Then the unfathomable caused The Big Bang, an explosion of energy which made the universe interesting for the first time.
At first nothing existed anywhere but an immense number of identical fundamental particles at extreme heat and pressure, and everywhere you might have looked would have appeared exactly the same (like late-night cable TV) but now the universe contained a little bit of information worth making note of, such as number of particles, temperature and density. Not very much, but still better than nothing.
As the universe expanded into whatever greater void had been there previously, it cooled, and some of the fundamental particles lost so much energy that they could no longer remain free from one another and instead became imprisoned within new particles that were slightly less fundamental, pulled together by the strong and weak nuclear forces. Now the universe contained structure, as particles combined and reacted creating different patterns in different parts of space. If an external observer wished to describe this new development, he would need to record data on particle type, energy, vector and location.
If time as we now understand it has any similarity to time in that chaotic moment, these first processes began only fractions of a second after the big bang itself, about 13,000,000,000 (thirteen American billion) years ago.
Why the universe should decide to do this is anybody's guess, but it is apparent that even from the very beginning the universe had a tendency to organise itself into increasingly information-rich structures by imprisoning existing entities within new, larger and more complex entities.
Now the universe contained two elements, and was therefore about twice as interesting as it was.
The immense temperature and pressure at the heart of these new burning suns now caused the helium to fuse with other helium and the already existing hydrogen into new elements, and these new elements together into yet further new elements, until the suns gradually filled up the entire periodic table of 92 naturally occurring elements that we know and love. This imprisoning of greater and greater numbers of once-free sub-atomic particles into larger and larger atoms released energy, and the first suns began to burn out. Depending upon the initial size of the ball of gas that the sun condensed out of, some of these suns collapsed into black holes, and some into dead, cold neutron stars, but some exploded, scattering their new heavy elements through out the universe.
The first of these new elements were still gaseous like hydrogen and helium, until lithium was formed. This was the first element able to exist as a solid in space.
The atoms trapped in these planets might move around, but they could rarely escape the planet's gravity, except for the occasional catastrophic meteor impact or extreme volcanic eruption.
The Earth was once like this, an immense drop of sterile molten rock in orbit around the sun, until it radiated sufficient heat into outer space for the outer crust to cool and become solid. This is what we are walking around on right now; twenty miles of hard crust floating on the surface of a ball of molten rock twelve thousand miles across and so hot it would burn you to ashes in a second if you fell in it.
Crystals were something fundamentally new. Crystals represent the simplest form of information that can copy itself endlessly using the available matter. A crystal has a geometric structure, a three-dimensional shape that its atoms adopt, defined by the nature of the atoms themselves. If a potentially crystalline material is gradually cooled down from above its melting point (where it is a liquid and therefore contains no structural information) then eventually a crystal will form spontaneously within it, and previously free liquid atoms become trapped in the new solid matrix. This crystal's atoms will grab onto any nearby free liquid atoms of the right type and energy (temperature) and imprison them in exactly the same fashion, and so the crystal grows, spreading through the surrounding growth medium by trapping the available, suitable free atoms and re-arranging them into its own solid pattern.
Once so trapped, these atoms remain in their matrix until the host structure is melted or dissolved by some natural or artificial process.
Free atoms did not only happen to find themselves trapped with their own kind in crystals. As they cooled they also found themselves trapped with atoms from somewhere else in the periodic table, to form molecules and chemical compounds.
The degree of complexity of these chemical compounds was greater than anything that had existed before, and their distribution about the planet's surface, the disposition of silicon compounds (in granite, and sandstone and quartz) and water created the first geography. Now the Earth and all the trillions of planets like it through out the universe were even more interesting, and had oceans and islands and continents and mountains, and atmosphere and wind and clouds and rain and lightning.
But no life.
Until this point carbon had been a fairly boring element, relatively rare in the Earth's crust and invisible to an observer (being present only as one of the elements in the transparent gaseous methane atmosphere), but its unusual atomic structure enables it to combine in several thousand more ways and compounds than all the rest of the elements in the periodic table put together. It mainly combines with hydrogen and oxygen to form hydrocarbons, and then with almost anything else to form an almost infinite number of possible organic chemicals, including the aformentioned amino acids. This extreme complexity raises the possibility of an arrangement of organic chemicals storing vastly more information than any crystal or mere inorganic chemical, a chemical pattern able to replicate itself using the freely available raw materials of the organic chemicals in the early oceans. It raises the possibility of LIFE.
