Stanislaw Lem - Microworlds

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 reason, which is embodied in the multitude of the highest civilizations.

At first, this new cosmogony was roundly attacked, but it also gained adherents when it became clear that its hypotheses allow for deductions that agree with observed phenomena. For instance, the theory explains the expansion of the universe, since an expanding universe would be the most comfortable home for all the leading civilizations participating in the game at the same time. As soon as life appears on the planets of second-generation suns, followed by the flowering of intelligent societies, the psychozoic density (the frequency of the presence of intelligent beings) of the cosmos is altered as more and more civilizations occupy each unit of space. Should neighboring civilizations reach agreements, they might form coalitions whose activities could disturb the progress of cosmic processes. Therefore, in order to keep the psychozoic density of the cosmos constant, the ancient civilizations effected the continuous expansion of the universe. This at once explains why terrestrial astronomers have not been able to discover a single civilization near the sun: the distances between civilizations must remain great. Pulsars, those great, pulsing founts of radiation, are instruments used to synchronize and keep in phase the activity of still more gigantic, but imperceptible, systems determining the measurable aspects of space. And quasars, each of which is a cosmic furnace so mighty that its capacity exceeds the total radiation capacity of the Milky Way, are devices for radiating energy into space: or, rather, this is how they functioned several billions of years ago, since, due to their great distance from the earth, we see them in their distant past, when the exalted partners had just begun their cooperation.