[Change of pace. My friend Dick Werling sent this, that his son wrote, and i found it so entertaining that I thought I’d pass it along. In concept, it reminded me of “The Human Holiday,” which some of you may remember from many years ago.
[I hope you enjoy it.]
Consent Forms
By Rob Werling, M.D.
Are you still there? Okay. A representative from the organization is ready to speak with you and will be with you shortly. Be advised that this conversation is being recorded for training and legal purposes. I will remain on the line for support as needed. Please hold.
Okay, uh, your complaints have been escalated, and Org tells me we need to get to the bottom of this as quickly as possible. Can you briefly tell me exactly how long ago you ran out of consent forms and what steps you’ve taken to resolve this problem?
No, I’m saying. Listen…thank you for taking my call, but I’m saying—if you’d look at your documentation—I’ve been putting it in my reports all along. This planet never got any consent forms. From the beginning, there weren’t any. And what steps I’ve taken–
Wait, stop right there… Are you saying you’ve been sitting on this problem for four billion years?! Are you saying that you can’t document that any of the clients on this planet was ever informed of the risks, benefits, and alternatives of incarnation before being subjected to it?!
Well, of course we’ve been working on it! Looking for forms—we tried to adapt an income tax form we found, but it was too complicated for any of us to work with. We’ve tried various workarounds and stopgaps. I send a request every single time I file a report, and this is the first time I’ve had an inkling that Org was even aware of the problem, much less cares about it.
Oh, people care about this one. (Mm hmm…) You’ve been sending our customers willy-nilly into their mind-boggling existences, certain to be hungry, angry, and overwhelmed, basically against their will. Now people at Org know about it, and they care. (Mm hmm…) And if I were you, I’d be worried.…
I have been worried, as I’ve been reporting this whole time! This is a frighteningly fluid situation. It started out slow, but once it got up to speed—I mean, we’re just playing Whac-A-Mole here. Everything changes so fast! Honestly, we’ve been considering just filling out the paperwork to have the planet condemned, because it’s so badly infested with life.
Well, now, we’ll see about that. Let’s get the data first. Condemning a planet is a major undertaking. Can you start from the beginning?
Yes, of course. Sorry. Uh, let’s see. After the usual dust-gas cataclysm, etc., etc., there was a fairly standard Brownian soup. It was unusual in that it accumulated a lot of liquid water, and we did start seeing some interesting chemical anomalies, but it was nothing we hadn’t seen before.
Just so we’re all on the same page, “water” is an oxygen atom with a couple of hydrogen knobs at one end, if you aren’t familiar with it. Curiously, the thermal range between its melting and boiling points is pretty narrow, and coincidentally, this particular planet has had zones well within that range for most of its existence, due to its stable orbit at a peculiar proximity to the pleasant star it revolves around.
Right, and we knew that having an excess of liquid water is a risk factor, but we had all been through Org’s water-and-other-unusual-liquids management module, so we knew what to look for. Still, I think we were caught off guard when nucleotides started combining and actually replicating.
Nucleotides…
Nucleotides are often referred to as the “building blocks” of macromolecules known as DNA and RNA. (Right, right.) Depending on your perspective, they are like Pringles, or cars on an LA freeway, or Mentos. They fit together and make nucleic acids, which [as far as people on Earth reading this transcript know], are the basis of life. [Without which, there could not be potato chips or a city of angels, or puppies, or your mother.]
At one point, as you know, I was able to get set up with waivers for those little mindless macromolecules, because the risk of “getting into anything ethically problematic” (Org’s words) is just so small that it was a formality, really.
Right, standard, just waivers. No actual signatures required.
But once the polymerizing self-replicating macromolecules stumbled into lipid bilayer envelopes (oil bubbles) and iterated on that a beaucoup number of times (too numerous to count, literally), we were dealing with cells (self-replicating oil bubbles), and then I knew we needed help.
Right, because then they basically had self-replication and metabolism, which—mind you—almost never happens. So obviously at that point you were obligated to file the appropriate forms.
That’s when I started sending my reports with supernova distress signals on the covers. Evidently that wasn’t enough to get anyone’s attention.
Well, we do have documentation of responding to a supernova’d report on macromolecules.
