“humanity’s game with nature”; our stance concerning it would be unequivocal, since we would not have to re- evaluate or reorient our cultural norms to conclude that the prevention of earthquakes is a good thing and a worthwhile goal for which to strive.
Our second work might describe what happens when the use of a certain chemical that separates the sensations of pleasure from sex spreads throughout the earth. One possible rational motive for the use of the drug might be the desire to check the population explosion. Or there might also be a hostile motive: the drug might be a secret weapon in a covert military operation. It is not difficult to imagine the consequences. Since no one wants to indulge in sex of his own free will any more — after all, it is simply hard physical labor, totally devoid of pleasure — humanity is threatened with extinction. To prevent this disastrous eventuality, governments are forced to experiment with strategies for saving the human race, First, they try propaganda. But quickly they are forced to realize that the very same drawings, photographs, and movies whose distribution they had been obliged to prohibit not so long before no longer interest anyone at all now; on the contrary, they produce general disgust, since they are no more arousing for either sex than a picture of a washtub is for a washerwoman, or a photo of an ax for an exhausted woodcutter. These seductive devices fail for a very simple reason: once the act itself has lost its attraction, no amount of hinting, alluding, and suggesting can create a desire for it. Since the promotion of sex proves ineffective, governments resort to more pragmatic methods. They mobilize material incentives: rewards, premiums, decorations, extraordinary honors, social benefits, privileges, and magnificent titles with honorary diplomas. In the meantime, several industries go under: the cosmetics industry, part of the publishing industry (after all, who will read erotic literature when all it calls to mind is drudgery?), the film industry, as well as advertising — since they have been based on sex. The clothing and underwear industries are faced with a crisis greater than they have ever faced. Women’s breasts now only remind people that humans are mammals; legs, that people can walk; and a painted mouth seems as bizarre as if someone had decided to glue an artificial ear on his bald head.
Naturally, researchers work feverishly to find an antidote that will neutralize the catastrophic effect of the drug; but in vain. As the new state of affairs stabilizes, new models of beauty emerge, models that provide security against every kind of erotic danger (for it can happen that one resigns himself to procreating to gain a medal or a title, only to find the potential partner repelled by the invitation; others may try to shirk their social responsibilities by making the illusion appear to be the reality, and thus supervisory committees are established to verify that everything is taking place as the social good demands; men declare that they deserve greater rewards because they have to put more work into it, while women protest that this is out of the question, and so forth). Under these conditions, perfect security lies in the companionship of someone visibly incapable of the sexual act (and so, not likely ever to suddenly demand it). Gray hair, potbellies, wheelchairs, and similar “antisexual” characteristics are accorded universal interest and respect as symbols of erotically disarmed paralysis.
A work of this sort would posit a certain anthropological hypothesis about the role of sexuality in the totality of human behavior.
The third example is of an entirely different order. It is a popular scientific book published in the mid-twenty- first century detailing the history of cosmological views, including the most recent theories. The author begins, naturally, at the beginning: long, long ago, humans, basing their thought on their relationships to their own products, conceived of the universe as an intentional object, like a pot or a table; there was a Someone who had created it, intentionally, and by design. The battle of ideas went on for centuries, until science appeared to establish that natural phenomena are not intentional objects. Thus, the trees, stones, atoms, clouds, oceans, rivers, and beyond them the planets, the sun, the stars, and the nebulae that constituted the objects of scientific inquiry were products of the natural processes of a heterogeneous evolution not conceived or designed by a personal being. Science discovered a series of objective regularities in these phenomena, and named them the fundamental laws of nature. Physics and astrophysics led the field, and the other branches of science queued up behind them.
