All the Flavors of Immortality
(This was originally written in 2002. I’m reposting it here as part of decommissioning my old website, and because I might want to refer to it later.)
Written March 14, 2002.
Major revisions October 10, 2002 suggested by Frink.
As an exercise, I thought I would try to enumerate all the different classes of immortality I have heard or read about, and give some discussion about the tradeoffs inherent in each and in the idea of immortality itself.
Some of these are real, some are fictional, and some are on the move from fiction to reality thanks to medical advances. I hope I don’t need to point out which are which.
Everyday Immortality
Immortality through Genetics
If your branch of your family tree doesn’t dead-end, you have this kind of immortality. Your genetic code, which defines characteristics of your body and health, will live on in your progeny, albeit in slightly altered forms. Unfortunately, your DNA doesn’t define your persona and after a few generations the part of it that is you will be severely diluted.
Another kind of genetic immortality would be having a sample of your DNA permanently recorded so that you could be cloned in the future. Sadly, as with your offspring, your clone is not you.
Immortality through Deeds
This is the romantic kind of immortality where you live on in the minds of others. Adults often try to sell this kind to kids when awkward questions about death come up. It can be as simple as being remembered fondly by family members or hallucinated by crazies. It can be as grand as being named a world hero for having accomplished some great work, and having numerous books and films made about you. The problem is that, as with DNA, memories get diluted over time. Even if your name is well-known enough to survive as part of world history, people will care less as time moves on, and you’re still vulnerable to being erased by some sort of global cataclysm. We remember the Caesars, but we’ve forgotten who invented fire and the wheel since they lived in a time when the worldwide disaster of not-having-a-coherent-written-history was going on.
Zombification
Sometimes when people die, they come back to life a short time later as zombies. Possible causes of this are many and varied – it can be the result of radiation from space, the summons of a wizard or deity, general cursedness etc.
There are a lot of drawbacks to being a zombie. Zombies stink, have horrible skin conditions, shamble everywhere, moan a lot, and feed upon the brains of the living. That really cuts down on your enjoyment of immortality. Your social life will be restricted to other zombies, your hopes of an athletic career will be dashed, and some people simply don’t enjoy cracking skulls open to feast upon the goo inside.
Furthermore, not all zombies have the ability to pull their bodies back together when smashed by zombie-haters (zombies are subject to much hatred from jealous non-zombies), which means that once your skeleton is broken into little bitty pieces, you have to spend eternity in one place. Very boring, and probably painful too.
This is Your Brain on Ice
There has been a lot of interest in cryonic preservation lately. It was in the news a fair bit in 2002 because of some baseball player who got frozen. Surprisingly, there are many people who object to allowing others to have themselves frozen. When examined, most of their arguments turn out to be hollow. The best debates arise out of the legal and ethical issues surrounding your existence after being frozen – what are your rights on ice, and what does the future owe you?
Cryo is currently the best chance we have of becoming immortal. There are lots of risks; it relies on keeping you frozen solid long enough for medical science to advance sufficiently to not only reverse the freezing damage but also fix whatever killed you and, if you only had your head frozen, grow you a new body. It’s impossible to estimate the probability that you’ll be awakened after having died and been frozen, but no matter how small it is, it’s still bigger than the chance of being revived after being buried or cremated. And even if being frozen turns out to be completely hopeless, you’re no worse off than you would be if you weren’t frozen.
Spiritual Immortality
There are many and varied cults in the world whose doctrines insist that death is merely a transition, and that afterwards our minds are freed from our bodies and either go on to another world, or are reincarnated into new bodies. Some believe that the other world involves some sort of eternal punishment or reward for deeds done while living, which sounds extremely boring.
Of course, nobody has found a single shred of evidence that these beliefs may be true, and some of them sound downright scary; for instance belief in reincarnation implies that the reincarnated person loses their memory and identity when reborn (since nobody can reliably recall a past life), and that sounds more like permanent death of the individual than immortality.
Immortality through Not Dying
A major shortcoming of the above listed forms of immortality is that they all involve dying. Besides seemingly violating the very definition of the word immortality, this is a big problem because if you want to be immortal, you probably don’t want to have to die to accomplish it. Too risky.
