Cosmic Drift and Temporal Divergence
Stefan Tiron
In the beginning there was Jordan thinking his lonely thoughts. Out of loneliness came a
longing; out of the longing came a vision. Out of the dream came a planning and out of the
planning came decision. Jordan’s hand was lifted and the ship was born.
Book of Jordan, Universe, X Minus One, 1955
ث مفيِ أرنممررناَ رهرذاَ رماَ رلني ر
س ممننهَه رفهَهرو رردد رمنن أرنحرد ر: قاَل رسول ا صلى ا عليه وسلم:عن عاَئشة رضيِ ا عنهاَ قاَلت
Whoever introduces into this affair of ours that which does not belong to it, will have it rejected.
Shariah, hadeeth of Aa'ishah (radiallaahu anhaa)
Its rise to power is less like the triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (a group whose
leaders the Islamic State considers apostates) than like the realization of a dystopian alternate
reality in which David Koresh or Jim Jones survived to wield absolute power over not just a few
hundred people, but some 8 million.
What ISIS Really Wants, Graeme Wood, The Atlantic, 2015
…a diversity of history which produces the discordance of chronology.
A.N. Whitehead, Symposium quoted by Jimena Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher:
Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time, 2015
image credit: Silent Running [movie still], director: Douglas Trumbull, Universal Pictures 1972
First, please listen to A Sense of Wonder, the X Minus One series radio play based on a story
written by Milton Lesser for Galaxy Magazine in 1956.
Whatever its true causes, the “apparition” of ISIS is still widely perceived as “unexpected”, as
not belonging to this world, as an “irruption” into reality of something that lacks explanation. It
bogs imagination and reason down to a halt. In the West, this irruption elicited tremendous
amounts of unpreparedness, confusion, fury, dismay, disbelief, compounded by a sense of
crippling doom. Here is an irreducible event that refuses to settle into previous explanatory
schemata, and which doges proper causative chains, bypassing rational and chronological rigor,
as if it should have happened elsewhere, in another time, in another region, in another parallel
universe.
ISIS is being actively lumped into a parallel universe along with other so-called crazed
manifestations at the margins of the credible, permissible and impossible. Mass suicides,
charismatic leaders, hallucinatory visions, millenarian prophecies and suicide cults are basically
all considered flukes of history, even if (or because) they announce tectonic creases or faults
crackling through smooth causal progressions where they don’t belong. Instead of isolating or
dismissing this general strain of thought, let’s enlarge its scope. Let’s actually consider these
and many other events (maybe all those that don’t “fit”, which don’t comply with our version of
smooth progression) as what the journalist Graeme Wood called in a stroke of genius, referring
to Isis, the “realization(s) of a dystopian alternate reality”(What ISIS Really Wants, Graeme
Wood, The Atlantic, 2015). Let’s not just consider them as unfortunate analogies of killer cults or
self-fulfilling prophecies, but as major indications that we are dealing with a drift from a banished
elsewhere (our own nowhere? unexpected?) sending chronoclysmic ripple-effects, obstructing
and disturbing the stable temporal succession, or the telos of things. How is the unthinkable,
unwatchable, unspeakable actually reversing our certitudes and re-inserting itself into our
existence? If we would only stop thinking for even a second that alternate realities happen
elsewhere – in a demented, fictional, purely theoretical multiverse version of our world as
described by loony science fiction stories! “Alternate realities”, multiple outcomes, are forever
just happening, and have just been happening all the time under our own noses, eyes and ears.
