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As the third millennium began, our chief problem was
a surfeit of politicians and bureaucrats. We felt weighed down by
innumerable taxes and ever-growing regulations. We and our rulers seemed
to be living in different worlds. We wished only to better ourselves;
they, on the other hand, were obsessed with grand political schemes
carried out at our expense and often against our interests. They
surrounded themselves with semi-monarchical courts of flatterers who
drove them to megalomania.
Gradually, our ancestors devised a means of defence
against these parasites. It lay in their personal computers. They had
long been in the habit of trading by e-mail. This involved the use of
credit cards, and credit card information had to be protected from
hackers. The answer was encryption. Millions of e-mail messages crossed
the world daily in impenetrable secret code. But if the authorities
could not read these messages, they could still see who was sending and
receiving them. Then some unknown genius popularised the idea of AEE, of
anonymous encrypted e-mail.
People found it easy without, as yet, breaking any
law to establish secret electronic ``addresses of accommodation'', known
only to their associates. With these it was impossible for outsiders to
know who was talking to whom and about what*. AEE gave people the
temptation which they did not resist because they so hated and despised
their rulers of under-declaring their incomes.
Now if an individual is suspected of tax evasion, the
authorities will descend on him, but if a significant part of a nation
starts to do the same thing, the state is powerless.
And this is what happened. Income tax became, in
effect, voluntary because it could no longer be fully collected. Tax
revenues slumped. and hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats found
themselves without work. Countless bloated bureaucracies collapsed.
Government did not disappear altogether, but people got instead the kind
of governments they wanted. They still needed police and armed forces,
but the rest of former state activity was privatised and was carried on
far more efficiently than before.
Freed from its burdens, the human race became
immeasurably richer. Space tourism became popular, with hotels in Earth
orbit and on the Moon. One joy of it was love-making in lunar hotels, so
much slower and vastly more enjoyable because the gravity was one sixth
of Earth's. We colonised Mars. We built settlements on the giant moons
of Jupiter–all except Io, a dreadful world whose continuous volcanic
eruptions and sulphurous clouds made it seem more like Mordor than
Maidenhead. Mining the asteroids became profitable. By extracting their
chemicals, we could live almost anywhere in the solar system without
depending economically on Earth. We looked at the stars and dreamed of
their Earth-like planets. On the airless surface of Mercury we built
factories that produced antimatter, the ultimate rocket fuel that could
propel a spaceship almost to the speed of light.
Here began a relationship which at first brought us
unsurpassed wealth, but later ruin–an obsession with the equations of
Albert Einstein. We fell in love with his earliest (and simplest)
equations, those of 1905, which showed that people in a fast-moving
spaceship would age more slowly. One could literally return from a visit
to the stars and find oneself younger than's own children.
Clever financial schemes too advantage of this fact.
A would-be coloniser of alien planets would invest a large part of his
money at compound interest. Then he would go off with a crew of several
hundred people to colonise a distant planet. He alone would return, only
a few years older, while Earth and everyone on it had aged many decades.
He would collect his accumulated interest, re-invest his capital and
finance a second voyage of colonisation. He would grow immensely richer,
as did the colonies that were settled.
The 26th century was the high noon of mankind. We had
colonised the planets of dozens of stars. Penetrating steadily into the
galaxy, and being spread over astronomical distances, we thought we had
made ourselves safe from any man-made or natural disaster. In
particular, because nothing could travel faster than light, we felt
absolutely safe from interstellar wars.
One can pinpoint the exact year when evil began to
return. It was 2579, the 700th anniversary of Einstein's birth.
Sentimental whispers started to spread. We had paid insufficient homage
to the memory of our benefactor. We had ignored a large part of his
life's work, and by doing so we had insulted him. We had to make amends.
For he had published a second set of equations, the General Theory of
Relativity, in 1916, a complex and mysterious 55-page document whose
full implications no one---not even Einstein himself---had ever truly
understood. With a new generation of supercomputers, we set out to tear
those equations apart.
Someone had once remarked that in the 1916 equations
lurked ``goblins and demons'', wormholes, time travel and other
universes. Our wisest sociologists could not hide their misgivings. They
feared that a fundamental discovery in physics could mean a fundamental
change in society, probably for the worse. But we laughed, calling them
a pack of old women.
