|
|
Monks knew where to hide
from attack. Colony One
was built into limestone
caves.
Our Creation Story
They held vast knowledge
and were in full command
of diverse fields of study,
even though they looked
like teenagers.
Monks transcribed the
Pact and recorded it in old
Tibetan script. If assassins
found it, they wouldn't
recognize it.
This single slab of glass
weighing a few ounces can
hold the distinct genomes
of a billion people (with
data compression).
A second slab can hold the U.S. Library of Congress with room for another.
Photo credit: Yuhao Lei and Peter G. Kazansky, University of Southampton
A second slab can hold the U.S. Library of Congress with room for another.
Photo credit: Yuhao Lei and Peter G. Kazansky, University of Southampton
We call ourselves mites. The term began as derision. Humans
imagined the underground colonists to be mindless clones packed
into airless tunnels. They thought we would be ghostly white for
lack of sunshine. So, in their search-and-destroy missions, humans
called the colonists termites. Military radio traffic was all about
finding and exterminating “mites.” The name stuck.
In the early third millennium AD, around 2080, there were wondrous advances in genetic engineering. The reaction was predictable.
Humans were the first species able to seize control of their DNA rather than be defined and held captive by it. For the first time, they could identify how they wanted to change and achieve the improvements quickly, effectively, and without misery. The ravages of old age were not inevitable. They could cure genetic diseases like hemophilia by repairing a single broken rung on the DNA ladder. They held the potential to fix dozens of maladies they didn’t even know they had.
But as I said, the reaction was predictable. Humans could recognize the positive potential of the new technology. But given the realities of their world, they thought any genetic alteration program, no matter how well intended, would end in disaster, one way or another. There was widespread concern that someone might weaponize the new technology or that it was somehow the work of the devil. So, there were international agreements to stop the work in progress. It was banned. Research on genetic engineering was defunded, and scientists risked losing their job prospects for having anything to do with it.
Right on schedule, most countries raced in secret to weaponize the new technology.
One country in Asia set out to develop a caste of conscience-free super-warriors for its army. It also envisioned a caste of menial workers for its factories and farms. Those workers would follow orders, not think much, and quietly suffer their lot. The plan was to make a country of clones — easy to replace if injured or starved to death. The plan was bound to fail. It would take decades to implement the program. In the meantime, the government officials who funded the project turned their knives on each other, infighting among project managers became a ticket to incompetence, and the populace wasn't happy about being replaced with clones.
A cadre of scientists working on the clone project revolted against it and fled. They felt it was worth risking their lives to pursue the positive potential of their work.
A military hit squad tracked the scientists to a Tibetan refugee area of Northern India. The scientists took shelter in a monastery, shaved their heads, and donned yellow robes. Assassins combing through the sanctuary looking for scientists saw only monks doing their prayers and meditation.
Monks took the scientists in, fed them, and befriended them. Their bond was existential, as both hated assassins. But beyond that, their values aligned, even though their backgrounds and methods could not have been farther apart. Both pursued the highest human potential. Monks had long studied human behavior, their notes spanning eight centuries.
The scientists wrote and signed a Pact, declaring their intention to create a new breed of people. They outlined what they wanted to achieve, explained why they felt compelled to pursue the project, and committed their lives to the effort in the face of likely assassination. Monks transcribed the Pact to Old Tibetan script, so if assassins found it, they wouldn't recognize it. The scientists feared that if they were ever captured, their little note would be pinned to their clothing on the way to some grim execution.
The scientists believed their new breed of people should be very different from the clones, with a different purpose and reason to exist. Instead of manning factories, farms, and armies, the new breed's purpose would be "to learn, grow, explore, and build." Instead of serving rulers, the new breed would exist "to love one another and always give more than they take."
The scientists' initial goal was to achieve good-heartedness, honesty, and compassion. Two considerations motivated their choice.
