In the face of current world events and mankind’s mad rush towards self-destruction, Lem’s scepticism about the future of planet Earth joins the list of his predictions that, unfortunately, are coming true right before our eyes. Scientists, despite appearances, are not so naive as to suicidally succumb to any kind of pressure (higher demands, protection of the state, etc.). Nevertheless, as Hogarth wrote in his fictional diary, ‘genius is, above all, constant doubting’, yet even the greats have ‘bent beneath the pressure of society’. But the problem lies elsewhere:
The easiest way to keep one’s hands clean is the ostrich-Pilate method of not involving oneself with anything that—even remotely—could contribute to increasing the means of annihilation. But what we do not wish to do, there will always be others to do in our place.
Translated by Michael Kandel
Moreover, working on commission becomes extremely comfortable because responsibility is in essence removed from the scholar, although in this way ‘Science is turning into a monastery for the Order of Capitulant Friars’. The author of the diary, although not enthusiastically, takes on the duties of a participant in a large-scale MAVO programme (an abbreviation of ‘Master’s Voice’), being an attempt to translate a regularly repeated message coming from the cosmos, which could prove a desire to establish contact by a distant extra-terrestrial civilisation.
This signal, with a radiant that is relatively very broad in that it covers the entire area of the Little Dog alpha and its surroundings within 1.5 degrees, conveys information of unknown content and purpose. Since the redundancy in the transmission channel is probably zero, the signal presents itself as noise. That this noise is a signal is evidenced by the fact that every 416 hours, 11 minutes and 23 seconds the entire modulated sequence is repeated from the beginning with an accuracy at least equal to the resolution of the apparatus used on Earth.
Translated by Michael Kandel
From the very beginning, the ambitious plan to decipher this message encountered various obstacles, and in time it also contributed to friction between two philosophical camps of researchers: humanists and naturalists, both pushing their own agenda. The assumption that the scientists’ passivity could allow others to utilise the knowledge in the encoded message had the potential to devolve into an arms race. At the same time, the incomplete knowledge of what the opposing side is up to forces scientists to more and more serious efforts in the matter of military equipment.
It so happened that the result of experiments in reading the star code, contained in the deciphered signal from the cosmos, was the invention of a type of weapon (TREX, a term meaning ‘transportable explosions’), which can annihilate powerful targets – armies or countries – from a great distance. Even for the cynical protagonist, moral qualms emerged: ‘The march of technology would disturb the balance of our world, and nothing would save us if we failed to draw practical lessons from this crisis.’