Of course, there is a preferential realm where these kinds of divergent histories happen, under –
let’s say – controlled imaginary (in vitro) conditions, the virtual conditions inside planet-sized ark
spaceships. Even if these are conditions isolated in vitro (in time, in our minds, imagination, and
stories), they abound in prolix and overflowing surprises. I’m quite passionate about the
literature of generational ships or galactic arks because of their isolated monadic universes, and
in fact I urge you to consider them as something more central than just an obscure sub-genre of
science-fiction, or a mere spin-off of Bible arks. They are not just a peculiar brand of speculative
fiction, they are incredible ways to probe the unexpected and unlikely evolutionary pathways
radiating from a clear set of initial conditions. On board the interstellar arks, history is being
restarted and re-winded, so that we may approach the elasticity of a bedrock reality quivering
under the whims of historical contingency. This kind of literature starts off its speculations from
previous canonical theories or current understandings about the origins of civilization, culture,
morals, gender roles, and ends up infusing them with bountiful and uncontrollable new
cosmologies that tend to spring forth as time drifts by.
image credit: Silent Running [movie still], director: Douglas Trumbull. Universal Pictures 1972
I will consider one by one a few of the cosmologies and happenings on board of these
generational ships or arks in no particular order: from radio-plays (Sense of Wonder and
Universe), comic books (Phoenix without Ashes, MYRIAD) to the infamous Canadian TV series
The Starlost (1973), based on an original and grotesquely modified script, originally written by
Harlan Ellison.
Cosmic drift and historical contingency are able to work on the human remains of a given home-
world (Earth), and proliferate those remains into a wildly mutated menagerie of habits-
mythologies-cosmologies, languages, rules, religions, aesthetics, ethics, societies and
technologies with their own (for us) diverging world views. Cosmic ark exo-anthropology and
evodevo synthetic biology unwind or speed forward multiple generations through the centrifuge
of cosmic drift – facing us now with expected or unexpected after-effects and prohibited
outcomes. Even under zero gravity there is never a tabula rasa, but a sort of impostor’s tabula
plenum, false memories, cognitive biases, dense agglutinations of obscurities, opaque obsidian
pasts that survive mostly in the form of hearsay, legends, fables, peculiar law systems, arbitrary
set of rules, and increasingly incisive taboos. The historical luggage doesn’t get thrown
overboard after the countdown and liftoff. This antecedent (ex-Terra) material is full of hidden
implications, clinging impurities that act as ferments, get adapted, modulated, mangled,
corroded and replicated as barely recognizable and (for us) hideous offspring. Generational ship
literature, movies or comic books, refuses the easy way out into an idyllic outer space existence
that underpins our benign exoplanet colonialism and the Martian robinsonade. It closely
monitors and stalks the surviving members on their rambling route through space, by doggedly
asking hard questions about what kind of new-old world we might establish, and what kind of
hard-to-admit outcomes we’ll find on board after landing.
Image credit: La Porte des Larmes [illustration], author: Philippe Cazaumayou aka Philippe Caza, 1996
The World-building neo-genesis aboard huge space ships sort of scales up every shipwrecked
earthly fragment and makes it unearthly, misguided, unintentionally literal or sacred beyond
recognition or rational premise. Every piece of scrap, every bit of buried data grows and
balloons to gigantic proportions, and becomes tremendously important. First you’ve got a brick,
then, after thousands of years it reaches ziqqurat-level heights of symbolism. Babel comes from
“Gate of God” (from Akkadian bab “gate” + ilu “god”), and here we have the first glimpse on how
Noah’s ark might have morphed into a time-portal, a dérive into a post-babylonian dispersal,
and further on – a stellar diaspora. The true apocalyptic bet survives not just pollution and
atomic fallout but the trauma of re-entry from time dilation, of divergence, departure-glitch and
rupture-rapture, when the Gate in itself, the escaping Ark becomes the ultimate aim or core
reality. Generational ships/galactic space vessel literature mutates the future Noah survival into
a Confusion of Tongues, into a confusio linguarum myth, just that it is more than linguistic
imprecision and more than mere semantic confusion. Deep time and on-board stowaway data
take care of that. Like a stowaway rat, like a newly introduced species, IT hides on-board. It’s
not just about having enough supplies stashed in your bunker, or a technical matter of supplying
enough room in your escape vessel of choice, or a simple launch from prison planet earth: when
one leaves earth, one simply doesn’t leave back earthly matters.
