One Human Minute Page 7

  Even in the twentieth century, the tactic of fighting in close ranks gave way to the spreading of troops, and in a mobile war the spreading was still greater. But the front lines still existed, separating friend from foe. Now such boundaries disappeared completely.

  A microarmy could easily penetrate all systems of defense and go deep into enemy territory. It had no more trouble accomplishing this than did rain or snow. Meanwhile, high-powered nuclear weapons were proving more and more useless on the battlefield. Imagine, if you will, an attempt to combat a virus epidemic with thermonuclear bombs. It was possible, of course, to scorch a large territory down to a depth of fifty feet, turning it into a vitrified, lifeless desert. But what good was that if on that expanse, one hour later, a military rain began to fall and from it there crystallized detachments of shock troops? Hydrogen bombs were expensive. One didn’t hunt in warships for leeches or sardines.

  The greatest problem in the unhuman stage of military history was that of distinguishing friend from foe. This task had been accomplished, in the twentieth century, by means of electronic systems working on a password principle. Challenged by radio, a plane or an unmanned missile either radioed the right answer or else was attacked as an enemy craft. This ancient method now proved useless. The new weapon-makers again borrowed from the biosphere — from plants, bacteria, and insects.

  Recognition duplicated the methods of identification used among living species: their immunology — the struggle of antigen with antibody — tropisms, protective coloration, camouflage, and mimicry. The nonliving weapon might imitate (extremely well) floating dust specks or pollen, or gnats, or drops of water. But under that mask lay a corrosive or lethal agent.

  It should be pointed out that although I am using metaphors from entomology in talking about attacks of artificial locusts or other insects, I do so as a twentieth-century person would describe, to the contemporaries of Vasco Da Cama or Christopher Columbus, a modern city with its automobile traffic. He would speak of carriages and wagons without horses; he would compare airplanes to birds made of metal. In this way he would evoke in the minds of his listeners images that had some connection with reality, albeit an imperfect one. A carriage rolling on large, thin wheels, with high little doors and a dropped step, with a box for the coachman and places at the back for the servants, is not a Fiat or a Mercedes. By the same token, the twenty-first-century synsect weapon is not a swarm of insects just like the ones in an entomologist’s atlas, only made of metal.

  Some of the pseudo-insects could pierce the human body like bullets; others could form optical systems to throw sunlight over wide areas, altering the temperature of large air masses so as to produce heavy rainfall or fair weather, according to the needs of the campaign. There existed “meteorological insects” corresponding to nothing we know today. The endothermic synsects, for example, absorbed large quantities of energy for the sole purpose of causing a sudden drop in temperature over a given area, resulting in a thick fog or the phenomenon known as an inversion. Then there were synsects able to concentrate themselves into a single-use laser beamer; they replaced the artillery of the previous century — although one can hardly speak of replacement, since artillery as we understand it would have been of as much use on the battlefield as slings and catapults. New weapons dictated new conditions of combat and, therefore, new strategy and tactics, both totally unhuman.

  For those who loved the uniform, the flag, the changing of the guard, standing at attention, drill, medals, and bayonet charges, the new era of war was an affront to their noble ideals, a mockery, a disgrace! The experts of the day called the new military science an “upside-down evolution,” because in nature what came first were the simple, microscopic systems, which then changed over the eons into larger and larger life forms. In the military evolution of the postnuclear period, the exact opposite took place: microminiaturization.

  The microarmies developed in two stages. In the first stage, the unhumaned microweapons were still designed and built by people. In the second stage, microsoldiers were designed, combat-tested, and sent to be mass-produced by “construction battalions” of nonliving microdesigners.

  A phenomenon known as “sociointegrative degeneration” displaced humans first from the military and later from the weapons industry. The individual soldier degenerated when he ceased to be an intelligent being with a large brain and grew increasingly small and therefore increasingly simple, or when he became disposable, a “single-use soldier.” (Some of the antimilitarists had maintained, long before, that modern warfare’s high mortality rate made “single-use soldiers” of all the combatants, with the exception of the top-ranking officers.) In the end, a microfighter had as much brain as an ant or a termite.

  A greater role, then, was assumed by the pseudo-sociointegrative collective of microsoldiers. Each nonliving army was incomparably more complex than a beehive or an anthill. In internal structure and interrelationships it was more akin to an ecological unit in nature — that is, to those pyramids of plant and animal species that coexist in a specific region or habitat in evolutionary equilibrium, with their antagonisms and symbioses forming a complex network of interdependencies.

  It is easy to see that in such an army there was nothing for noncommissioned officers to do. A corporal or a sergeant, even a general, could not lead a division of such an army. To grasp the whole picture, as complex as nature itself (although quite dead), the wisdom of a university senate would not have sufficed — even for a mere inspection, much less an actual campaign. Besides the impoverished nations of the Third World, therefore, those who suffered the most from the great military revolution of the twenty-first century were the officer cadres.