Tour the Fourth Dimension via Stasis
If you’re worried about dying, you can always stick yourself in some sort of time-stopping machine. You could do this in the hope that the future will have a cure for death ready for you when you step out, or you could just use it to spread your lifetime out over a longer range of real time in order to see what the future has in store.
The biggest problem with this plan is the risk that someone will mess with your preservation apparatus and kill you in your sleep. A certain amount of hedging can be done to prevent that, but you will still be at the mercy of environmental disasters.
Slow Aging with Relativity
That funny-looking man with the frizzy hair told us that as you move faster and faster, time slows down for you relative to the rest of the universe. The effect becomes most pronounced when you approach the speed of light.
This is better than the stasis idea because you can remain conscious and somewhat in touch with what’s going on in the universe. At a minimum, you can watch the stars move and get a time-lapse view of any nearby macro-engineering projects.
There are slight technical difficulties here; to avoid hitting something, you pretty much need to do this in space, which means you need a spacecraft capable of sustaining you for however long you intend to employ relativistic time dilation. Furthermore, it takes a hell of a lot of energy to get up near light speed, especially if you want to do so within your mortal lifetime. Life extension via relativistic effects is therefore outside most peoples’ budget – at least for the time being.
Medical Immortality
Body Swapping
Medical science has already made great strides in using organ transplants and other treatments to extend life. Cloning technology is being born right now. It is not hard to imagine having a fresh copy of your body cloned every few decades, and having your brain transplanted into it.
Brain deterioration would still be a problem, but progress is being made in treating that too. The major risk here is that your surrounding society may collapse and lose the ability to clone bodies for you. It’s safer for an immortal to be self-sufficient.
Instead of having the same old brain transplanted into a cloned body, sufficiently advanced technology could copy your neural wiring into a cloned brain. This raises the same identity questions as uploading and matter transporters.
Boosterspice
Another route to medical immortality lies in finding out why aging happens, and finding a cure for it and for the various types of deterioration that afflict the elderly. In the literature this is often posited to take the final form of a drug, treatment or dietary supplement that prevents one from dying of natural causes. It does not necessarily prevent virulent disease or death from preventable poor health (like extreme obesity or malnutrition). Again, there may be a self-sufficiency problem here.
A related idea is that of curing the disease called old age. We’re giant machines for helping genes make more genes, and our bodies are designed to have a reproductive peak. Once we’re no longer fit for reproduction, our genes could care less about us and everything starts falling apart. With a sufficient understanding of how genetic molecules work, we could reprogram them to make the priority keeping the organism alive and healthy instead of simply reproducible.
Cyborgism
Some people find the ideas of organ transplantation and cloning disturbing. Fortunately for them there are a wide range of mechanical body part replacements available. When something wears out, replace it with a machine. The logical end result is a machine with a human brain controlling it directly.
The problems of brain deterioration must still be faced, of course, unless you also replace it with a better thinking device. Furthermore, some current mechanical organ replacements are quite crude and cumbersome. You have to ensure your machine parts are well-maintained and receive enough power, or else you run the risk of becoming a statue.
There are a lot of potential advantages too, including the ability to interface digitally with computers, enhanced strength and speed, and resistance to hostile environments.
Immortality through Transformation
If humans can’t be immortal, maybe they can be changed into something that can.
Vampirism
For those of you born in the last five seconds, vampires are people who drink the blood of others in order to stay alive and young. Various additional powers are often attributed to vampires, along with some curious weaknesses.
The origin of vampirism is unknown, but the condition is believed to be a disease transmitted by bodily fluids. Vampires can transform humans into vampires by administering a non-fatal bite. This sometimes happens by accident when a vampire fails to drain enough blood to kill the victim.
The advantages and disadvantages of being a vampire are open to debate. There is a huge amount of variation in the powers and weaknesses ascribed to vampires.
