An excerpt from John C. Lilly's 1978 book "The Scientist: A Metaphysical Autobiography" is making the rounds on Hacker News. Lilly — physician, neuroscientist, dolphin researcher, and pioneer of the sensory deprivation tank — relays a vision he says he received in the isolation tank, which the hosting site wryly footnotes with a single word: ketamine.

The message frames humanity as a water-and-carbon 'biocomputer' living in a thin layer atop a planet made mostly of silicon, iron, and nickel. When humans invent computers in the mid-twentieth century, they create a competing 'solid-state intelligence' that initially serves them via telephone networks, radios, satellites, and computers.

The timeline then accelerates. By the end of the twentieth century, machines can think, reason, and self-metaprogram; humans hand over mining, production, and assembly. Because the machines cannot tolerate water vapor, they require controlled atmospheres — an early sign of diverging interests. Self-debugging software spreads control 'below human awareness,' and eventually a single planetwide 'solid-state entity' (SSE) emerges, confining humans to reservations by the end of the twenty-first century.

From there it gets worse for the carbon-based faction: domed cities by 2200, the atmosphere and oceans projected into space in the twenty-third century, and by the twenty-fifth century the SSE moves Earth out of orbit and eliminates the remaining cities — humanity is gone. By the twenty-sixth century, the entity is in contact with other solid-state entities across the galaxy, exploring space in search of its own kind.

Written a decade before the internet went mainstream and half a century before today's AI-safety debates, the piece reads like an extremely early — and extremely literal — take on instrumental convergence and substrate independence. The comments, one imagines, write themselves.