“… That’s incredible! Just the scale of it is staggering.” The emphasis in Harry Hartman’s voice reverberated off the acoustic wall panels lining the auditorium. A cardioid microphone was perched on his mahogany desk at the center of the stage. It was presently transducing Hartman’s analog wonder into electrical signals, which sped along serpentine circuits that ran the length of The Medusa. An array of antennae located in the spaceship’s quarterdekc modulated these signals and broadcasted a frequency to which most of the Solar System had tuned into.
The stage opened up into semi-circular stands rising majestically one after the other in dim, undulating arcs until they dissolved into complete darkness. In addition to the five thousand heads in the stands nodding their agreement with Hartman, the broadcasting unit registered another hundred fifty million virtual heads. However, the hologram-ready screen towering behind Hartman—the HoloVisor—could only capture a fraction of them.
At the center of the Holovisor, the prominent projection of an hourglass stood out amidst the sea of virtual heads. With every passing moment more sand trickled out from the bulb above into the one below. A modest pile had already gathered there. A countdown underneath the hourglass announced precisely what measure of time remained: ninety cevs. A hundred cevs make one shirev, and a shirev is the time it takes for one Type-I ship revolution to complete. One shirev is an eighth of the Earth’s rotation.
Ninety Cevs
The polyester armchair that stood on Hartman’s left was reserved for the show’s guests. Tonight’s guest, and the center of everyone’s attention, sat still, with both hands clasped in his lap. Warm rays descending from the main stage light fell upon his delicate form, which seemed so fragile that light appeared to pass straight through him. His dark eyes remained unfocussed as they gazed out into a faceless audience.
On paper he was Floyd Ryzen, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Encordia, First Author of The Solarian Encyclopedia and Founder of Zelion; to Solaris though, he was simply “Professor”. A lifetime at lecture hall podiums had trained the professor to convey detail in his deliveries; tonight, however, had to be different. With the hourglass draining incessantly, every syllable had to carry weight.
Hartman was first to stir. He put aside the letter he was holding and produced another one from behind his desk. “Professor Ryzen, five-year-old Marissa from the Venutian Quarter writes, ‘Dear Professor, dada says we wouldn’t be live without you so thanks! Can you help me please what is your rek-mun-dation’” —Hartman contained a grin as he attempted to remain true to text— “‘for what I should be when I grow up?’”
For a few moments, the hourglass slipped from Solarian awareness as the audience cooed at the innocence in the letter. As Ryzen smiled, his wizened face broke into a hundred lines, and fifty years appeared deducted from him. “Dear Marissa,” he began softly, “you are very welcome!” Dotage had lent his baritone a hoarse quality, but as Ryzen addressed the child it took to a gentler timbre. “As for what you should be when you’re all grown up… the answer is already written inside you.” Then the professor resumed his silent gaze. The audience waited for more, but when none came, a soft applause broke out.
“The answer is already written inside you—that’s a T-shirt right there!” cheered Hartman. Brown, winged glasses teetered dangerously close to the edge of his nose. The cheer in his voice conveyed an indomitable spirit, one that wouldn’t be subdued even by the knowledge that he’d been second choice as host. He understood his bouncy brand wasn’t congruent with iconic moments like these, so when the network phoned him in, it took him by surprise. The paycheck was nice, but Hartman would’ve done it for the privilege alone.
Eighty-Five Cevs
The host drew another letter. “Mihād Arkum from the Chelum Belt asks, ‘Dear Professor, I’m wondering, in your opinion, which event in Post-Modern history contributed most to shifting us away from the socioeconomic systems of the late Modern Era?’”
Hartman lowered the letter down onto his desk. In the auditorium, slowly the atmosphere morphed as the question sank in. The lightheartedness from the letter before gave way to a grim curiosity. These days, talk of socioeconomic systems and the late Modern Era invariably conjured images of a darker time in human history. Every day, at dinner tables around Solaris, well-meaning elders recounted solemn tales of the Resource Wars.
The guest thought for a few moments. This wasn’t the first time he’d been probed on the anthropological socioeconomics of yesteryear—in fact, he mused, this would likely be the last— but, as was habit, he sought the answer anew.
“Well, uh, let’s see Mihād, it’s difficult to identify any single event. The thing about anthropological processes is that, like most intricate processes, they often require a horde of chained factors to fall into place before a more transcendent reality can emerge. Our journey from the late Modern Era down to present day civilization is no different.” Ryzen consulted the confidence monitor relaying the hourglass from the edge of the stage. “I’m afraid I can speak to you of only a handful of those factors.”
