Joanes had sat down on the floor, his back against the wall. With him in this position, and the professor sitting in the chair, it was as if he were being given a lecture, something that neither of them failed to notice.
Once the professor finished his overview, they went on discussing the matter in more detail, keeping their voices down so as not to disturb the professor’s wife. Joanes was feeling more and more at ease. He was enjoying their sophisticated tête-à-tête, such a welcome change from the mind-numbing and intellectually undemanding discussions over costs and energy efficiency that he had in his day job. He hadn’t felt that animated for ages, and he had the impression that the professor, too, was enjoying himself. The conversation acted as a bubble that isolated and protected them from their surroundings, shutting out the woeful hotel, the hurricane, and all their worries. The professor even seemed to have forgotten about his son’s accident. With nothing but words, they’d created an intellectual environment, a warm microclimate of contemplation familiar to them both and in which they felt safe and sure of themselves.
The conversation grew livelier by the minute, and not even an intermission when the professor had to help his wife to the bathroom diminished their satisfaction at the moment.
“The conference was, on the whole, an extremely agreeable experience,” the professor explained as he returned to the room. “It was a shame that in the Q & A session someone had to lower the tone.”
“What happened?” asked Joanes.
“An audience member, someone with a clear antagonistic streak, explained what he thought would happen if further developments in the field of AI led to the creation of a intelligence surpassing that of human beings. As he saw it, such an intelligence would prompt a new moral order, one based on the machines and more elevated than man’s. He suggested that such a moral order might well represent the origin of a new religion.”
“What did you answer?” asked Joanes after an expectant pause.
“I spoke to him about Hans Hörbiger and his World Ice Doctrine.”
“I’m sorry, I’m afraid I don’t know who he is.”
The professor nodded and cleared his throat before speaking again.
“Hans Hörbiger was born in Austria in the middle of the nineteenth century. He studied engineering and specialized in steam-powered machinery and compressors. He invented an incredibly low-friction valve, patented it, and before he knew it was a millionaire. He created a company to commercialize his invention and left it in the hands of his son. From that day on, he dedicated himself wholly to scientific investigation.”
“Our friend Hörbiger had two passions. The first was astronomy, and the second, as it is for most experts in steam-powered machinery, the transformation of water into its various states. From his telescopic observations, he had begun to suspect that the reflections he saw on the Moon were produced by great masses of ice, which in turn led him to think that the entire satellite was formed of this substance. What’s more, he believed that the same was true of other celestial bodies. Most likely he had this idea in mind when, one winter’s day, on a visit to a steelworks, he noticed how a quantity of molten steel spilled over the frozen ground. The earth sizzled and spat and cracked open under the burning steel and produced violent explosions of steam. Hörbiger had an epiphany.”
“The entire universe had to be the result of a encounter between ice and fire. Hörbiger imagined the origin of the universe as a collision between an enormous, incandescent mass — a super sun — and another mass of immense proportions, in this case made of ice. The meeting of these two bodies provoked a colossal explosion that broke both into pieces, which were then scattered throughout space. Out of this came fragments made solely of ice, like the Moon, others made solely of fire, like the Sun, and others, like Earth, made out of a combination of the two. Are you still with me?”
Joanes nodded a yes.
“Next, Hörbiger concluded his cosmogony by applying to it the Law of Universal Gravitation, or an adapted version of it. According to him, astral bodies did not adhere to fixed orbits around the larger bodies, as the Moon does around us. He believed that forces of attraction possessed a greater power than repulsive forces. As a result, a satellite, like the Moon, would not trace an elliptical orbit around its planet but rather a slow spiral that would gradually draw it toward the planet. At the end of this spiral, the two bodies would collide in a new cataclysm of fire and ice. According to Hörbiger, this will have happened various times since the beginning of the universe. Our Moon must be the fourth to have circled us since the beginning of time. Three others would have preceded it, each with their own resulting cataclysm.”
The professor paused for a moment and cleared his throat before going on.
“Up to this point, Hörbiger’s theory, however erroneous, is based on scientific principles and would merit at least some consideration. But notes of fantasy-science gradually begin to creep in. The Moon’s approach toward the Earth, he suggested, must be very slow, which means there must also be a lengthy period — of several thousands of years — in which the two bodies find themselves in very close proximity. In this interval, the combined gravitational pulls of the satellite and the planet would have certain effects on the Earth’s inhabitants, primarily on their size. In other words, it would have been an age of giants. The Earth would have been populated by plants, animals, and human beings, all giant.”
“These giants wouldn’t have been entirely wiped from the Earth during the final collision. Some of them, the fittest, the super-giants, would have survived, and from there life on Earth would have regenerated. As you can see, a load of baloney.”
“But this boloney fell on fertile ground; ground peopled by goosestep aficionados and Wagner-loving opera-goers. Hörbiger’s cosmology fitted the burgeoning national socialist mythology like a glove. All those tales of giants, cataclysms, frozen landscapes, and biologically privileged survivors resounded perfectly with the Nordic mythology so admired by the Führer. Hitler adopted Hörbiger’s hypotheses as his own. As such, the deliriums of a madman who should never have left his valve workshop ended up turning into doctrine.”
“But we’re talking about the 1930s,” interrupted Joanes, “not the Middle Ages. Those deliriums would have met with staunch opposition.”
The professor threw him a pitying smile.
“Hörbiger considered objective science to be a kind of totem in decline. He also claimed that man’s preoccupation with coherence is a deadly vice. And Hitler thought the same. What’s more, as well you know, the Nazis’ methods for silencing their opposition were as effective as they were uncivilized.”
“I don’t see the relevance of this to your argument,” said Joanes. “The dramatic or truly problematic element of this story isn’t that a mystic or religious doctrine was extrapolated from a scientific discovery, but the fact that this doctrine was espoused by another, larger one for exclusively utilitarian motives. The Nazis appropriated Hörbiger’s cosmogony not because they really believed in it, but because it suited their interests. The truly despicable thing is to carry an ideology, in this case National Socialism, to such twisted extremes.”
“I’m not sure that the Nazis didn’t believe in The World Ice Doctrine,” the professor responded, “although it’s possible that you know more on this matter than I do. In any case, what really matters here is that his cosmogony was accepted thanks in great part to its scientific foundations, which lent it credibility. Worse still, they converted it into something applicable to the real world. Hitler believed that by simply adhering to The World Ice Doctrine, ice would obey him, as if by uncovering the secrets of ice’s origin and behavior, the Führer could become its master. When he launched his winter campaign against Russia during the Second World War, Hitler spoke of how the cold was going to obey him like one of his generals. Of course, you’re well aware of what really happened. Temperatures dropped to as low as forty below, liquid syngas disassociated, and vehicles stopped working, soldiers would bend down to defecate, and their asses would turn into ice donuts. Until one of Hitler’s generals dared to ask him to reconsider the Russian assault. Do you know what his response was?”