A Fire Upon the Deep

Some years ago, I read Vernor Vinge’s 1992 space opera, A Fire Upon the Deep. It’s a good read, and it has some interesting ideas.

First interesting idea, it incorporates intergalatic network communication, clearly modeled both technically and sociologically on Usenet (R.I.P.). The little excerpts of Intergalatic Usenet messages are reminders of how we thought an internet should work in 1992.

Second it’s a Space Opera. It’s been obvious for 60+ years that if a civilization can make fusion-powered rocket engines, and their biology or technology allow “cryosleep” or “suspended animation”, then that civilization has interstellar travel. Larry Niven figured this out in the mid-to-late 1960s. It’s apparently hard to write Space Opera with sub-light-speed, relativistic, interstellar travel and retain any pretense of “science”. It’s much easier with faster-than-light star ships, so easy that such stories often end up as High Fantasy, not workaday science fiction. I’ll offer Niven’s Known Space stories as an arguable example of an author transitioning from Space Opera to High Fantasy.

Vinge gets around having to write High Fantasy with “Zones of Thought”. as an axiomatic starting point for his intergalactic civilizations.

Roughly spherical shells with slightly different physical laws surround the “Unthinking Depths” at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Cognition and computation are apparently not possible in the Unthinking Depths. Surrounding the Unthinking Depths is The Slow Zone, where some thought and computation are possible. Outside the Slow Zone is The Beyond, where nonrelativistic faster-than-light travel and communication are possible. Outside and around The Beyond is The Transcend, where sentient AI is possible. The zones are never really explained, Vinge dances around any explanation. In-universe, they’re taken for granted, or worked around, even though the consequences to every civilization are enormous, and would have sparked curiosity and science everywhere.

Zones of Thought lets Vinge avoid the singularity he has bumped up against his entire writing career. His singularity simple cannot take place in the Slow Zone or even The Beyond, only in The Transcend. There’s a reason why Earth civilizations are stuck with the technology we’ve got, why the Fermi paradox presents itself: the earth is in the Slow Zone.

I think that it’s obvious that Zones of Thought actually exist. I propose Murphy’s Law as an aphoristic manifestation of the physical law(s) that delineate Zones of Thought. Without Murphy’s Law, the Church-Turing Thesis is false, P probably equals NP, one can prove the Continuum Hypothesis and FTL travel is possible. Vinge makes a big deal out of any cryptography other than one time pads being impossible or unreliable in The Beyond. Out in The Transcend, sentient artificial intelligence is possible, even easy.

We, here on Earth, can perceive the Zones of Thought. Apparently, we’re on the border between The Slow Zone and The Beyond. That border fluctuates somewhat unpredictably. When the Earth is closer to The Beyond, human, biological, computation is better and faster, we see civilization having an uptick. John von Neumann exists. People and nations get along better, rationality triumphs, albeit briefly. When the border moves further out, things go wrong. People make bad decisions, war, pestilence and famine stalk the Earth. During particularly deep plunges into The Slow Zone, the Earth suffers mass extinctions.

This latter is important, given the apparent effect of past mass extinctions on what lives in the Earth’s biosphere, and the evolution of intelligent beings. Intelligence and civilizations should evolve faster, or at least more often, in solar systems in the fluctuating border between Slow Zone and The Beyond. I think there’s room for fiction depicting a Milky Way where intelligence only evolves frequently at the edge of The Slow Zone, but only thrives in The Beyond. With enough imagination elbow grease, this could be written.