On Hope in Speculative Fiction

I was recently asked the question “Would you say that this is a hopeful film?” at a film festival q&a regarding my latest science fiction animation. I sensed from the person asking the question that they truly wished my answer to be “yes.”

The short answer is indeed yes . . . but I hope you will keep reading in spite of my jump to the punchline, because that yes is somewhat of a complicated yes.

This animation, “Revelation to the Disembodied,” depicts a highly speculative future, one in which fragments of a collective post-human dream construct a world that straddles hyper-technological, ecological, and mythological dimensions. On its surface, the animation plays with the transhuman concept of uploading one’s consciousness to an online environment. But this idea of mind-uploading is only useful as a metaphor.

the luminous object at the end of time from “Revelation to the Disembodied”

Personally, I find the idea of uploading my consciousness to an online environment after my physical form decides to tap out a complete nightmare. Who would pay for my consciousness “domain” after I die? What happens if the terms and conditions to whomever I entrust my digital soul change? Also, I can’t imagine spending thousands of years as André Silva. A normal human life span is enough.

But, I digress.

Back to the idea of hope. What does a hopeful future look like, really? If I am to be perfectly honest, from the perspective of my animal body that wants to survive, hope really means that I - hope - things get “better” on personal, local and global levels, but that there isn’t such an existential rift that my entire sense of reality is pulled out from under me. I would guess that most of the world shares the same sense of “hope.” Despite how miserable things can get sometimes, our perspective on the world is what we know. It’s how we can frame things.

But what if a hopeful future is one in which our fundamental sense of ourselves must cease to exist - or at least cease to take center stage - in order for our collective future to be sustainable? For example, what if, in the words of John Lennon’s song “Imagine” the world does evolve to “live as one” - literally. That sounds nice on paper until you realize that for all the world (not just humans but also non-human animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, etc.) to literally live as one, we individuals must cease to be individuals. We even cease to think like humans since we would merge consciousness with all the other life forms. What if the Earth does evolve into a single conscious organism? And what if this is ultimately the only hope for the sustainability of our planet? On the individual level, in which we each exist and navigate and understand the world, this could easily be terrifying, let’s be honest. It could be fascinating - but also terrifying.

In another scenario of hope, microscopic life could manage to escape Earth and hitch a ride on some human created space probe. The probe eventually lands on a planet where the microbes thrive. Over time, more complex life forms emerge from these microscopic beings and during the next few billion years on this alien planet, a complex network of ecosystems emerge. Meanwhile, some near future cataclysm (human-created or otherwise) causes the extinction of all life on Earth. This second scenario presents a very hopeful story for our home planet in terms of Earth’s ability to spread life to other planets. It’s of course not so hopeful for us insofar as we identify with our individual containers rather than part of a larger biological organism - part of which escapes our home planet and finds life elsewhere.

This second scenario, by the way, is not some loosely-veiled justification for the desire of some billionaires to colonize Mars. Both scenarios are more about radical shifts in the way life in general is organized so that everyone - billionaires and non-billionaires alike - are equally subject to the same existential rifts.

So to me, true hope represents something, not outside myself, but meta to myself. Individual André - hopes - that I can still get my groceries delivered to my doorstep, if I want, and access the library of the modern world through my phone - while making all this environmentally sustainable. I, André Silva, hope that we can find completely sustainable and renewable energy sources and can figure out a way to create those smart phones without mining rare earth metals. But what all that really comes down to is that I want all the stuff I have now, but I want it without any side effects. And thus, isn’t that type of hope just a pacifier? It’s only natural, at least from an individual perspective, that we hope like this. We hope we somehow figure it out - that our future is bright. But what if meta hope has something else in mind. What if in order for life to go on, our current understanding of reality, our current senses of self, has to die?

These are some of the ontological questions with which “Revelation to the Disembodied” wrestles. Essentially, when what we do know - or even how we are able to know - gives us a limited view of future possibilities, none of which seems especially bright, things that lie outside our current ability to even conceive of them could provide solutions.

“Isn’t it funny. You can see so much further in the dark,” one character muses toward the end of “Revelation,” hinting at this idea.

My dog lays beside me, aware that I am looking at a glowing rectangle while wiggling my fingers on an array of squares below the rectangle, but understands nothing about the operating system behind this device or its ability to transmit and receive information from great distances. What metaphorical glowing rectangles are in our presence that we haven’t yet figured out? Though it may signal an obliteration of our current way of understanding the world, therein may lie the hope.