Part 1. The Appearance of a Dead End.

The third decade of the 21st century presents us with at least three clear threats to the existence of humanity. Russia's war with Ukraine, Europe, and international law has brought the threat of nuclear war to the forefront. Political systems that have allowed utterly immoral individuals like Putin and Trump to gain power in nuclear states have no brakes against a world war.

The second obvious threat is a viral pandemic with the contagiousness of COVID and the lethality of Ebola. The history of COVID has shown that the Earth's biosphere is seeking ways to punish the Homo sapiens species for its aggressive behavior toward the biosphere. Since humanity has not learned any lessons from the recent pandemic, the next attack from the biosphere will not be demonstrative, but militant.

The third threat is climate. I'm not even talking about gradual global warming, the melting of Antarctica, or the flooding of Holland. Things could unfold much faster and more dramatically if a slight warming of the world's deep oceans triggers the decomposition of methane hydrates, which are abundant on the ocean floor. This is the scenario of the so-called "methane catastrophe," when methane, rather than CO2, becomes the primary greenhouse gas in the Earth's atmosphere. Within just a few years, the atmosphere would warm to the level of Venus, the oceans would boil away, and all life would cease. (Someone tell Donald Trump about this!)

What these threats have in common is that they require humanity to act in concert across the entire population, while any action on the scale of any single state is futile. In other words, globalization isn't a whim of leftist intellectuals, but a necessary condition for human survival.

So how are things with globalization on Earth? Bad. There is one functioning integration project – the European Union. It's in crisis: in the east, Ukraine's attempt at European integration has encountered armed resistance, and in the west, one of the most important countries voluntarily left the union (Brexit). Trump, Xi, and Putin are all vying for global leadership, and they all staunchly support national sovereignty – a concept directly opposed to globalization. Because globalization is the peaceful, gradual dissolution of state borders, with the prospect of abandoning the idea of ​​the nation state as an outdated concept. This movement is necessary, but it's not happening. Why is humanity still divided by state borders?

I see three main reasons.

First: there is no optimal model of political and economic structure. The Soviet Union drew a globe on its coat of arms, assuming that the socialist system was so good that it would become global, that it would become universal. The Soviet Union itself buried this idea. Then Fukuyama came along and suggested that liberal democracy was so good that it would become global. Fukuyama's concept was destroyed in the 21st century by China with its economic miracle. One can debate whether China's economy is socialist, but its political system is certainly not liberal. Meanwhile, optimal social models are quickly adopted and become global standards. Airports, hospitals, and schools look very similar everywhere on Earth. And government structures are completely different. Because none of the existing systems is optimal.

Someone might object: each nation has its own optimal system. Americans are proactive and universally armed – for them, a free market and fair elections are essential. The Chinese are hardworking and love to march in formation—for them, state capitalism flies under a red flag. Europeans have suffered the most from wars and dictators, but they haven't forgotten how to work and think—for them, a knowledge economy and a welfare state. Russians are spiritual and Orthodox, with the most glorious history of continuous victories—for them, a dictatorship of lying Chekist scum is optimal. But here I would object: isn't it strange that such diverse nations still exist within a single biological species? This situation is clearly temporary, but what perpetuates it?

The second reason for the strength of borders is that humanity speaks different languages. For me, this is also clear evidence of the suboptimal nature of each modern language. When a communication problem is optimally solved, it quickly becomes a global standard. Examples include Arabic numerals in the Middle Ages and the TCP/IP protocol in the 20th century. Attempts to create a universal language have been made, the most successful being Esperanto. But this artificial language failed to achieve universality because it offered its speakers no competitive advantages. Such advantages could include the speed of thought exchange and the impossibility of lying—if such a language were invented, it would become the language of a unified humanity. I have an idea, which I will outline in the second part of the article.

The third reason for humanity's division is religious consciousness in the face of a multiplicity of religions. I am an atheist; I consider all classical religions and all new sects false. It's like with languages: diversity speaks of the absence of a correct solution. Prayer doesn't work in any religion, and if it did, that religion would have long ago become universal. But why then hasn't atheism triumphed on a global scale, as seemed inevitable to both the French Enlightenment thinkers and the Russian communists? Because a scientific worldview was proposed as a replacement, but it doesn't answer the need. And this need is central to human consciousness: liberation from the fear of death. All religions exploit this fear and offer various solutions. But the scientific worldview speaks of something else; it describes a picture of the external world. But even here it is not very successful: science’s answers to questions about the origin of the Universe (Where does the anthropic principle come from?), about the origin of life (no chain of accidents could lead to the emergence of DNA), about the emergence of man (What purpose is such a brain designed for?) are no good.