Example powers include flight, limited invulnerability, superhuman strength and speed, limited shape-changing ability, uncommon attractiveness, ability to teleport via shadows or doorways, ability to mentally control animals or demons, and automatic ownership of outrageous castles in European mountain ranges.
Example weaknesses include weakness in the presence of garlic or religious symbols, death upon exposure to sunlight, ability to enter homes only when invited, extreme vulnerability to slivers, a requirement to sleep in a coffin, and a propensity for being followed around by angry mobs of peasants carrying torches and pitchforks.
Transcendence
Some people believe that humanity is just the larval stage of some kind of non-corporeal being. Others believe that when we die, our minds are freed to roam the universe. There are lots of variations on these themes, most of which end up with the mortal subject being transformed into some sort of pretty energy creature able to go where it wills.
Unfortunately there is no supporting evidence for such claims, and indeed we have plenty of reason to believe that a pure-energy life-form is physically impossible.
Another kind of transcendence involves becoming something godlike yet still rooted in matter. This can range all the way from unlocking the hidden secrets of the human brain and making full use of it, to being artificially “evolved” into a more advanced kind of life form, to uploading (see below) and expanding your consciousness to fill all available computing resources. Of course if you’re still matter you can still be destroyed, but presumably if you’re something much better than human you’ll also be better at avoiding danger.
Uploading
With computing power growing at a fantastic rate, it is becoming practical to digitally simulate the behavior of the neurons that make us think. We’re still a long, long way from being able to simulate a human brain in any practical way, but it could happen. Combine that with advances in medical scanning technology, and hopefully a breakthrough in understanding how neurons work together to produce thought and memory and consciousness, and you have an obvious conclusion: Why not transcribe our brains into computers?
The potential advantages are mind-boggling. Immortality. Making extra backups of your mind just in case. Cheap space travel and exploration. Cheap travel anywhere there’s a network. Ability to multi-process; create a second copy of yourself to handle annoying people or tackle dangerous jobs. High-speed thought. Ability to slow thought to wait out boring events. Increased memory capacity and accuracy. Seamless interaction with computers. Enhanced communication abilities.
Along with this come heavy philosophical questions. If you upload yourself into a computer, is it still you, or have you died? Is the you in the computer really conscious and sentient, or is it just a flawless simulation? Does it even matter? Do you have continuity of consciousness? If the meat version of you remains alive, which one is legally a person or are both? Does this count as reproduction? Similar questions also apply to brain modifications.
Magical Means
Assuming the existence of magic, there are many and varied means to use it to keep oneself alive. Magic is often portrayed as having a Do-What-I-Mean interface, which is a big plus because it reduces the likelihood that you will accidentally curse yourself.
The wise magic-user will be cautious and flexible. Start with the basics, like protection from all sorts of harm (violence, poison, disease), then add self-regenerating health and vigor, create a set of quick-escapes from especially dangerous scenarios, and take steps to ensure that you will always be able to revise, strengthen or add to these spells in the future. Also, avoid placing trust in others to procure your survival supplies, because forever is plenty of opportunity for your side-kicks to change their minds and betray you.
For non-spellcasters, wish-granting genies and deals with demons are popular ways to gain magical immortality. Such entities tend to be capricious and overly literal in their interpretation of wishes, and they have good lawyers. If one is not exceedingly precise in the wording of a wish, it can become a curse. For example, wishing simply for eternal life might not save you from the ravages of disease and decay. You could end up an immortal mind trapped forever in a useless, rotten body. Not fun.
Of course, one can also become immortal as the result of a curse placed upon oneself by an enemy. This is often done to earthy characters who value their friends and family, because it subjects them to the torture of watching all their loved ones grow old and die, and deprives them of the chance of reaching whatever afterlife they might believe in. In this case, all you can do is make the most of it. No sense being depressed for all eternity.
Immortal Plus
Most of the previously mentioned forms of undying immortality only offer safety from common forms of death like old age and disease, but there are many ways to die. Here are some additional factors you might want to consider.
Permanence. Do you want to be absolutely immortal, or do you want the option of ending your own life if you get bored? Can you trust yourself to make a sound judgement of when to end it? A thousand years of depression might make it tempting, but a million years of bliss could be right around the corner.
