A Perfect Vacuum (28 page)

What happened to them? The German astronomer Sebastian von Hoerner maintained they all committed suicide. And why not, if they were nowhere to be found! But no, replied Acheropoulos. They are nowhere to be found? It is only that we do not perceive them, because they are
already everywhere.
That is, not they, but the fruit of their labor. Twelve billion years ago, then, yes, at that time space was without life, and the first seeds of life quickened in it, on the planets of the first stellar generation. But after the passage of eons, nothing was left of that cosmic primordium. If one considers “artificial” to be that which is shaped by an active Intelligence, then the entire Universe that surrounds us is already
artificial.
So audacious a statement evokes an immediate protest: surely we know what “artificial” things look like, things that are produced by an Intelligence engaged in instrumental activity! Where, then, are the spacecraft, where the Moloch-machines, where—in short—the titanic technologies of these beings who are supposed to surround us and constitute the starry firmament? But this is a mistake caused by the inertia of the mind, since instrumental technologies are required only—says Acheropoulos—by a civilization still in the embryonic stage, like Earth's. A billion-year-old civilization employs none. Its tools are what
we
call the Laws of Nature. Physics itself is the “machine” of such civilizations ! And it is no “ready-made machine,” nothing of the sort. That “machine” (obviously it has nothing in common with mechanical machines) is billions of years in the making, and its structure, though much advanced, has not yet been finished!

The sheer audacity of the blasphemy, its terribly rebellious flavor, casts Acheropoulos's book out of the reader's hands—so it must have been in many cases. And yet this is but the first step on the road to further apostasies by the author, the greatest heresiarch in the history of science.

Acheropoulos does away with the distinction between “natural” (the work of Nature) and “artificial” (the work of technology) and goes so far as to dispense with the unquestioned difference between Established Law (juridical) and the Law of Nature.... He dismisses the tenet that the separability of any and all objects into artificial and natural by origin constitutes an objective property of the world. He considers this tenet to be a fundamental aberration of the mind, caused by an effect he calls “the closing in upon itself of the conceptual horizon.”

A man watches nature—he says—and learns to act from it; he pays close attention to falling bodies, lightning bolts, the process of combustion; Nature always is the teacher, and he the student; after a certain amount of time, he begins actually to imitate the processes of his own body. Later, with biology, he takes private lessons from that body, but even then, like the cave dweller, continues to regard Nature as the upper bound of perfection in solutions. He tells himself that maybe someday—someday—he will come near to matching Nature in its excellence of action, but this, then, will be the end of the road. To go further is impossible, for that which exists as atoms, suns, the bodies of animals, his own brain, is, in its construction, unsurpassable for all time. The natural thus represents the limit of the series of works that “artificially” repeat or modify it.

Now, this is an error of perspective, says Acheropoulos, or “the closing in upon itself of the conceptual horizon.” The very notion of the “perfection of Nature” is an illusion, as much an illusion as the image of rails meeting at the vanishing point. Nature may be replaced in everything, provided, of course, one possesses the requisite knowledge. One can control atoms, and then one can alter the properties of the atoms as well. In this, one ought not ask oneself whether the thing that will be the “artificial” product of such operations will not prove “more perfect” than the thing that was, hitherto, “natural.” It will be simply different—according to the design and intention of the Operating Parties; it will be “superior”—that is, “more perfect”—insofar as it is fashioned in conformity with the purpose of the Intelligence. Indeed, what sort of “absolute superiority” could be displayed by cosmic matter after its total reconstruction? Possible are “various Natures,” “different Universes,” but only one specific variant was carried out, this one that has begotten us and in which we have existence; that is all. The so-called Laws of Nature are inviolable only for a civilization that is “embryonic,” such as Earth's. According to Acheropoulos, the road leads from the level where the Laws of Nature are discovered to the level where such laws may be laid down.