As mentioned, after 10 000 years in eternal orbit (The Sense of Wonder written by Milton Lesser
for Galaxy Magazine in 1956), earthly matters in outer space start to sound strangely unfamiliar
whenever we make contact with the survivors. The Book sez: “when the ship shall enter into the
orbital pull of its destination, the motors will change in sound, due to the increased anti-gravity
components. A study is being made to interpret the meaning of the word “destination” which was
lost some 4000 years ago and has always been a subject of much controversy. But this may not
concern you. Suffice to be reassured that the sound of the motors is part of scheme of things.
Return to be scheduled. The Ship is All! Praise the Ship!”
What has happened, what does this opening fragment say? What is the lifetime of a word, a
plan, a God, a schedule? What is the lifetime of intentionality itself? Big questions that A Sense
of Wonder tries to answer in a partial way. The answer is resoundingly clear, past thousands of
years of being adrift in space into the future – nearly the same time interval that separates us
from the Epic of Gilgamesh, a new society has developed out of the initial embers of a dead
planet with a space-crew plus an exo-culture, biopolitics, a credo plus society to boot. During
hundreds, thousands of generations, the spaceship gimmicks, technical manuals and
commands, together with the captain’s log, have been accurately and reverently transmitted in a
mutated “holy” form to these intergalactic offspring.
They are not just “merely” lost in space, or “merely” lost in translation, but being lost has
become their entire purpose. Even read in a literal way, this fragmentary logbook releases all its
various implications on us. For example, the whole initial aim of the escape, the whole purpose,
the whole striving and meaning of the voyage, has lost any meaning, and is somehow given
way to countless interpretations, squabbles, mind-boggling speculations, recuperative studies
and extrapolations. Recursive inferences, frail analogies and deductions have upcycled these
fragmentary remains of the past into a fully-formed cosmology, a new-neo-retro-archaic
theoretical effort with a fully-fledged ancient religion, plus law and educational system to crown it
all.
Image credit: Arcology [illustration], author: Claire Jones, IFS flame fractal rendered in Apophysis 7x, Deviant Art,
2012
Time didn’t just freeze on board. You’ll probably say, yeah this is analog, and true, this is
analogue, and yes, digital copies never loosen out, never suffer data loss, so no high mutation
rates, right? Well, think again in the sense of irretrievable data sets, think again about
unreadable formats only one generation away, think again about Long Now Foundation’s efforts
to preserve data for the next 10 000 years. Think again how 20th century culture & technology
seems incredible remote already! Yes, A Sense of Wonder is terribly outdated and pre-digital,
but please take a deep breath and ponder on all of the above.
During those thousands of years, some tremendously important things have happened on-board
– 1) the spaceship itself has taken on a new, more grandiose meaning. 2) at the same time, the
notions of what a “spaceship” is, of “on-board”, and “control room” have been altered beyond
recognition. The ship is All! This adagio and mantra makes it clear to the new generations that
there is nothing beyond their ship, and also that the ship is not a ship but ALL. Their ship is not
just a transporter, a vehicle towards some destination, but it has been reborn as the whole – as
the totality of the known Universe. All the prerogatives that kept science separate from religion
are being distorted, subsumed and recodified into a new set of encompassing dogmas that
strives to keep all externalities away. In fact, the main radical conclusion of A Sense of Wonder
is that there is no insulation against the gradual (long-term) transformation of science or any
other systematic knowledge corpus into new suicidal cults, where dim origins morph into
nebulous and overpowering conceptual scaffoldings.
With its dystopian slant, the meta-spaceship is returned to what appears an even more
regressive stage than the fairly benign pre-Copernican universe. It is not flat or geocentric, but a
sort of Hollow Earth cosmological model, replete with biospheric spaceship-centric, spheroid,
intra- universe, where the outside has ceased to matter or exist, where hierarchies grow
unchecked, nested inside its depths. A hellish yet homely place where there is no “outer space”,
because all inner space has expanded and taken over every empty room and logical option.
