Фред Хойл: October the First Is Too Late

‘We know of nothing definite.’

John was pacing about restlessly. He was evidently much agitated. Dramatically he turned. ‘You know what I think, I think both Africa and the southern hemisphere belong to the future, like the great Plain of Glass. I don’t think they’re your contemporary world at all. Otherwise there would be unmistakable traces of your people somewhere.’

The white-haired man smiled a little sadly.

‘You are very intelligent, Dr Sinclair. There seems to be little that has escaped you. Yes, it is possible that those regions may represent the future, the future even to us.’

‘You realize the implication?’

‘Naturally.’

I could contain myself no longer. ‘For heaven’s sake what does it mean?’

John turned on me. ‘It means that in the future, in the time belonging to those lands, the human race has become extinct. It has all come to nothing, the great experiment of animal life on this planet. Nothing has survived except a few insects.’

‘I do not see why you should be so perturbed, Dr Sinclair.’

‘It is a confession of failure.’

‘I cannot see why. In that sense, failure must come in any case, quite inevitably. You yourself have stood on the great Plain of Glass. You know what the whole Earth will come to in the end. The only question is whether it comes later, or sooner.’

I turned incredulously. ‘Extinction! It doesn’t worry you?’

‘In the sense of a serious critical problem, no. It will be hard for you to understand our point of view. In your time, everything of importance always lay in the future. You worked for the future, you were dominated by a sense of progress. The path along which you walked was always less important than the view around the next corner. Our philosophy is quite different. We have strong ideas of how life should be lived. If the conditions we believe to be necessary can no longer be met we would prefer there to be no future. You see, we do not believe in time as an ever-rolling stream. We believe all times are equally important, the past is not lost.’

I looked quizzically at John, for this was much what he himself had said one afternoon back in England. I remembered his argument about consciousness and about rows of pigeon holes, except I couldn’t remember the details. Whether because he actually agreed with the white-haired man, or because he thought I had detected him in some inconsistency, John now took a different line.

‘I could sympathize with your point of view if you could be sure extinction will come quickly. Do you think that will be the way of it? Surely there will be a long slow downward trend, at any rate to begin with. The degeneration will occur by slow creeping degrees. Things will go just a little wrong at first, then more wrong, then catastrophically wrong. We have seen enough today to be sure our species will not die easily. Extinction will be a long-drawn-out, agonizing affair. Surely you can’t maintain that living through such an experience would be in any way pleasant? Surely it is to be avoided, if it possibly can be?’

The white-haired man fell silent. I could see John’s point had great force with him. The girl Neria took up the argument:

‘These are exactly the questions we have been occupied with during the past months. We have only come to a decision after much discussion.’

The white-haired man continued. ‘It is only fair to tell you that what we are now saying is being heard by all our people.’

He pointed to the walls of the room as if to signify their qualities as receiving and transmission systems, qualities that were really obvious from the translations we were receiving.

He went on, ‘I tell you this to make it clear that I am not giving just a personal opinion. These are the considered views of our whole community.’

‘So what it comes down to,’ said John, ‘is that you’re not going to do anything definite. You’re going to continue in the same way as before?’

‘You are correct. We have weighed the likelihood of extinction against all the other factors. We see that a general mixing of ourselves with the people of Europe might be said to give the human species another chance. But it would only be a blind chance.’

‘It may be better to take even a blind chance.’

‘With the certainty of a repetition of what you have just seen?’

We were back at the dilemma.

‘Is there no way of proceeding slowly, of making experiments as you go?’ I asked. For answer, the white-haired man went on:

‘It is necessary for me to tell you something further, which I do not think you have yet appreciated. This strange world, this world with different ages living side by side, is not going to last permanently. Soon we shall revert to where we were before, or very nearly to where we were before.’

John nodded. ‘Yes, I’ve been having suspicions in that direction. The question is, whose world is it going to be?’

‘There can be no doubt at all about that. It will be ours. The play is already complete so far as you are concerned. There is no possibility of changing your society. It is we who are balanced on the knife edge.’

Deep within me I had the concept of there being some sort of plan.

When I said so, the white-haired man answered, ‘The concept of a plan involves the idea of working to a specified end. You have in mind an ultimate El Dorado, which some day you may attain. Yet there can be no such El Dorado for the Earth. You have seen the final state of the Earth, out there in the great Plain of Glass. Perhaps you may think we could escape to some other planet moving around some other star. Yet that star too will die. So it will be for our whole galaxy. Ultimate continuity, in a physical, material respect is impossible.

‘It is possible that gradually, inevitably, a huge intellect is being built from the creatures evolving on trillions of planets, everywhere throughout the universe. What in these circumstances you wonder would be our personal contribution? Perhaps if we were lucky we might contribute some small fragment to the sum total. More likely, we should contribute nothing. In all respects duplication occurs on an enormous scale, galaxies, stars, planets, living creatures, all in vast numbers. Stars like each other, living creatures like each other, all doing more or less the same thing, many indeed following almost exactly the same course of evolution. Yet, like the occasional mutation, something a little different may happen in exceptional cases. Perhaps in one case in a thousand a new facet may emerge. The question we have asked ourselves is whether this small chance is worth all the agony. Is it worth even the few thousand years you have observed this morning? Was the long process of evolution, lasting hundreds of millions of years, perhaps still to go on for hundreds of millions of years, worth the eventual small chance of life here on the Earth making a fragmentary contribution to some higher level of attainment, of which we can barely conceive? To an imaginary planner, the answer would of course be yes, because the planner would be interested only in the higher levels being built from the lower, just as we ourselves are pleased to have evolved from more primitive creatures. Yet to the creatures themselves the answer may be no.’

I saw now where the argument was leading. ‘Your answer I take it is no?’

‘Our answer is no. If we hold firmly with the utmost determination to our present point of balance we may hope to deny what we believe to be the normal course of evolution.’

John was walking up and down. ‘Can we come back now to the how and the why of it?’

‘There are several interpretations. It could be an opportunity to repair some biological defect in our heredity. We may have lost some essential component which your population has still within it. It could be a punishment, by showing us our own extinction, to cause us distress. It could even be an experiment to see how we react in the face of both these things.’