This is precisely what has happened—and is happening—these billions of years. The present Universe
no longer
is the field of the play of forces elemental, pristine, blindly giving birth to and destroying suns and their systems; nothing of the sort. In the Universe it is no longer possible to distinguish what is “natural” (original) from what is “artificial” (transformed). Who performed these cosmogonic labors? The first generation of civilizations. In what manner? That we do not know: our knowledge is too minute. How, then, and by what can we tell that such is indeed the case?

Had the first civilizations—replies Acheropoulos—been free in their actions from the beginning, as was the Creator of the Universe in the conception of religion, then, truly, we never would have been able to discern the change that took place. God, after all, created the world—say the religions—through a pure act of will, in complete freedom; but the situation in which the Intelligence found itself was different; the Civilizations that arose were limited by the properties of the primal matter that begot them; these properties conditioned their subsequent actions; from the way in which those Civilizations now behave one can, indirectly, divine the starting conditions for the Psychozoic Cosmogony. This is no easy thing, for, whatever took place, the Civilizations did not emerge unchanged from the work of transforming the Cosmos; being a part of it, they could not touch it without also touching themselves.

Acheropoulos employs the following visual model. When on an agar medium we place colonies of bacteria, we can at once distinguish between the starting (the “natural”) agar and those colonies. In time, however, the vital processes of the bacteria change the agar medium, introducing into it certain substances, consuming others, so that the composition of the nutrient material—its acidity, its consistency—undergoes transformations. Now, when as a result of those changes the agar, endowed with new chemisms, causes the rise of new varieties of bacteria, altered quite beyond recognition with respect to the parent generations, these new varieties are nothing more or less than the product of the “biochemical game” that has gone on between all the colonies collectively and the culture medium. The later varieties of bacteria would not have arisen had the earlier ones not changed the environment; hence, the later ones are creations of the game itself. Meanwhile, it is not at all necessary for the individual colonies to be in direct contact with one another; they affect one another, but only through osmosis, diffusion, the displacements in the acid-base equilibrium of the nutrient. As one can see, the original game state has a tendency to disappear, to be supplanted by qualitatively new, initially nonexistent forms of game interaction. For the agar, substitute the Protocosmos, and for the bacteria, the Protocivilizations, and you obtain a simplified view of the New Cosmogony.

What I have said thus far is, from the standpoint of knowledge accumulated historically, totally insane. Nothing, however, is to prevent our conducting thought experiments with the most arbitrary assumptions, provided they be logically consistent. When therefore we agree to the model of the Universe-Game, there arise a series of questions, and to these we must provide consistent answers. They are questions, above all, concerning the initial state: can we infer anything at all about it, can we by inference arrive at the starting conditions of the Game? Acheropoulos believes this to be possible. For the Game to have originated in it, the Protocosmos must have possessed well-defined properties. It must have been such, for example, as to allow the first civilizations to come into existence in it, and therefore it was not a physical chaos, but obeyed certain rules.

These rules, however, did not have to be universal, that is to say, the same everywhere. The Protouniverse could have been heterogeneous physically; it could have represented a sort of miscellany of diverse physics, physics not in every place identical and even not in every place equally rigorous (processes occurring under the sovereignty of a nonrigorous or indefinite physics would not always run the same course, though their initial conditions might be analogous). Acheropoulos posited that the Protouniverse was precisely such a physical “patchwork” and that civilizations were able to arise in it only in a few locations, at a considerable distance from one another. Acheropoulos conceived of the Protouniverse as the physical homologue of a honeycomb; what in the honeycomb are cells would in the Protouniverse be regions of temporarily stabilized physics, with each physics different from the physics of the adjoining regions. Each civilization, developing inside such an enclosure, in isolation from the others, would think itself alone in the entire Universum, and, growing in power and knowledge, would attempt to impart stability to its surroundings, and this in an ever-widening radius. When it succeeded in doing so, after a very long time such a civilization began to encounter—in its centrifugal industry—phenomena that were not now simply the natural elementality of the time-space ambience, but manifestations of the industry of another civilization. So concluded, according to Acheropoulos, the first stage of the Game, the preliminary stage. The civilizations could not come into direct contact with one another, but the physics established by one would always happen upon, during expansion, the physics of its neighbors.