The work proceeded. At last, our scientists devised a
function that induced micro-changes in the coordinates of space time. We
had the Pandora Equation. It laid bare the secret of ``hyperspace'', a
hidden dimension without space or time. A spaceship travelling through
it could literally vanish in one region of space and reappear an instant
later in another. The speed of light barrier was circumvented. Journey
times between the stars could be reduced from years or decades to mere
weeks. And most of that time was spent in positioning a ship for the
``jump'' through hyperspace.
What foolish optimism greeted this discovery.
``Darling, isn't it marvellous,'' said a fashionable lady. ``I can nip
over to Alpha Centauri and do my Christmas shopping!'' But if shoppers
could make instantaneous journeys, so could fleets and armies.
The behaviour of mankind deteriorated almost
overnight. Here was the chance to settle old grievances. Politicians
returned. But because high politics had not been practised for
centuries, its subtler arts were forgotten. Leaders wanted only to seem
valiant and heroic. They created an atmosphere of hysteria and extremism
in which to be a moderate was to be deemed a traitor.
What began as mere play-acting soon became earnest.
Hyperspace enabled interstellar wars to be fought. Humans were like
children who had long been kept under strict discipline but were
suddenly allowed to do whatever they liked. One could seize other
peoples' property and slaughter them when they objected. Each planet,
hitherto merely a place to live and work, became a ``nation'' with its
``honour.'' Bureaucrats reappeared, this time in uniforms and polished
boots. They liked large offices with marble floors, not because the
marble was elegant, but because it was ideal for strutting and stamping.
The hyperspatial radio waves echoed with bellicose rhetoric: ``faithful
to our destiny'', ``will not be intimidated'', and ``scrap of paper.''
There followed a century and a half of senseless and
bloody wars. Tens of billions perished through acts of malice and
revenge. At length humanity became exhausted from the slaughter, and a
warlord arose who was more intelligent than the rest. His brief career
was a glimmer of light in the gathering darkness. A brilliant soldier,
adept at fighting battles by emerging from hyperspace where he was least
expected he was also a statesman. He made it his life's aim to halt the
perpetual warfare. Having established the shell of an interstellar
imperium amid the ruins of civilisation, he adopted the title of
``Peacekeeper.''
He was also a skilled journalist. One of his
hyperspatial broadcasts contained this passage: ``Would that the Pandora
Equation had been discovered 500 years earlier, before the first
starship was built! Then it would have had a happier name. Hyperspace in
the 22nd century would have had no military function since there would
have been no one to use it against. It would have been used only for
peaceful expansion. The equation cannot be unmade. But it is not too
late to use it as it should have been used, to build a peaceful empire,
not just among the few scores of habitable planets we have so far
discovered, but the undiscovered tens of millions that lie beyond
them.''
But this was not to be. The Peacekeeper was murdered
by jealous subordinates who murdered also his dream. They saw no need
for a wider empire; they were content to rule what they had inherited,
and they ruled–and they still rule it–by violence and terror. Any
world that incurs their displeasure they attack with a ``relativistic
bomb.'' This fearsome weapon is an unmanned spacecraft weighing no more
than 20,000 tons. It has no explosive warhead; it is its own warhead.
For it is made to strike an offending planet at more than 90 per cent of
the speed of light. Because the kinetic energy released by such by such
a missile equals its mass multiplied by half the square of its speed,
all life is obliterated.
It was said by one who visited a ``punished'' world a
few months after such an impact that the only sign of its vanished
humanity was the``smell of millions of carbonised human beings.'' We
live in daily fear of our imperial tyrants. Our only pleasure is
re-reading Gibbon's The Decline and fall of the Roman Empire
and hoping that history will repeat itself.
* Since I
wrote this article at the end of 1999, it has become easy to use
Anonymous Encrypted Email! Anyone can now create addresses for
themselves and their friends like JuliusCaesar@safe-mail.net or
Napoleon@hotmail.com. And fairly strong encryption can be provided by
the Password Protection feature of Microsoft Word, provided a password
is chosen that is difficult to guess. A.B.
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