You can see that in these three affinities, other than the Purity affinity, both the Harmony and the Supremacy affinity changed their humanity. In my first run of the game, I picked Purity because in the cut scene, the purpose of exploring this new planet in the game was to find a new home for people on the Old Earth.

One cannot forget one’s purpose no matter under what condition was one of my believes. However, as the game evolved, the Purity affinity changed the new planet to exactly like earth by killing alien animals and finally populated it with refugees from the Old Earth.

The Old Earth was destroyed by the same process, such as to populate the planet without keeping its natural balance. It is possible that this new planet will repeat the same path under the same treatment.

As for the Supremacy affinity, the story was much more tragic. Since they have changed themselves to be part human and mostly part machine, when they established contact with the Old Earth. Humans instantly regarded them as hostile, since they no longer looked like humans anymore.

This forced them to go on conquering the Old Earth by force.

As for the Harmony affinity, they forgot the Old Earth all together, and began a new life form on the planet emphasizing mutual understandings, but heavily lack of individuality, since they seem to become one life as a whole instead of individual humans.

Mid tier game play, but fascinating story concept.

I can’t help but to think of Interstellar, in which the story seem to be similar, where earth became inhabitable and we went on to find new planets.

The black hole in Interstellar

In Interstellar, the biggest challenge of interstellar travel is time, as humans are not built for long time space travel and the different speed of time in relation to gravity created the dramatic effect of the father aging slower than the daughter.

Notice that in both Beyond Earth and Interstellar, the main purpose of venturing out of earth was to survive, therefore the adaptation of human bodies seems to be quite reasonable under such purpose.

What if space is much less useful for us to explore? Where we can reach somewhere, but far away from finding a planet to colonize. Well, it is pretty much the situation for now, since we have slowed our steps for space exploration for years.

However, the topic for today is will the space change us?

Walking down from the trees and leaving the forest have changed us more than 1.89 million years ago. It was a complex form of both physical and societal changes. They intertwined with each other to the point where we can’t tell exactly which was the cause.

We had a large society because we left the forest, but so were several other none forest primates. Our brain enlarged because of the society size, with the physical changes of our diet and our bipedalism as prerequisites.

Therefore, when we are looking into the problem of whether the space will change our evolutionary path, other than the physical changes of the environment, such as now we have to adapt to long time space travel and potentially a different habitable environment of the new planet. We have to look at the societal structural change that space may bring us.

What is the social structure that space travel may entail?

This reminds me of one of my favorite science fiction, the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov.

The Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov

In Foundation, although it was much modeled after the Roman Empire, other than a realistic space empire, humans colonized the entire Milky Way Galaxy. So were the settings of many other science fictions, that we are able to set foot on many other habitable planets in the galaxy, without much changes to our social structure.

Let’s start with the simple question: what are the physical prerequisites for this social structure change.

Long term, or time difference enabled space travel

Endurance of space and different planetary environments

The ways to overcome these two difficulties can be for example, to manipulate time in the first case, or to shorten the time for space travel. If we can’t find a way to manipulate time, or to shorten the time for space travel, even if the machines replace us to explore the universe, they will run out of time.

The ways to compete with time can be to increase our computational capacity. For example, if you can see that humans are in fact machines made with organic materials, the current structure and material of human brains are one of the optimal machines we know. However, some new materials and structure may contribute to a faster brain.

Everything is simpler when the computational capacity increases. So that is the first problem we are to tackle.