First, they knew any genetic engineering project would fail unless they achieved good-heartedness early on. They had witnessed too many other projects ruined when a nascent population self-destructed because of character flaws. Those conscience-free super-warriors from the clone project all died fighting each other. If the scientists had not fled before the incident, they would have been executed for the project’s failure.
Second, monks were highly interested in good-heartedness. They could precisely define the concept and explain why they valued it and its ramifications. Several local monks volunteered to join a genetics project, giving the scientists inroads into the local community. That was the break needed to launch a program.
The scientists waited for couples to emerge who chose each other freely and wanted a child through the program. Parents were given independent control over their child's genome. The enhanced children looked like their parents, right down to the twinkle, because their genome was almost entirely a natural inheritance. The children were also exceptionally healthy, precocious, and good-natured. Word of the parents' delight spread through the community.
To this day, the foundation of mite society is good-heartedness, and we can trace that back to our Founders. We call the scientists our Founders, with a capital F, even though at the time they were a ragtag handful of dreamers begging for rice.
The Founders knew they would eventually want a large human gene pool for a base, one much bigger than a refugee area of ethnic Tibetans could provide. DNA engineering was banned, but a few biologists [4] [5] elsewhere were developing a DNA Tree-of-life [1] of the world’s plant and animal species. Advances in robotics and computers made it possible to take a scoop of detritus from the ocean floor, a spadeful of topsoil from the African planes, or a vial of stream water and pick out DNA from the shed cells of millions of plants, animals, and humans that had roamed above it. Computers removed duplicate and fragmented DNA records and organized the remainder into a tree according to evolutionary relationships. The Founders participated in the project by sending soil and water samples from Northern India. In return, they got a copy of the results — a set of glass slabs with the DNA Tree-of-Life data file etched into it. With the technology of the time, a single slab of glass weighing a few ounces could hold the distinct genomes of a billion individual life forms. [2] [3]
They also got a repository of the world's culture and science, a "Rosetta Stone" of human history. The entire record of the U.S. Library of Congress fit into a single glass slab with room for another.
Fast-forward 60 years, and the outside world discovered unusual people from a shadowy project somewhere in Northern India. These people looked like ethnic Tibetans, but they were different. They held vast knowledge and were in full command of diverse fields of study, even though they looked like teenagers. They could talk to anyone fluent in the other’s language. They were also strangely kind — thoughtful, insightful, and engaging. They could gently slice through verbal evasion and send one home with several things to ponder.
News of the new breed, or whatever they were, went viral. The Founders’ group feared this would happen.
Most humans could be convinced by the mites' story and recognized what mites had to give. But the warriors among humans couldn't pass up an opportunity for a fight. They easily convinced themselves that mites were a small but growing menace to be stamped out like cancer. Warriors flooded the realm with lies about a supposed enemy. They drank to visions of glorious battle. When that didn't gain enough support for a war, they staged false-flag terrorist attacks. A few minor explosions were not enough; they had to go big. Collapsing buildings did the trick. A coalition military went in to kill the lot.
The Founders’ group — much larger by then — had already moved into limestone caverns because a surface establishment would probably not survive. The group furnished their hideaway with power generation, hydroponics bays for growing crops, apartments, and research labs.
"Mite Colony One" included a labyrinth of tunnels, bunkers, and escape hatches designed to confuse attackers. The foils worked. A cat-and-mouse game went on for a decade, with colonists using decoys to lure the military to dead-ends. Humans would destroy what they thought was a colony and leave satisfied, unaware that the real colony was elsewhere.
Mites didn’t win the war; humans lost it. The radio chatter went silent, and mites went topside to investigate. The cities and military installations were all deserted. It was as if, one afternoon, the humans took whatever they were working on, threw it on the floor, left the windows and doors swinging in the breeze, and vanished, never to be seen again. One could only imagine where they went, the chaos in their departure, and their eventual fate. The surface was a wasteland. Mites salvaged what they could and went back underground in peace.
That was about 3,000 years ago. A lot has happened since then. We have continued our genetic evolution and spread to colonies all over the globe.