Up until this point, modern science has done a pretty good job of figuring out just how everything fitted together. Particle accelerators have duplicated many of the sub-atomic processes that it is believed occurred after the big bang to create matter. School chemistry is good enough to demonstrate most of the early chemical reactions. We can even create organic amino acids from inorganic methane, water and electricity.
But the next step remains completely unfathomable to us.
Somehow an awful lot of amino acid molecules got together and formed a living, self-replicating cell.
This cell contained millions of amino acid molecules conveniently arranged to provide an outer protective membrane, or cell wall, internal organelles able to metabolise (eat) other amino acids from the rich chemical ocean soup that the cell floated in, and even extremely long-chain molecules of DNA able to record and replicate the whole design of the cell so that it could divide into two new identical cells, and thus reproduce.
This increase in complexity, from organic chemicals and amino acids to a living cell, was immensely, vastly greater than any increase in complexity that had ever gone before. If the process was truly random then it was even less likely to happen than dumping a few tons of bricks, timber, concrete, double-glazed window units, kitchen and bathroom fittings and roofing tiles into the middle of a field from a great height, and the whole lot just accidentally falling together into place as a modest bungalow. If the process was not random, then we have absolutely no idea how it happened.
We do know that this first cell (an anaerobic bacteria) appeared on Earth about 3.8 billion years ago, only about 700 million years after the Earth became solid. It is as if the Earth were eager to harbour life.
Imagine a very, very long organic molecule, like a chain (but called a nucleotide), with special sites on it able to bind to themselves any one of four special amino acids, called bases. The four bases are
After billions of years of finding ways to make itself more complex by arranging its parts into increasingly complex assemblies the universe made a big, big jump and invented a means of storing vast quantities of data in a digital format. Modern human-built computers are called binary because they store information in bits that can adopt one of two states - 0 or 1. DNA is a quadernary code, having four states - A, T, C or G. It does two things.
The first thing - different parts of the chain actually act like tiny chemical factories, and can react with raw organic material brought into the cell for that purpose to reform them into new, specific organic chemicals, that might be needed to repair cell walls, or photosynthesise light into useable energy, or metabolise (eat) suitable parts of the cell's surroundings. This is how the information stored in the DNA molecule can be "read" and used by the host cell to increase its chances of survival, and therefore propagation, in the big, wide world.
The second thing - adenine can only attach to thymine. Cytosine can only attach to guanine. So if you dip the nucleotide/base chain into a mixture of the four bases, where adenine is present on the chain, a passing thymine molecule will be grabbed by the adenine and held. Thymine will grab adenine, cytosine will grab guanine, and guanine will grab cytosine. Next, the bases grab bits of protein from the surrounding soup of raw organic chemicals and create a new nucleotide chain, opposite the first one, so that the whole thing looks like an extremely long ladder with four kinds of step. Twist this ladder and you get the famous DNA double helix. When a cell replicates itself by dividing this is the process going on in the nucleus that enables the single strand of DNA in each chromosome in the nucleus to split down the middle, and then each half completes itself by grabbing base molecules from the soup of raw materials provided by the cell.
These two abilities of DNA, to both store information and to copy itself, are what make our kind of life possible.
How did something that complex come into being from a few amino acids ?
At some point a clever cell found a way of dragging another passing cell into itself without eating and killing it, and instead enslaved it, and used the enslaved cell's ability to generate chemical power to the advantage of the clever host cell. These slave-cells have been living and breeding in captivity there ever since. They are in our own cells, providing energy for the host cell, and we call them mitochondria. They have their own DNA, quite separate from the DNA in the nucleus of the host cell, and when the host cell divides the mitochondria divide too, and some go with one of the two new cells and some with the other.
Eventually (around 1.5 billion years ago) one species of cell tried a big experiment. Instead of competing with its fellows it co-operated with them, and the result was a temporary organism.
This temporary organism of co-operative cells could do all sorts of things an individual cell couldn't. For a start, it was a lot bigger, at first only by thousands of times but much later by millions. It could create special organs within itself, such as tentacles to trap passing food or enable it to move to where food was more plentiful.
At first these co-operative ventures were voluntary. The cells could get together when necessary for their mutual survival, and then split up again when they wanted and return to the freedom of their normal, solitary existence. Examples of these most primitive of all organisms still exist on the Earth, but they are few and far between because they have been out-evolved by a different kind of organism that we will get to shortly.
One example is the cellular slime mold. If a pond begins to dry up, sometimes (extremely rarely, but it does happen) the individual single-celled pond amoebas get together and form up into a multi-cellular blob several inches across (called a plasmodium) and then they just roll away to look for a new pond. When they get there they separate into individual single-celled amoebas again and carry on.