All sciences related to humanity—biology, history, and sociology—are not truly sciences, as they lack predictive power. However, in those areas where science is successful, it transcends borders and "stitches" humanity together. There is no Orthodox mathematics, Chinese physics, Catholic chemistry, or Islamic astronomy. Pythagoras, Newton, Mendeleev, and Einstein are correct everywhere on Earth. True knowledge about the origins of the Universe, life, and humanity will also quickly become universal and supplant all religions. Because the question of the meaning of every human life will also be answered (it exists, and it is common to all people). I very much want to contribute to this fascinating process of shaping planetary consciousness, so I move on to the second part of the article—to hypotheses for discussion.

Part 2. Eight Hypotheses.

1) The Hypothesis of the Unique Future. What I am presenting is correctly called scientific creationism: the recognition of the fact of intelligent design of the Universe and an attempt to reconstruct this design without inventing "superfluous entities." I propose that the future has no variations, is unique, and information about the future is available in the present and governs so-called "random" events. In this conception of the future, the state of the Universe is what God is in religious concepts – the source of controlling influences. With this approach, the principle of "reverse causality" becomes acceptable in science: event A occurred SO that event B could occur (classical science recognizes only direct causality: event B occurred BECAUSE event A occurred earlier, and for many uncaused events, it introduces an extra entity – the concept of chance).

The proposed concept eliminates any chance, and every event has a cause—either in the past or in the future. For example, the reason the Universe emerged is that it now exists. This is also the source of the laws of physics, with the values ​​of the fundamental constants that alone could have led to the emergence of elementary particles, atoms, stars, and planets, at the moment of the Big Bang. Similarly, with the emergence of life, information about the structure of protein molecules came into the past from the present, where these molecules exist. The principle of reverse causality will help make biology and history, where currently observed patterns cannot be formulated within the framework of direct causality, real sciences.

2). Earth is the only inhabited planet in the Universe. I believe the Fermi paradox has a simple solution: we do not see alien civilizations because they do not exist. And even the simplest forms of life do not exist in space. Because Earth is not an ordinary place in the Universe; it was specially created for life. The proposed concept returns Earth to the center of the Universe—not to the geometric center, as Ptolemy believed, but to the center of the embodiment of information from the future. All "random" events occur on Earth.

3). Humans are an unfinished aromorphosis. In evolutionary theory, aromorphoses are unexplained evolutionary leaps, such as the emergence of photosynthesis, the emergence of fish on land, and the appearance of wings on reptiles. According to hypothesis 1, all of this happened so that life could increase its biomass and expand into previously uninhabited areas of the planet. Following Tsiolkovsky, I believe that humans emerged to bring life beyond Earth and begin populating the Universe. Tsiolkovsky's correctness is confirmed by the fact that it was the human species that actually began this work in the 20th century. And then it turned out that the aromorphosis was incomplete: humans have learned to travel to space, but they cannot live beyond Earth. And the majority of them don't even want to. Humanity's breakthrough in space occurred because a few highly motivated followers of Tsiolkovsky (primarily S.P. Korolev) were able to take advantage of the competing political systems and manipulate the political leaders of the USSR and the USA. Since then, humanity has yet to find a more serious incentive specifically for manned space exploration.

4). Modern human consciousness is a deformity that has not yet been overcome. I see two obvious defects of consciousness: its separateness and the illusion of free will. In fact, every person is part of the Earth's biosphere and part of their biological species. These realities are largely ignored by every human consciousness. There are exceptions (Greta Thunberg's case, for example), but they are universally perceived as mental illness. Altruistic behavior is also rare among people, yet without it, humanity's assault on the biosphere, driven by the mass egotistical need for unlimited personal consumption, cannot be stopped.

The second defect of consciousness is the inability to receive information from the future and act on it. There are exceptions here, too: a temporary state of "external control" (being in love) or a constant capacity for insight (genius). But for the majority of people, the future is completely hidden, and they remain confident that they can somehow influence the future. Experience constantly refutes this, and here religious consciousness, with its "God works in mysterious ways" and "God's will be done," is called upon to help. To complete aromorphosis, these two defects of consciousness must be overcome.

5). A change in individual consciousness will presumably inspire a unified motivation in people to advance life into space. But where exactly? Terraform Mars? I believe the immediate goal of extraterrestrial life expansion is not Mars, but the moons of the giant planets, or more precisely, their subglacial oceans of liquid water (presumably found on Jupiter's moon Europa, among other places). This is the only place in the solar system where modern humans can exist for any length of time without a spacesuit, in their natural state (I draw readers' attention to the extreme hobby of freediving, and invite everyone to consider the dynamics of ice diving records).

