The Invisible Pyramid

by Loren Eiseley

  To comprehend the rise of the world eaters one must leap centuries and millennia. To account for the rise of high-energy civilization is as difficult as to explain the circumstances that have gone into the creation of man himself. Certainly the old sun-plant civilizations provided leisure for meditation, mathematics, and transport energy through the use of sails. Writing, which arose among them, created a kind of stored thought-energy, an enhanced social brain.

  All this the seed-and-sun world contributed, but no more. Not all of these civilizations left the traditional religious round of the seasons or the worship of the sun-kings installed on earth. Only far on in time, in west Europe, did a new culture and a new world emerge. Perhaps it would be best to limit our exposition to one spokesman who immediately anticipated its appearance. “If we must select some one philosopher as the hero of the revolution in scientific method,” maintained William Whewell, the nineteenth-century historian, “beyond all doubt Francis Bacon occupies the place of honor.” This view is based upon four simple precepts, the first of which, from The Advancement of Learning, I will give in Bacon’s own words. “As the foundation,” he wrote, “we are not to imagine or suppose, but to discover what nature does or may be made to do.” Today this sounds like a truism. In Bacon’s time it was a novel, analytical, and unheard-of way to explore nature. Bacon was thus the herald of what has been called “the invention of inventions”—the scientific method itself.

  He believed also that the thinker could join with the skilled worker—what we today would call the technologist—to conduct experiments more ably than by simple and untested meditation in the cloister. Bacon, in other words, was groping toward the idea of the laboratory, of a whole new way of schooling. Within such schools, aided by government support, he hoped for the solution of problems not to be dealt with “in the hourglass of one man’s life.” In expressing this hope he had recognized that great achievement in science must not wait on the unaided and rare genius, but that research should be institutionalized and supported over the human generations.

  Fourth and last of Bacon’s insights was his vision of the future to be created by science. Here there clearly emerges that orientation toward the future which has since preoccupied the world of science and the West. Bacon was preeminently the spokesman of anticipatory man. The long reign of the custom-bound scholastics was at an end. Anticipatory analytical man, enraptured by novelty, was about to walk an increasingly dangerous pathway.

  He would triumph over disease and his numbers would mount; steam and, later, air transport would link the ends of the earth. Agriculture would fall under scientific management, and fewer men on the land would easily support the febrile millions in the gathering cities. As Glanvill had foreseen, thought would fly upon the air. Man’s telescopic eye would rove through the galaxy and beyond. No longer would men be burned or tortured for dreaming of life on far-off worlds.

  There came, too, in the twentieth century to mock the dream of progress the most ruthless and cruel wars of history. They were the first wars fought with total scientific detachment. Cities were fire-bombed, submarines turned the night waters into a flaming horror, the air was black with opposing air fleets.

  The laboratories of Bacon’s vision produced the atom bomb and toyed prospectively with deadly nerve gas. “Overkill” became a professional word. Iron, steel, Plexiglas, and the deadly mathematics of missile and anti-missile occupied the finest constructive minds. Even before space was entered, man began to assume the fixed mask of the robot. His courage was unbreakable, but in society there was mounting evidence of strain. Billions of dollars were being devoured in the space effort, while at the same time an affluent civilization was consuming its resources at an ever-increasing rate. Air and water and the land itself were being polluted by the activities of a creature grown used to the careless ravage of a continent.

  Francis Bacon had spoken one further word on the subject of science, but by the time that science came its prophet had been forgotten. He had spoken of learning as intended to bring an enlightened life. Western man’s ethic is not directed toward the preservation of the earth that fathered him. A devouring frenzy is mounting as his numbers mount. It is like the final movement in the spore palaces of the slime molds. Man is now only a creature of anticipation feeding upon events.

  “When evil comes it is because two gods have disagreed,” runs the proverb of an elder people. Perhaps it is another way of saying that the past and the future are at war in the heart of man. On March 7, 1970, as I sit at my desk the eastern seaboard is swept by the shadow of the greatest eclipse since 1900. Beyond my window I can see a strangely darkened sky, as though the light of the sun were going out forever. For an instant, lost in the dim gray light, I experience an equally gray clarity of vision.

  IV

  There is a tradition among the little Bushmen of the Kalahari desert that eclipses of the moon are caused by Kingsfoot, the lion who covers the moon’s face with his paw to make the night dark for hunting. Since our most modern science informs us we have come from animals, and since almost all primitives have tended to draw their creator gods from the animal world with which they were familiar, modern man and his bush contemporaries have arrived at the same conclusion by very different routes. Both know that they are shape shifters and changelings. They know their relationship to animals by different ways of logic and different measures of time.

  Modern man, the world eater, respects no space and no thing green or furred as sacred. The march of the machines has entered his blood. They are his seed boxes, his potential wings and guidance systems on the far roads of the universe. The fruition time of the planet virus is at hand. It is high autumn, the autumn before winter topples the spore cities. “The living memory of the city disappears,” writes Mumford of this phase of urban life; “its inhabitants live in a self-annihilating moment to moment continuum.” The ancestral center exists no longer. Anonymous millions roam the streets.

