Darwin Among the Machines (38 page)

“An electron within an atom, they say, has no distinct individuality at all,” Stapledon would write thirty years later in a short novel titled
Death into Life
. “It is a mere factor pervading the whole atom. So, equally, with these disembodied individual spirits, dissolved in corporate beings. But the electron may recover its individuality and leap free from the atom, to join perhaps with some other atom and once more die from individuality into a new corporate being. So also with these spirits.”
¹⁵
By this time Stapledon was an acclaimed writer of science fiction, though he rarely used that term himself.

Stapledon returned from France at the end of January 1919, driving from Dover to Liverpool in a beat-up Sunbeam motorcar that had been donated to the unit by his father and, unlike the ambulances, was not wanted by the Boulogne detachment of the British Red Cross. He married his cousin Agnes Miller (1894–1984) in July 1919, taking her and the Sunbeam on an extended honeymoon in the Lake District before settling down, in a house purchased by his generous shipping-agent father, to raise two children, teach sporadically, and write. His reputation was secured by his first novel,
Last and First Men
, published in 1930, during that dark period when the wounds of World War I were scarcely healed yet the first signs of a sequel were in the
air. A gloomy assessment of the human condition pervaded all of Stapledon's fiction, offset by a faith in the possibility of transcending a divisive nature through the evolution of communal mind. A committed socialist, Stapledon leaned toward communism for most of his life but recoiled from the injustices executed in its name. Through the agency of distributed, communal intelligence, Stapledon envisioned the ideals of communism without the dangers of centralized control.

Stapledon's novel, subtitled
A Story of the Near and Far Future
, chronicled life's expression throughout the solar system, looking two billion years ahead. Seven years later,
Star Maker
expanded the field of view to cosmological scale. Stapledon touched on themes that would sustain both science and science fiction for the next sixty years—from artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and atomic energy to extraterrestrial beings, interstellar transport, and the gradual expansion of civilization into a loosely organized, light-gathering veil around its sun. These two books pursue a quest for meaning through the heavens and beyond. “Was man indeed, as he sometimes desired to be, the growing point of the cosmical spirit, in its temporal aspect at least? Or was he one of many million growing points? Or was mankind of no more importance in the universal view than rats in a cathedral?”
¹⁶

Last and First Men
presents a closing history of our species, reviewed by one of our descendants as stellar catastrophe is bringing our solar system to an end. Humanity rises and falls through a succession of mental and physical transformations, regenerating after natural and artificial disasters and emerging in the end into a polymorphous group intelligence, a telepathically linked community of ten million minds spanning the orbits of the outer planets and breaking the bounds of individual consciousness, yet still incapable of more than “a fledgling's knowledge” of the whole. Some ten million years into the story, a virulent species of Martian intelligence invades the earth. Navigating through space on the solar wind, clouds of Martian microorganisms arrive in search of a source of water for their dehydrated home. Individually powerless both in body and in mind, the Martian “sub-vital units” maintain communication via faint electromagnetic fields. When gathered together by the billions they constitute a collective intelligence, “something between an extremely well-disciplined army of specialized units, and a body possessed by one mind.”
¹⁷

“Terrestrial organisms, and Martian organisms of the terrestrial type, maintained themselves as vital units by means of nervous systems, or other forms of material contact between parts,” Stapledon
explained. “In the most developed form, an immensely complicated neural ‘telephone' system connected every part of the body with a vast central exchange, the brain. Thus on the earth a single organism was without exception a continuous system of matter, which maintained a certain consistency of form. But . . . Martian life developed at length the capacity of maintaining vital organization as a single conscious individual without continuity of living matter. . . . The Martian organism depended, so to speak, not on ‘telephone' wires, but on an immense crowd of mobile ‘wireless stations,' transmitting and receiving different wavelengths according to their function. The radiation of a single unit was of course very feeble; but a great system of units could maintain contact with its wandering parts.”
¹⁸

The Martian particles were able to aggregate faint magnetic forces to exert measurable physical strength. “Thus a system of materially disconnected units had a certain cohesion,” the historian explained. “Its consistency was something between a smoke-cloud and a very tenuous jelly.”
¹⁹
Faced with attacks by humans and disruption by indiscriminately propagated electromagnetic radiation, the Martians learned to take defensive, and later offensive, forms. It took the two species a long time to recognize each other as intelligent: humans were unable to see anything intelligent in the diffuse Martian clouds; Martians were unable to see anything intelligent in the mute, gravity-bound individuals who appeared to have no mind. In our wireless stations the Martians discerned crude attempts at communication but could find no evidence of organized mentality, concluding that “their only feat seemed to be that they had managed to get control of the unconscious bipeds who tended them.”
²⁰

After fifty thousand years and repeated invasions the Martians succeeded in establishing a permanent colony on the earth. The two races, Martian and human, reached an uneasy coexistence until decadence among the humans led to weaknesses the Martians could not resist. A final war ensued. As the battle dragged on, human scientists invented a bacterium fatal to the Martian organisms but with side effects known to kill people as well. Our politicians, after brief discussions, decided this dangerous pesticide should be used. The Martian society disintegrated, carrying the epidemic back to their home planet, while only a few pockets of shattered humanity survived, plagued for millions of years by an infection of Martian “sub-vital units” that had learned to survive like viruses in the bodies of animals and humans. These microorganisms retained their electromagnetic tendencies, and over the course of vast ages of biological time, “certain species of mammals so readjusted themselves that the
Martian virus became not only harmless but necessary to their well-being. A relationship which was originally that of parasite and host became in time a true symbiosis, a co-operative partnership, in which terrestrial animals gained something of the unique attributes of the vanished Martian organisms. The time was to come when Man himself should look with envy on these creatures, and finally make use of the Martian ‘virus' for his own enrichment.”
²¹
Thus telepathic abilities were realized among humankind.

