Everything makes sense when the meaning of life has been grasped, and this is nowhere near as slippery as it sounds. The question may have exercised philosophers, alchemists, and scientists for several thousand years — an abiding sense that life has some purpose has been the curse of Homo sapiens — but the answer to this putative riddle is quite a simple one: All life-forms are merely vehicles for DNA survival; and genes are little bits of software that have but one goal — to make copies of themselves. Men, marsupials, and mollusks are just sophisticated conveyances that their respective duplicating programs have created to help them reproduce. This is the only true meaning of life, and the most successful DNA sequences are the variants that are better than others in competing for the planet’s scarce resources. We call this process of the survival of the fittest natural selection. Thus it may be seen that human beings are nothing more than a highly successful vehicle for one particular DNA message.
Life is in no way devalued by this analysis; rather it is strengthened. Man may be very like a computer that has been programmed to replicate the original lines of genetic program code. But DNA’s performance and capacity to preserve a message is vastly superior to any known or anticipated computer. The mathematics of the DNA archive is nothing short of staggering. Each gene in your body has been recopied as many as twenty billion times with 99 percent accuracy. Just imagine how degraded any other method of preserving a valuable text for the archives would be by such repeated copying. For this reason alone life cannot be too common in the universe. Indeed it is arguably a cosmic principle.
But the success of the DNA sequence is not limited to producing the most effective vehicular bodies for reproduction. The long-term survival of a DNA sequence is not limited to the replicator’s own body. A corollary of DNA success is the way in which genes affect the world at large — successful genes reaching beyond their bodies and changing the world around them. Spider genes spin a web, bird genes build a nest, and bee genes construct a honeycomb. Most successful of all, the human gene reaches out to invent the wheel — and anything else that may contribute to its chances of successful reproduction: the longbow, the plow, writing, the saddle, the printing press, the telescope, the camera, the electric light, penicillin, ad infinitum. It is not long before the most successful replicator, man, has invented himself another replicator — the computer. As digital programs are copied many times over, it is no time at all before the survival success story that is synthetic code sequences can affect the world around them. Computers build other machines. Computers build better computers. And with the creation of the first computer virus — which acts very like a biological virus — a new era in evolution is born: artificial replication. Viruses mutate. They find a way of ensuring their survival, of manipulating the world beyond the computer. Replicators are by definition opportunistic. That is the foundation of their success.
Doubtless the reader will be familiar with one of the central panels from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican as painted by Michelangelo, entitled The Creation of Adam.[112] God and Adam, members of the same race of superbeings, confront each other against a primordial, half-formed landscape. Life seems to leap to Adam like an electric spark from the hand of God — a communication from one successful replicator to another.[113] Both are reaching out to change the world around them.
Is it possible that, one day, the relationship between man and computer could be depicted in a similar way? Might there come a time when, somehow, the two most successful sequences of digital information on the planet — DNA and binary code — will reach out and change each other in some profound way? Because I think that’s what were all reaching for — that Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo moment.
VII
In the one-sixth gravity of the Moon, there was little necessity that a chair should require cushioning or upholstery. As a result, the design requirements of the two matching chairs on which Gates and Dallas sat adjacent to each other, while Prevezer readied his Simworld equipment, had been purely visual. To Rameses Gates, each of the sculpted white nanomarble chairs had a windswept equipoise that recalled the wing of an angel — wasn’t there a category of angel ranked below a cherubim, called a throne?[114] He was not a religious man, although he was nonetheless familiar with the concept of angels. In these new millenarian times it was hard not to be, with several dozen religious cults[115] offering a spiritual introduction to your very own guardian angel as a guarantee of a personal resurrection after death. Now that the robbery was growing nearer, Gates realized he might have welcomed the reassurance of a guardian angel, or two.
To Dallas’s more scientific eye the chairs looked like two lumps of melted candle wax — something much more prosaic. Which could not be said of the spherical, transparent, and self-supporting structure of electro-tetrahedrons that Prevezer now placed on each man’s head.
‘I thought you didn’t go in for immersive head-mounted displays,’ remarked Simou, who, like Cavor, Ronica, and Lenina, was in Prevezer’s suite to watch him conduct the simulation.
‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘These aren’t headsets — they’re geodesic MRIs. That’s magnetic resonance imagers, to you. It takes an image of the cerebral cortex and then turns it into a kind of digital diagram — like a topographical map of Earth. The geodesic dome then subdivides the scan into tiny digital boxes called voxels, so that an algorithm can select those particular voxels on the cerebral cortex that process sensory information and working memory.’
Prevezer adjusted the geodesic dome on Dallas’s shoulders. ‘How does that feel? Comfortable?’
‘Like it was hardly there,’ admitted Dallas.
‘That’s the whole idea,’ Prevezer said proudly as he retired behind the computer lectern to initiate the simulation countdown sequence. ‘You won’t get nausea or headaches with a geodesic. Not like those crappy head-mounted displays you still see around. Antique porno-projection mounts, ’n’ shit like that.’
Prevezer ran through some final diagnostic program checks. ‘The fellow who invented this design was a guy called Buckminster Fuller. He wanted to create a low-cost building and used a design he’d originally visualized as an analogical aid for a system of thought. Curiously enough, the geodesic mimics the way we now create a simulation model. The way Fuller imagined the thinking process, only the surface of the sphere consisted of relevant experiences or thoughts. Experiences too small to be relevant remained inside the sphere, and those that were too large stayed outside.’
‘Some of us know what that’s like,’ grumbled Lenina. ‘It seems to me this simulation would have made a lot more sense if we could all have experienced it. It’s not much of a run-through for a plan if not everyone is allowed to run through it.’
‘You know, you’re absolutely right,’ said Prevezer, his voice sharp with sarcasm. He didn’t even look at Lenina; he was too busy connecting his computer to a small display, which was worn over his left eye so that he could keep a constant visual check on their vital signs while Gates and Dallas progressed through the Simworld he had modeled. ‘The trouble is, there isn’t a computer that’s been built that can handle more than two POVs in the same Simworld.’
113
114
115