But by the mid-twentieth century, theoretical views in the scientific world had come into grave conflict with one another. On the one hand, physics, planetology, astronomy, and evolutionary biology preached that the birth and development of life, which is crowned by the appearance of intelligent beings, is, in cosmic terms, normal, typical, average, and therefore a phenomenon belonging to the order of things. On the other hand, despite years of serious effort not a single trace had been discovered of any great, stellar-scale constructs that might have signaled the existence of a highly developed civilization, either in our own galaxy, or elsewhere. The persistence of this intolerable situation — produced by the contradiction between scientific expectations and the empirical data that had actually been gathered — swept the natural sciences, primarily biology and astronomy, into an ever-deepening crisis, until at last the inevitable ensued, and science resigned itself to the painful labor of restructuring its theoretical foundations.
Since we are here gathering in a nutshell something that itself amounts to a summary of an entire epoch’s work (i.e., in our proposed popular scientific book) we cannot delve into the biographies of the learned people who set human thinking, including cosmogony and cosmology, on a completely new track. The first tentative hypotheses proposed by certain pioneering scientists were given the worst possible reception by the community of inquirers. But when the evidence of the “negative facts” became incontestable (i.e., the total absence of signs of “astrotechnical” constructs or traces), an extraordinary reversal occurred. Through their common efforts, scientists shaped new approaches and new models of the cosmos one after another, and the broad outlines of a new image of the universe began to unfold as follows.
Astrophysicists already know today that our sun and its planetary system belong to the so-called second stellar generation; the solar system is approximately five billion years old, while our whole galaxy is close to ten billion years old. Clearly then, the first generation of stars came into being before the formation of our solar system, in the remote mists of the cosmic past. With them came the planets, and on these planets life emerged. This was the first stage in the history of cosmic civilizations. When they attained a sufficiently high degree of scientific development they applied astrotechnics in an ever wider sphere of activity. For creatures at lower levels of development, the laws of nature are immutable attributes of being, but for those who have reached the higher planes of cognition, the laws of nature are no longer absolutely binding. Certain changes can be effected on them; the constant of gravitation, for example, can be reshaped, as well as the constants of electrical charges, the constant of maximum velocity, and so on. Since enormous distances separate the most developed civilizations from one another -distances of several hundred million light-years’ magnitude, at the very least — they do not communicate with each other directly. They only infer the existence of their neighbors from certain observed facts: from certain gradual, noticeable changes in the laws of nature. Some of these transformations may benefit a given civilization, others may not. Therefore, each civilization approves and augments the former, and obstructs the latter, through its own astrotechnical activities. Thus begins the cosmogonic game played by the most developed civilizations of the universe.
This cosmogonic game is not military in nature, since the partners do not use weapons and do not aim to annihilate one another. Rather, it is a co-operation justified by considerations beyond ethics: the annihilation or conquest of the partners would benefit no one, while by co-operating the partners help to sustain the trend of cosmogonic transformation most beneficial to everyone. Nor is the game a form of interstellar dialogue. Civilizations so advanced have nothing to say to one another — the less so when we consider that a dialogue in which the reply is separated from the question by a billion years is utterly irrelevant. Intelligent discussions might be held about which natural laws should be transformed and in what manner, but the time spent waiting for an answer would be too long for any effective action. The situation might be described like this: a certain ship, battling a storm, is so large that the machinist and navigator cannot coordinate their actions through a dialogue, since they must act too quickly for orders or replies. Every message is thus hopelessly late in relation to the actions that have already been initiated; as they arrive, the messages always refer to something no longer relevant. Similarly, communication in the universe occurs on the level of action, not in articulated messages. The civilizations do not fight, since it would do them no good; nor do they converse, since that would be meaningless. Gradually, over millions of years, their cooperation has become harmonized and synchronized. In the beginning, surely, confusions did arise when they misunderstood one another’s creative work; traces of this can still be observed by astronomers. But that time is long past. Now, the exalted partners do their work wrapped in energetic silence, and realize their plans of cosmic stabilization or transformation so well that hardly any part of the primal universe that existed seven to eight billion years ago remains untouched. In the course of time, they transformed the entire universe in accordance with the strategy of the exalted civilizations, and everything within it — stars, dust clouds, galaxies, nebulae, as well as the laws directing them -originated in the game of this coalition. The evolution of matter is governed by collective