  The twentieth century had already begun the process of destroying them, dispensing with swords, three-cornered hats, and gorgeous uniforms. The final blow, however, was dealt in the twenty-first century by the army’s pseudo-insect evolution — or, rather, involution. The cruel pressure to unhumanize the armies did away with the picturesque traditions of war games, the pageantry of parades (a marching locust, unlike a procession of tanks or rockets, is not a grand sight), the bayonet drills, the bugle calls, the flag raisings and lowerings, the roll calls, the whole rich fabric of barracks life. For a time, high-ranking command positions were kept for people, but not for very long.

  The strategical-numerical superiority of the computer-produced echelons finally forced even the most competent of commanders, including field marshals, into retirement. A tapestry of ribbons and medals on the chest was no protection against being put out to pasture. In various countries, at that time, a resistance movement developed among career officers. In the desperation of unemployment, they even joined the terrorist underground. It was a malicious trick of history — no one deliberately planned it — that these insurrections were crushed by means of micro-spies and minipolice built on the model of a particular cockroach.

  This roach, first described in 1981 by an eminent American neuroentomologist, has at the end of its abdomen fine hairs that are sensitive to even the slightest stirring in the air. Connected to a special dorsal nerve bundle, the hairs enable the roach to detect the approach of an enemy, even in complete darkness, and so to flee instantly. The counterparts to these hairs were the electronic picosensors of the minipolicemen who concealed themselves in cracks in old wallpaper at the rebel headquarters.

  But things were not so good in the affluent nations, either. It was impossible to go on with the old political games. The line between war and peace, increasingly blurred for some time, was now obliterated entirely. The twentieth century had discarded the ritual of formal declarations of war, introducing the sneak attack, the fifth column, mass sabotage, cold war, and war by proxy, but this was only the beginning of the erosion of distinctions.

  A world with two mutually exclusive political conditions — war or peace — changed into a world in which war was peace and peace became war. In the past, when covert agents were all human beings, they hid their mischief behi
nd various masks of respectability and virtue. They infiltrated religious and social movements, including even senior citizens’ choral societies and organizations of matchbox collectors. Later, however, anything could be a covert agent: a nail in the wall, a laundry detergent. Military espionage and sabotage flourished. Since human beings were no longer a real political or military force, there was no point in winning them over with propaganda or in talking them into collaborating with the enemy. Unable to write here about the political changes as much as they warrant, I will convey in a few words the essence of what took place.

  Even in the previous century the politicians of the parliamentary countries could not keep up with everything that was going on in their own countries — much less in the world — and so they had advisers. Every political party had its experts. But the advisers of the different parties said completely different things. With time, computer systems were brought in to help; too late, people realized they were becoming the mouthpieces of their computers. They thought they were the ones doing the reasoning, drawing independent conclusions based on data supplied by computer memory; but in fact they were operating with material preprocessed by the computer centers, and that material was determining human decisions.

  After a period of some confusion, the major parties concluded that the expert advisers were dispensable middlemen; from then on, each party headquarters had a main computer. In the second half of the twenty-first century, when a party took power its computer was sometimes given the post of minister without portfolio (a computer did not need a portfolio anyway), and the pivotal role in such democracies was played by programmers. The programmer took a loyalty oath, but that did not prove very effective. Democracy, many warned, was becoming computerocracy.

  For this reason, too, espionage and counterespionage turned away from politicians and environmental-protection groups (of which there were few, since by then there was not much left to save) and infiltrated the computation and decision centers. Of course, no one could absolutely prove that this was so. Some political scientists maintained that if nation A took over the computerocracy of nation B, and nation B did the same to nation A, then international equilibrium would again be restored. What had become everyday reality could no longer be described in terms of the old, traditional politics, or even by common sense, which still distinguished between natural phenomena, like a hailstorm, and man-made ones, like a bombing attack.

  Elections were still held for political parties, but each party boasted of having not the best economic program but the best computer, one that would solve all social ills and problems. Whenever two computers disagreed, the government ostensibly decided; but in reality the arbiter was another computer. It will be better to give a concrete example.

  For several decades the three major branches of the United States armed forces, the army, navy, and air force, had been struggling among themselves for supremacy. Each tried to get the largest share of the military allocation in the budget at the expense of the others. Each kept its newest weapons secret from the others. To learn these secrets was one of the main tasks of the President’s advisers. Each service had its own headquarters, its own security system, its own codes, and — obviously! — its own computer. Each kept cooperation with the others to the absolute minimum, just enough so the government wouldn’t fall apart. Indeed, the main concern of each successive administration was to see that a minimum of unity was maintained in the government of the country and the conduct of foreign policy.

  Even in the previous century no one knew what the real military strength of the United States was, because that strength was presented to the people differently, depending on whether a White House spokesman was speaking or an opposing presidential candidate. But nowadays the devil himself could not make head or tail of the situation.