Eighty Cevs
“By the year twenty-ninety-four, as humanity stood rebuilding in the aftermath of the Resource Wars, the socioeconomic systems of that civilization had already received a substantial makeover. Contemporary power structures had both the context and the wisdom to realize that latent factors like compassion, and empathy, went largely overlooked as far as socioeconomic modelling was concerned. Thus began an era of unprecedented exploration into such arcane topics as the structure of emotion, and the nature of consciousness.”
“Some decades later, Anjali Gupta, an Indian social scientist, published the first high-fidelity model of human consciousness. Her model unlocked, amongst other things, empirical research into the inner workings of human reward systems, collaboration under duress, and optimal states of individual satisfaction. Gupta’s model transformed psychology; instead of reconstructing maps of meaning through the ambiguity of natural language, the model offered a generalized map that could be fine-tuned through interaction with the subject. But perhaps the grandest achievement of Gupta’s model was in revealing what reams and reams of data had hitherto withheld: that consciousness tends to be asymptotically unstable.”
“No matter how the model was tweaked, after a finite time interval, the modelled consciousness would catastrophically self-destruct more than ninety-nice percent of the time. An explanation for this pre-destined self-destruction remained at large for many years, and the problem troubled one researcher in particular. Ralph Gutenberg, who happened to be studying causal models of motivation at Berkeley, realized he could use Gupta’s model to augment the sparse datasets on motivational cause-effect patterns by playing out parametrized episodes of the simulated consciousness. But it would take work; Gupta’s model was the recipe, but what Gutenberg really needed was an automaton that could rapidly execute the recipe millions of times, with the flexibility to plug in different ingredients.”
“When Gutenberg’s team finally built an automaton that could simulate consciousness, he got to experimenting immediately. And what Gutenberg found startled even himself: the consciousness implicitly creates a structure, known later as the integrated ledger, to keep track of its net activity debt. Using a patched version of Gupta’s recipe, Gutenberg showed that the simulation is asymptotically stable so long as its integrated ledger is balanced.”
“In his publications, Gutenberg explains that consciousness incurs an activity loss if it revokes its awareness from experienced conditions. Revoking awareness reduces the consciousness’ capacity to process real-time signals, which must then fester in a backlog of unprocessed signals, borrowing bandwidth from future ‘processing’. Gutenberg called this ‘buffering’ of old signals a ‘loss’, because with limited processing capacity the simulation had to rely on a lower-dimensional, more inefficient form of decision-making, which led to even higher losses. On the other hand, the simulation incurs an activity reward if it increases its awareness to experienced conditions. By controlling awareness, consciousness can maintain a neutral environment conducive to ongoing evolution—that is, it achieves stability.”
“Gutenberg’s simulation gave us mathematical intuition that to walk around with an unbalanced ledger is self-destructive. This Integrated Ledger Principle, as it came to be known, transformed our relationship with ourselves. It transformed our judicial systems; the instigator would eventually ‘self- punish’, and the victim was at peace from the knowledge of it. The Principle gave us an objective way to assess balance, an acid test we still use when picking our leaders. For the first time in a long time, we built a society that optimizes for balance in integrated ledgers, rather than optimizing for the will of the masses like earlier societies that lived by the law of large numbers.”
“But even though Gutenberg’s proof of the Integrated Ledger Principle was revolutionary, it too suffered from a limitation. Gutenberg’s simulations occurred in a closed system—the simulations couldn’t interact with the real world—which limited their applicability to real-life situations. That changed with Andrey Heidel, the zoologist studying plasticity of awareness in Indonesian Orangutans.”
Seventy Cevs
“Heidel had invented the world’s first myo-psychic electrode—or ‘MPE’, as he called them—to better study the relationship between an Orangutan’s motor neuron signals and its field-of-attention. When Heidel heard of Gutenberg’s work, he scrapped what he was doing, much to the dismay of his sponsors, and got to work on a different research interest. You see, the MPE held the potential to feed sensory and actuator signals directly into the simulation, turning Gutenberg’s closed simulation into an open one. If Heidel were to succeed, his simulation would be truly revolutionary. For example, such a simulation would unlock the playing out of episodes concerning real-life events by using the electrode to fine-tune the pre-trained simulated consciousness.”
“Heidel did succeed, and his simulation, which we still use today, made some profound revelations. One of them was that a unit of consciousness could be made to balance its ledger faster by shaping the characteristics of the myo-psychic signal fed into it. His work gave us a deeper understanding of the relationship between psychological and physiological makeups. Heidel gave us empirical proof that natural law is embedded within all conscious agents. His group went on to publish many corollaries to Gutenberg’s Principle, one of which even showed that the mathematics of consciousness without built-in legality doesn’t work.”
