Barrington Bayley - Barrington Bayley SF Gateway Omnibus - The Soul of the Robot, The Knights of the Limits, The Fall of Chronopolis

Crowds of gigantic magnitude have mostly been associated with religious occasions. The earliest historical mention of a giant crowd is for the year 1966, when five million people assembled for the Hindu festival of Kumbh-Mela. A Kumbh-Mela crowd of over twenty million is recorded for eighty years later. The largest recorded crowd ever was an estimated two hundred and ten million people who assembled for the event of the Joyous Declaration of the World God Uhuru movement on the Central African Plain in AD 2381, this number being compressed into a remarkably small area thanks to the ingenious open-plan multi-storey stadia erected for the occasion. When control measures failed fifty million people died as a result of internal crowd pressure. At several loci within the crowd the aggregated pressure rose to such a degree that several millions at a time were fused into a single bloody mass in which no individual bodies or parts of bodies were distinguishable. Gigantic crowds continued to be a feature of World God Uhuru despite attempts by civil authorities to have the gatherings banned.

A more disciplined crowd-like conformation yields mass regimentation (‘the human dragon’, as it has been called), the simplest and crudest means of accomplishing large-scale enterprises. This conformation was the basis of all the great engineering works of the ancient world, there being at the time no other form of economic organisation equal to the tasks involved. History furnishes many impressive examples of its use – for instance, the digging of a canal during the Chinese Sui dynasty to join the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, by order of the emperor Yang Ti (of whom it is recorded: ‘He ruled without benevolence’). Five and a half million workers were assembled and worked under guard by 50,000 police. In some areas all commoners between the ages of fifteen and fifty were drafted; every fifth family was required to contribute one person to help to supply and prepare food. Over two million workers were listed as ‘lost’.

The history of civilisation is largely the story of the developing range of cohesive conformations.

Resolution Levels: The main success of the theory of social energy fields is that it at last brings human activity within the realm of purely physical phenomena, attributing to it properties as definitive as those of charge and mass. At first the energy field was looked on as only an analogy; but then T. R. Millikan pointed out that it is only in scale that the SEF is any different from, say, electromagneticism. Electrons are very small in relation to us; therefore it is easy to accept that they are acting on one another through the medium of an electric field. Were we able to study people reduced to the same resolution level as electrons, we would similarly infer that they were acting on one another through the medium of a field of energy.

From there it was but a short step to the idea that the SEF actually exists as a measurable field of force to which human beings respond. This field might, it was thought, consist of some subtle and undetected form of magnetism. It would go a long way towards explaining such phenomena as mass hypnotism, mass delusion, and the improbable feats of healing that are known sometimes to occur, since the human perception of reality must necessarily be tied to this field, and therefore would be malleable.

Attempts have been made to detect and measure the field, as well as to influence it by means of artificial field generators. In order to obtain a convenient resolution level, Earth civilisation has been studied from satellite laboratories, from Luna, and from Triton. The effects of the ‘field generators’ placed in some large cities, usually sending out low-powered magnetic and electrical oscillations, were initially quite promising, apparently producing either manic enthusiasm among the urban population, or else an unnatural lassitude. But due to the difficulty of isolating these results from other possible causes, none of them could be taken as conclusive.

The Theory of the Social Black Hole: If continued additions are made to force fields they become so powerful as to create weird and abnormal states of matter, such as the neutron star and the black hole. Social scientists have speculated on the results of endlessly adding to human populations, since the SEF also contains a gravitating principle: population tends towards centres, producing the well-known ‘skyscraper effect’.

If large human communities were to exist in cosmic space the centripetal effect would tend towards the centre of a sphere. The ‘skyscraper effect’ would then produce only increasing concentration and density, there being no extra dimension to ease the load as the dimension of height does on the ground. There being no theoretical limit to the size a population may ultimately assume, it has already been proposed to build a vast artificial sphere several hundred million miles in diameter (a development of the once-projected Dyson sphere) to trap all solar energy so as to power and accommodate a truly titanic civilisation. Leaving aside considerations of physical mass and gravity, the question that arises is what would happen to the SEF inside such a sphere (centred on the sun or built in interstellar space if provided with alternative sources of energy) if it were to fill up entirely with human population. It is believed that a condition of ‘psychosocial collapse’ would occur towards the centre of the sphere. Individual and collective mentalities would assume unimaginable relationships; the two poles would perhaps disappear into one another, much as electrons and protons are forced to merge by the intense pressure inside a neutron star. Perception of reality, which is based on the polar relationship, would bear no resemblance to our perception of it. The whole of mankind within the sphere would ultimately be drawn into a ‘social black hole’, and would be totally unable to perceive or conceive of an external physical universe.

The theory of the social black hole, while it might seem to verge on the limit of possibility, does indicate that a social energy field could become subject to wholly strange effects.

5. Conclusions: The quadropolar social energy field, with its properties of coherence and cohesion, can be looked on as a cosmic instrument of action: Its evolution has taken several hundred million years; it is now capable of a large range of accomplishments, many of them, no doubt, not even imagined as yet.

A disquieting feature of the SEF is that it is a self-conserving type of system beyond the scope of any of its parts to control. The reason for this is that any impulse arising within it is, after a period of time, answered by a re-equilibrating impulse from the opposite polarity. Systems of this type are open to external control, however . It is not idle to speculate that the universe may contain entities to whom Earth civilisation appears as a convenient readymade tool or ‘machine’ and who might be able to locate or devise external controls for such a machine – entities, perhaps, whose mentalities do not have a polar structure and whose perception of reality is therefore at variance with our own.

Isaac Morley, an acknowledged genius, had by his own account invented a new methodology of thought which included original concepts in ontology. He claims it was a coded statement of this system that was emitted by the Antarctic Structure. When asked why the project was undertaken, Morley said: ‘It seemed fitting that the information should be transmitted into the cosmos.’ When further asked why the transmission tapes were subsequently wiped clean, he merely replied that they had fulfilled their purpose; the concepts had been created and would travel through space for all eternity. Morley now claims not to be able to remember the salient features of his breakthrough in philosophical thought, their subtlety having proved too elusive for his memory.