My day job is the search for alien life and the most difficult thing about it is thinking about alien minds.  How different might the structure of an alien’s experience be from ours? That’s why I’ve been having so much fun with Apple TV’s hit new show Pluribus and its exploration of a true existential question: is it better to be a miserable individual or a happy hive mind?

So, for background, a hive mind is something like an ant colony or a beehive (duh).  While individual ants each represent separate organisms, it is the colony which seems to do the thinking.  Ant colonies and beehives are examples of what’s called “collective intelligence” or better yet, “liquid brains”.  For my work in astrobiology, I often must consider what kind of mind would be behind any signal of alien intelligence we astronomers find.  The possibilities usually split down the middle between the kind of individual intelligence we humans have and the kind of collective intelligence we see in “eusocial” species like ants, termites, bees and naked mole rats (no, I’m not pulling your leg on the last one).

But what is it like to be part of a hive mind?  Are you just a slave to some larger intelligence that uses your body like a robot?  Or can you still retain your individuality while being immersed in the warm thoughts and feelings of everyone else in the collective?  This is a really deep question for which science doesn’t yet have any answers because it's hard to ask ants how they feel.   Into that vacuum jumps art to explore the possibilities.

Pluribus is a brilliant take on the question of hive minds.  (Very mild spoilers now follow for the first episode or two) The series begins when astronomers pick up a signal from a distant star which turns out to be a prescription for a virus that links humans together.  While individuals retain their identity and memories, those memories are now shared among the global “We”.  In the blink of an eye all war, crime, hunger, and discrimination disappear.  Most importantly, the “We” appear to be joyful at their new state.

The brilliant hinge on which the story turns is that the transition did not work on everyone.  Pluribus focuses on Carol, a successful but profoundly unhappy writer from Albuquerque.   The virus fails on Carol, and she is left as an “I” while the rest of humanity unifies into its new “We”.  The story’s central drama revolves around the collective trying desperately to make Carol happy (happiness seems to be their Prime Directive) while Carol desperately fights for her right to be miserable as a solitary individual.

So, which is better?  Would you give up some of your individuality to experience something beyond the solitude that haunts us all our lives?  Or is it exactly that solitude which gives life meaning? 

I have not finished Pluribus yet and will come back to this question again when I do. I’ll note a just finished the book Alien Clay by the great science fiction writer Adrian Tchaikovsky which deals with exactly the same question.

Freaky Hive Mind or Lonely Human.  What’s better?  And when it comes to technological civilizations, which would last longer?

PSS. Thoughts? Leave a comment on the website version of the post or email me at [email protected] 

— Adam Frank 🚀