The word
telepathy
was coined by Frederic W. H. Myers (1843–1901), an English poet and school inspector who founded the Society for Psychical Research in 1882. Of vigorous mental and physical constitution, Myers became, at the age of twenty-one, the first Englishman to swim across the channel below Niagara Falls. Claiming that “experiment proves that telepathy—the supersensory transference of thoughts and feelings from one mind to another—is a fact,” he attracted a substantial late-Victorian following, especially as new discoveries in physics opened avenues of possibility to otherwise implausible ideas.
²²
J.J. Thomson, among other reputable scientists who were asked to witness Myers's experiments, kept an open mind, while making it clear that at least two of the demonstrations he attended showed evidence of fraud.

Myers's eldest son, Leopold (1881–1944), was a promising novelist (
The Orissers
, 1923;
The Near and the Far
, 1929;
The Root and the Flower
, 1935) who never escaped the shadow of his father and never adjusted to the pretensions of literary success. There was little adventure in his life. While Stapledon was rescuing the wounded during the Great War, Leo held a position at the Board of Trade. In 1901, on the death of his father, Leo accompanied his mother to the United States, where a posthumous communication with her husband had been prearranged. This final experiment failed, and Leo was on his own. Drawn by admiration for
Last and First Men
, he became Stapledon's closest literary friend and correspondent until he committed suicide in 1944. Frederic Myers contributed the idea of telepathy that infused Stapledon's books; Leo Myers contributed encouragement as Stapledon developed a literary career. Stapledon's writings echo the proclamation made by the elder Myers in his
Science and a Future Life
: “We ourselves are a part, not only of the race, but of the universe. It is conceivable that our share in its fortunes may be more abiding than we know; that our evolution may be not planetary but cosmical, and our destiny without an end.”
²³

Preferring the exotic to the occult, Stapledon went to great lengths to give telepathy a physically explainable form. Technology, however,
was about to achieve the same objective, without extraterrestrial help. Millions of years before our Martian adventures were set to unfold, we have been invaded by subvital units—microprocessors—not from the sands of Mars, but from the sands of Earth. Silicon and oxygen, forged from helium and hydrogen in the atomic furnaces of stars, have lingered as the two most common elements in the outer layer of the planet we call home. One atom of silicon combines with two atoms of oxygen to produce silicon dioxide, or silica, which makes up 59 percent of the thin, floating crust—a silica wafer—that is solid ground to us. Silica, in one form or another, is the principal ingredient of 95 percent of the rock beneath our feet.

Exobiologists consider silicon a possible platform for extraterrestrial life. On our planet, carbon-based life came first, although, according to the theories of A. G. Cairns-Smith, siliceous clays may have given our genetic system its start. Self-reproducing clay crystals may have served as a template for the beginnings of organic life, just as organic life is now serving as a substrate for the proliferation of self-reproducing forms of silicon and their associated code. But the development of silicon-based cyberplasm, governing the course of organic life, does not mean that carbon-based metabolism will be superseded or replaced. The distinction between chemistry and electronics appears clear-cut from a distance, but as you look closer the separation is less distinct. The fabrication of microelectronic components is largely a chemical process, while the fabrication of chemical structures depends largely on relations between electrons. We shall not see biochemistry replaced by electronics; we shall see a merger that incorporates them both.

Evolution is traditionally portrayed as a succession of discrete layers, those of geology and biology gathered into chapters like the pages of a book. A layer of dinosaurs is followed by a layer of mammals. But the precursors of mammals were there all along. If you could ask the mammals how long they had been around, they wouldn't answer, “Since the dinosaurs left,” they would answer, “Since life began.” If you could ask the same question of machines such as microprocessors, you might get an answer that begins not with the age of computers but with the age of bifacial stones. When silica is liquefied by heat and pressure within the earth, then ejected toward the surface and cooled, the result is a glassy substance, obsidian or flint. Glass is a brittle, noncrystalline material that breaks with a characteristic conchoidal fracture, leaving an edge that is scalpel sharp.

For billions of years glass lay scattered by occasional cataclysms about the earth until, roughly two million years ago, it attracted the
attention of humanoid hands and minds. Our hands discovered the killing, dismembering power of the edge, while mind discovered the power of selecting, and later duplicating, certain shapes that were found to work the best. Through a convoluted, coevolutionary process, fragments of silica began to be reproduced. The human presence selectively favored increasingly complex chips of silica, given form by the force of information, while the powers gained through the manufacture of these artifacts favored increasingly complex constructs of the human mind.

Silicon, however, had at least two more innings in the game. Pure, crystalline silicon—or rather, pure silicon rendered impure in exactly the right way—was discovered to be a semiconductor, able to act as an electrical switch with electrons as its only moving parts. The first practical application was the silicon-crystal detector for wireless signals, developed by G. W. Pickard in 1906, followed many years later by the diode, the transistor, and then the multiple-transistor integrated circuit, which, if the transistor is considered a Paleolithic implement, compares to the Neolithic, multiple-fluted Clovis point. Then came the microprocessor, a working copy of the machine Julian Bigelow had built at the Institute for Advanced Study twenty years earlier imprinted on a single chip. The two-thousand transistor Intel 4004 appeared in 1971, the one-million transistor Intel 486 in 1990, the five-million transistor Pentium Pro in 1996, with ten-million-transistor digital-signal processors now being introduced. These fragments of silicon, chiseled on submicron scale, depend, like Stapledon's subvital units, on communication for collective strength. Once again silica intervened, this time as thin strands of quartz, forged not into discrete devices such as microblades or microchips, but woven into a fiberoptic network spreading across the surface of the earth like a spider's web.