My fascination with science began before I was five years old. I checked out hundreds of science books from my neighborhood library in San Francisco, on topics such as astronomy, geology, biology, and many others. I later became a floor trader on the now extinct Pacific Stock Exchange, where I eventually trained the very programmers who would take my job.
Then I met Douglas Engelbart at a local bookstore. He was the most prominent creator of the graphical user interface and the computer mouse (The very same tech you’re using now to read this.) He told me to get into computer programming because computers will replace millions of jobs. I did! This shifted my perspective about how technology shapes society.
As a database programmer, I specialize in linking very large scientific data sets with no common key. The Ephemeral Species is my ultimate pattern-seeking project, linking the data of our current world to a plausible future. My work once automated the tasks of thousands who manually sorted paper records. Today, I watch as AI begins to automate my own.
As an award-winning photographer, I find myself at another crossroads: Will AI replace the human eye, just as it reshapes the code I write? My work gathered over 100 billion views on the extinct Google Plus social network. 1.5 Million Followers, zero remaining. A lesson in the ephemeral. Here’s an article in COMPUTERWORLD where halfway down, Mike Elgin mentions I have over 50 billion views. Even the Google plus photo of mine at the top of the article is gone. Nothing lasts forever. As of 2026, my photo website, PatrickSmithPhotography still exists.
I continue to seek understanding into how the universe works. As human technology improves, I have become one of many who worries about what the future holds. New technology leads to utopias and dystopias. When fire was invented, it was likely immediately used to cook food and burn down neighboring villages. What new utopias and dystopias will be created by innovations in AI, biology, genetics, and other disciplines? Science fiction attempts to answer these questions.
I have questions. What happens when the human genome is manipulated to increase longevity, intelligence, disease resistance, and other human properties? What happens to society if artificial intelligence escapes the box? What happens if advancing technology places most of humanity into a permanent underclass?
I wonder how common advanced life is in our galaxy. We see thousands of exoplanets, some residing in the habitable zones of their stars. Science fiction often deals with alien life forms, speculating on their habits and societies. Often, the aliens try to destroy our species, conduct experiments, or save us from ourselves. However, what if they visited and didn’t care about us one way or the other?
I decided to write ‘The Ephemeral Species,’ a 100-chapter exploration, as a method to grapple with these questions, through the experiences of characters like Nisha and Priya.
I invite you to join me in these explorations. The answers may be as fleeting as the species that seeks them.
Press Kit
(Copy/Paste the author photo above and the cover below.)
Comparable Titles
Readers of Carl Sagan’s Contact will find The Ephemeral Species operating in familiar thematic territory regarding how the protagonist must use science driven analyses to understand what is coming, and where we fit in the grand cosmos.
People who read Rendezvous with Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke will see similarities in the use of physics and technology woven into The Ephemeral Species.
Those who enjoyed Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir will appreciate the effort Patrick Smith put into building a science-based world supporting The Ephemeral Species
Talking Points
Talking Point 1 — The Wanting-and-Hating Contradiction
A crucial observation about human nature in this book is that people want the new ‘improved’ species and hate them simultaneously. They want smarter and kinder gene-altered children with better futures, but they want to fire the gene-altered employee and exclude them from society because they’re a threat. That’s how humans have responded to every group that threatened to outcompete them throughout history.
Talking Point 2 — Personal Technological Displacement for Us All
Professionally, Patrick Smith has been replaced by technology three times. As the floor trader replaced by algorithms he helped train. As the database programmer watching AI absorb his work. And as the photographer seeing his images scraped by AI to generate images to replace his own. He wrote this book to understand where this will take us in the future, where our entire species will be replaced by something new and improved via directed evolution.
Talking Point 3 — The Fermi Paradox and Extinction as Biological Normality
The Ephemeral Species tackles the profound concept of what it means to be a fleeting, short-lived civilization when measured against the unyielding, multi-billion-year timeline of the universe. It directly explores how everything we see and worry about in everyday life is ephemeral, because even our species will be gone someday. Perhaps we don’t see evidence of extraterrestrial life because the universe is too big, and our time is too short.
Talking Point 4 — The AI Warning Embedded in a Story About Aliens
The planetary AI singleton in the book, from which even the advanced aliens are fleeing, could be in Earth’s future if we’re not careful. A self-improving AI will become smarter than humans and may take possession of the planet. We’ll have no say in it, just as native species have no say in what humans do. It will be inscrutable
Talking Point 5 — Longevity Leads to a New Species, and Our Extinction
We’re discovering the genetic keys to a longer lifespan. What will happen to society when some people can live 300 years, while others die before they reach 100? They would outlive old species spouses just as we outlive our pets. Therefore, they will only marry those with long lifespans, leading to the emergence of a new human species. They would have much longer careers and acquire more wealth, leading to a new economic species as well.
Here’s a full resolution image of the cover of The Ephemeral Species.