6). Tsiolkovsky proposed that life beyond Earth would adapt to the new conditions. This would be the next step in human evolution—an intelligent being living permanently in space. The source of energy for such beings, according to Tsiolkovsky, would be sunlight. But isn't it dark in Europa's subglacial ocean? Yes, so I have another unexpected hypothesis. Cold nuclear fusion will be the source of energy for extraterrestrial life. Deuterium is present in all natural water—that's a fact. Living organisms are already capable of accumulating deuterium for some reason—that's also a fact. The hypothesis is that certain organic molecules, in which hydrogen is replaced by deuterium, are capable of nuclear fusion (producing helium and heat). How? I have no idea; I'm not a nuclear physicist. But I understand why: so that life can spread beyond Earth and conquer the universe. The logic of the process, presumably, is as follows.

7). Humanity still has yet to invent a universal language on Earth. It will become universal due to its competitive advantages over existing languages: the exchange of information at the speed of thought and the fundamental impossibility of lying. The organs of communication will be the hands, specifically the ten fingers of the human hand. This hypothesis is based on the fact that the same area of ​​the brain is responsible for finger motor skills and spoken language, and the sensitivity of human fingertips is highly trainable (blind people can read Braille with their fingers, something sighted people cannot do without training). I believe that in this language, the "transmit" channel will be the right palm, the fingers of which touch the fingers of the interlocutor's left hand. Likewise, the left palm is the "receive" channel. Conversations are possible both in pairs, in a "round dance," and in a chain. The language's alphabet consists of 32 symbols, corresponding to combinations of closed and open fingers of the right and left hands. The language's vocabulary will be formed from 32 basic concepts, each encoded by its own finger closure combination. The remaining concepts are a sequential combination of the basic ones (the principle of Bliss symbolism). Presumably, if a person is a native speaker of such a language (i.e., not only understands it but thinks in it), then "ideomotor reactions" arise in their fingers—all their thoughts are transmitted to their fingers without any special effort. Accordingly, their interlocutor is able to perceive the "unfiltered" flow of thoughts, meaning lying becomes impossible. (A lie is the intentional distortion of information with the aim of manipulating the recipient's behavior. Lying in direct communication is possible because all communication methods are now slow: people think many times faster than they speak or write. If information exchange occurs at the speed of thought, there is no time to distort or substitute one's thoughts. If absolutely all thoughts are always pulsing in the fingertips of your right hand, you cannot lie. Today, lying is possible in all languages ​​​​on Earth, and it is precisely this that significantly reduces the effectiveness of human communication.)

8). Communication at the speed of thought will lead to the elimination of the separateness of human consciousness. I suggest that if a child is exposed to their parents' thoughts for extended periods of time from early childhood, their individual consciousness will not develop. Consciousness immediately becomes collective, and as the child grows, their circle of contacts expands, and then technology makes it possible to connect children's hands to the collective consciousness of humanity. The analogy with a beehive or an anthill is clear, except there are hundreds of bees in a hive, while there are billions of people on Earth. And the brain capacity of each individual human is incomparably greater than that of a bee's nervous system. The result is a World Wide Web with truly cosmic capabilities—and that's precisely why the Universe needs us. But what happens to the individual human being? There isn't one. So who needs such a future? Many. Because in such a future, there is no fear of death. Do you want to be part of an immortal humanity destined to spread throughout the Universe? Then get involved yourself, and get your children involved. Do you want to live your own life, die, and rot in a coffin? Then don't join us; it's our job to offer.

Part 3. Transitional Provisions.

In the first part, I described humanity's current state—it's in crisis. In the second part, I attempted to divine the future—it exists, and it's interesting. But what is the mechanism for this transition? And here I have no good news for you. An evolutionary transition isn't taking shape. My eight hypotheses, for example, may be true or false, but one thing is clear: they are of absolutely no use to anyone today. There's no demand for a future as long as everyone is satisfied with the present. Appealing to the future doesn't garner a majority in elections (as the 2024 US presidential election demonstrated), but the minority also lacks a common goal, so it can't organize and achieve anything (as the failure of the anti-war protests in Russia demonstrated).

Conclusion: the transition will be catastrophic, as evolution has done many times before. Mass demand for a future will emerge when the present proves uninhabitable. Today, the most likely catastrophe scenario seems to be nuclear war, toward which Putin is persistently leading humanity (and nothing happens by chance, and a mad dictator at the head of a nuclear state is precisely for...). But human history will not end here; it will just begin.

Tver Pretrial Detention Center No. 1, April 14-17, 2025

Andrey Trofimov