Food. Do you want to have to continue eating? Consider how much food you’ll need to eat over the next 15 billion years. Granted it doesn’t take much more than a large, well-maintained garden to feed one person, and a garden is a renewable food source. Well, renewable barring extinction of the light source or mutation of the plants into something inedible and no doubt intent on the extermination of all animals. An immortal may no longer be subject to the forces of evolution, but his food supply still is.
However, if you want to take long trips you have to ensure food will be available, or lug some with you. And what about bad food? If you’re the adventurous type, you’ll probably want to sample the local delicacies wherever you go, but that almost guarantees you’ll be poisoned at some point. It would be really embarrassing to keel over at the local fast food joint while sharing your accumulated wisdom with the natives.
Invulnerability. No matter how much of a hermit you are, if you live forever you’re bound to get into altercations ranging from fisticuffs to interstellar wars. Do you want protection from physical harm? Probably, but what kind? Being completely impervious to harm will make you cocky and more likely to endanger those around you, while at the same time boring you in the long run. Suffering an injury can be a positive personal growth experience, so maybe what you want is something along the lines of protection from death combined with total body regeneration ability.
Of course, even the ability to completely regenerate your body can cause problems. What if someone tosses you into a star? You’ll be floating there constantly growing new flesh only to have it instantly burned to a crisp. Mmmm… bacon… where was I? Oh yes, this little scenario leads to:
Protection from traps. Some people resent immortals and will set nasty traps for them. There is also always the risk of doing something stupid and trapping yourself. This could be really bad, because if you’re immortal and fall into an inescapable trap, you’re going to be really bored for a really long time. Probably the most practical way to avoid this problem is to also have the ability to teleport yourself arbitrarily.
Even so, escaping traps is a major problem for invulnerable types. As Frink pointed out to me after reading the first version of this article, what if someone tosses you into a singularity? It would really suck to be able to survive that because it’s pretty far-fetched to imagine a way of getting out again. You’d pretty much have to hope that Hawking was right and wait for the thing to evaporate.
Travel ability. Not a major problem really, but worth thinking about. You will eventually get bored of whatever planet you start on, and will want to explore other worlds. How will you get there?
Common Misconceptions about Immortality
It’s Boring.
Could very well be, if mishandled. Fortunately humans are amazingly good at finding ways to rationalize remaining alive in bad situations. If it gets too boring, you can make it more interesting by playing games with yourself, like deliberately forgetting things, or becoming an investigator or a collector of the rarest of the rare. If you’re bored forever, you’re doing something wrong.
Nobody Wants to Live Forever!
Wrong. I do. I want to see what happens next. Then what happens after that, and so on. I want to be able to travel the universe and see the sights. I want to see how the universe ends. As I said to Frink once, I’d like to be able to point at a distant galaxy and say, “I think I’ll go see who lives there, but I’ll take my time and see all the sights along the way,” and be able to actually do it.
It’s Selfish.
Damn right it is; nothing wrong with that. However, an immortal can also be of enormous benefit as a carrier of knowledge. Having a friendly immortal on your planet is a great safeguard against long-term dark ages; that person can help civilization rebuild quickly after large-scale disasters.
Why Deny Yourself Your Eternal Reward?
There is no evidence to support the belief in an afterlife, therefore it is logical to put off death as long as possible to maximize enjoyment of life. If there is an afterlife, it will still be there for you when you get tired of immortality.
It can also be argued that dying is irresponsible because it denies the benefit of your future works to your society. You might think to counter-argue that a given immortal might be more of a burden than a benefit to society, but that argument breaks down when you talk about immortality because immortality practically guarantees that the person will change many times over, and at some point will be greatly productive.
I would go so far as to suggest that even believing in an afterlife is socially irresponsible, because it cheapens the lives of others. Life becomes more precious if you believe that death is The End.
Solaris: Book vs. Films
The 1972 film Solaris has long been one of my favorite science fiction movies. Mainly because of the concept of Solaris itself, but also because of the oddities of Russian filmmaking and its extreme length, both of which made the set of people who have watched it something of an elite club.
