Why Are We Building Something That Could Surpass Us?
Human → created tools → tools amplified human power → AI amplified the human mind → robots replicated the human body → the two began to converge → powered by energy and resources, they started becoming increasingly autonomous → Mars could be the first real laboratory for this → so the question is no longer “What can AI do?” → but “Why does humanity want to create a civilization that can operate independently of us?”
AI, robots, Mars, and the possibility that humanity is building a civilization that may one day no longer need us.
We usually tell the story of humanity through wars, kings, inventions, revolutions, and technological breakthroughs.
Maybe there is another way to look at it.
Maybe the entire story of humanity revolves around two very simple things:
Survival and transcendence.
Think about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
At the bottom are physiological needs: food, water, shelter, safety.
As we move upward, we find belonging, esteem, and eventually self-actualization.
Maslow’s pyramid is not a perfect model for describing entire societies. But it is an interesting metaphor for understanding human history.
Because while a large part of humanity has always had to spend enormous amounts of time dealing with the lower levels of survival, some people have had the privilege of spending more time thinking about what lies above them.
If your entire day is spent finding food, protecting your home, or doing physically demanding work, you have less time to wonder about the universe.
But once your basic needs are secured, different questions begin to emerge:
- Who am I?
- Why am I here?
- What will remain after me?
- Can I become more than I am?
Maybe as civilization developed, we didn’t just produce more resources.
We bought ourselves more time to think.
First, humanity had to survive
For early humans, much of life was about survival.
Hunting.
Gathering.
Finding shelter.
- Then we moved some of our survival problems outside the human body through technology and organization.
Industrial production scaled human labor.
Computers took over calculation.
The internet made communication almost instantaneous.
And now AI is arriving.
This time, what we are beginning to outsource is not just physical labor or calculation. Every major technological leap moved another part of human limitation outside the human body.
But technology wasn’t the only thing that changed us
Humanity didn’t only transform itself through machines.
We transformed ourselves through social systems too.
We created structures that determined how people lived, worked, married, raised children, exchanged resources, inherited wealth, and organized themselves.
For most of human history, our world was small.
Early human communities lived in relatively small, kin-based groups. We don’t know exactly how their relationship systems worked, but survival depended heavily on cooperation within the group. As societies grew, something changed: humans needed ways to organize people who no longer knew each other personally.
That is where social systems emerged.
Family structures, marriage rules, religion, laws, gender roles, traditions, and eventually states all helped societies coordinate larger groups of people. They didn’t all emerge for the same reason, and they cannot be reduced to one simple explanation. But together, they created shared rules about how people should live, reproduce, work, and belong.
For thousands of years, these systems were largely shaped by geography.
If you were born into a particular culture, your idea of what was “normal” was mostly defined by that culture.
There were different versions of these rules across societies. Some cultures heavily restricted female sexuality. Others imposed strict expectations around appearance, marriage, or motherhood. Men were also constrained by social expectations: strength, economic responsibility, status, leadership, and emotional restraint.
In many societies, the people at the top of the social hierarchy shaped these norms, while those norms helped reproduce the hierarchy itself.
Then something unprecedented happened.
Globalization, migration, international education, travel, the internet, social media, and global workplaces allowed people to see lifestyles that would previously have been almost invisible to them.
A person in Turkey could see how someone in Japan lived.
Someone in Dubai could date someone from Europe.
Someone in France could build a life in South Korea.
And people didn’t just exchange products.
They exchanged ideas, values, relationships, identities, and ways of living.
Suddenly, the word “normal” became questionable.
You could look at another culture and realize:
The way I was taught to live isn’t the only way to live.
Globalization makes us more similar.
We listen to the same music, use the same technologies, watch the same movies, wear similar clothes, use the same platforms, and increasingly share similar aspirations: freedom, travel, meaningful work, financial independence, love, and self-expression.
But at the same time, globalization creates something else:
hybrid identities.
For thousands of years, humanity moved from:
small groups → tribes → cities → religions → states → nations.
Now we seem to be moving toward:
nations → global networks → one connected information system.
Globalization connected humans to humans.
The internet connected information to information.
AI is beginning to connect human knowledge to machine intelligence.
Diversity has always been one of humanity’s greatest sources of creativity.
The real challenge may not be creating one global culture.
It may be learning how to build one global system while preserving billions of different ways of being human.
Maybe humanity’s next tribe won’t be defined by blood, geography, or religion.
Maybe it will be defined by ideas.
Then we look up at the sky
NASA’s robotics roadmaps have long explored robots as precursors to human exploration: exploring environments, identifying resources, preparing infrastructure, and supporting future human missions.
And this isn’t a new idea.
In 1992, Michael Duke and colleagues published work on the roles of humans and robots in Mars exploration and settlement, exploring how robotic systems could evolve from scientific exploration toward increasingly sophisticated support for human presence.
So sending a human to Mars isn’t simply:
“Put a person in a rocket.”
It’s closer to:
“How do we build a system in which a human can survive on another planet?”
The human becomes the starting condition of the system.
This is where science fiction begins to overlap with serious scientific thought.
The idea of self-replicating probes, often associated with von Neumann probe concepts, imagines machines capable of using resources in another planetary system to reproduce themselves and continue expanding.
We are nowhere near building such a system.
But the idea reveals something important:
A civilization could potentially expand physically without its biological species expanding with it.
Kardashev asked a bigger question: How much energy can we use?
In 1964, Nikolai Kardashev proposed thinking about advanced civilizations in terms of their energy use.
The concept later became widely known as the Kardashev Scale:
Type I — a civilization capable of harnessing planetary-scale energy.
Type II — a civilization capable of harnessing the energy of its star.
Type III — a civilization capable of harnessing energy on a galactic scale.
The framework is highly speculative, but it offers a fascinating thought experiment:
As a civilization grows, its energy requirements may grow with it.
“Can we build a self-sustaining system outside our natural environment?”
And perhaps the first workers in that system won’t be humans.
They will be machines.
Humans might arrive later.
Or maybe they won’t.
That second possibility is uncomfortable.
But it is also fascinating.
Because in that scenario, what reaches Mars isn’t necessarily humanity’s body.
It is humanity’s capability.
On a small planet.
Inside the minds of a fragile species.
Maybe humanity’s ultimate goal was never immortality.
Maybe it was to create something that could continue beyond humanity itself.
And perhaps what we are witnessing today isn’t simply a race to build better AI.
Maybe it is the moment when biological evolution begins creating a new kind of carrier for intelligence.
Something that doesn’t need our bodies.
Something that doesn’t share our lifespan.
Something that might eventually go where we cannot.
Which leaves us with a much stranger question than:
“Will AI replace us?”
The real question may be:
Why are we building something that could surpass us?
And if it does, will that be the end of humanity — or the furthest humanity has ever reached?