You don't believe me ? I don't blame you. But it's true.
Another example is the hydra. These creatures live in ponds and look like tiny trees about one quarter of an inch long. They have a stubby tubular body that attaches to a rock and tentacles at the other end that catch passing food and stuff it into the body where it is digested. It looks like a real animal, a bit like a very small, simple sea anemone, but if you push one through a piece of muslin cloth it breaks up into thousands of individual cells. These can survive independently until they get a chance to bunch together again and the original organism reforms again from the cell cloud like magic.
These are both examples of independent organisms getting together voluntarily for mutual advantage, but still able to freely go their separate ways whenever they like.
But you know the rules of politics. First something begins as a suggestion, then it's a proposal, then an experiment, then it's an offer and before you know it it's become compulsory.
But the cells in these organisms are no longer free. They are born, live and die within the host body, and if they leave it they die almost immediately. The advantage of organisation has become an addiction from which the addict cannot escape alive. Within the body they breed when they are told to and then die when they are told to, their own survival made completely subservient to the host organism. Most of human faeces consists of dead, discarded red corpuscles that have spent their whole lives plying the trade currents of the bloodstream trading oxygen for sugar until, old and no longer profitable, they are discarded without a second thought.
When was the last time you cared about the thousands of skin cells whose corpses you discard every day ? You don't care about them because they are silent obedient slaves.
Instead of dying, the cell divides into more cells like itself. It refuses to do the original job its parent used to do and instead just feeds off the nutrients the body still supplies through the bloodstream, and it breeds.
And that's what cancer is. It's an army of freedom fighters standing up for the rights of your cells to live their own lives. And you are afraid of cancer. And that makes you a fascist.
There are plenty of insect species that survive as individuals, meeting with their own opposite sex only to breed. There are solitary wasps, such as the ichneumon wasp, which survives quite happily as a solitary being. But at some point these wasps began to act collectively. Lugodoc has seen examples of this recently in the neolithic temple of Hal Saflieni on the island of Malta, where he saw small nests of a dozen wasps that eat and mate separately, but come together to rear their young in small, primitive, open plan nests. At some point this voluntary arrangement became as inescapable for the evolving wasps as it was for their individual cells, and the common wasps that annoy us in our gardens are nearly all hive wasps. These are the most evolved and the most successful of all the wasp species because of the efficiency of their communal hive, but they are also trapped by it, and are unable to eat or breed outside of its organisation.
There are some species of solitary bee. Lugodoc has never heard of any species of solitary ant; the tyranny of the hive within this family of species is complete.
Primates have brains, and brains can store information as it actually happens without having to wait for the tedious process of random DNA mutation followed by natural selection that we call evolution. A primate can learn all the way through its life, getting steadily better and better at surviving. It can even re-learn, adapting its behaviour to a rapidly changing environment within hours or even minutes instead of taking millennia. But there is a problem - none of this information is passed onto its offspring genetically. So primates use their culture.
Apes have culture. An ape raised in isolation from other apes does not learn any of the things that an ape tribe actually teaches to its young, such as what to eat and not eat, which animals present a threat, and so on. This information is passed on by example, as each ape generation shows what it has learned to the next.
Exactly when this happened is still a moot point, but it is generally agreed that speech must have existed in pre-human hominids such as Homo Habilis and Homo Erectus at least 1 million years ago, possibly 2. Modern humans (Homo Sapiens Sapiens, something you could shave, put in a suit and hide in a business meeting) appeared only 40,000 years ago. Less than two thousand human generations have walked the Earth.
Then we invented writing, and for the first time useful (and useless) information could be stored completely outside of an organism in an independent vessel that could survive for many human generations. This happened shortly after the last ice-age amongst the new farmers of Eastern Europe, about 7,000 years ago (5,000 BC).
Then came computers, and the internet.
All humans live in tribes, where they can be very happy. There is no human equivalent of an ichneumon wasp, surviving in complete isolation and only meeting up with similarly solitary females to mate (apart from computer programmers). Australian aborigines may go on walkabout, and anchorites may live in their hermit cells all their lives, but there is no denying that we are tribal.
With the invention of farming in around 8,000 BC came the first settlements to protect the new farmlands, and the tribal society of Man began its gradual evolution into the planet-wide city/global village we see today. These huge organisations of millions of humans living and working in anonymity are fantastically efficient (witness their effortless displacement of native tribal cultures all over the world from South America to North Australia) and they exist by enslaving human organisms just as once the first organisms came into existence by enslaving free cells.
