Starfarers, Prologue, fourth section

Starfarers, PROLOGUE.

This is quite a rich section so we might pause on it for a while.

First, a settlement is established in the Jovian System, asteroid outposts are coordinated and space is industrialized so that Earth need no longer be polluted:

"The hope of most people concerned in the endeavor was to make a profit. And this was right and proper. No civilization, whatever its social and economic arrangements, can continue forever throwing resources into a void. It must eventually start to reap some kind of material return." (p. 15)

However, "profit" and "material return" are not identical. "Profit" means not merely value created by labor but, more specifically, value created by labor and competitively accumulated by employers of labor. That is one kind of social and economic arrangement.

A spaceship using the quantum field gate drive, nicknamed "the zero-zero drive," (p. 14) springs from the normal, "zero," energy level to a superhigh energy level and back down again repeatedly so it sounds in part like the quantum hyperdrive in Poul Anderson's Technic History.

Olivares' theory leads to the zero-zero drive and, later in Starfarers, a planet is named "Olivares." The future historicity here is overwhelming.

An observer on the Jovian moon, Himalia, comments that machines will never become as intelligent as human beings because:

"'I know some neuropsychology. Consciousness, creative thought, that is not merely a business of electrons in circuits. It is something the entire living human organism does.'" (p. 15)

People use the word, "consciousness," differently and confusingly. In my use of the term, all animals are conscious whereas human beings think and create. However, I agree that both consciousness and thought result from organism-environment interactions, not from electronic circuitry. A different kind of artifact that did duplicate organism-environment interactions and thus generate consciousness might be called not a machine but an artificial organism.