The first mites looked like humans and could hide among them. Today, we stand about 34 inches tall and weigh about 20 pounds. All mites now have the intellect of an Albert Einstein, the heart of a Mother Teresa, and the patience and dedication of a Mahatma Gandhi. We have a photographic memory of everything we have ever seen, heard, or experienced. We live to 160+ years of age and remain teenage-pert throughout our adult lifespan, doing cartwheels and jumping fences alongside our children. We effortlessly retain health, vigor, and trim. Mites are not ghostly white; they are the picture of radiant health — without UV skin damage from our lighting. Far from being mindless clones, mites are highly individualistic — as distinctive and full of personality as any gathering of Hollywood actors and actresses.
The underground quarters are not airless tunnels but palaces of light sculptures, crystals, mirrors, artwork, music, and dance. Machines and computers do almost all of our work, and our physical needs are met at no cost. That leaves us free to pursue leisure and special interests. The result has been a dazzling explosion of culture and science.
The story continues here.
_________________________
[1] The term tree of life is used in other contexts. As used here, the expression follows Charles Darwin’s (1809–1882) metaphor of a tree for organizing and classifying living forms according to evolutionary relationships. That idea is applied here for arranging a database of DNA scans.
[2] "Library in a glass chip: laser-writing trick can store vast amounts of data", Cosmos Newsletter, October 2021. <https://cosmosmagazine.com/technology/materials/long-term-
data-storage-in-glass/>
[3] "Femtosecond Lasers Could Enable Long-Term Data Storage." Optica - Optics & Photonic News, November 2021, https://www.optica-opn.org/home/newsroom/2021/november/
femtosecond_lasers_could_enable_long-term_data_sto/
[4] Harris Lewin, Sequence locally, think globally: The Darwin Tree of Life Project, PNAS Vol. 119, No. 4. January 18, 2022 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2115642118
[5] Tina Hesman Saey, The Pangenome Makes Its Debut, Science News Vol. 203, No 10, page 6.
Home | Creation Story | Warriors | Honesty | Limits | Class | Gender | Religion | Sexuality | Countries | Stewardship | Author | Contact
Copyright (c) 2024 by Don Knight
In the early third millennium AD, around 2080, there were wondrous advances in genetic engineering. The reaction was predictable.
Humans were the first species able to seize control of their DNA rather than be defined and held captive by it. For the first time, they could identify how they wanted to change and achieve the improvements quickly, effectively, and without misery. The ravages of old age were not inevitable. They could cure genetic diseases like hemophilia by repairing a single broken rung on the DNA ladder. They held the potential to fix dozens of maladies they didn’t even know they had.
But as I said, the reaction was predictable. Humans could recognize the positive potential of the new technology. But given the realities of their world, they thought any genetic alteration program, no matter how well intended, would end in disaster, one way or another. There was widespread concern that someone might weaponize the new technology or that it was somehow the work of the devil. So, there were international agreements to stop the work in progress. It was banned. Research on genetic engineering was defunded, and scientists risked losing their job prospects for having anything to do with it.
Right on schedule, most countries raced in secret to weaponize the new technology.
One country in Asia set out to develop a caste of conscience-free super-warriors for its army. It also envisioned a caste of menial workers for its factories and farms. Those workers would follow orders, not think much, and quietly suffer their lot. The plan was to make a country of clones — easy to replace if injured or starved to death. The plan was bound to fail. It would take decades to implement the program. In the meantime, the government officials who funded the project turned their knives on each other, infighting among project managers became a ticket to incompetence, and the populace wasn't happy about being replaced with clones.
A cadre of scientists working on the clone project revolted against it and fled. They felt it was worth risking their lives to pursue the positive potential of their work.
A military hit squad tracked the scientists to a Tibetan refugee area of Northern India. The scientists took shelter in a monastery, shaved their heads, and donned yellow robes. Assassins combing through the sanctuary looking for scientists saw only monks doing their prayers and meditation.