  On the African veldt the lion, the last of the great carnivores, is addressed by the Bushmen over a kill whose ownership is contested. They speak softly the age-old ritual words for the occasion, “Great Lions, Old Lions, we know that you are brave.” Nevertheless the little, almost weaponless people steadily advance. The beginning and the end are dying in unison and the one is braver than the other. Dreaming on by the eclipse-darkened window, I know with a sudden sure premonition that Kingsfoot has put his paw once more against the moon. The animal gods will come out for one last hunt.

  Beginning on some winter night the snow will fall steadily for a thousand years and hush in its falling the spore cities whose seed has flown. The delicate traceries of the frost will slowly dim the glass in the observatories and all will be as it had been before the virus wakened. The long trail of Halley’s comet, once more returning, will pass like a ghostly matchflame over the unwatched grave of the cities. This has always been their end, whether in the snow or in the sand.

  FOUR

  The Spore Bearers

  Either the machine has a meaning to life that we have not yet been able to interpret in a rational manner, or it is itself a manifestation of life and therefore mysterious.

  —GARET GARRETT

  IT IS A remarkable fact that much of what man has achieved through the use of his intellect, nature had invented before him. Pilobolus, another fungus which prepares, sights, and fires its spore capsule, constitutes a curious anticipation of human rocketry. The fungus is one that grows upon the dung of cattle. To fulfill its life cycle, its spores must be driven up and outward to land upon vegetation several feet away, where they may be eaten by grazing cows or horses.

  The spore tower that discharges the Pilobolus missile is one of the most fascinating objects in nature. A swollen cell beneath the black capsule that contains the spores is a genuinely light-sensitive “eye.” This pigmented eye controls the direction of growth of the spore cannon and aims it very carefully at the region of greatest light in order that no intervening obstacle may block
the flight of the spore capsule.

  When a pressure of several atmospheres has been built up chemically within the cell underlying the spore container, the cell explodes, blasting the capsule several feet into the air. Since firing takes place in the morning hours, the stalks point to the sun at an angle sure to carry the tiny “rocket” several feet away as well as up. Tests in which the light has been reduced to a small spot indicate that the firing eye aims with remarkable accuracy. The spore vessel itself is so equipped with a quick-drying glue as to adhere to vegetation always in the proper position. Rain will not wash it off, and there it waits an opportunity to be taken up by munching cattle in order that Pilobolus can continue its travels through the digestive tract of the herbivores.

  The tiny black capsule that bears the living spores through space is strangely reminiscent, in miniature, of man’s latest adventure. Man, too, is a spore bearer. The labor of millions and the consumption of vast stores of energy are necessary to hurl just a few individuals, perhaps eventually people of both sexes, on the road toward another planet. Similarly, for every spore city that arises in the fungus world, only a few survivors find their way into the future.

  It is useless to talk of transporting the excess population of our planet elsewhere, even if a world of sparkling water and green trees were available. In nature it is a law that the spore cities die, but the spores fly on to find their destiny. Perhaps this will prove to be the rule of the newborn planet virus. Somehow in the mysterium behind genetics, the tiny pigmented eye and the rocket capsule were evolved together.

  In an equal mystery that we only pretend to understand, man, in the words of Garet Garrett, “reached with his mind into emptiness and seized the machine.” Deathly though some of its effects have proved, robber of the earth’s crust though it may appear at this human stage to be, perhaps there are written within the machine two ultimate possibilities. The first, already, if primitively, demonstrated, is that of being a genuine spore bearer of the first complex organism to cross the barrier of the void. The second is that of providing the means by which man may someday be able to program his personality, or its better aspects, into the deathless machine itself, and thus escape, or nearly escape, the mortality of the body.

  This may well prove to be an illusory experiment, but we who stand so close under the green primeval shade may still be as incapable of evaluating the human future as the first ape-man would have been to chart the course of Homo sapiens. There are over one hundred thousand spores packed in a single capsule of Pilobolus, and but few such capsules will ever reach their destiny. This is the way of the spore cities, in the infinite prodigality of nature. It may well be the dictum that controls the fate of man. Perhaps Rome drove blindly toward it and failed in the marches of the West. In the dreaming Buddhist cities that slowly ebbed away beneath the jungle, something was said that lingers, not entirely forgotten—namely, “Thou canst not travel on the Path before thou hast become the Path itself.” Perhaps written deep in ourselves is a simulacrum of the Way and the mind’s deep spaces to travel. If so, our goal is light-years distant, even though year by year the gantries lengthen over the giant rockets.

