the secular humanist's heaven

Imagine a world rather like that in Star Trek: The Next Generation. I do not mean cavorting across the galaxy with warp drives. That is not likely. There is so far no plausible prospect for faster-than-light travel. But what is likely, indeed certain, if we keep our peace and prosperity long enough, is a world where human rights and freedoms are universally respected, and everything is free except human labor. All our needs will be satisfied by safe machines that can create anything, drawing on self-sustaining power sources like clean fusion or orbital solar. There will be no poverty. The mentally and physically ill will be cared for. The ignorant will be educated.

Everyone will be taught and encouraged to dedicate time and effort to some social good of their choosing: as teachers, builders, explorers, researchers, artists. Their week will be short, and their work fulfilling. All menial, dangerous, and unpleasant labor will be handled by machines. Everyone will be capable of understanding and appreciating themselves and their society, and will want to serve the public good, because a rich education will be freely given to all, throughout childhood and into adulthood, that encourages exactly this, and provides the skills for it.

This world will not be free of evil. There will still be criminals and loafers and attempts to abuse power or cause harm, there will still be accidents and mistakes and disasters. But the elimination of poverty and the reduction of illness and a universal humanistic education in reason and sense will make this much rarer than in any present society, as will our constant advance in knowledge and technology. And the government will have been honed and perfected by applying to its reform the scientific principles and findings of many centuries, until we have the most effective system for protecting human rights and managing the automated economy - and above all, for maintaining checks and balances, and providing quick remedies and effective preventive measures against the natural human impulses towards incompetence, negligence, corruption, and crime, as well as hubris. The government will be of the people, by the people, and for the people - a people who will almost all be healthy, happy, and civil, and a government that will be more self-critical, self-repairing, self-policing. Most natural evils will have been abolished. Genetic diseases and disabilities will be a thing of the past, illnesses cured, most injuries easily repaired. Natural disasters will be all but incapable of thwarting our countermeasures against them.

We will certainly have terraformed and colonized other worlds, at least in our own solar system, with fabricated worlds to live in as well in the very reaches of space. But at the same time we will have much more control over population pressures here on earth. Fertility will be so well managed that all men and women can turn it on or off without difficulty or side effects. With smaller population densities and cleaner technologies, a more comfortable and beautiful coexistence with nature will be possible, as cities and parks become more thoroughly and intelligently integrated.

We might even make immortality possible. It may even happen that, in the fullness of time, we will be able to transfer our minds, by transferring the patterns of our brains, into computer-simulated worlds that are in even more perfect regulation than the physical world, a true paradise. And this simulated universe, and the computers that produce it, would itself be a self-sustaining, self-maintaining, self-repairing, self-expanding artificial organism. It is possible it will never die. As the Third Law of Thermodynamics entails, it will take infinite time for the Second Law of Thermodynamics to dissipate all the available energy in the universe into unusable form. So there will always be an energy differential in the cosmos that a resourceful machine can exploit as a power source. Perhaps this will never be achieved in practice, but in theory it can be hoped for.

This is all science fiction, surely. But I hope one day to make it science fact. If it sounds like your dream of heaven, this is no accident. This is the society I want to work toward so that it may exist if not for us, then for our children, or our children's children - ultimately, so it may simply exist: so we can defy the coldness of space and the brutality of nature and create paradise in spite of them.

- Richard Carrier