This last week, I finally set out to read the original book by Stanislaw Lem, and re-watch both of the films based on it. I had somehow never got around to reading the book before, and when I last saw the 1972 film I was too young to fully understand it. By the time of the 2002 film, I certainly understood it but was left with the feeling that it really diverged from the original vision, which is what prompted me to eventually do this comparison of the three.
There is a big difference. Lem was upset with the first film and I can see why. Both film adaptations use the trappings of the book to tell a different story, and largely miss what the book was about. The films are two different versions of the same love story, set in space, with Solaris simply being a setting that enables the strange situation of a man being confronted with what seems to be his dead wife, and all the mystery and angst that comes out of this apparent second chance.
I’m not saying the movies are bad. They’re both excellent films that tell engrossing and touching stories, but they’re not the original story. These are stories about people, which is fine since those tend to make for good movies, but they ignore the seven hundred billion ton elephant just outside the room.
Solaris, the book, was about questioning what humans as a race want from the universe. Science fiction is full of humans zipping around space, fighting and colonizing and meeting aliens and having a good time or getting eaten by monsters. Those are all pretty familiar and easy to understand things because they’ve happened on Earth in the past – we’ve gone zipping around the oceans, fighting and colonizing, meeting other flavors of humans and having a good time or getting eaten by tigers.
In Solaris we meet something truly alien – and what I love about Solaris is that it’s by far the most credible alien I’ve encountered in my life of reading the watching science fiction. Here’s a life form the size of a planet, larger than Earth. Apparently intelligent. Not an organism as we understand it – it’s not made of cells, but instead is a planetwide ocean of chemicals. Have you ever flown over the ocean and looked down at the endless deep water with its tiny waves? Imagine all that water was part of a giant brain. What commonality do we have with a being like that? How could we possibly communicate with it, and should we even bother trying?
Part of the setting in the book is about this – humans have been studying Solaris for decades already and making exactly zero progress. Solaris is certainly active – it reacts to their presence. It also manifests structures out of its soup, some of which appear to be models of things it knows about, including humans and mathematics, but these appear to be part of its thought process rather than communications. Human attempts at communication go nowhere – it may not know what communication is or may not have any motivation to communicate, or it may be trying to communicate and we just can’t recognize it.
After smacking their heads into this wall of alienness for so long, the characters in the story articulate how the communication effort reflects back on humanity: We don’t really know what to do with other planets and other beings, except convert them into more of the same – more Earths, more varieties of humans. The first time we run into something that can’t be hammered into any of the familiar pigeonholes, we don’t know what to do. The characters end up speculating to try and satisfy themselves, but it gains them no additional truth or understanding.
Best of all, there is no conclusion. Both of the movies have an ending that says what happens to the protagonist from then on, but the book is open-ended, and I prefer it that way. The story is meant to cause contemplation, and putting a bow tie on it removes the trigger for contemplation, which is the act of wondering what happens next.
I’m also disappointed that neither of the films attempt to render the visual richness of Solaris – making the films character stories certainly cut the effects budget by a lot. Solaris as described in the book is full of visual richness, with a wide variety of forms appearing on its surface ranging from barely comprehensible to completely incomprehensible. The hard science fiction nerd in me wants to see those things – I wanted a film about the what rather than the who. A future-documentary about Solaris would be just the thing.
To sum up, all three versions are great, but only the book is the true Solaris – the films are relatively pedestrian people stories in which the one truly special thing about the book is ignored and could be replaced with some other plot device, like a capricious wizard or standard little green men from Mars.
What I’ve Been Reading
Vancouver Noir by Diane Purvey and John Belshaw. This caught my eye while I was on a bookstore crawl and I bought it on impulse, mainly because it seemed to have some nice historical photos of Vancouver.
It’s pretty interesting – Vancouver has a somewhat seedy history that I was completely unaware of, but now that I’ve read it I can sort of see why some areas of the city are they way they are today. It was interesting to learn some historic events involving hotels that still stand today, and watch the evolution and motion of the downtown core.