One is eternally intra, obliged, even forced to acknowledge that there is nothing that wasn’t
inside, predicted, prepared or mentioned by precedent, and only mere ignorance can account
for the “why?” or the unexpected “what?” situation. At the same time, “The Ship Is All” has a
clear modern ring to it – and it seems to overcome the split (identified by Alexander Koyré in his
groundbreaking From A Closed World to the Infinite Universe from 1957) between Earth and
Space inherent in traditional Aristotelian science. Overcoming this gap brought a new
homogeneity between the laws governing Earth (Ship) and the laws governing the entire
universe, but this closing of the extremes ended up (in Koyré’s argumentation) pumping up
another widening split between phenomenal man and the purely abstract mathematical (or
extremely technical) world of science (for most of us).
One is left to listen intently in order to get an experience of the subtle or not so subtle changes
of the spaceship motors – the single way out is to make bodily sense and assess these
unknown mechanisms and invisible forces or gravitational pulls towards unknown directions.
Not just sense (as in just meaning) but sense as a primary perceptual apparatus, fragile and
atrophied sensorium still keeping pace and intimately attuned to wider pulls and remote
mechanisms and triggers. A new specialist priesthood is now busy interposing, interpreting
assiduously the operation manuals that have become the new Bibles. The journey had no end,
because even the end ceased to have a meaning.
The ship is a multi-leveled stratified ensemble, and inside its anthill structure a multi-tiered caste
system society has developed. An eugenic program insures that only those (Superiors) who
have a health and fertility certificate may reproduce. The main character is a low caste
Attendant that has a peculiar deformity – he is always dreaming, questioning, lost in sensory
cues and rambling thoughts – something that is severely punished. “Schedule” became fixated
status indicating your social position in the dual caste system of the spaceship, tattooed at birth
on the arms. The function of attendants is to keep the Superiors alive and productive with
“optimum number of children”.
There is also a strange dullness, a loss of affection and curiosity inter-spread with high
excitement when incredible panic accompanies the incomprehensible signals from the outside
hull,when Alarm calls break in. Wonderment is one sentiment that seems to be in short supply
on the ship, where one is constantly attuned to the buzzer or the dreaded alarm rules. In this
dystopian setting, curiosity, dreaming, idleness and wonder have to be cured, so “therapy” has
been instituted to cure exactly that. A buzzer is your guide, the buzzer calls everybody to the
Conditioning Room. Health (of the eugenically superior) has become a new sort of cult, and not
keeping fit with vitamins and supplements is considered blasphemy short of punishment. But
even punishable, there are “permissible deviations” when one is allowed to skip the usual dose.
Feelings are banished (a long pedigree in dystopian literature), and love is not permitted. The
50s behaviorist Skinner-box methods make sure that each is content and unquestioning since
birth. But other areas have flourished, during the 10 000 years voyage new priests were
interpreting the meaning of the “change-bells” (radiation alarms?), using the prohibited operation
manual (“the Book of Jordan”). The Alarms have only rang twice in thousands of years, and
each time there was some ill presage and a “cure” where the priests intervened – a radioactive
leak and a biohazard situation epidemic.
image credit: Beneath the Planet of the Apes [movie still], director: Ted Post, APJAC Productions 1970
The Forbidden sacred door has a special plaque, a mantra, “NO NON-AUTHORIZED
PERSONS PERMITTED BEYOND THIS DOOR” – imposed under the penalty of death. An
authorized personnel sancta sanctorum guarded by Control Police. Behind the forbidden doors
are the secretive operative engines, the true data centers of the spaceship communicating and
humming their activity only from the distance – a true soundtrack to life on the spaceship,
intimating fragile forbidden feelings and indefinite expectations. One of the apocryphal forbidden
texts (a legend) reveals that the commanders of the ship have decided to hide the cruelty of
their mission – the fact that it was all running on automatic pilot on “ever increasing and
decreasing circles” for thousands of years, while trying to postpone the moment of return to a
potentially uninhabitable Earth (see secure means of terminal storage problem by Human
Interference Task Force). What I find doubly ironic for us today is that the current free market
dogma has become the new orbital navigation manual with a very high cost for all aboard,
because it exhibits some of the same certified and bonafide autopilot crashcourse
characteristics.
Like always, women – “the trusted ones” – have been secretly transmitting through the
generations some dangerous alternative interpretations of the holy high tech scriptures. Out of
this and the fact that one star in the sky starts to grow (and approach), heresy starts to foment.
