A meditation on what humanity might become when survival stops being the point
There is a number that I find impossible to actually feel, no matter how many times I encounter it.
The observable universe contains an estimated two trillion galaxies. Not two trillion stars. Two trillion galaxies, each containing somewhere between ten million and one trillion stars of their own. The math collapses into abstraction so quickly that the mind retreats from it, the way your eyes slide off a surface that offers no purchase. You know the number is real. You cannot make it real. The scale defeats imagination before imagination gets started.
I return to this number not because it is humbling, though it is, but because of what it implies about the question I keep turning over: what is a human being for?
Whatever the answer is, it cannot be small. It cannot be as small as survival. It cannot be as small as tribe. It cannot be as small as the particular dogmas we have carried, with such confidence, through such a brief and localized sliver of what may be an incomprehensibly vast story.
Against two trillion galaxies, the specific institutional claims of any religion -- the precise boundary between the saved and the unsaved, the exact doctrinal threshold between grace and damnation -- become not merely questionable but cosmically improbable. Not because truth is relative, but because smallness of that kind seems, to put it gently, unlikely in a universe that vast.
I am not an atheist. I want to be precise about this, because precision matters here and vagueness is its own kind of cowardice.
I am someone who cannot reconcile the idea of a God with a God who is petty. Who cannot believe that whatever intelligence, if any, underlies two trillion galaxies is primarily concerned with whether a person checked the right theological boxes before dying. Who looks at the moral structure of exclusivist salvation -- the good person of another tradition condemned, the bad person of the right tradition saved -- and finds not a hard teaching to accept but a contradiction in terms.
A God capable of that is not worth the name. A God worthy of two trillion galaxies would have to be something else entirely. Something larger than any tradition has fully captured, which is not an argument against traditions -- they have carried enormous wisdom, enormous beauty, enormous discipline -- but an argument against treating any of them as the final word.
What I am left with, after setting down the institutional claims, is not emptiness.
It is something more interesting: openness. A genuine not-knowing that feels, oddly, more honest than certainty ever did. And alongside the not-knowing, something that might be called reverence -- a persistent sense that the fact of existence, of consciousness, of the specific mystery that there is something rather than nothing, is not accidental in the shallow sense of that word. Not directed toward a predetermined end. But not random either. Something in between, which we do not yet have good language for.
Buddhism has always appealed to me less as a religion and more as a rigorous investigation of that in-between. It is less interested in metaphysical assertions -- is there a God, what happens after death, is the universe conscious -- than in the direct examination of experience. What is suffering, and where does it actually come from? What would it mean to be free? Not free from circumstances, which mostly cannot be controlled, but free in the sense that Marcus Aurelius meant when he wrote that nothing can harm a man who refuses to be harmed -- free from the reflexive contractions of fear, craving, and the exhausting project of building a self that needs constant defending. That freedom is not a theological position. It is a practice. And it is available, if the practitioners across thousands of years are to be believed, to anyone willing to do the work.
This is the spiritual inheritance I carry: a reverence without a fixed address. A conviction that the universe is larger than any account of it. A gratitude that feels like more than mere sentiment. And a growing suspicion that the highest form of whatever we might call spiritual life is not the correct performance of belief but the willingness to keep asking the question honestly, wherever it leads.
Now here is where it gets strange. And wonderful.
Humanity is, with fair confidence, at the very beginning of its story. We are not a mature civilization. We are something closer to an adolescent species -- powerful enough to do enormous harm, not yet wise enough to reliably prevent it, aware in some dim way that we are capable of something beyond what we are currently managing. The gap between what we are and what we could be is not a cause for despair. It is the most interesting open question in the known universe.
What happens when that adolescent species grows up?
What happens when the organizing pressures of scarcity -- the need to compete for food, territory, status, survival -- are no longer the primary forces shaping human behavior? What happens when advanced technology, over some span of decades or centuries, genuinely removes the compulsory dimensions of labor? When no one has to do something degrading to keep eating. When the baseline of material security is so reliably provided that the mind is freed, for the first time in the species' history, to ask what it actually wants?
This is not a fantasy. It is a direction that serious people -- engineers, economists, scientists, philosophers -- believe is possible within timescales that are, by civilizational standards, not very long. We are not there. We are not close. But the trajectory is legible, and it asks a question that most civilizations have never had to seriously confront: what do people do when they don't have to do anything?
Iain Banks spent a career exploring this question in fiction, and his answer was more honest than utopian. In the Culture, his imagined post-scarcity civilization, material abundance does not solve the problem of meaning. It relocates it. When everything can be provided, the only things that cannot be manufactured are genuine achievement, authentic connection, and the specific dignity of having chosen your life rather than had it chosen for you by necessity. Citizens find identity through intrinsic passion -- through work done because it is loved, through games played because winning matters, through relationships entered because they are worth entering.
The scarce thing turns out to be quality, in the deepest sense: the real thing, the chosen thing, the thing that cannot be faked or distributed.
Banks was writing science fiction. He was also writing philosophy. The question his novels keep asking is the question that post-scarcity forces into the open: in the absence of need, what is a human life for?
