One Human Minute Page 6
At this same time, the production of microchips was discontinued; they were replaced by a product of the latest genetic engineering. The strain Silocobacter wieneri (named after the creator of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener) produced, in solutions containing silicates, silver, and a secret ingredient, solid-state circuits that were smaller than fly’s eggs. These elements were called “grain,” and after four years of mass production a handful of them cost no more than a handful of corn. In this way, from the intersection of two curves — the rising curve of cost for heavy weaponry and the falling curve of cost for artificial intelligence — came the “unhumanization” of the military.
Armies began to change from living to nonliving forces. Initially, the effects of the change were undramatic. It was like the automobile, whose inventors did not immediately come up with an entirely new shape but, instead, simply put an internal-combustion engine in a cart or carriage, with the harness removed. Similarly, the earliest pioneers of aviation gave their flying machines the wings of birds. Thanks to this kind of mental inertia, which in the military is considerable, not very radical new missiles, unmanned tanks, and self-propelled artillery were adapted for the new microsilicon “soldier,” simply by reducing them in size and installing computer-controlled command modules. But this was anachronistic. The new, nonliving microsoldier required a whole new approach to tactics, strategy, and, of course, to the question of what kinds of weapons he could put to best use.
This came at a time when the world was slowly recovering from two economic crises. The first was caused by the formation of the OPEC cartel and the big increases in the price of crude oil; the second, by the collapse of OPEC and the sudden drop in the price of oil. Although early nuclear-power plants were in operation, they were of no use for powering land or air vehicles. This is why the cost of heavy equipment such as troop carriers, artillery, missiles, trucks, tanks, and submarines, not to mention the cost of the newer (late-twentieth-century) types of heavy weapons, was constantly on the rise, even though by then the troop carriers had no one to transport and before long the artillery would have no one to shell.
This final phase of the military’s gigantomania in weaponry gave way to a period of microminiaturization under the banner of artificial nonintelligence. Oddly enough, it was only in 2040 that the informationists, cipher theorists, and other experts expressed surprise at how their predecessors could have been so blind for so long, struggling to create artificial intelligence. After all, for the overwhelming majority of tasks performed by people in 97.8 percent of both blue- and white-collar jobs, intelligence was not necessary. What was necessary? A command of the situation, skill, care, and enterprise. All these qualities are found in insects.
A wasp of the Sphecidae family finds herself a cricket and injects into its nervous system a poison that paralyzes but does not kill. Next she digs a burrow in the sand, sets her victim beside it, enters the burrow to make sure that it is usable — free of dampness or ants — then drags the cricket inside, deposits her egg in it, and flies off to repeat the process. The wasp’s larva will feed on the living body of the cricket until the larva changes into a pupa. The wasp thus displays an excellent command of the situation in the choice of victim and in the anesthetic procedure she performs on it; skill in preparing an enclosure for it; care in checking the enclosure to see that conditions are suitable for her offspring; and enterprise, without which this whole series of activities could never have been carried through.
The wasp may have enough nerve tissue to drive a truck from a port to a distant city or to guide a transcontinental rocket. It is only that its nervous system was programmed by natural evolution for completely different tasks.
Successive generations of information theorists and computer scientists had labored in vain to imitate the functions of the human brain in computers; stubbornly they ignored a mechanism a million times simpler than the brain, incredibly small, and remarkably reliable in its operation. Not artificial intelligence but artificial instinct should have been simulated for programming at the outset. Instinct appeared almost a billion years earlier than intelligence — clear proof that it is easier to produce.
From studying the neurology and neuroanatomy of the mindless insect the specialists of the mid-twenty-first century quickly obtained splendid results. Their predecessors were truly blind to overlook the fact that such insects as bees, seemingly primitive creatures, nevertheless possess their own, inherited language, with which the workers in the hive inform one another of the location of newly discovered nectar. Through signal-gesture-pantomime the direction of the path is given, the time required to reach the nectar, and even its relative quantity.
Of course, the point was not to duplicate wasps, flies, spiders, or bees in computer chips or the like; the important thing was their neural anatomy with its built-in sequences of directed behavior and programmed goals. The result was a scientific-technological revolution that totally and irreversibly transformed the battlegrounds of Earth. Until then, all arms had been fashioned to fit man; their components were tailored to his anatomy, so that he could kill effectively, and to his physiology, so that he could be killed effectively.
As so often happened, the beginnings of this complex new trend lay in the twentieth century, but at that time no one was able to combine them into a novel synthesis, because the discoveries that made possible the unhumanization of weapons systems took place in widely separated fields. Military experts had no interest in insects (except the lice, fleas, and other parasites that beset soldiers in wartime). Intellectronics engineers, who with the entomologists and neurologists studied the neurology of insects, knew nothing about military problems. And politicians, true to form, knew nothing about anything.
