Mars Trilogoy Post, pt. 2

Well, I've been listening to the second half as an audio book, so I don't have page numbers to reference. One thing that I want to say before beginning a close reading of a specific passage is that I was not completely off when I claimed that the first 100 were moving towards communism. Apparently, the people back on earth had that view of them also - living as a community with a very limited economy, working towards the common good of all the people on Mars, which they thought would happen by cutting their connections with UNOMA and Earth.

This exchange between John Boone and Hiroko presents an interesting problem when discussing the whether the people of Mars are becoming posthuman - in one sense they have already discarded "humanity" in favor of "Martianity." But, this is a way of examining what it means to be human, a social being.

"What gave you the right to do all these things without our permission?" John asked. "To make our children without asking us-to run away and hide in the first place-why? Why?"

Hiroko returned his gaze calmly. "We have a vision of what life on Mars can be. We could see it wasn't going to go that way. We have been proved right by what has happened since. So we thought we would establish our own life-"

and later

"You're needed every day!" John said flatly. "That's how social life works. You've made a mistake, Hiroko."

What we get from this passage is the development of a sort of eugenic practice in which Hiroko and her cohort has created her own life through science. While this is not exaclty what posthuman theorists see as posthumanity, the process that Hiroko used to nuture those chilren connects to Katherine Hayle's assertion that we have always been posthuman, in the sense that we have always used tools to navigate the world. Here, Hiroko is using the scientific tools that she has at her disposal to create life. Since the children are still created through slicing two genetic codes (female and male), they would still be considered "human." Those children, as John informs Hiroko, still need to interact with other human beings since, as Kenneth Burke tells us, humans require interaction with other humans. In the sense that the people on Mars cannot live without their tools, they are all posthuman, according to Halyes, but this is contrasted with the descriptions of robots and thier uses on Mars, specifically in constructing the elevator.

As Robinson writes from Frank's perspective, "offloading the elevator cars and getting the stuff on trains. Robots were supposed to do it, but it was surprising how much labor remained in the process for human muscle. Heavy-equipment operators, robot programmers, machine repairmen, waldo dwarves, construction workers." These robots would not even be considered "posthuman" beings because they lack consciousness. As Bostrom and Marovec have explained, the move towards posthumanity requires that there is a mixture between the human body and the technological body, and to some extent, a cybernetic being that develops a level of consciousness that is equivalent or exceeds human consciousness. Since all of the people on Mars retain their consciousness, which is altered by their existence on Mars, they still do not constitute posthumans beyond what we and they already are before reaching Mars.