Yes, and thank you—obviously—but when I finally learned there was a huge pile of macromolecule waiver forms supposedly en route, most of the replicating chemicals were either spinning themselves out in nonsensical infinite loops, or else they’d gotten themselves integrated into actual viable cells, and the horse was out of the barn.
The what was out of the what?
(This is a local metaphor for “it was too late.”) Horses are herbivorous ungulates, usually domesticated but not killed and eaten by humans, in contrast to their close relatives cows, who, together with their human domesticators, make up roughly 96% of mammalian biomass on the planet, and are just delicious. [Proc Nat Acad Sci, 2018-ish.] Barns are buildings where horses and cows usually stay, waiting to be killed or whatever.
But the pity is, I honestly think we’d have been okay if Org had gotten involved back then, because single cells are so simple. It was over a billion years of single cells just minding their own business, replicating and dying, leaving behind a carpet of dead cells, which nourished all the future cells, coming along. We were able to handle the ethics of that kind of life on our own for quite a while. We just kept using the macromolecule waivers, and everything seemed to be fine.
It was so quiet. Bacteria are such simple creatures. Each perspective is unique and clean. They have their tiny little selves and their infinitely humungous soup-world. They twinkle for a bit and then go out. They get hungry and move toward food; they get cold and move toward heat. They self-replicate, okay, whatever; it’s no one’s business, really, what happens in bacterial bedrooms.
Well, you sort of know pornography when you see it, don’t you? I don’t think this business of cell division qualifies, but it is mesmerizing to watch. (See for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbNp9DBbTkU). Sorry. Please, go on.
You get used to that quiet hum of hunger, and their little life-lights popping on and flickering out. Looking back now on that almost-contemplative serenity, I see that we may have gotten complacent. Maybe we could have pushed harder for a response from Org.
Maybe you should have, because who has ever been satisfied with being a grease bubble, eating nothing but old dead grease bubbles? Obviously. Can you blame them for wanting to introduce a little drama into their billion-year-old soup? And it’s a slippery slope from there. You simply can’t commit someone to the vicissitudes of the first-person perspective without prior informed consent!
I see that now, because the shit really hit the fan when they stopped just eating the carpet and started eating each other, before the lights had flickered out, consuming the life force while it still had a perspective. Worse, they started enslaving each other, engulfing and expropriating other cells with impunity. Can I tell you about eukaryotes? Cells with nuclei? Each cell has a passel of slaves, mini-cells, inside of it! The nucleus for the genetic material, mitochondria for energy production, and all sorts of other “organelles.”
Those “organelles” were all originally separate single-cell organisms, humming quietly along, but they got systematically incorporated into bigger hungry cells,…
Eaten…
…but they didn’t get digested. Instead, they stayed alive and kept on doing their work, which was way better than just surrendering their nutrients to the eater. Well, the results were as satisfying as they were surprising! They ended up making these new super-cells, which we call “eukaryotes.”
And the eukaryotes then outcompeted the bacterial schmucks who still haven’t figured out this primordial expression of capitalism.
No one had time to consider the ethical repercussions of “slavery” in that context. That’s when it got confusing, and we could have used some help from Org.
Right. This does complicate the consent process. Because whose perspective is it, then, when you have the one big cell, but also a bunch of little industrious individual cells inside of that one, doing much of the work of metabolism for it? That would need to be referred over to Ethics. I’ll need to make some calls.
But it gets worse. The new super single cells weren’t satisfied with that level of complexity. They started to “team up.” They have these “teams” that we’ve taken to calling multi-cellular organisms, for lack of a better term. How they differ from slave colonies, though, is a distinction I’m not really prepared to make or defend. One cell may be in charge, but the question of perspective becomes tricky. Whose cell is it? Whose organism is it?
Do we consent each cell? What if some of the cells are willing, and others aren’t? Remember, it’s a team, an organism. It seems to “think” that it has its own single perspective.
Right, this is for Ethics. I was not briefed about any of this…
Wait, I’m just getting started. Once there were multi-cellular organisms, the asymmetries, enslavements, murders accelerated logarithmically. “Animals,” as we call the mobile complex organisms, are almost all cannibals, eating other animals as a matter of course, or else eating similarly complex but immobile organisms (“plants” and “fungi”). It’s abominable!