Thus, while intellectronics was developing microcalculators so small that they competed in size with the nerve bundles of mosquitoes and hornets, the majority of artificial-intelligence enthusiasts were still busy programming computers to carry on stupid conversations with not-too-bright people. The mammoths and dinosaurs of the computer species were beating chess masters not because they were more intelligent but only because they could process data a billion times faster than Einstein. For a long time no one imagined that all the ordinary front-line soldier needed was the skill and enterprise of a bee or a hornet. In basic military operations, intelligence and combat effectiveness are two entirely different things. (Intelligence can actually be a negative factor. In battle, the soldier’s instinct for self-preservation, incomparably greater than a bee’s, can interfere; the bee, on the other hand, will sting to defend its hive though the sting means its own death.) Who knows how long the old-fashioned way of thinking would have continued in the weapons industry — the search for new conventional and unconventional instruments of warfare, the spiraling arms race — had it not been for a few works that directed the public’s attention to a remote and unusual episode in our planet’s history.
IV
Sixty-five million years ago, on the so-called C-T geological boundary (between the Cretaceous and the Tertiary), a meteorite fell on our planet. It had a diameter of about ten kilometers and contained a considerable amount of iron and iridium. Its mass is estimated to have been over three and a half trillion (3,600,000,000,000) tons. It is unclear whether it was one mass, hence an asteroid from the region between Earth and Mars, or a group of bodies forming the head of a comet. In the geological stratum of this period, iridium and rare earth metals have been discovered in amounts and concentrations not normally found in the Earth’s crust. The absence of an impact crater made it difficult to prove the planetary scale of this cataclysm, since craters that appeared later (caused by meteorites a thousand times smaller) left marks on the Earth’s surface that are clearly visible today. Most likely, this asteroid or comet did not strike any of the continents but landed in the open ocean — or else the collision took place near a junction of continental plates, and the subsequent shifting obliterated the crater.
A meteor of such size and mass can
easily pass through the protective layer of the atmosphere. The energy of the impact, comparable in magnitude to the energy of all the world’s nuclear stockpiles (if not larger), turned that body — or group of bodies — into thousands of billions of tons of dust, which the air currents spread over the entire surface of the Earth, creating a cloud so thick and long-lasting that for at least four months photosynthesis ceased in plants on all continents. Darkness reigned; the land surface, no longer heated by the sun’s rays, grew much colder than did the ocean, which cooled more slowly. Nevertheless, the marine algae, one of the main sources of atmospheric oxygen, also lost their ability to carry on photosynthesis during that time. As a result, an enormous number of plant and animal species became extinct. The most spectacular extinction was that of the giant reptiles commonly called dinosaurs — although at least several hundred other reptile species died out then, too. The catastrophe occurred at a time when the Earth’s climate was gradually cooling, and the large, hairless Mesozoic reptiles found themselves in great difficulty. Even before the cataclysm, their viability had been on the wane for about a million years, as the fossil record reveals. The calcium shells of the dinosaur eggs grew thinner as the millennia passed — testimony to the increasing hardships in feeding and to the worsening climate of the large landmasses.
Computer simulations of such an event, done back in the 1980s, verified its lethal effect on the biosphere. Strangely enough, the phenomenon to which we owe our emergence as a rational species was not introduced into any school curriculum, even though there was not the slightest doubt about the connection between the Cretaceous-Tertiary saurocide and anthropogenesis.
Paleontological research toward the end of the twentieth century proved that the dinosaurs were warm-blooded, and that the winged varieties were covered with something very much like feathers. The mammal species that coexisted with these reptiles, having no opportunity to evolve, did not exceed the size of a rat or a squirrel. Competition on land, in the water, and in the air from the powerful, hardy reptiles was too great; the mammals were but an evolutionary footnote to the carnivorous and herbivorous vertebrates of the day.
The planetary catastrophe worked against the large animals not directly but indirectly, through the interruption of the food chain in the biosphere. When photosynthesis stopped, vegetation withered on a massive scale, and the large herbivorous reptiles of land, sea, and air could not find enough food. The predators who ate the herbivores perished for the same reason. A huge number of marine animals also died out, because in the oceans the biological carbon cycle proceeds much faster than on land, and because the surface layers of water cooled more quickly than the deeper layers. A few small reptile species did survive. But the small mammal survivors were numerous, and so, when the dust of the meteor settled and the atmosphere cleared and plant life revived, they began to differentiate, branching into many species, which after forty million years produced the line of primates from which Homo sapiens descended.
Thus the cause — indirect but undoubted — of rational man’s emergence was a cataclysm on the C-T boundary. For our subject, however — the military evolution of civilization — it is the consequences of this event, so long overlooked, that are important. The fact is that the ones who suffered least on the C-T boundary were the insects! Before the catastrophe there were about three-quarters of a million insect species; a short time afterward, there were still at least seven hundred thousand, and social insects like ants, termites, and bees survived the cataclysm practically unimpaired. This leads us to conclude that cataclysms are survived most easily and with the greatest probability by small or very small animals with an insectile anatomy and physiology.
