C1. Ubi Sunt…

Why are the skies so silent? Just where is everyone? Where are the feats of astroengineering, the Dyson spheres, the spacefaring exo-civilizations? This is the astrobiological ‘Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?’ (‘Where are those who were before us?’). Do we ‘groaneth and travaileth’ alone in creation? Such were the ultimate outward-looking questions that led Barker to begin charting the most intimately inward, and to turn from astronomical signaletics to the spine.

A persistent theme throughout our secret history of Spinal Catastrophism has been the dubious relation—and even telic antagonism—between the cerebro-spinal and vegetative-autonomic factions of the complexified organism, CNS and ANS, the former embedded within the latter. Such evolutionary nesting of separate functional systems—or adaptive complexification via endosymbiosis—has recently been argued to be a plausible ‘astrobiological universal’ for the evolution of life forms across all exo-biospheres.1 If we have learnt one thing on our journey, however, it is that such ‘nesting’ creates an unstable alliance (one that, again and again, invokes connotations of parasitism and nosology). As it happens, it has lately been suggested that such nested antagonism may potentially explain the deafening silence of the cosmic skies.

In a paper entitled ‘The Intelligence Paradox’, a team of nutritional scientists propose that intellection is essentially self-cancelling.2 Referring to hormesis, they claim that continual environmental stressors are behind the evolution of intelligence: intermittent perturbations provoke the organism—as homeodynamic system—to adapt via feedforward and anticipative control, producing ever more resilient responses to the perturbating environment. This is connected to Croft’s idea of the phylogenesis of chronognostic range3 (see section C4) and therefore to the centralization and encephalization of cerebrospinal nervous systems across macroevolution. As ever, it is a tremoring and quaking—Erschütterung—that forces the self-interested system to assert stability and develop robustness. And this is precisely where we began our Cervical Prospectus: In responding to this environing and aboriginary trauma, precisely by developing increasingly long-range behavioural stratagems and cunning plots, the organic system tends toward a reformatting of its environment. Intelligence, as the terrestrial pinnacle of this creeping process of incremental chronognostic range, then ensconces itself through psychozoic activities, capturing the whole earth system in its intentional energy dispersal systems, collapsing the ‘natural’ into the ‘artefactual’. Chronotopic escapement into time allows organic function to spill out into space. This, the authors of ‘The Intelligence Paradox’ argue, reaches a level of aptitude (a ‘tipping point’) in technologically mature civilizations when intelligence essentially alleviates the environmental stressors—or hormetic perturbating factors—that, in the first place, drove its evolution and, moreover, maintain its persistence (in the sense that big brains are energetically expensive and thus their evolutionary persistence is not necessarily a given). In our modern lives, we no longer experience much hormetic stress: everything we desire (or at least, simulations of it) is readily available.

Intelligence is self-limiting: it erases the very contexts that create and maintain it. The authors link this to the rising pandemic of metabolic illness, mitochondrial dysfunction, diabetes, and obesity throughout the developed world (causative of depression and the denudation of intellect). Generalizing this ‘intelligence paradox’ across exo-biospheres, they then argue that the absence of SETI detections, the ‘great silence’ may be explained by the fact that technologically advanced civilizations do not become spacefaring because they follow this preordained path, and invariably become ‘too fat for space’. The authors point to the skyrocketing costs of healthcare here on Earth: extrapolating that ‘coupled with resource depletion and environmental damage’ it ‘could potentially lead to increasing internal conflict and societal destabilisation’. ‘All of this’, they infer, ‘would reduce or halt interstellar exploration’. Calculating global healthcare costs for obesity, they claim that we are potentially already spending too much on palliation and healthcare to ever afford to go to space. It may well already be too late. The adipose apocalypse has already taken place. In a similar vein, The Lancet recently published a report calling ‘low back pain’—a complication that, just like obesity, is skyrocketing owing to the sedentary modern lifestyles of developed countries—a ‘major global challenge’.4 The economic and clinical costs of obesity to the US could be nearing an eye-watering $200 billion per annum, whilst the socio-economic burden of back pain upon the US (from lost productivity combined with healthcare bills) has recently received almost identical annual estimates.5 ‘This makes NASA’s budget for 2013, at $17.7 billion […] look paltry’6—by an order of magnitude. Of course, obesity and spinal complications are not unrelated as acutely modern problems.7 The fate of intelligence is a comic parade of slipped discs and metabolic disasters, not a resplendent march of space colonization. And so, talking of ‘entropy’s dark laughter’, Nunn et al. conclude that it belongs to the nature of intelligent neuro-systems—here and elsewhere—to remove the very hormetic factors that facilitate their existence:

Throughout evolution the need to adapt has been drive by a stressful environment, suggesting that if intelligence ever evolved to a high enough level, it would alter the environment to remove the stress. This would thus remove the driver for further development of intelligence and adaptability (and hence longevity). However, if it reached a high enough level, it may well also fulfil the original driver for life itself: acceleration of entropy. Thus, it is possible that mankind, or ET, may be reaching a point where the original driver for entropy is still occurring through technology, but the individual driver for intelligence and adaptability has been removed. The universe could be playing a very cruel joke on us.8

A chilling image: intelligence—that poor player, with all its cunning and ambition—is just a self-obsolescing moment in expenditure’s cosmic cataract. It emerges to amplify and intensify universal energy dispersal by creating its own supernormal metabolic utopia, before passing on the energetic baton to less retentive and more expellent systems and thus seceding from existence in the process. This may well be the astrobiological life-cycle of Geist: It exists to make us fat and then disappear. In this account, then, the upward surge of the spine is self-cancelling. This would be the ultimate revenge of the vegetative system on the nervous system: the stomach gets the last laugh, turning on the spinal cord—rejecting its influx of nociceptive reality-function—by dragging both into a mutual oblivion of metabolic dysfunction brought on by their own collaborative success. We drink too much Pepsi to go to the stars.9

Milan Ćirković, in a brilliant turn of phrase, calls this proposed solution to Fermi’s Paradox the ‘galactic stomach ache’,10 a cosmic dyspepsia. However, Ćirković points out that (especially in a media-ecosystem including a worldwide web) over-consumption of supernormal stimuli extends over modalities beyond the culinary; he quotes evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller’s provocations on the matter:

We are already disappearing up our own brainstems. Freud’s pleasure principle triumphs over the reality principle. We narrow-cast human-interest stories to each other, rather than broad-casting messages of universal peace and progress to other star systems.11

The spectacle of homo sapiens disappearing up their own brainstems would probably look a lot like Bernal’s and Burroughs’s humans of the future: spinal-cord-trailing tadpoles. Of course, Leroi-Gourhan and others already worried about our exodus into our own externalizations. Since Alsberg, such ‘body-liberation’ was understood as the principle behind intelligence’s conquest; the tenebrous implication, however, has always been that, at the extreme, this becomes a tendency to liberate oneself from existence itself—whether through obesity or fakery. Jailbreak from life is nothing but an embrace of death. Blumenberg, indeed, had already prophesied a deleteriously decreasing ‘reality-contact’ in our egress into our ectopic neuronal exoskeleton. Ballard likewise remarked on this diaspora into ‘inner space’. An escape up our brainstems: because post-normal technoscience multiplies the artefactual to the point where ‘it is almost impossible to distinguish between the “real” and the “false”’. Reality isn’t what it used to be. We retreat into ‘inner space’ because we excrete it over the globe. Such an implosive trajectory has, of course, also been proposed as a solution to Fermi’s silence:

The transcension hypothesis proposes that a universal process of evolutionary development guides all sufficiently advanced civilizations into what may be called ‘inner space,’ a computationally optimal domain of increasingly dense, productive, miniaturized, and efficient scales of space, time, energy, and matter, and eventually, to a black-hole-like destination.12

This seems wildly optimistic, however. Currently, our ability to reformat reality appears not so much to be resulting in a hyper-dense kingdom of ends as to be incarcerating us into a limbic loop.13 For the authors behind the ‘Galactic Stomach Ache’ hypothesis, as for Geoffrey Miller, inward secession from traction in outward reality doesn’t lead to Lilliputian megacomputers14 or miniaturized ‘basement universes’,15 but to the redoubled return of the worst, most catastrophic, inherited aspects of our history-riddled ‘mind-with-a-past’: a hijack, by superstimuli, of our most base desires and compulsions; dopaminergic return, and lock-in of the most irrational tics and stereotypies.16 Technology increasingly gives us everything we want and more, but ‘want’ is, by this very same token, increasingly a question of the most salamandrine portions of our nature. Again, future curves into the past (it is more accurate to say that the future is kidnapped by the past). Ballard, indeed, defined ‘inner space’ precisely as the ‘landscape of tomorrow that is a transmuted image of the past’. The brain—a parvenu—cannot quite achieve escape velocity from its libidinous spine. (An old question raised again: will the future of the human race be hostage to limbic terrorism?) Medullary man might have that ‘last laugh’, after all. Even Bernal’s communist space-brains still drag their dinosaur tail. For future-hastening technologies merely facilitate novel possibilities for lapses (mnemoclastic flows and sugar crashes) into the atavistic past and its recidivist compulsions, whether in the form of obesity epidemic or the evolutionary eclipse of intelligence itself, given its potentially self-limiting nature (a paradox unto death).