Monks took the scientists in, fed them, and befriended them. Their bond was existential, as both hated assassins. But beyond that, their values aligned, even though their backgrounds and methods could not have been farther apart. Both pursued the highest human potential. Monks had long studied human behavior, their notes spanning eight centuries.
The scientists wrote and signed a Pact, declaring their intention to create a new breed of people. They outlined what they wanted to achieve, explained why they felt compelled to pursue the project, and committed their lives to the effort in the face of likely assassination. Monks transcribed the Pact to Old Tibetan script, so if assassins found it, they wouldn't recognize it. The scientists feared that if they were ever captured, their little note would be pinned to their clothing on the way to some grim execution.
The scientists believed their new breed of people should be very different from the clones, with a different purpose and reason to exist. Instead of manning factories, farms, and armies, the new breed's purpose would be "to learn, grow, explore, and build." Instead of serving rulers, the new breed would exist "to love one another and always give more than they take."
The scientists' initial goal was to achieve good-heartedness, honesty, and compassion. Two considerations motivated their choice.
First, they knew any genetic engineering project would fail unless they achieved good-heartedness early on. They had witnessed too many other projects ruined when a nascent population self-destructed because of character flaws. Those conscience-free super-warriors from the clone project all died fighting each other. If the scientists had not fled before the incident, they would have been executed for the project’s failure.
Second, monks were highly interested in good-heartedness. They could precisely define the concept and explain why they valued it and its ramifications. Several local monks volunteered to join a genetics project, giving the scientists inroads into the local community. That was the break needed to launch a program.
The scientists waited for couples to emerge who chose each other freely and wanted a child through the program. Parents were given independent control over their child's genome. The enhanced children looked like their parents, right down to the twinkle, because their genome was almost entirely a natural inheritance. The children were also exceptionally healthy, precocious, and good-natured. Word of the parents' delight spread through the community.
To this day, the foundation of mite society is good-heartedness, and we can trace that back to our Founders. We call the scientists our Founders, with a capital F, even though at the time they were a ragtag handful of dreamers begging for rice.
The Founders knew they would eventually want a large human gene pool for a base, one much bigger than a refugee area of ethnic Tibetans could provide. DNA engineering was banned, but a few biologists [4] [5] elsewhere were developing a DNA Tree-of-life [1] of the world’s plant and animal species. Advances in robotics and computers made it possible to take a scoop of detritus from the ocean floor, a spadeful of topsoil from the African planes, or a vial of stream water and pick out DNA from the shed cells of millions of plants, animals, and humans that had roamed above it. Computers removed duplicate and fragmented DNA records and organized the remainder into a tree according to evolutionary relationships. The Founders participated in the project by sending soil and water samples from Northern India. In return, they got a copy of the results — a set of glass slabs with the DNA Tree-of-Life data file etched into it. With the technology of the time, a single slab of glass weighing a few ounces could hold the distinct genomes of a billion individual life forms. [2] [3]
They also got a repository of the world's culture and science, a "Rosetta Stone" of human history. The entire record of the U.S. Library of Congress fit into a single glass slab with room for another.
Fast-forward 60 years, and the outside world discovered unusual people from a shadowy project somewhere in Northern India. These people looked like ethnic Tibetans, but they were different. They held vast knowledge and were in full command of diverse fields of study, even though they looked like teenagers. They could talk to anyone fluent in the other’s language. They were also strangely kind — thoughtful, insightful, and engaging. They could gently slice through verbal evasion and send one home with several things to ponder.
News of the new breed, or whatever they were, went viral. The Founders’ group feared this would happen.
Most humans could be convinced by the mites' story and recognized what mites had to give. But the warriors among humans couldn't pass up an opportunity for a fight. They easily convinced themselves that mites were a small but growing menace to be stamped out like cancer. Warriors flooded the realm with lies about a supposed enemy. They drank to visions of glorious battle. When that didn't gain enough support for a war, they staged false-flag terrorist attacks. A few minor explosions were not enough; they had to go big. Collapsing buildings did the trick. A coalition military went in to kill the lot.