One discovers how to smash the Buzzer – remarking on how such a simple pre-programmed
machine is controlling the buzzer that dictates every aspect of their life (ring a bell? ya screen-
touching acolytes!). These are just strings of consequences, but what is more pragmatically
interesting is that these new reactions and meanings, these mutations and deletions are
relevant, and relevant even to us in our alternate universe, sitting as we sit in front of our back-lit
screens. Charts, Help?, operation manuals, protocols, warranties, clickbaits, synced calendar
apps, self-tracking, prescriptions “in case of”, emergency routines – all these are slowly
gestating, already constituting the substrate, the extended back-up texture for future visions.The
same holds true for those traditional sacred texts (Bible, Koran, Torah, Tripitaka) that we
cherish. Why consider them as paradoxes, as out-of-place, just because they are preserving
stowaway data with a highly controlled mutation-rate (proofreading and no mistakes) like the
alphabetic transcription of a carefully annotated extra-somatic junk DNA (that is no junk at all, by
the way).
That’s one way to think about the importance of Bid’ah ()اَلبدعة, and of identifying and avoiding as
much as possible the various effect of time drift (praiseworthy or blameworthy), the fatal
progressive divergence. In its primary form, Bid’ah refers “to bringing anything new without any
prior example. At this point, this could refer to all newly-invented things, praiseworthy or
blameworthy, religious, or otherwise.” It is very easy to forget that Islamic law, legal theory,
theology and philosophy is highly formal in its arrangements and classifications of topics,
chapters, sections, following a particular order and logic. It was part of a venerable scholastic
tradition that is/was steeped in heightened debate and skilled point by point argumentation and
refutation. Ibn Taymiyyah (1263 – 1328), the great Islamic scholar and theologian was also a
logician, and his early work dealt mostly with theology and the use of reason in interpretation of
scriptural evidences, with later works focusing on refutation of Greek logic, which he thought to
be the ultimate source of erroneous metaphysical doctrines espoused by philosophers
(Introduction: Ibn Taymiyya Against the Greek Logicians by Wael B. Hallaq [1993] is an amazing
study that I warmly recommend). His tome al-Radd-ala al-Manitqiyyin amounted to one of the
most devastating and systematic attacks ever leveled against the early Greeks, their
commentators, and their Muslim followers (be they orthodox theologians or sufi). Motivated by
faith and also by using rational arguments, Ibn Taymiyyah targeted Aristotelian logic and the
metaphysical grounds of this logic, mounting a coherent refutation of essentialist definition, a
critique of universals and a rejection of the syllogism (as purveyor of new or superior
knowledge) that paradoxically brought him closer to later Western critics of Aristotelian logic and
especially the tradition of British empiricism. Here is that most incredible moment when an
“alternate universe” (to follow our strenuous line of thought) gives rise to alternate universes, or
subsists under our very eyes and noses before journalistic wave function collapses.
The second and third more restricted uses of Bid’ah in Shariah law is either a newly-invented
thing ascribed to the Shariah and pertaining to religion or thirdly, Bid’ah may be prayer or
legislated matter that has been long forgotten and newly revived (general or specific). But in
general, that Bid’ah transmitted definition is taken to indicate that “every innovation is
misguidance” (my emphasis) – please read here misguidance as leading astray, a-drift and
departing from immediate homeworld origins. Overall, I think Islamic Bid’ah usage demonstrates
something much deeper, perhaps something similar to what Whitehead identified as “the
inexpugnable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a
perfectly definite manner” in his Science and the Modern World, considering it as probably the
most important contribution of medieval thought to the formation of modern science.
