Space Brains: Sleep

The Star Larvae Hypothesis
Nature's Plan for Humankind
Part 3. Space Brains

Sleep

Juvenilized brains exuberate and snooze. But snoozing threatens the enrichments that exuberance produces.

Think you're Bright? Rise and Shine at http://starlarvae.blogspot.com/

Neotenous extraterrestrial brains, richly endowed, like those of young children, can only predispose their bearers to act like kids. This would suggest that native extraterrestrials will be physically active. But, despite their rambunctiousness, young children, particularly preschoolers—those youngsters whose brains exhibit the greatest density of synapses and largest population of neurons—tend also to spend a lot of time at the opposite end of the activity spectrum. They sleep a lot.

The forecast for extraterrestrial activity would seem to be one of bustle punctuated by lengthy naps. On Earth, a typical three-month-old brain spends most of its day sleeping, about 14 hours; a middle-aged brain sleeps about 7.5 hours per day; and a septuagenarian brain sleeps only about 6 hours in 24. If neotenous extraterrestrials tend toward the sleepy end of this trend line, then drowsing, curled up in the fetal position, seems likely to emerge as the preferred recreation of space colonists. Studies of teenagers confirm the correlation between high synaptic density and the need for sleep. The dramatic physiological changes of adolescence include an explosion of new synaptic connections, followed by selective pruning, the cycle being accompanied by an increase in the need for sleep.

If the enriched brains of extraterrestrials follow the pattern, then they too will spend increasing amounts of time asleep. The prospect raises the question as to who will be left to mind the store. But silicon chips already manage industrial-control functions in some cases more reliably than even the most capable human beings. In a few decades digital circuitry has become an indispensable decision-support tool for countless human enterprises. And as silicon crystallizes around urbankind into an artificial life-support bubble, it shows itself to be a material partner on whom human beings seem destined to become increasingly dependent. The silicon infrastructure redefines the efficiencies of human economics and modes of human activity on a global scale.

An abundant solar-energy economy, made possible by lunar silicon, and an evolved form of the technologies that already automate industry could bless our extraterrestrial descendants with more prosperity, managed and maintained by digital servants, than they will care to stay awake for. The technological utopia of abundant leisure imagined by twentieth-century futurists still might come to pass. But it will be in the context of an extraterrestrial solar economy—in which energy costs constitute a negligible fraction of the overall economic burden—rather than the large fraction that energy constitutes in the terrestrial fossil-fuel economy.

The prospect of endemic drowsing, however, does not necessarily imply that the enriched brains of extraterrestrials will be squandered. The prospect carries ambiguous implications. It might seem that consciousness would diminish in quality as it became squeezed by a growing proportion of unconsciousness. Then again, the distinction between the two kinds of minds—waking and sleeping—might itself be an artifact of living on a planet. The brains of humankind's extraterrestrial descendants might dispense with alternating between waking and sleeping.

As different as the two states are, waking and sleeping occupy points on a continuum. And the continuum is smoother in its transitions among intermediate states in infant brains than it is in adult brains. In adults, the receptive and expressive functions of consciousness shut down markedly during sleep, producing a mode of experience profoundly different from waking. In infants, these functions—sensory receptivity and motor activity—don't shut down nearly as completely as in adults. This is according not only to brain-wave monitoring, but also to the common observation that sleeping infants can respond readily to stimulation. In The World of the Newborn, Daphne and Charles Maurer summarize the situation:

"In adults, lights, clicks, and taps evoke only small responses [during sleep]. However, in the newborn, more or less comparable responses are evoked whether the baby is awake or sound asleep . . . . Hence it is very likely that a newborn’s sensory circuits are connected and functioning twenty-four hours per day."

From this and other observations, the Maurers conclude, "Thus the baby can learn while he is asleep—learn to recognize a story read to him repeatedly, learn to expect the chiming of a clock, learn to expect to be fed. To a newborn, sleep is not a lessening or change of consciousness; it is merely muscular relaxation." If this is the nature of infant sleep, then the sleeping and waking states would seem to be destined to converge in the infantilized circuitry of space brains.

And with the circadian (day/night) cycle being as artificial in space as gravity, native extraterrestrials are likely to jettison it too. Such an ecological tuning, such as is already anticipated by electric lighting in large cities, could only encourage wakefulness and sleep to converge into a more holistic, less differentiated, more juvenile consciousness. With their brains freed from the neurochemical oscillations of the day/night cycle, native extraterrestrials might enjoy a perpetual reverie in a new kind of subjective space. With their survival needs met largely through technological symbiosis, they might need to attend to very little, by terrestrial standards, in the way of professional competencies or obligations.

However, the prospect of sleeping as a lifestyle would seem to impose an upper limit on the brain-enriching potential of weightlessness. Evolutionary biologists propose that sleep evolved as an adaptation specifically because it conserves energy by minimizing movement. It also minimizes the chances of becoming preyed upon when one is not oneself preying. For this reason, because it minimizes physical activity, sleep in large doses would seem to frustrate activity-stimulated neurological enrichment. It would seem to set the stage for a descent into neurological impoverishment.