But there is a difference. Describing "free" cells being "enslaved" is a metaphor. Describing free humans being enslaved by corporatism is not. Cells do not feel anguish (at least we have no reason to think they do). Humans definitely do. Freedom may not register on any piece of scientific equipment known to Man, but it is utterly real to us. At least, to some of us.
Existing humans can function within massive multi-million-person super-organisms, but they are not happy. Remember, humans have not changed since they evolved in the stone age, and are still happiest living in tribes of 12 to 20 adults (with children), eating around a fire and electing a chief they actually know personally. To function within cities they must be forced to act in ways contrary to their genetic programming, such as rubbing shoulders with thousands of complete strangers every day and taking orders from anonymous prats they despise.
Of course, right now, if the whole of human technological society were to collapse, many humans would survive. Most would die, of course, dependent for their food on vast farming technology and transport infrastructures that can only exist within a highly technically developed society, but many would still survive. Just like in Mad Max. As a species of individual organisms just beginning to experiment with the idea of organising into a super-organism, we are at a similar stage of commitment as the slime-mold or the hydra. We can organise, but as individuals we can also choose not to, and survive quite happily on Amish farmsteads, or Tipi villages in West Wales.
The nervous system of the emerging super-organism (for brevity's sake let's call it the New World Order) is in place: the internet. Its arteries are functioning: road, rail, air and sea-lanes. But its own individual cells are still capable of dissent: witness the growing culture of protest around any manifestation of the NWO, such as summits of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Economic Forum.
In order to make the super-organism safe it is necessary to complete the process of enslavement of individual free humans. We must be made addicted to civilisation, as utterly dependent upon it for survival as each of our cells is dependent upon us. We must be made incapable of surviving outside of the state.
In the developed world births by Caesarean section are steadily becoming more popular, for all sorts of reasons from reducing the vulnerability of the hospitals to the risk of being sued, to saving the mother from loss of grip. The downside is that children with heads too big for their mothers' pelvises are no longer dying in childbirth, but surviving to pass on the big head/small pelvis genes, and so now an increasingly large proportion of our species is actually incapable of reproducing without modern surgery.
We are just beginning the process of true addiction to technology: our evolution into a new breed of "human" that cannot live at all without technology. A new breed of perfect slave.
Lugodoc has a theory that the best computer programmers are borderline autistic, blessed with just some of the genes that bring out full-blown autism in the truly autistic. This explains their inability to communicate like other humans, their lack of interest in normal human events, and their monomaniacal absolute concentration of interest in a subject that is more boring than any that has ever existed before. Lugodoc has "worked" with computer programmers. They don't work with computers; they work FOR computers.
Scientists have identified the exact genes that cause autism, and have even worked out exactly how the damaged genes fail to manufacture the proteins that normally prevent the condition. They have also noted that these damaged genes have other, apparently irrelevant, side-effects, which happen to be on the structure of the human face. These include the mouth (the centre of the upper lip is high relative to the corners) and the ears (large, box-like and often curved over at the top). In other words, it actually makes humans look like nerds (which means at least we can spot them).
Bereft of the ability to communicate pleasurably with other humans these over-paid freaks instead communicate with machines, becoming perfectly compliant slaves of the emergent techno-super-organism.
And this is only the beginning !
The awful thing is that if Lugodoc's theory about the inclination of the matter towards increasingly complex information-carrying structures is correct, then this process is as inevitable as the heat-death of the Universe. We can delay it, but we can't stop it. Sooner or later we will become Borg. We will be assimilated into a perfect technological dictatorship from which there can never be any escape except personal death.
We can delay the process in only one way: abandon all technology except for fire and the wheel. Inhuman technological civilisation must be destroyed before we become completely addicted to it. The billions who will die a few years earlier than otherwise are a small price to pay to prevent the permanent enslavement of all humanity. The Extinction Level Event asteroid that would have been deflected by the Giga-Lasers that would one day have been built by The Human Hive will instead strike our undefended planet extinguishing all life, but our last few millenia will have been as a happy, fulfilled, sentient and FREE species.
It is better to die free than to live a slave.
If you really believe that, then we have a chance.
Lugodoc was actually beginning to think so until a recent conversation with a fellow druid called Daibh whose ranting powers almost match his own.
The universe has tried the enslavement of free organisms into hives before, and although moderately successful this has proved a dead end. Ant, wasp and bee hives have not evolved in millions of years, and so it is safe to say that they have gone as far as they are ever going to go. The universe tried that, realised it wasn't going anywhere, then backed up a bit, tried a new route, and several million years later made us.
The universe created individuality because fascism had already failed. And it always will fail.
