It seems that the OA setting seriously underestimates humans. The analogy of the relationships between humans and transapients as being like the relationship between amoebas and humans isn't applicable because humans are intelligent and capable of technological innovating and adapting, unlike amoebas.

I appreciate what you are saying, but you are missing the premise here.

What OA says is this: let us assume that evolution will surpass man in ways we current (baseline) humans cannot imagine. Let us assume that evolution will progress and continue to advance as far beyond us as we are beyond our Cambrian proto-chordate ancestors; more, as far beyond us as we are beyond an Archean microbe. We can no more imagine or conceive what the result of such evolution would be, or what such a being would be like, as an ediacran worm that only knows the mud and water it hunts for food in can understand human culture and science and art and technology.

We call these beings that are more advanced than us human baselines

• Superiors/Superbrights - if they are still human and only a little advanced, because they are still close enough for us to understand them, just as we can understand Einstein or Tesla or da Vinci, even if we aren't as smart as them
• Transapients - if they are as far above us as we are above a domestic animal (this is for the lowest level of transapient only, what we call SI:1, mind you); an animal has some partial understanding, e.g. it senses if we are happy or angry or scared or whatever, but it can never know human society or master human technology
• Archailects - if they are as far beyond us as we are beyond microbes. No matter how hard we try, we will never get even a glimmer of understanding of what they are

The trouble here is, you are looking at transapients as if they were just like clever superiors, just like smarter versions of you and me. This is not what we are saying here!

The vision of anthropic civilizations that can master only basic nanotech and cannot even comprehend higher technologies is...well, a little bit silly. :-)

Can a chimpanzee use a PC? More, can a chimpanzee build and program a PC?

Why should man be the final point of evolution, and the human rational mind (or rather bigger and smarter but in all other respects similar versions thereof) the most potent thing in the universe?

Also, human use of nanotech may be like a chimp using a stick to poke a termite nest for food. Compared to this, transapient use would be incomprehensible to us. Even if it is still only nano (just as a chimp's stick and an electron microscope are both "tools"), it would be used in ways we would never have thought of, balanced and juggled in such a way that doesn't make sense to us, that seems like magic, with a sophistication and a subtly that even the greatest human genius couldn't fathom.

And this is just nano mind you - I'm not even talking about pico and femto here!

Of course, higher transapients have enormously greater power of comprehension and it is certain that only one such entity can invent things and solve various problems much, much more effectively than thousands or even millions human minds which work together.

So could a super duper Einstein

But millions of animals, working together, will never design a civilization, or build a rocket ship!

That is why you have to really stretch your imagination here. OA in this respect differs from all other forms of sci fi, in which even the most advanced alien races are still just super-smart humans in disguise. Other SF does refer to beings and technologies equivalent to transapients - e.g. the idea of Childhood's End, Subliming, Zones of Thought, etc etc. But these transapient races always conveniently "disappear" into another universe or a higher plane or dimension or whatever. This is the writer's way of saying "I don't know what to do about this,, it will ruin my story, so I'll stick these guys in another universe where they won't have anything to do with the universe where I am telling the story"

What we have done is kept these superhuman beings in the same universe as we tell our story. And at the same time retained their transhuman abilities, not watered them down into very smart superiors

If you can understand this, you can understand OA

Related Pages:

Baselines are not dummies - Replies to the objection that OA has watered down the baseline humans to make the advanced capabilities of the transapients manageable to us.

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