I think the honest answer is: we do not know yet. And I think that not-knowing is exactly right.
The traditions that have tried to answer it -- religious, philosophical, political -- have all been answering it under conditions of scarcity. Every ethical system we have inherited was developed by people for whom survival was a live question, for whom death was close, for whom resources were limited and their distribution a matter of constant contest. The virtues those conditions produce are real virtues -- courage, patience, endurance, solidarity, the willingness to sacrifice for something beyond yourself. These are not going away. But they are not the whole of what is possible.
What virtues become available when fear is no longer the organizing principle? When the anxiety of not having enough is lifted from the baseline of existence, what does the human being reach for?
I find myself believing -- not with certainty, but with something that feels like earned conviction -- that what people reach for, when fear is genuinely removed, is beauty. And meaning. And depth of connection. And the specific pleasure of understanding something that was previously dark. Not everyone, not automatically, not without new challenges we cannot currently foresee. But as a central tendency of a species that has always, even under the worst conditions, found ways to make art and ask questions and love people with a completeness that survival alone cannot explain.
There is something in human beings that reaches beyond what survival requires. We have always known this. We have built cathedrals when we could have built shelters. We have composed music when we could have been sleeping. We have written philosophy when we could have been hunting. The impulse toward transcendence -- toward the things that matter beyond utility -- has been present in every culture, in every era, under every set of material conditions. It is not a luxury of abundance. It is something closer to the species' deepest nature.
Post-scarcity does not create this impulse. It unmasks it. It removes the constant pressure of survival that has, for most of history, kept the impulse suppressed or redirected, and allows it to become the organizing principle of a life rather than its occasional overflow.
Freedom is terrifying.
Not in the dramatic sense of a specific fear, but in the structural sense: when the answer to "what must I do?" is "nothing that you don't choose," the question "what should I choose?" becomes genuinely open in a way that no tradition or institution fully prepared us for. Viktor Frankl, writing from Auschwitz, argued that the freedom to choose one's response to any given set of circumstances is the last of human freedoms. He was right. But he was writing about freedom within constraint. The freedom of post-scarcity is the freedom of open constraint. The field is not clarified by necessity. Everything is available. And everything available can feel, to a being still running on the evolutionary software of a survival-pressured animal, like nothing at all.
This is the Culture's real problem, and Banks was honest enough to name it:
Freedom without purpose can produce decadence as readily as flourishing. Citizens who drift through simulated realities, who cannot find anything genuinely worth caring about, who accumulate experiences the way their ancestors accumulated provisions, without ever asking what the experiences are in service of. The post-scarcity problem is not poverty. It is meaninglessness. And meaninglessness is, I would argue, a spiritual problem in exactly the sense I meant earlier: a problem about what a person is for, which no material provision can answer.
The way through is something more demanding: the development of a relationship to meaning that does not depend on compulsion.
This is what every serious spiritual tradition has always been pointing toward, in its own language. The Stoics called it virtue -- the cultivation of a character that can find the good worth pursuing under any external conditions. Buddhism calls it non-attachment -- the capacity to engage fully with life without requiring life to be other than it is. Christianity, at its best and deepest, calls it love -- the orientation toward the good of the other that transforms the will from a machine of desire into something capable of genuine gift. None of these traditions were designed for post-scarcity. All of them contain, embedded in their practice, the tools for navigating it.
What would it mean to take those tools seriously, not as religious obligations or cultural inheritances, but as genuine disciplines for the specific challenge of being free?
I want to end with something I cannot prove, but believe.
Two trillion galaxies. The number I mentioned at the start. I return to it because I think it is asking us something.
If that scale is real -- and it is -- then the probability that the emergence of consciousness on this particular planet is the only emergence of consciousness anywhere is so small as to be, practically speaking, zero. Somewhere in that incomprehensible expanse, other minds have formed. Other civilizations have risen, wrestled with their own versions of scarcity and fear and the question of what life is for, and perhaps -- across the vast majority of possible timescales -- found their way to something we cannot yet imagine. Some may have been consumed by the same impulses that threaten us: the tribalism, the fear, the will to dominate. Others may have survived and grown into things that would make our current civilization look like a preliminary sketch.
We do not know. We may never know, given the physics of distance and time. But the possibility exists, and the possibility is enough.
It is enough to hold open the question: what does a civilization look like on the far shore of fear? What is possible for a species that has genuinely moved beyond the organizing pressures of scarcity and survival -- not as a thought experiment but as a lived reality -- and turned its full intelligence and creativity toward the question of what a life, and a civilization, ought to be?
I do not know the answer. Neither do you. Neither, I suspect, does anyone currently alive.
That is not a problem. That is the most exhilarating thing I can think of.
We are early. We are unfinished. We are a species that has, despite everything, never stopped building cathedrals when it could have built shelters.
Whatever we are reaching toward, we have been reaching toward it for a very long time, through conditions that would have extinguished the impulse if it were not, in some deep sense, constitutive of what we are.
The far shore of fear is not a destination. It is a direction. And we are, however slowly and however imperfectly, moving toward it.
That is enough to keep going. More than enough.