These physics could not traverse one another without collision because they were not identical; and they were not identical because they did not represent the same initial living conditions for each civilization considered separately. The individual civilizations for a long time did not realize that they were no longer penetrating, in their work, a completely inert element; but that they were, instead, touching upon realms of intentionally initiated work—the work of other civilizations. Comprehension was arrived at gradually. These determinations, which undoubtedly did not take place all at the same time, opened up the next and second stage of the Game. To give verisimilitude to his hypothesis, Acheropoulos includes in
A New Cosmogony
a number of imaginary scenes depicting that cosmic era when different Physics, dissimilar in their principal laws, came into conflict. The fronts of their clashes made gigantic eruptions and fires, for prodigious amounts of energy were released by annihilations and transformations of various kinds. Presumably they were collisions so powerful that their echo to this day reverberates in the Universum, in the form of the residual or background radiation that astrophysics identified in the sixties, conjecturing that it was the last vestige of the shock waves produced by the explosive birth of the Universe from its point source. Such an exploding (“big bang”) model of creation was at the time considered plausible by many. But after further eons the civilizations, each, as it were, on its own, discovered that they had been waging an antagonistic Game not with the forces of Nature, but—unknowingly—with other civilizations. Now, the thing that determined their subsequent strategies was the fact of the fundamental impossibility of communication, of establishing contact, because one cannot transmit, from the domain of one Physics, any message into the domain of another.

Each of them, therefore, had to work alone. A continuation of their former tactics would have been pointless if not outright perilous; instead of wasting effort in head-on collisions they had to unite, but unite without any prior arrangement whatever. Such decisions, made, again, not at the same time, in any case led finally to the Game's passing into its third stage, which is going on even now. For practically the entire group of psychozoics in the Macrocosm is conducting a game both solidary and normative. The members of this group act much like the crews of ships that, during a storm, pour oil on the turbulent waves; though they have not coordinated this course of action, it will be—will it not?—to the advantage of all. Each player, then, operates on the strategic principle of minimax: it changes the existing conditions in such a way as to maximize the common gain and minimize harm. For this reason the present Universe is homogeneous and isotropic (it is governed by the same laws throughout, and in it no one direction is favored over another). The properties that Einstein discovered in the Universum are the result of decisions which, though made separately, are identical, owing to the identical situation of the players; but it was their
strategic
situation that was identical in the beginning, and not necessarily the
physical.
It was not that a uniform Physics gave rise to the strategy of the Game. Rather, it happened the other way around: the uniform strategy of minimax gave rise to a single Physics.
Id fecit Universum, cui prodest.

Ladies and gentlemen, to the best of our knowledge Acheropoulos's vision conforms to the broad outlines of reality, although it contains a number of oversimplifications and mistakes. Acheropoulos postulated that within the context of different Physics there could originate the same type of logic. For if civilization A
₁
, begotten in “cosmic cell” A, had had a logic other than that of civilization B
₁
, arisen in “cell” B, then both would not have been able to employ the same strategy and thereby unify their Physics. He postulated, then, that nonidentical Physics could nevertheless cause the emergence of a single Logic—otherwise he could not have explained what took place cosmically. In this intuition there is a modicum of truth, but the matter is much more complicated than he imagined. From him we inherited a plan for the reconstruction of the strategy of the Game—on the principle of “working backward.” Taking our present Physics as the point of departure, we attempt to figure out what—in the form of the decisions of the Players—gave rise to it. The task is made difficult by the fact that the course of events cannot be thought of as a linear sequence: as if the Protouniverse determined the Game and the Game, in turn, determined our present Physics. He who changes Physics changes himself; that is to say, he creates a feedback loop between the transformation of his surroundings and his autotransformation.