“And so, Mihād, you see, there are many layers to unpack in your question. Gupta’s work laid the foundation for Gutenberg’s Principle, without which Heidel wouldn’t have invented an open simulation. Many such revolutionary milestones have passed us by on the road to modern-day systems. Their contributions have given us an evolved form of scalable government, empirical insights into the nature of consciousness, and, of course, most fundamentally, another dimension in our decision-making as we navigate the question of how best to live our lives.”
Sixty-Four Cevs
Hartman read: “‘Professor Ryzen, what inspired you to create the Solarian Encyclopaedia?’” “Hmm, let’s see… well, as you already know, a sizeable portion of the literature on state-of-the-art energy harvestation techniques was lost to the Resource Wars. I think it’s safe to say that without feasible methods of energy production, humanity would’ve gone extinct many decades ago. Were it not for the support of millions of inspired human beings, zillions of dollars in funding, and the prowess of a dedicated scientific research community, the Resource Wars would’ve set humanity back by a few centuries.”
“And yet our energy demands will continue to rise. We’ve spent far too much effort scavenging for non-hydrocarbon-based energy methods to risk losing it all over again. Starting over would be disastrous for our space-faring civilization. This encyclopaedia”—Ryzen gestured to the book on Hartman’s desk—“is a culmination of the effort of a community of forward-thinking leaders, created with the express mission to set humanity sailing back on course, and to keep it there. We’ve made invaluable progress over the last century which must be transmitted to posterity. This encyclopaedia is our affirmation to our successors that we played our part to foster a forward trend in the expansion of our collective consciousness.”
Sixty Cevs
“‘Professor, why does Zelion pursue the development of Type II civilization methods? What’s the best way to get there?’”
Ryzen sat up straighter. “Well, to start with, getting to Type II, what we call Project Earth Two Point O’ at Zelion, is not vain ambition—it’s necessity.” His tone carried the air of a man who had spent his entire life studying human civilizations. “Energy has been a decisive factor in determining a civilization’s productive capacity for as far back as recorded history. A civilization capable of harvesting more energy than another will win in an armed conflict every time—the Resource Wars made that clear as day.”
“If there is still any doubt that getting to Type II is a necessity, consider this. First, collective consciousness must balance its collective ledger, otherwise it is derailed onto a path of self-assured destruction. Second, Heidel’s simulations show that activity loss tends to rise with predisposition to existential danger. And third, when energy supplies stall, existential danger surges. So, you see, it follows that energy supply must move lockstep with demand. If energy demand rises exponentially, so must its supply. And ever since the onset of the Information Age, demand has been rising exponentially.”
“Opinions vary on how we can get there, but one thing remains clear: we must move quickly. Whatever we do, we mustn’t forget the lessons history recorded on the road to Type I—lessons which beg us to safeguard against energy starvation as early as possible.” Ryzen checked his confidence monitor. " This is an important point, so I’ll hazard a brisk walk down memory lane.”
Fifty-Five Cevs
“The beginning of the twentieth century saw the ground shake under the impact of the first World Wars—the birthplace of the hydrocarbon machine. This machine paved the path to industrialization, globalization and the resulting economies of scale. The hydrocarbon legacy of the World Wars laid the foundation for how the world would derive its energy for another century. But this innovation came at a price; war optimizes for speed and efficiency, leaving out such trifling factors as planetary well-being or fair and equal outcomes. By the time the warning bells tolled, it was too late; the legacy hydrocarbon machine had taken firm root. This machine ate the future so the world could go round in the present.”
“And so began in earnest a desperate attempt to move away from notorious hydrocarbons. Battery technology had matured significantly, but somewhere along the battery production line hydrocarbons had to be burned to create the energy the batteries stored. The Photovoltaic cell, a remarkable invention capable of creating electricity from sunlight, cost too much for the wattage it produced. Renewable biofuel like Ethanol and Biodiesel burned cleaner than hydrocarbons, but troublesome monoculture farming thwarted efforts to scale up to global proportions. Hydrogen fuel cell technology, responsible for the bulk of potable water aboard this very ship, was still expensive then compared with cheap fossil-based fuel. So, where then could the world pin its hopes?”
