied “birthing pains” and what we will face next is a second coming where Christ unites with his bride.
Troubles
If the wedding is the next step, then this might call into question whether Christ really is a seed implanted in the earth at all since this could suggest an incestuous relationship. Still, it’s hard to say such an act would be wrong. After all we’re dealing with superorganisms here, not individuals, and this cosmic sex is more like an abstract concept anyways.
Reconciling the male and female superorganisms
In any case, suppose the baby-making happens later. If so, how? So if we have the body of Christ, and this body on earth is female, then where is Christ, the male counterpart? And how would Christ manifest himself?
It’s all very confusing because… would Jesus have to be another superorganism? If so, would that mean that the male counterpart is also made of human beings? It seems like we’re having to jump through too many hoops to make the “future is female” vision of the future coherent at all. Musk’s vision is obvious and straightforward, and my religious one looks like a mountain of speculation by comparison.
But what if we incorporate Musk’s view into this vision? His rockets will give us the Christ superorganism. Then, this superorganism will eventually return back to earth after many hundreds or thousands of years and save those who are meant to be saved. This would make sense because we don’t have to imagine any kind of inter dimensional heaven.
This vision also gives us an idea of what “hell” would be. Anyone left on earth at this point is doomed to burn up. But why would this male figure (Christ) need to come back to save his bride? Couldn’t we just take care of the earth a little better and prevent something like this from happening? Not really. The sun is predicted to eventually expand into a red giant. But long before that, it will increase in luminosity by 10% 1 billion years from now. The oceans will evaporate and leave us with a place that really does resemble what we might conceive of as eternal torment in hell (source).
I’m painting a terrible picture for the fate of the world. The prophesy of this birth and wedding suggests that earth will be put to waste, and there’s nothing we can do about it. And Christianity is quite clear in predicting the end of this planet. And this end also makes sense because tragedy of the commons is unavoidable. There are a couple resources that we all share: water and air. And the economics would eventually dictate that we’d eventually use them up.
Anyhow, once this female counterpart is also taken up, presumably what will be left is the superorganism’s placenta. Or maybe the single-cell organisms. But even single-cell organisms isn’t a great answer because our bodies have good bacteria. So it’s possible that the superorganism will have its own “good bacteria” and these will be individual and autonomous human beings who live within the larger body.
So, is the human race fundamentally driven by this masculine drive to plant our rockets into the apparently desolate (but actually fertile) planets and populate the universe, or are we driven by a feminine force?
It seems to me the answer is both.
Related:
This was, in fact, one of the weirdest pieces I came across in quite some time. Exquisite!