Book of the Church of Sequence Space

The Book's first question is how to cure all diseases within the decade. Its author envisions "a vast movement, a war, a religion, a game" to do it, and suspects that the hardest part will be getting started at all.^[1]

"Cure all diseases" is, in the Book's phrase, a battle cry. What it means is an end to involuntary human biological suffering, with involuntary death counted as part of it. Self-determination comes first, so anyone who wants to keep a disease may keep it. The cures must reach "the poorest of the poor", and so the Book prefers pills to surgery: pills can be mass-produced and carried anywhere, and their contents could be made by the cheapest kinds of biomolecular printing, such as the synthesis of nucleic acids.^[1]

Medicine, in the Book's picture, is a jungle. Every reported breakthrough is a miracle trying to cross "the molecular and cellular jungle" to the clinic, and most die on the way. Basic research maps the jungle, and applied research carries cures through it. The Book agrees with the futurist Ray Kurzweil that trends in research will eventually bring practical immortality, in about thirty years, and objects only to the wait, since any reader might have a heart attack tomorrow. In place of "non-conscious collective acceleration, a la Kurzweil", it proposes a deliberate acceleration of biomedical research on the scale of a historical movement. On death, the Book says: "We're not fans of the scythe".^[1]

It then lists four ways to go faster. More people could work on the problem; the Book counts about ten million scientists and engineers working on it worldwide. They could be better coordinated, since they work in silos and often compete. They could have better and faster tools, and use them more efficiently. One answer covers all four: "have them play a video game". Reading the Book, the reader is told, already counts as playing, and the section closes by naming the game and thanking the reader for playing it.^[1]

The Game to Cure All Diseases would let anyone with an internet connection use the equipment needed for experiments in the life sciences, and the Book hopes for millions of players, "perhaps tens of millions". It should be cheap and open, though not necessarily free; safe, fun, educational and deep; and "addictive in the best sense". Command structures would coordinate millions of players at once, and the rewards would be fun, social status and possibly money. Some parts would allow free exploration, but most of the effort would go to the molecular and cellular engineering most relevant to human health.^[1]

The Book promises to describe each module "in detail herein". The copy in the company's records ends before it describes the first.^[1]

Only then does the Book ask whether this is really a church, and how a church can also be a game. Members, it answers, may believe anything they like about the church and still play. There is no functional difference between playing the game and belonging to the church, and the church's theology neither overlaps nor contradicts that of any major religion on Earth. It has exactly two moral precepts, which members are expected to follow and are never forced to. The first, worded more bluntly in the original, asks them to try not to be unpleasant to other people. The second is "cure all diseases".^[1]

The church is older than the Book. It was "technically founded" many quadrillions of years ago, in another universe, on the home planet of Keltar, who led his people to a positive technological singularity against long odds. His species now travels the multiverse as "interuniversal boddhisattvas"[sic], bringing "responsible technological uplift" to civilizations near a singularity of their own.^[1]

Keltar's avatar on Earth is "a small one-eyed felt green alien doll" that looks much like his original self. According to the Book it appeared to the author in 2012, on a shuttle bus at San Jose's airport, and has traveled with him ever since. Readers need not believe a word of it, the Book adds. They can treat the story as the background of a role-playing game, and Keltar as a mascot for everyone who believes in the task ahead.^[1]

The Book also explains why Keltar does not simply say how to cure every disease. His avatar lacks his full superintelligence, because of limits on travel between universes, and can only match patterns from his experience of trillions of civilizations, and biology varies too much across the multiverse for that to be enough. He has met only "a few tens of billions" of civilizations whose biology could be put right with a few obvious interventions. Among civilizations held back by problems other than biology, he brought 89.4 percent to a positive singularity. Physics also varies wildly from one universe to the next, so he proposes that this one start with its biology.^[1]