The Founders’ group — much larger by then — had already moved into limestone caverns because a surface establishment would probably not survive. The group furnished their hideaway with power generation, hydroponics bays for growing crops, apartments, and research labs.
"Mite Colony One" included a labyrinth of tunnels, bunkers, and escape hatches designed to confuse attackers. The foils worked. A cat-and-mouse game went on for a decade, with colonists using decoys to lure the military to dead-ends. Humans would destroy what they thought was a colony and leave satisfied, unaware that the real colony was elsewhere.
Mites didn’t win the war; humans lost it. The radio chatter went silent, and mites went topside to investigate. The cities and military installations were all deserted. It was as if, one afternoon, the humans took whatever they were working on, threw it on the floor, left the windows and doors swinging in the breeze, and vanished, never to be seen again. One could only imagine where they went, the chaos in their departure, and their eventual fate. The surface was a wasteland. Mites salvaged what they could and went back underground in peace.
That was about 3,000 years ago. A lot has happened since then. We have continued our genetic evolution and spread to colonies all over the globe.
The first mites looked like humans and could hide among them. Today, we stand about 34 inches tall and weigh about 20 pounds. All mites now have the intellect of an Albert Einstein, the heart of a Mother Teresa, and the patience and dedication of a Mahatma Gandhi. We have a photographic memory of everything we have ever seen, heard, or experienced. We live to 160+ years of age and remain teenage-pert throughout our adult lifespan, doing cartwheels and jumping fences alongside our children. We effortlessly retain health, vigor, and trim. Mites are not ghostly white; they are the picture of radiant health — without UV skin damage from our lighting. Far from being mindless clones, mites are highly individualistic — as distinctive and full of personality as any gathering of Hollywood actors and actresses.
The underground quarters are not airless tunnels but palaces of light sculptures, crystals, mirrors, artwork, music, and dance. Machines and computers do almost all of our work, and our physical needs are met at no cost. That leaves us free to pursue leisure and special interests. The result has been a dazzling explosion of culture and science.
The story continues here.
_________________________
[1] The term tree of life is used in other contexts. As used here, the expression follows Charles Darwin’s (1809–1882) metaphor of a tree for organizing and classifying living forms according to evolutionary relationships. That idea is applied here for arranging a database of DNA scans.
[2] "Library in a glass chip: laser-writing trick can store vast amounts of data", Cosmos Newsletter, October 2021. <https://cosmosmagazine.com/technology/materials/long-term-
data-storage-in-glass/>
[3] "Femtosecond Lasers Could Enable Long-Term Data Storage." Optica - Optics & Photonic News, November 2021, https://www.optica-opn.org/home/newsroom/2021/november/
femtosecond_lasers_could_enable_long-term_data_sto/
[4] Harris Lewin, Sequence locally, think globally: The Darwin Tree of Life Project, PNAS Vol. 119, No. 4. January 18, 2022 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2115642118
[5] Tina Hesman Saey, The Pangenome Makes Its Debut, Science News Vol. 203, No 10, page 6.
Home | Creation Story | Warriors | Honesty | Limits | Class | Gender | Religion | Sexuality | Countries | Stewardship | Author | Contact
Copyright (c) 2024 by Don Knight
Assassins combing
through the sanctuary saw
only monks doing their
prayers and meditation.
Mites went topside to find
the human installations
abandoned. One could
only imagine where they
went or the chaos in their
departure.
One country attempted to
use the new technology to
develop a caste of clones
for its military. It also
envisioned a caste of
menial workers for its
factories and farms.
Our underground
installations have
continued to expand.
The scientists thought it
easier to hide in McLeod
Ganj, the location of the
Tibetan government in
exile, than in a small
village.
Our Crystal Ballroom.
Rail connecting colonies.
Our train station.
There were wondrous
advances in genetic
engineering.