Suitably enough, Elaine Morgan connected humanity’s peculiar propensity to become obese with our standing upright all those millions of years ago.17 Upright standing has ever been a ticking time bomb. Certainly, the Second World War, which for Bataille was that most luxuriant flare of energetic disbursement, perfectly demonstrated the ability for the speeding future to facilitate recrudescent atavism via unspeakable cruelties: for Velikovsky, indeed, the atomic blasts had dislodged ‘lost phylogenetic memories’ from their ‘sealed haven’. This jolt to our ‘ancient engram’ is surely only preamble, however. As Ballard prophesied, World War III, that immense synthesis wrought by the most advanced munitions, will merely have been the expression of our antediluvian longings for lost symmetry. In Reich’s eyes, then, the ultimate deluge of release. Our posterity is never more precocious than when we are recollecting our deepest past.

We evolved a vertical spine to look up into the skies, but, given the ‘Intelligence Paradox’, was the destiny of our historical erection already decided for us, from across the wounded galaxies?18 Do we steadfastly stand only to answer the call of entropy’s dark laughter? Only another giga-annum of genealogy will arbitrate an answer.

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Chasing what he called the ‘mnemoclastic flow’, Barker reportedly complained of the tinnitus ring of the Big Bang: his last archived research reports recount lapses into araneotic madness—warnings of heterotopic hippocampal ossification caused by looking too long at images of LDN-483, a symptom of what he called ‘Barnard Object Synchronoclasm’ or ‘The Hubble Effect’.19 As Barker seemed to realise retrospectively, moving from outer-space signaletics to spinal tics was scarcely a move at all—‘There is a voyage, but a strangely immobile one’.20 It was all a question of cryptography—which is to say, a question of camouflage—and thus a matter of listening in the right way.

Following the path of those prior spinal catastrophists all of whom had, as we have seen, variously insisted that the body is a mnemic archive of deep time, Barker became convinced that all human experience is formed of the epiphenomenal recurrences, repercussions, and recombinations of a ramified cosmic trauma that stretches from the stelliferous all the way to the sagittal. If the universe is one giant memory, then individuality can only be understood as retrograde amnesia. Yet Barker became increasingly convinced that one could reverse the amnesia, recollect and revisit the monuments of the voyage from nucleosynthesis to accretion to bone to spirit, with the spine as switching station. And, following the footsteps of his Romantic and Naturphilosophisch forebears, he undertook a programme of self-experimentations: operating on the infinite threads that tether the human to its cosmos, Barker made his own tattered psyche into the primary exo-archaeological site. Yet in doing so he was, of course, only making the entire universe into his analysand.

And somewhere in Borneo, Barker learnt that ‘listening in the right way’ tended to unravel time itself. He fell headlong down into memory’s boundless sea.

As we have seen, the curious line of thought that led Barker to his fate is not exclusive to him; it seems almost to be an intellectual compulsion for philosophers of all stripes. Its historical recurrence is, if not suspicious, at the very least untimely. So many different types of thinkers (rationalists and vitalists, psychoanalysts and Marxists, Naturphilosophen and anthropologists, penis poets and utopian futurists, libertine theriophiliacs and moral rigorists, Tarzan philosophers and uchronic enlighteners—proponents and practitioners from both day- and night-sides of natural science) have been drawn to this distinctive hypergenealogical motif. Even Kant, in spite of his right-mindedness, couldn’t help but read catastrophes into the spine (and, in so doing, made a superlating mess of himself). Whether assiduously rationalist or ardently irrationalist, it seems that in the wake of modernity (that constitutively unfinished, thus forever ‘untimely’, process), philosophers cannot but be led to think that hominization—or, whatever it was that happened to us to dredge up notions such as ‘persons’ and ‘subjecthood’—is something utterly non-natural.

Beginning with the neuroanatomist-geognost Steno, all the way back in the seventeenth century, modernity slowly discovered that space is nothing but agglutinated time and that depth is memory. And ever since we realised that the universe is one colossal chronometer—and every object an hourglass—the meaning of ‘inside’ and ‘out’ has never been the same, although, admittedly, we are always realising that we didn’t quite fully understand this yet. In the collision between absolute Idealism and natural history, recapitulation was forged as an attempt to naturalize the non-nature of the human—by dispersing its exceptionality throughout the totality of phyletic time; but it only further unleashed the sense that there is something cosmically damaged about the upright human. As we have seen, recapitulatory ideas, far more often than achieving the intended goal of smoothing out the relation between intelligence and time, tend instead to highlight the ways in which intelligence interferes with time itself: rendering everything either ‘late’ or ‘early’, speeding along chronopathic vectors, luxuriating in utter heterochronia. Another word for this is modernity, of course, and when it comes to ‘the modern’ we haven’t seen anything yet. But the ancestral spine—and its relation to our regal brain—may well yield portents and clues, providing the crooked key to the Menschheitsrätsel, the riddle of the human’s complicity with the cosmos that produced it, and offering a roadmap of the highways of history upon which our deepest past intersects with our future—or lack thereof.

*

‘Man is the embodied impossibility; he is the animal that lives anyway’, or so Blumenberg said—the truth of this statement has yet to be determined. Mind may well be at the end of its bony tether.