One Human Minute

its own security system, its own codes, and — obviously! — its own computer. Each kept cooperation with the others to the absolute minimum, just enough so the government wouldn’t fall apart. Indeed, the main concern of each successive administration was to see that a minimum of unity was maintained in the government of the country and the conduct of foreign policy.

Even in the previous century no one knew what the real military strength of the United States was, because that strength was presented to the people differently, depending on whether a White House spokesman was speaking or an opposing presidential candidate. But nowadays the devil himself could not make head or tail of the situation.

Meanwhile, in addition to computer rule, which was gradually replacing natural, human rule, there appeared certain phenomena that once would have been called natural; but now no one knew by what or by whom they were caused, if indeed they were caused by anything or anyone at all. Acid rain had been known in the twentieth century. But now there were rains so corrosive that they destroyed roads, power lines, and factory roofs, and it was impossible to determine whether they were caused by pollution or by enemy sabotage. It was that way with everything. Livestock were stricken, but was the disease natural or artificial? The hurricane that ravaged the coast — was it a chance thing, or was it engineered by an invisible swarm of micrometeorological agents, each as small as a virus, covertly diverting ocean air masses? Was the drought natural — however murderous — or was it, too, caused by a skillful diversion of the rain clouds?

These calamities beset not just the United States but the entire world. Again, some saw in this evidence of their natural origin; others, again, were convinced that the reason they were pandemic was that all countries now had at their disposal unhuman means of striking at any distance and were inflicting damage on one another, while declaring officially that they were doing nothing of the sort. Caught in the act, a saboteur could not be cross- examined: synsects and artificial microbes were mute. Meteorological counterintelligence, seismic espionage, reconnaissance teams of epidemiologists, geneticists, and even hydrographers had their hands full. An ever larger share of world science was enlisted in this military intelligence work. Hurricanes, crop failures, rising mortality rates in cattle, and even meteor showers were suspected of being intentional. (Note, by the way, that the idea of guiding asteroids to fall on enemy territory, causing terrible devastation, had arisen in the twentieth century and was considered interesting.)

New disciplines were taught in the military academies: crypto-offensive and crypto-defensive strategies, the cryptology of counter-counterintelligence (the covert enticement-deception of agents raised to the next power), applied enigmatics, and finally “cryptocryptics,” which presented in a secret manner the secret use of weapons so secret that there was no way anyone could tell them from innocent phenomena of nature.

Blurred, also, was the distinction between real and spurious hostilities. In order to turn its people against another nation, a country would produce on its own territory “natural” catastrophes so obviously artificial that its citizens were bound to believe the charge that the enemy was responsible. When it came out that a certain large and wealthy nation, in offering aid to those that were underdeveloped and overpopulated, supplemented the provisions it sold (cheaply) of sago, wheat, corn, and potato flour with a drug that diminished sexual potency, the Third World became enraged. This was now an undercover, antinatural war.

Thus peace was war, and war peace. Although the catastrophic consequences of this trend for the future were clear — a mutual victory indistinguishable from universal destruction — the world continued to move in that fatal direction. It was not a totalitarian conspiracy, as Orwell once imagined, that made peace war, but the technological advances that effaced the boundary between the natural and the artificial in every area of human life, even in extraterrestrial space.

When there is no longer any difference between natural and artificial protein, or between natural and artificial intelligence — say the theoreticians of knowledge, the philosophers — then neither can one distinguish a misfortune that is intentional from one for which no one is to blame.

As light, pulled irresistibly into the heart of a stellar black hole, cannot escape that gravitational trap, so humanity, pulled by the forces of mutual antagonism into the heart of matter’s secrets, fell into the trap of technology, a trap of its own making. The decision to invest everything in new weapons was not made by governments, statesmen, generals, corporate interests, or pressure groups, but by the ever-growing fear that someone else would be first to hit upon the discoveries and technologies affording the ultimate advantage. This paralyzed traditional politics. The negotiators at summit meetings could not negotiate, because their willingness to relinquish a new weapon would only indicate, in the eyes of the other side, that they had another, newer weapon up their sleeve…

By now the impossibility of disarmament had been proved mathematically. I have seen the mathematical model of the so-called general theory of conflicts; it shows why arms talks cannot produce results. At summit meetings certain decisions are reached. But when it takes longer to reach a decision promoting peace than it does to develop the kind of military innovations that radically change the very situation under negotiation, then any decision, at the moment of its acceptance, is an anachronism.

It is as if the ancients had debated so long about banning their “Greek fire” that by the time they agreed to ban it, Berthold Schwarz had appeared with his gunpowder. When one decides “today” about something that existed “yesterday,” the decision moves from the present into the past and thereby becomes an empty game.

It was this that finally, at the end of the twenty-first century, forced the world powers into a new type of agreement, an agreement that opened up a new era in the history of the human race. But that is a subject that belongs to the twenty-second century and therefore lies outside the scope of these remarks. Later, if I am able, I will devote a separate discussion to it — describing the next chapter of general history, a remarkable chapter, in which Earth, emerging from the era of antagonisms, truly frees itself from one technological trap, but steps into another, as if her destiny is to go forever from the frying pan into the fire.

THE WORLD AS CATACLYSM

Introduction

Books with titles like this one began to appear at the end of the twentieth century, but the image of the world contained in them did not become generally known until the next century, for only then did the discoveries germinating in widely separated branches of knowledge come together into a new synthesis. That synthesis — to put it bluntly — marked an anti-Copernican revolution in astronomy, in which our notion of the place we occupy in the Universe was stood on its head.

Pre-Copernican astronomy put the Earth in the center of the world; Copernicus deposed it from its privileged position when he discovered that ours is but one of many planets orbiting the Sun. Over the centuries, advances in astronomy strengthened the Copernican hypothesis, showing that not only was Earth not the central body in the solar system but that the system itself was located on the periphery of our Galaxy, the Milky Way. We lived “nowhere in particular” in the Universe, in a stellar suburb.

Astronomy studied the evolution of the stars, biology the evolution of life on Earth; and the paths of their investigations met — or, rather, converged like two tributaries of a river. Astronomy took for its province the question of the incidence of life in the Universe, and theoretical biology lent its assistance to the task. Thus, in the middle of the twentieth century, CETI (Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence) came into being, the first program dedicated to the search for other civilizations.

But the search, conducted for several decades, utilizing ever better and more powerful instruments, found no alien civilization or any trace of a radio signal. So arose the enigma of the silentium universi. The “cosmic silence” received some publicity in the seventies, when it was taken up by the media. The undetectability of “other intelligences” was incomprehensible to scientists. The biologists had already determined what physical-chemical conditions facilitated the emergence of life from inert matter — and the conditions were not at all exceptional. The astronomers proved the existence of numerous planets around various stars. Observations indicated that a high