“Oddly enough, nuclear fission—the principle underpinning nuclear weapons of mass destruction— found widespread use in the first half of the twenty-first century. Then again, perhaps this is not so surprising, seeing as departments of defence around the globe were eager to fund this area of research. What’s curious though, is that nuclear fission reactors prevailed despite infamous disasters that remain forever etched in our collective mind. The fission reaction is a potentially ‘run away’ chain reaction, leaving a mushroom cloud in its wake and radioactive sites that remain hazardous for thousands of Earth years. So, despite its temporary adoption, the fission reactor’s days were numbered.”
“Which brings us to nuclear fusion. Fusion reactions create temperatures so hot they create a plasma, which then burns the surrounding fuel. The triple product of plasma ion density, plasma temperature and the confinement time govern energy output of fusion reactions. The result is clean energy, chain reactions that don’t run away and dissipate in shorter half-lives, and above all, energy output to match that of the stars.”
“Building fusion reactors though, involved advanced physics rarely practiced elsewhere. The engineering had to be spot on. It’s no surprise that fusion reactors cost billions of dollars, and it would still be a few decades before the energy output per dollar made sense. At best, humanity could fund a few scattered reactors, which may actually have fuelled the case for a resource war. No; it would still take another order of magnitude in cost reduction before humanity could take refuge in fusion.”
“And all this time, as humanity foraged for sustainably scalable energy, hydrocarbons—an exhaustible resource—kept on depleting. Fear arose. The exhaustion of the hydrocarbon would halt all the machinery it drove, and with it, life as people knew it. From transportation and data centers to more fundamental requirements like feeding populations and keeping them warm, all systems would fail.”
“So, by the time the Resource Wars broke out, the consequences of burning hydrocarbons had already been foreseen decades ago, but no one knew how to mitigate them. Yes, new research had set in motion a shift away from hydrocarbon-based economies, but supply couldn’t keep up with demand. Consumption, even amongst ordinary civilians, was so high that leaders feared mutiny should they interfere with the layman’s lofty lifestyle.”
“Of course, corporate malfeasance and political ambition delayed progress too. Large corporations—the imperialists of the Modern Era— facilitated hydrocarbon-hungry lifestyles to create more stable income streams; they called it a ‘recurring revenue model’. Sponsorship that could’ve funded responsible energy sequestration was used instead to drive consumerism to soaring heights. A vicious cycle set in: hydrocarbons fueled supply chains, which encouraged consumerism, which intensified demand and further stoked hydrocarbon-based supply chains.”
“Gradually, humans exiled temperance. Unbeknownst, minimalism was banished. Our collective planet-awareness plummeted. In the wake of globalization and its economies of scale, producers learned to keep consumers far removed from their deviant means of production. Pavlovian consumers fell into the routine of turning a blind eye.”
“It began in under-resourced societies first; loved ones fell to hunger and thirst, and of cold in the winter months. The sickly that remained found little treatment. As the Doomsday Clock struck 2 seconds to midnight, nations with any last remaining morsels of coal or freshwater river were met with a sobering thought: they were fated to spend the last of their frantic days fending off the rest of the famished world.”
Thirty-Nine Cevs
“All this time, humanity was still sitting at point eight on the Kardashev scale. Every technique in the renewable energy handbook was either exorbitantly expensive, blatantly unfeasible or impertinently inefficient. It seemed only a miracle could get us to Type I, and yet that’s exactly what was required, not only to save a dying planet, but to save a civilization imploding under the weight of its own demands.”
“And a miracle did happen. Hope came, at the eleventh hour, in the twenty-sixties. Physicists Sue Lee Kwon and Priyanka Ajithkumar, in an underground war bunker in South Korea, developed an artificially intelligent model that narrowed down the search space for possible temperature-resistant molecular sequences. By conducting an ablative study with the remaining sequences, Kwon and Ajithkumar invented a new material, Cermathil, alloys of which we still use in the walls of our spaceships. Single-handedly, Cermathil reduced implementation costs for fusion reactors and increased the triple product. The rest, as they say, is history.”
“A century’s worth of innovation followed, leaving us wielding more energy than a Type I civilization could dream of. Humanity was able to rescue itself from itself. Out of the ashes of the Resource Wars we fashioned for ourselves a new, clean home. Today we have spaceships dedicated to terraforming future habitats. We’ve invested in space-faring solar power centers that can transduce unsullied sunlight into everything from food and clothing to electricity and shelter. We can fuse atoms in the endless vacuum of space, at a fraction of the cost and effort. And of course, we’ve learned to live within our means. The capacity to find satisfaction in the tiniest of morsels of greenbread is the true prize of modern life.”