True guidance is obscured by ulterior incorporation and adoption, and this is also the incredible
history of early Arab medieval proto-science-fiction, a set of pioneering desert island novels read
avidly, following their late 17th century translation, by the most important representatives of
European Enlightenment and the incipient Scientific Revolution. I am talking, of course, about
Philosophus Autodidactus (Ḥayy ibn Yaqdhan “ حيِ بن يقظاَنAlive, son of Awake”, or in its English
translation: The Improvement of Human Reason: Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan) and
Theologus Autodidactus (Al-Risalah al-Kamiliyyah fil Siera al-Nabawiyyah translated as The
Treatise of Kamil on the Prophet’s Biography) written by Ibn al-Nafis (1213-1288) as a response
to the first. Philosophus Autodidactus was a bestseller in the West, being probably the third-
most translated book from Arabic, after the Koran and One Thousand and One Nights. It is very
easy to forget that – the first of these books was written in early 12th century Islamic Spain and
the second in North Africa somewhere between 1268 and 1277 CE.
image credit: The Flying Carpet [painting], author: Viktor Vasnetsov. a depiction of the hero of Russian folklore Ivan
Tsarevich, 1880, Русский: «Ковёр-самолёт»
Philosophus Autodidactus or Hayy ibn Yaqdhan by Ibn Tufail (c. 1105 – 1185) aka Aben Tofail
aka Ebn Tophail was translated into Latin in 1660 by Edward Pococke the Younger and
published in 1671. Suffice it to say that this novel was an inspiration for John Locke’s concept of
the tabula rasa as developed in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1790) – who was
a student of Pococke. He also referred to this translation as “novelty”, probably because it was
mainly a philosophical novel, and under the guise of literature it was also a lure for other things,
like helping transmit and popularize scientific and experimental ideas. Tabula rasa in turn gave
rise to the whole nature versus nurture debate, but we should be careful in ascribing to this
treatise (as some have) an unabashed (or conversely blind) support for naturalism against
revelation, because “Hayy ibn Yaqdhan is a work that seeks to unveil within man [sic] the
significance of the intellect whose illumination of the mind is like an inner revelation that cannot
but confirm the truths of the outer revelation and objective prophecy”, according to Seyyed
Hossein Nasr.
Immediately after its publishing, thought experiments and ideas found in Philosophus
Autodidactus return with various degrees of mutation, adaptation and transformation in a host of
widely celebrated authors. Hobbes, Defoe, Hume, Berkeley, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Marx,
Newton and Kant read it and were delighted by it. It was a work of imagination set on a desert
island, trying to reconcile ideas of rationalist Avicennism, mystical Sufism and orthodox Kalam
theological tradition. It’s also no accident that the Islamic world with its many famous travelers
and explorers, who kept accurate logs on various facts and encounters, became a direct
inspiration for desert island literature. These thought experiments should not be de-linked from
later more “respectable” desert island scripts as laboratories of life or “living laboratories of
evolution” that have had such an illustrious pedigree reaching out to Galápagos Islands (in
Charles Darwin’s case) and Malay Archipelago (in Alfred Russel Wallace’s case) – a real-world
basis for major theoretical work and concrete examples of adaptive radiation.
The novelty of desert islands novels foreshadows our own speculative exo-anthropology – it is a
lost and found subgenre. Itself akin to a feral child cast upon an ocean of speculative fiction, it
allowed far-from-insular thought experiments to bridge the temporal gap between island
biogeography and spaceship islands, scattering a new humanity at intervals of thousands of
years into the future.
Deep time drift coupled with the slow fermentation of information should not be understood
outside of continuous recycling of expanded residues of dimly recorded antecedence, a
ritualized scavenging of salvaged memory implants never at rest. A Sense of Wonder’s curious
example of “The Ship is All” prayer is relevant because it ascribes the correct if completely
exaggerated importance to a spaceship that is not a spaceship anymore – it is for all purposes a
celestial object, a righteous collapsed spheroid (a concave inversion of Sloterdijk Sphärologie?)
where a new custom-made cosmology grows inside the confines of a sacred artificial carrier.
The bland memory of the home planet has been unwittingly but systematically engulfed and
dismantled in order that the Spaceship be reborn as a viable exoplanet and homely prison world
of its own. Thus, one is not “merely” suspended under eternal rotations and purposeless orbits,
completely left at the whims of 10 000 years, but one drifts into what could be called a Galactic
Ark Diaspora (from the Greek “diaspeirein” meaning “to disperse”, from “dia”, which means
“across” and “speirein”, “to scatter”).