One thing really annoyed me about this book – an apparent lack of editorial oversight. The words “discrete” and “discreet” were consistently confused in the few places they were used, and I have a feeling there were some past/present tense flip-flops going on though I didn’t pay close enough attention to explicitly note them.
Overall it was a fascinating read though, and the pictures are indeed interesting.
—–
Greg Egan: Axiomatic and Luminous
Being two short story collections, the first collected in 1995 and the second in 1998. I’ve liked all of Egan’s novels so far, but my biggest comment about these short stories is that they seem awfully formulaic. A lot of them follow the pattern of establishing a character who has some interest in the nature of mind, will or identity, then introducing a plot device that allows exploration of one of these themes, and then ending with some sort of ironic or otherwise revelatory twist that results. To be fair, this is partially symptomatic of the short story format, and since the stories were probably originally published at different times and in different fora, the similarities would not have been so apparent until they were collected.
There were a lot of good plot device concepts, such as a biofeedback device that would let you visualize your brain activity in real time, or a brain replacement that learns to be you by successive approximation over the course of decades.
There were also some bad plot devices – things that I could let slide as a concept to be explored as a story, but otherwise were pretty bad science. Like predicting the future by looking at a time-reversed image of the galaxy through a telescope. Or the claim that a simulated person could have experience during the construction of the simulation, before it was actually run – that’s just plain impossible, and the way it was written it almost seemed to be begging the existence of a supernatural “soul”.
A few of the endings were a bit predictable too, like where buying cheap knockoff products gives not quite the desired result. A couple of the stories were incomprehensible to me – I just didn’t get the point at the end – presumably because they were ones that touched on religious themes.
Some of the stories were good, and the common theme of exploring the nature of self and mind is very appealing to me, but overall I prefer Egan’s full-length novels.
—–
L.E. Modesitt, Jr.: The Eternity Artifact – Chosen because it sounded like exactly the sort of story I felt like reading at the time. Space opera with mysterious deserted alien cities to be explored and artifacts to be found and human enemies to be outwitted. The ending was not what I expected, but it wasn’t disappointing. Pretty decent read.
Modesitt chose to create a familiar political climate for this far-future story by creating a back-story involving a diaspora from Earth at a time when there were still strong national and religious groupings, so the major types of religions and political systems tended to end up controlling groups of proximate solar systems and then warring with each other the same way they did when they lived in countries instead of on entire worlds.
The author casts the descendants of Christian-like and roughly-Islamic groups as the major villain-groups of the story, which was a pleasing surprise. The secular protagonist civilization is questing after the first alien relics ever discovered, which are clearly from a much more advanced civilization, and the religious groups really don’t want this to happen, because either the relics are one of the biblical superweapons left by God or Satan, in which case they must either be secured by the righteous or sealed away forever, or they’re not, in which case Man is not God’s foremost creation – which is an idea is a major threat to the core beliefs of the pseudo-Christians especially.
—–
Robert L. Forward: Martian Rainbow – Seldom have I been so disappointed in a hard SF story. This one is unusually shallow and contrived, even for Forward, who has a tendency to produce what I call “tech demo” stories – hard SF that is even harder on the speculation and thinner on the characterization than usual. This is not to say that kind of writing is always bad – I’ve enjoyed most of Forward’s other books.
The story here is: Earth conquered by madman, Martian bases left to fend for themselves with insufficient resources, madman threatens survival of human race, Martians find self-replicating nanofactories left by original inhabitants of Mars, use them to save day for everyone and terraform Mars too.
The madman’s conquest of Earth through a cult of personality reinforced by masterful religious propaganda and political manipulation was way, way too fast and easy to be believable. Also the fact that the PR and technical wizards that enabled his rise to power were so fatally blind to his insanity. It basically boils down to “everyone loves the war hero and believes him when he says he’s God and lets him become dictator of Earth.”