“But space life is as yet nascent. To scale to interstellar proportions will take yet more energy. For one, we would certainly need advancements in power transmission technology. We know how to store energy well, but we don’t know how to transmit it over the long, incalculable distances spanning our galaxy without leaking most of it. Broadly speaking, we have two ways to get to Type II: either we harvest energy at the Sun (where it is strongest and least attenuated) and beam it back to Solarian consumers, or we learn to generate megawatts on the go. Solving efficient energy transfer will set the stage for interstellar expansion, ending humanity’s reliance on a singular Sun. But I hope we can see that getting there, and quickly, is a necessity which we must start acting on now.”
Twenty-Two Cevs
“‘Professor, do you believe in God?’”
“It doesn’t matter what I believe.” The abruptness in the professor’s reply took the audience by surprise.
Ryzen must have sensed this, for he explained: “Whatever that term ‘God’ points to is non- falsifiable. Science investigates what our senses and the extensions thereof can perceive. Our senses report through quantifiable signals, but the quantifiable needs a physical medium for expression. We can’t say much about what lies at the end of the term God, because what we can say is limited to what our consciousness can receive through the senses. As soon as one mentions the term God, what follows is a commentary about an experience devoid of physical substance. So, while the experience of any one unit of consciousness is invaluable to itself, it’s nothing short of fable to another unit.”
“The concept of ‘God’ was invented by consciousness that, in a variety of ways, arrived upon a state of existence so utterly shocking, that it transformed the very fibre of its existence. Where previously life was a dull thrum, now it became magical. Every action used to require thought and consideration; now one rested in the faith that life would converge to a global optimum. The state of anxiety and fear that previously ruled consciousness was itself overruled by unconditional love.”
“This is the state when the ledger from Gutenberg’s Principal balances, a point when consciousness achieves asymptotic stability. And it so happens that once there, consciousness cannot help but endow others with asymptotic stability too. But how to share this inwardly originating experience intrinsic to one unit of consciousness with other units, when the only available medium is the language of the physical senses? So, repetitive practices were invented; each stable consciousness invented a set of practices—rituals—perhaps supplemented with a guidebook. What they left behind was code for the consciousness which, when executed, created conditions that incited the consciousness to restore balance in its integrated ledger.”
“Do I believe in ‘God’? I say it doesn’t affect you in the least. In fact, I propose a different set of questions: What makes life magical for you? And have you ever had the experience of unspeakable communion with another unit of consciousness? If not, I suggest you roll the dice and take a gamble. Try new things till your answer changes to a resounding ‘yes!’. And once you find it, hold on tightly to the thread that got you there. Do it over and over until you are roiling in the unconditional union which is characteristic of that state. This is just one example of code that can bring balance.”
Ten Cevs
As the last remaining specks of sand trickled away, the mood in the auditorium grew even more sombre. Solarians had known for many years that the proverbial sun would set on the crucible out of which humanity emerged, but as that time drew nigh, the reality of the moment became disconcertingly inescapable. An occasional sob, an odd sniffle, rose from the stands. Even Hartman’s trained voice faltered.
“Thank you, Professor Ryzen. Is there… is there anything you’d like to say? As we near the end of our countdown?”
Ryzen consulted the confidence monitor one last time. Then, with a long exhale, he spoke: “Yes, thank you, Harry. I want to say that this may be the end for our first home, but I’m grateful that it’s not the end for humanity. Out of apes we fashioned a spacefaring nation that has transcended nuclear war, disease, and now the death of our planet. Together, we learned to look past the differences in our beliefs and our appearances, to instead revel in our diversity, and to see through to what’s actually important, what lies at the core—our collective consciousness.”
“But this is no time to rest. We may have a new home amongst the stars, but this home is untethered. So, we must create tethers. It took the contributions of millions of people throughout the ages to get here, all to protect the future promise of a stable, collective consciousness. Let me repeat and say, this is not the time to rest.”
Three Cevs
“To Solarian leaders I hand the reins of Zelion, where you will find tools to catalyze the onset of a Type II civilization. In the custody of Solarian civilians, I leave the encyclopaedia, as a reminder of the endless potency of human perseverance. And for our children, I leave the image of the pale blue dot. I hope that all consciousness will stabilize.”
Ryzen ended with a smile, just as he had begun.
Zero Cevs
About two hundred thousand miles away, the asteroid christened Shiva destroyed the world called Earth, and with that ended the hologrammatic transmission of Floyd Ryzen, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Encordia, and Founder of Zelion, whom Solarians knew simply as “Professor”.