Nor should one consider it an accident that insects are generally much less susceptible to the lethal effects of radioactivity than the so-called higher animals, the vertebrates. Paleontology speaks unequivocally. A catastrophe that unleashed the destructive force of a global atomic war killed every one of the large animals but did little damage to the insects and did not touch the bacteria. This shows that the greater the destructive action of an elemental force or technological weapon, the smaller must a system be in order to survive it unharmed. Thus the atomic bomb demanded the dispersal not only of whole armies but also of individual soldiers. General staffs considered dispersing their armies, but in the twentieth century the idea of reducing a soldier to the size of an ant or a wasp found no expression outside the pages of fantasy. A human being couldn’t be reduced or dispersed! In those days much thought was given to soldier-automatons — humanoid robots — a naive anthropomorphism. Yet heavy industry was already undergoing unhumanization, and the robots that replaced people on the assembly lines were not remotely humanoid. They were the enlargement of selected, functional parts of the human being: a computer “brain” with one huge steel hand assembling a car chassis, or a system with a hammer-fist, or with a laser-finger to weld the bodies. These devices worked like eyes and hands but did not look like eyes or hands. But large and heavy robots such as these could not be put on the battlefield, where they would immediately become the target of accurate, self-guided, intelligent missiles.
So it was not humanoid automata that formed the new armies but synthetic insects (synsects) — ceramic microcrustacea, titanium annelids, and flying pseudo-hymenoptera with nerve centers made of arsenic compounds and with stingers of heavy, fissionable elements. Most of this “nonliving micropersonnel” could, at the first warning of an atomic attack, dig deep into the ground and then crawl out after the explosion, maintaining combat functions even in an environment glowing with terrible radioactivity, because these soldiers were not only microscopic but nonbiological. The flying synsect combined plane, pilot, and missile in one miniature whole. But the operating unit was the microarmy, which possessed superior combat effectiveness only as a whole (just as a colony of bees was an independent, surviving unit while a single bee was nothing).
Because the battlefield was constantly exposed to atomic attack, which not only destroyed combat forces but also disrupted all communications between the various weapons systems (and also between the weapons and their command centers), there arose nonliving microarmies of many types. These were based on two opposing principles.
According to the first — the principle of autonomy — an army proceeded like a column of ants, or a wave of microbes, or a swarm of locusts. The last analogy is particularly apt. The locust, as we know, is simply a biological variety of the common grasshopper (not a separate species); even in clouds numbering hundreds of billions of specimens (still greater numbers have been observed from planes) it is not directly harmful to humans.[2] Nevertheless, the sheer mass of a locust cloud can cause a train to derail, turn day into night, and paralyze all movement. (Even a tank, entering a cloud of locusts, will begin to slip as it crushes the insects into a pulp of ichor and grease and will bog down as in a quagmire.) The nonliving, synthetic “locust” was incomparably more lethal, since it was made that way by its designers. It possessed a preprogrammed autonomy, so that communication with a command center was unnecessary.
The pseudo-locust could be destroyed, of course, by an atomic attack, but this would have an effect like that of shooting at clouds with nuclear weapons: great holes would open, only to fill again with more cloud.
According to the second principle of the new military — telotropism — the microarmy was one giant flowing or flying aggregate of self-assembling elements. It started out dispersed, approaching its objective from many different directions, as strategy or tactics demanded, in order to concentrate into a preprogrammed whole on the battlefield. For this fighting material did not leave the factory in final shape, ready for use, like tanks or guns loaded on a railroad flatcar; the mechanisms were microproductive blocks designed to fuse together into a war machine at the designated place. For this reason, such armies were called “self-bonding."
The simplest example was a self-dispersing atomic weapon. Any missile launched from land, ship, or submarine co
uld be destroyed from space by a satellite laser. But it was impossible to destroy gigantic clouds of microparticles carrying uranium or plutonium that merged into a critical mass only at the target. En route to the target, they were so dispersed as to be indistinguishable from fog or dust.
The competition between old and new weapons was brief: massive, armored equipment could not withstand the attacks of the microarmies. Just as germs invisibly invade an organism to kill it from within, so the nonliving, artificial microbes, following the tropisms built into them, penetrated the gun barrels, cartridge chambers, tank and plane engines. They corroded the metal catalytically, or, reaching the powder charges or fuel tanks, blew them up. What could even the bravest soldier, carrying grenades, a machine gun, a bazooka, or any other firearm, do against a nonliving, microscopic enemy? He would be like a doctor trying to fight the bacteria of cholera with a hammer or a revolver.
Amid a swarm of self-guided, programmed microarms, a man in uniform was as helpless as a Roman legionary with sword and shield against a hail of bullets. In the face of special types of biotropic microarms capable of destroying everything that lived, human beings had no choice but to abandon the battlefield, for they would be killed in seconds.