The other side of it is the Martian tech that saves the day. These are mobile machines (initially mistaken for organisms) that can eat anything and manufacture almost anything, including diamond in any size and shape you want, while producing no harmful waste products. They can also produce more of themselves as needed, and multiply their computing power by linking up in a chain, and do so in order to learn human language overnight. How awfully convenient if your survival requires rapid terraforming of Mars and you also need to pull a miracle out of your ass to save Earth from destruction. But all this isn’t the part that bugs me. Many of Forward’s stories are contrived around biological or technological oddities. What bugs me is there’s no back story here. The interaction between the humans and Martians machines amounts to:
- Humans: “Here’s our language files.”
- Martians: “Hi. Excuse us while we get back to tending our plants.”
- Humans: “Hey, if you don’t mind, we could really use a hand converting your planet into something we can live on.”
- Martians: “OK.”
- Humans: “Just like that? Won’t this affect you?”
- Martians: “It’s unthinkable for us to refuse any request or interfere with your survival, and your request doesn’t contradict our masters’ orders.”
- Humans: “Where are your masters?”
- Martians: “They went away, and we’re not allowed to tell you anything about them.”
- Humans: “OK. Get to work.”
- (time passes)
- Humans: “Hey, that bunch of Martians is going to get themselves killed! We don’t want any of you dying for us!”
- Martians: “Even though we’re obviously intelligent and autonomous, we’re machines and not alive so it’s OK.”
- Humans: “Oh, carry on then.”
So basically there’s a tantalizing mention that some aliens built these extremely capable machines and then left them behind to do menial tasks, but there’s absolutely no attempt by the humans to weasel out more information about the aliens or find it by other means. There are just token gestures as to how humans are awfully nice and considerate even when in dire straits, and then the alien machines are used to bludgeon into the reader how powerful the concepts of exponential growth and molecular manufacturing are.
The ideas here could have gotten a better treatment if the book were twice as long, but it would still need these rough edges filed off.
What I’ve Been Reading: Velikovsky
Worlds in Collision, Immanuel Velikovsky, 1950
Earth in Upheaval, Velikovsky, 1952
Scientists Confront Velikovsky, Goldsmith, Sagan, Storer, Huber, Mulholland and Morrison, 1977
I occasionally like to consume the works of crackpots as a form of entertainment, and Velikovsky has a reputation as one of the greatest. Having found two of his three books (the third sounding relatively uninteresting, and I didn’t learn of it until too late) and a rebuttal by noted scientists, I read them back to back.
To sum up, Velikovsky contends that in historical times (less than 4,000 years ago), the planet Jupiter spat out a giant comet. On two occasions, around 1,500 BC and 700 BC, this comet made very close – perhaps even physically grazing – approaches to the Earth, and also knocked Mars around a bit, causing Mars to also have a close encounter with Earth. After all this, Mars settled down into its present orbit and the comet assumed a circular orbit and became what we now know as the planet Venus.
These close approaches to Earth caused the major biblical catastrophes; gravitational effects caused massive tides, accounting for a variety of flood myths around the world. Material falling from the comet’s tail became the “manna from heaven” of the biblical tale, and the rains of vermin also fell from the comet. The close contact also caused slippages of the Earth’s crust, causing its rotation to appear to pause or change direction, changing the length of the day, and moving many lands out of their accustomed climates, accounting for the flash-freezing of the Siberian mammoths, the massive anachronistic animal boneyards found in various places, and the misalignment of a few buildings that were notably constructed to have calendrical functions. Interplanetary lightning bolts and tidal effects caused the moon to melt and bubble, the bubbles being the cause of the visible circular scars we call craters.
There’s much, much more but these are the main features of his work. To back this up he cites a lot of mythology from around the world and points out selected geological oddities that he believes support his case. I’m not doing this part justice, but there are three books full of this stuff – it’s not easily dismissed, as the rebuttal shows.
(Edit: In the interest of not presenting things back to front, I should mention that I think Velikovsky’s intent was to reconcile a large number of historical and mythological catastrophes, and the planetary billiards theory is what he came up with to accomplish that purpose.)