  Man possesses the potential power to reach all the planets in this system. None, so far as can be presently determined, offers the prospects of extended colonization. The journey, however, will be undertaken as President Nixon has announced. It will be pursued because the technological and psychological commitment to space is too great for Western culture to abandon. In spite of the breadth of the universe we have previously surveyed, a nagging hope persists that someday, by means unavailable at present, we might achieve the creation of a rocket ship operating near the speed of light. At this point we would enter upon unknown territory, for it has been argued on the basis of relativity theory that men in such a mechanism might exist on a different time scale and age less rapidly than man upon earth. Assuming that such were the case, a question arises whether such a ship, coasting around the galaxy or beyond, might return to find life on our planet long departed. The disparities and the problems are great, and the conflicts of authorities have not made them less so.

  It has been pointed out that so great a physicist as Sir Ernest Rutherford, as late as 1936, had pronounced the use of nuclear energy to be Utopian, at least within this century. Similar speculations on the part of others suggest that a great scientist’s attempts to extrapolate his knowledge into the future may occasionally prove as inaccurate as the guesses of laymen. Scientific training is apt to produce a restraint, laudable enough in itself, that can readily degenerate into a kind of institutional conservatism. Darwin saw and commented upon this in his time. History has a way of outguessing all of us, but she does it in retrospect.

  Nevertheless, because man is small and growing ever lonelier in his expanding universe, there remains a question he is unlikely ever to be able to answer. It involves the discovery of other civilizations in the cosmos. In some three billion years of life on this planet, man, who occupies a very small part of the geological time scale, is the one creature of earth who has achieved the ability to reason on a high abstract level. He has only grasped the nature of the stars within the last few generations. The number of such stars in the universe cannot be counted. Some may possess planets. Judging by our own solar system, of those planets few will possess life. Fewer still, infinitely fewer, will possess what could be called “civilizations” developed by other rational creatures.

  On the basis of pure statistical chance, the likelihood that such civilizations are located in our portion of the galaxy is very small. Man’s end may well come upon him long before he has had time to locate or even to establish the presence of other intelligent creatures in the universe. There are far more stars in the heavens than there are men upon the earth. The waste to be searched is too great for the powers we possess. In gambling terms, the percentage lies all with the house, or rather with the universe. Lonely though we may feel ourselves to be, we must steel ourselves to the fact that man, even far future man, may pass from the scene without possessing either negative or positive evidence of the existence of other civilized beings in this or other galaxies.

  This is said with all due allowance for the fact that we may learn to make at least some satellites or planets within our own solar system artificially capable, in a small way, of sustaining life. For man to spread widely on the dubious and desert worlds of this sun system is unlikely. Much more unlikely is the chance that coursing at near the speed of light over a single arm of this galaxy would ever reveal intelligence, even if it were there. The speed would be too high and the planetary body too small. The size of our near neighbors, Mars and Venus, is proportionately tiny beside the sun’s diameter or even that of the huge outer planets, Jupiter and Saturn.

  I have suggested that man-machines and finally pure intelligent machines—the product of a biology and a computerized machine technology beyond anything this century will possess—might be launched by man and dispersed as his final spore flight through the galaxies. Such machines would not need to trouble themselves with the time problem and, as the capsules of Pilobolus carry spores, might even be able to carry refrigerated human egg cells held in suspended animation and prepared to be activated, educated, and to grow up alone under the care of the machines.

  The idea is fantastically wasteful, but so is life. It would be sufficient if the proper planetary conditions were discovered once in a thousand times. These human-machine combinations are much spoken of nowadays under the term “cyborg”—a shorthand term for “cybernetic organism.” The machine structures would be intimately controlled by the human brain but built in such a manner as to amplify and extend the powers of the human personality. Other machines might be controlled by human beings deliberately modified by man’s increasing knowledge of micro-surgery and genetics. Science has speculated that man has reached an evolutionary plateau. To advance beyond that plateau he must either intimately associate himself with machines in a new way or give way to “e
xosomatic evolution” and, in some fashion, transfer himself and his personality to the machine.

  These are matters of the shadowy future and must be considered only as remote possibilities. More likely is the stricture that, even if we do not destroy ourselves as a planet virus, we will exhaust the primary resources of earth before we can produce the kind of spore carriers of which we dream. Again, the conception may lie forever beyond us. There is a certain grandeur, however, in the thought of man in some far future hour battling against oblivion by launching a final spore flight of cyborgs through the galaxy—a haven-seeking flight projected by those doomed never to know its success or failure, a flight such as life itself has always engaged in since it arose from the primeval waters.

  One must repeat that nature is extravagant in the expenditure of individuals and germ cells. Our remote half-human ancestors gave themselves and never expected, or got, an answer as to the destiny their descendants might serve or if, indeed, they would survive. This is still the road we tread in the twentieth century. Sight of the future is denied us, and life was never given to be bearable. To what far creature, whether of metal or of flesh, we may be the bridge, no word informs us. If such a being is destined to come, there can be no assurance that it will spare a thought for the men who, in the human dawn, prepared its way. Man is a part of that torrential living river, which, since the beginning, has instinctively known the value of dispersion. He will yearn therefore to spread beyond the planet he now threatens to devour. This thought persists and is growing. It is rooted in the psychology of man.