Right. Audaciously, “spider wasps” anesthetize their prey and keep them alive in their underground lairs for weeks at a time, while their babies eat them. But the most egregious are the peculiar clever animals that have entire civilizations of fellow complex life forms, maintained generation-after-generation (“domesticated”) for the sole purpose of killing and eating them. Leaf-cutter ants do this with fungi, and humans do it with plants and conspicuously, as noted above, cows.
Oh dear. So it isn’t just Ethics. We’ll have to get Coms involved… Probably Public Relations… There is going to be a lot of paperwork.
But it keeps going. Some of them get really complex. They get these internal communication networks, we’ve been calling them “nervous systems”.
(Not just because they make people nervous; that’s another story.)
With nervous systems, eventually they literally think. It isn’t just metaphor anymore. At first, they just feel their way around and process environmental information, but then they start thinking. When they start really thinking they’re thinking, then it’s chaos. Because imagine these hungry greedy cannibals actually making plans and acting on them.
Definitely PR needs to be involved. This is getting escalated…
By the way, regarding the problem of thinking life-forms specifically, we thought Org might want to know that we were at least able to create a software patch to make sure that most of them didn’t remember anything prior to the moment of incarnation.
A patch?
Oh, uh, please hold for a moment? …
…
…
Yes, yes ma’am. Uh, yes, I will. Okay. Thank you.
… Okay. This pre-incarnation memory-obliterating “software patch” you mentioned. Org has a problem with it. The interpretation is that you not only coerced the clients into living, but on top of that, your team also deprived them of any kind of perspective for the endeavor! Looks like Legal is getting involved, and probably Risk Management as well.
Transparency is central to any durable system of ethics. The subjects have to have perspective if they’re going to get anywhere interesting. [For Earth readers, why did you encourage your children to believe in Santa Claus if you did?] What are we doing here? If you have no idea why you exist, how do you know what you want? Where do you plant your flag? Do you even have a flag to plant? If you have planted your flag, do you maintain the flexibility to examine it honestly, to look longitudinally at what it stands for? What you stand for? What if you pull someone from a burning building, saving his life, but then he turns out to be Adolf Hitler or Ted Bundy? Now what have you done for the things your planted-flag stands for?
Okay, at this point, sue me for all I care, but as far as we’ve been concerned, the thinking is the least of our worries. They have other organs, too. Not just nervous systems, but digestion systems and breathing systems, hormone systems. Entire communities of like-minded cells in organs forced to do the will of the over-organism. It’s soul-crushing, what they’ve come up with.
And since the whole thing started with self-replication, it isn’t at all surprising that some of them developed a special organ system just for reproduction.
It’s diabolical…
Right! The things they do to each other! Inserting an organ from one complex organism into the body of another one and injecting nucleic acid? How can you even begin to make sense of it, ethically?
These amalgamations of slave-colonies rub against each other and recruit their reproductive organs to combine their perspectives into new, fantastically flawed copies of the instigators. (We’ve been calling the commingled organ systems “parents” in this situation. Some of us think the poetry of that terminology makes up for the off-the-wall insanity of it all.)
Okay, well, I think this qualifies as an Emergent Situation. I am going to see if I can expedite a Mitigation Team out to your planet. If Org approves, the team can usually be there in under a million years.
Finally! All due respect though, it can’t happen faster than that? A lot can go wrong in a million years. We have billions of these complex organisms popping into life every single year here (each containing, as noted, billions of individual cells), and none of them is getting consented. And with the advent of sexual reproduction (maybe a billion years ago), they do this evolution thing.
As bizarre as it sounds, taking two of them and mixing their genetic material up all skiwaddly into each offspring, means they’re constantly changing, from generation to generation. The time scale is literally over just thousands of years or even less. For example, the systematic civilizational cannibals mentioned earlier (humans and their food-colleagues), have covered the entire planet—like the bacterial carpet of quieter times—in less than a million years. Who knows what changes will happen on that timescale now?
Better let the Mitigation Team know, too, that once they started reproducing sexually, they also started forming into communities of complex organisms. So the problem is compounded yet again, see? Groups of groups of groups, with necessarily different perspectives and often-contradictory requirements and goals at every level. The enslavement and murder and cannibalism continue. And the rubbing.
But I mean honestly, in their defense, …the joy! The love, the contentment; eventually, for some of them, even laughter, and slow glowing sunsets.
Please hold…
Actually, come to think of it. With the sunsets and everything… You know, maybe we should just…
Hello?