  Meanwhile, in addition to computer rule, which was gradually replacing natural, human rule, there appeared certain phenomena that once would have been called natural; but now no one knew by what or by whom they were caused, if indeed they were caused by anything or anyone at all. Acid rain had been known in the twentieth century. But now there were rains so corrosive that they destroyed roads, power lines, and factory roofs, and it was impossible to determine whether they were caused by pollution or by enemy sabotage. It was that way with everything. Livestock were stricken, but was the disease natural or artificial? The hurricane that ravaged the coast — was it a chance thing, or was it engineered by an invisible swarm of micrometeorological agents, each as small as a virus, covertly diverting ocean air masses? Was the drought natural — however murderous — or was it, too, caused by a skillful diversion of the rain clouds?

  These calamities beset not just the United States but the entire world. Again, some saw in this evidence of their natural origin; others, again, were convinced that the reason they were pandemic was that all countries now had at their disposal unhuman means of striking at any distance and were inflicting damage on one another, while declaring officially that they were doing nothing of the sort. Caught in the act, a saboteur could not be cross-examined: synsects and artificial microbes were mute. Meteorological counterintelligence, seismic espionage, reconnaissance teams of epidemiologists, geneticists, and even hydrographers had their hands full. An ever larger share of world science was enlisted in this military intelligence work. Hurricanes, crop failures, rising mortality rates in cattle, and even meteor showers were suspected of being intentional. (Note, by the way, that the idea of guiding asteroids to fall on enemy territory, causing terrible devastation, had arisen in the twentieth century and was considered interesting.)

  New disciplines were taught in the military academies: crypto-offensive and crypto-defensive strategies, the cryptology of counter-counterintelligence (the covert enticement-deception of agents raised to the next power), applied enigmatics, and finally “cryptocryptics,” which presented in a secret manner the secret use of weapons so secret that there was no way anyone could tell them from innocent phenomena of nature.

  Blurred, also, was the distinction between real and spurious hostilities. In order to turn its people against another nation, a country would produce on its own territory “natural” catastrophes so obviously artificial that its citizens were bound to believe the charge that the enemy was responsible. When it came out that a certain large and wealthy nation, in offering aid to those that were underdeveloped and overpopulated, supplemented the provisions it sold (cheaply) of sago, wheat, corn, and potato flour with a drug that diminished sexual potency, the Third World became enraged. This was now an undercover, antinatural war.

  Thus peace was war, and war peace. Although the catastrophic consequences of this trend for the future were clear — a mutual victory indistinguishable from universal destruction — the world continued to move in that fatal direction. It was not a totalitarian conspiracy, as Orwell once imagined, that made peace war, but the technological advances that effaced the boundary between the natural and the artificial in every area of human life, even in extraterrestrial space.

  When there is no longer any difference between natural and artificial protein, or between natural and artificial intelligence — say the theoreticians of knowledge, the philosophers — then neither can one distinguish a misfortune that is intentional from one for which no one is to blame.

  As light, pulled irresistibly into the heart of a stellar black hole, cannot escape that gravitational trap, so humanity, pulled by the forces of mutual antagonism into the heart of matter’s secrets, fell into the trap of technology, a trap of its own making. The decision to invest everything in new weapons was not made by governments, statesmen, generals, corporate interests, or pressure groups, but by the ever-growing fear that someone else would be first to hit upon the discoveries and technologies affording the ultimate advantage. This paralyzed traditional politics. The negotiators at summit meetings could not negotiate, because their willingness to relinquish a new weapon would only indicate, in the eyes of the other side, that they had another, newer we
apon up their sleeve…

  By now the impossibility of disarmament had been proved mathematically. I have seen the mathematical model of the so-called general theory of conflicts; it shows why arms talks cannot produce results. At summit meetings certain decisions are reached. But when it takes longer to reach a decision promoting peace than it does to develop the kind of military innovations that radically change the very situation under negotiation, then any decision, at the moment of its acceptance, is an anachronism.

  It is as if the ancients had debated so long about banning their “Greek fire” that by the time they agreed to ban it, Berthold Schwarz had appeared with his gunpowder. When one decides “today” about something that existed “yesterday,” the decision moves from the present into the past and thereby becomes an empty game.

  It was this that finally, at the end of the twenty-first century, forced the world powers into a new type of agreement, an agreement that opened up a new era in the history of the human race. But that is a subject that belongs to the twenty-second century and therefore lies outside the scope of these remarks. Later, if I am able, I will devote a separate discussion to it — describing the next chapter of general history, a remarkable chapter, in which Earth, emerging from the era of antagonisms, truly frees itself from one technological trap, but steps into another, as if her destiny is to go forever from the frying pan into the fire.

  THE WORLD AS CATACLYSM

  Introduction

  Books with titles like this one began to appear at the end of the twentieth century, but the image of the world contained in them did not become generally known until the next century, for only then did the discoveries germinating in widely separated branches of knowledge come together into a new synthesis. That synthesis — to put it bluntly — marked an anti-Copernican revolution in astronomy, in which our notion of the place we occupy in the Universe was stood on its head.