In reading Velikovsky’s books, I found his list of geological anomalies quite interesting and was fascinated by his recounting of relevant myths from around the world, and the exciting way he made connections between them. He’s quite a good author and gives the impression of having thoroughly researched everything he writes about. However, he did frequently make one mistake that is a personal bugbear of mine – he asserted things as proven that were not. Verbal handwaving crafted to flummox the credulous. There were also several claims made that I found laughably wrong, though they may not have been known wrong back at time of writing. If you weren’t watching for these things, you could easily be taken in – he writes like a popular scientist, has footnotes and references and all that. By the end there was such a long laundry list of doubts in my mind that I had taken to reading it as an amusing alternate universe history text – a work of fiction – rather than a serious attempt at science.
But it was apparently a serious attempt at science, and it became an interesting phenomenon that drew the attention of serious scientists not because of its content but because of the way things went down. Velikovsky was rightly laughed out of all real scientific publications, so instead published his work himself, as these books. They became popular with nonscientists, and over time quite a hubbub arose over how this outsider with a good theory was being ignored by the ivory tower scientific establishment, who don’t like to admit error – this in itself a sore point of public misunderstanding about how science works. History is full, they said, of outsiders who were later proven right, therefore Velikovsky must be right – PLUS, his work makes the Bible and a lot of other mythologies all work out! Surely that’s of great value and shouldn’t be ignored.
Goldsmith, Sagan and the others organized a conference and invited Velikovsky and his supporters to present papers in support of his work, and also themselves presented papers that demonstrated how some of his key claims could not possibly be true. The major works against are presented in the third book on my list above, and they’re pretty soundly damning. For example, actual math demonstrating that even if somehow Jupiter could have ejected a mass the size of Venus, the amount of energy required to do so would have vaporized the mass in the process. And even if it didn’t, the probability of this mass having multiple near-collisions with Earth and Mars within a span of two thousand years is trillions to one against. And even then, there’s no known way to get such a body into a circular orbit afterwards, using what we know to have been present in the inner solar system at the time.
This should have put the last coffin nail in his theories, but he and his followers continued to try to shore up his crumbling edifice long after. It probably was the end of his general public popularity though.
An interesting comment made in the introductory material of the third book is that all of the astronomers etc. who reviewed Velikovsky’s work found his astronomical claims absurd but were fascinated (as was I) by his seemingly credible connection of many interesting worldwide mythologies, whereas the historians who reviewed his work found the history part worthless but thought the astronomy was credible. Velikovsky himself had scientific training, though neither as an astronomer, historian nor physicist. It just goes to show the importance of relevant expertise.
None of the papers in the third book really addressed the mythology – the closest was one that explained why his dates for some historical events couldn’t be right – and I would actually like to read a similar debunking of the mythology because I found it tantalizing.
Overall, entertaining reads on two counts: Reading the story of Velikovsky’s failed assault on the imagined “ivory tower” of science provided an interesting and unexpected perspective on the way we view science in relation to pseudoscience today, and secondly, Velikovsky’s works themselves are very entertaining if read as a history text that dropped out of a bizarre alternate universe.
More on Prometheus
One of my cow-orkers pointed out there’s a popular theory going around that Prometheus is all about classical mythology in an SF setting. Most SF movies are, but the theory outlined here actually does a pretty good job of explaining some of the more baffling aspects of the movie. I’m not equipped to spot this kind of stuff, not having a religious background and not having studied mythology.
The links and videos at the bottom of his post provide some good counterpoint though, and if you invest the time to read the article I suggest you also watch the videos – especially the first half of the Akira the Don one (the second half is irrelevant).
In addition to what is said in the latter, an obvious flaw with the Space Jesus theory is that wiping out humanity because we nailed their peace teacher to a tree is a pretty hypocritical lesson in peaceing out, space dudes.
While there’s nothing wrong with weaving mythological references all through a movie, even an SF movie, it still doesn’t feel like a well-put-together story. Also, I wish people would stop relying so heavily on this material – consider the underlying values behind things like the Prometheus myth. They’re outdated in that they severely undervalue life – depending on how they’re told, they’re almost death propaganda. I’d like to see some more sensible SF flicks made to establish new, pro-life mythology.
