Prometheus 6

Poul Anderson wrote one of my favorite novels, Brain Wave. It's out of print and only available as an downloadable secured ebook. In the book, the motion, materials and energies of the galaxy are such that a field that suppresses a broad class of reactions is generated and the Earth happened to be in that field when life developed.

Then the Earth came out of that field, and neural activity was greatly affected…anything with a brain got massively more intelligent. One of the lead characters is developmentally disabled, and this is how he experienced the change:

It was funny the way he kept thinking things tonight. Usually he just went along, especially when he was as tired as now, but - maybe it was the moon - he kept remembering bits of things, and words sort of formed themselves in his head like someone was talking. He thought about his bed and how nice it would have been to drive home from work; only of course he got sort of mixed up when driving, and there´d been a couple of smashups. Funny he should have done that, because all at once it didn´t seem so hard: just a few signals to learn, and you kept your eyes open, and that was all.

The sound of his feet was hollow on the road. He breathed deeply, drawing a cool night into his lungs, and looked upward, away from the moon. The stars were sure big and bright tonight.

Another memory came back to him, somebody had said the stars were like the sun only further away. It hadn´t made much sense then. But maybe it was so, like a light was a small thing till you got up close and then maybe it was very big. Only if the stars were as big as the sun, they´d have to be awful far away.

He stopped dead, feeling a sudden cold run through him. Jesus God! How far up the stars were!

The earth seemed to fall away underfoot, he was hanging on to a tiny rock that spun crazily through an everlasting darkness, and the great stars burned and roared around him, so far up that he whimpered with knowing it.

This is the sensation you get when you've been studying something for a while and suddenly it clicks and everything is clear. Not just what you were immediately studying but its relationship to a myriad of connected things is in sharp focus. This could be a good feeling. Or, if it shows you a much vaster world of which you're the master of only a small shard, it could be frightening as hell.

This is also very much like the change we culturally are undergoing because our collective capabilities are growing so quickly.

I understand the Luddite; "I was fine, now this thing comes and I have a problem. The solution is to make the thing go away." I think your typical conservative isn't quite that bad; "Just slow down. After I die you can do whatever you want, okay?" And as a personal response, this is fine. A person has every right to decide to stick to what they know. But for a nation, a culture, that decision is the first step on the path to stasis