Science Quote by Greg Egan

A thousand years is a dare, not a forecast. Egan plants his flag far enough in the future to dodge today’s tired AI talking points, then snaps the implications into focus with one cool turn: “a major branch of our descendants.” That phrase drags the idea out of gadget-land and into genealogy. He’s not imagining machines replacing us; he’s imagining us continuing in a form that makes the category “human” feel provincial.

The intent is classic Egan: hard-edged speculation used as moral crowbar. “Moved inside computers” isn’t just a plot premise, it’s an attack on the comforting assumption that consciousness needs meat to count. By calling the inhabitants “conscious software,” he pre-emptively refuses the easy dismissal that digital minds are mere simulations. If they’re conscious, they’re not tools. They’re citizens of the future with claims on continuity, rights, and identity.

The subtext has bite for the present. Framing the shift as “most of human civilisation” makes it a civilizational migration, not a niche cult of uploaders. Civilization becomes infrastructure plus subjective experience, not buildings plus bodies. That’s why “diaspora” is doing so much work: it’s a word about displacement, survival, and splintered belonging. Egan hints that the body-bound will become a minority culture - potentially romanticized, potentially abandoned.

Contextually, this sits in a late-20th/early-21st-century lineage of computationalist thought and transhumanist aspiration, but Egan’s scientist’s voice keeps it austere. No salvation rhetoric, no apocalypse porn. Just a clean, unsettling reframing: the future family tree forks, and one branch boots up.