<abstract>Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you.</abstract> This is a short book containing three stories. The first is a fake review of a non-existent book called <i>One Human Minute</i>. The book purports to give an impression of what occurs on Earth each minute by compiling meticulous statistics about every conceivable facet of human life. E.g. the number of deaths of various kinds, the number of births, copulations, illnesses, etc. He actually reviews several editions of this book, each of which extends the concept of the original. The second is a foretelling of the development of 21st-century weapons, told as a history. This sounds contradictory, but actually works quite well. His idea is that the battlefield will be increasingly automated and miniaturized until the "war" moves entirely out of human hands and into the purely virtual. He's not far wrong, actually, so far. All signs point to his predictions coming true. The third is an interesting foray into cosmology, a discussion of how much luck had to do with the formation of life on Earth and the possible answers this provides to Fermi's purported paradox. The notion of how the inexorable rotation of the galactic spiral arms were timed perfectly with the cycles of life on Earth is a tempting explanation and entirely plausible, at least the way he presents it as a "fake" scientist. All three books were, as ever with Lem, very interesting and engaging and well-worth reading. He's never predictable. <h>Citations</h> The following citations pertain to the review of <i>One Human Minute</i>, the book that details everything that happens in one minute on planet Earth. It is all seasons at once and there is an overwhelming amount of distraction and delight in a world where everything global is available locally---an apt description of our Internet Age, made well before its time. <bq caption="Location 46-50">Because advertising, with monstrous effectiveness, attributes perfection to everything—and so to books, to every book—a person is beguiled by twenty thousand Miss Universes at once and, unable to decide, lingers unfulfilled in amorous readiness like a sheep in a stupor. So it is with everything. Cable television, broadcasting forty programs at once, produces in the viewer the feeling that, since there are so many, others must be better than the one he has on, <b>so he jumps from program to program like a flea on a hot stove, proof that technological progress produces new heights of frustration.</b> (Emphasis added.)</bq> <bq caption="Location 53-55">There had to be a book, then, about what Everybody Else was doing, so that we would be tormented no longer by the doubt that we were reading nonsense while the Important Things were taking place Elsewhere.</bq> <bq caption="Location 57-59">While it is untrue that there is no such thing as mental illness, that it was invented by psychiatrists to torment their patients and squeeze money out of them, it is true that normal people do far madder things than the insane.</bq> <bq caption="Location 74-77">You may feel indignation, you may take it as an affront to the entire human race, aimed so skillfully that it is irrefutable, containing nothing but verified facts; you may console yourself that at least no one can possibly make a film or a television series out of it—but it will definitely be worthwhile to think about it, though your conclusions will not be pleasant.</bq> <bq caption="Location 120-123">You can have sympathy for one person, possibly for four, but eight hundred thousand is impossible The numbers that we employ in such circumstances are cunning artificial limbs. They are like the cane a blind man uses; tapping the sidewalk keeps him from bumping into a wall, but no one will claim that with this cane he sees the whole richness of the world, or even the small fragment of it on his own street.</bq> <bq caption="Location 200-203">Games of this sort with statistics can rightly be called cheap. They may be meant as a reminder that we—who with the might of our industry poisoned the air, the soil, the seas, who turned jungles into deserts, who exterminated countless species of animals and plants that had lived for hundreds of millions of years, who reached other planets, and who altered even the albedo of the Earth, thereby revealing our presence to cosmic observers—could disappear so easily and without a trace.</bq> <bq caption="Location 229-230">There is something mechanical about this, inexorable, and animallike. How can one come to terms with an image of humanity copulating relentlessly through all the cataclysms that befall it, or that it has brought upon itself?</bq> <bq caption="Location 247-249">Does this book truly show all of humanity? The statistical tables are a keyhole, and the reader, a Peeping Tom, spies on the huge naked body of humanity busy about its everyday affairs. But through a keyhole not everything can be seen at once.</bq> <bq caption="Location 265-266">It is as if someone were to try to measure the heat of passion with a thermometer, or to put, under the heading “Acts," both sex acts and acts of faith.</bq> <bq caption="Location 277-282">Dostoevsky feared in his Notes from Underground. Dostoevsky believed that we were threatened by scientifically proven determinism, which would toss the sovereignty of the individual—with its free will—onto the garbage heap when science became capable of predicting every decision and every emotion like the movements of a mechanical switch. He saw no alternative, no escape from the cruel predictability that would deprive us of our freedom, except madness His Underground Man was prepared to lose his mind, so that, released by madness, it would not succumb to triumphant determinism.</bq> <bq caption="Location 502-504">yet). This introduction claims an important role for One Human Minute and its imitators: to supply the complete truth. The original One Human Minute is supposed to be computerized, so that one can call it up on one's home computer But most people will prefer the volume on the shelf. And</bq> <bq caption="Location 504-506">And so the book, styling itself "all books in one,” will increase the mass of printed paper In it you can find out how many trees fall per minute to saw and ax all over the world. Forests are turned into paper to make newspapers that call for the forests to be saved. But that piece of information is not in One Human Minute.</bq> The next set of citations are for the second book, the reverse military history of the 21st century. <bq caption="Location 653-655">From a military standpoint it was wasteful, because at ground zero all objects turned into flaming plasma, a gas of atoms stripped of their electron shells. At the site of the explosion, stones, trees, houses, metals, bridges, and human bodies vaporized, and concrete and sand were hurled into the stratosphere in a rising mushroom of flames.</bq> <bq caption="Location 818-823">The competition between old and new weapons was brief: massive, armored equipment could not withstand the attacks of the microarmies Just as germs invisibly invade an organism to kill it from within, so the nonliving, artificial microbes, following the tropisms built into them, penetrated the gun barrels, cartridge chambers, tank and plane engines. They corroded the metal catalytically, or, reaching the powder charges or fuel tanks, blew them up. What could even the bravest soldier, carrying grenades, a machine gun, a bazooka, or any other firearm, do against a nonliving, microscopic enemy? He would be like a doctor trying to fight the bacteria of cholera with a hammer or a revolver.</bq> An interesting metaphor for the asymmetrical warfare we see today, from guerrilla to cyber. <bq caption="Location 891-895">Every political party had its experts But the advisers of the different parties said completely different things With time, computer systems were brought in to help; too late, people realized they were becoming the mouthpieces of their computers. They thought they were the ones doing the reasoning, drawing independent conclusions based on data supplied by computer memory; but in fact they were operating with material preprocessed by the computer centers, and that material was determining human decisions.</bq> <bq caption="Location 916-920">Acid rain had been known in the twentieth century But now there were rains so corrosive that they destroyed roads, power lines, and factory roofs, and it was impossible to determine whether they were caused by pollution or by enemy sabotage. It was that way with everything. Livestock were stricken, but was the disease natural or artificial? The hurricane that ravaged the coast—was it a chance thing, or was it engineered by an invisible swarm of micrometeorological agents, each as small as a virus, covertly diverting ocean air masses? Was the drought natural—however murderous—or was it, too, caused by a skillful diversion of the rain clouds?</bq> <bq caption="Location 931-935">Blurred, also, was the distinction between real and spurious hostilities In order to turn its people against another nation, a country would produce on its own territory “natural” catastrophes so obviously artificial that its citizens were bound to believe the charge that the enemy was responsible. When it came out that a certain large and wealthy nation, in offering aid to those that were underdeveloped and overpopulated, supplemented the provisions it sold (cheaply) of sago, wheat, corn, and potato flour with a drug that diminished sexual potency, the Third World became enraged. This was now an undercover, antinatural war.</bq> This last set of citations about from the third book about cosmological musings. <bq caption="Location 981-986">And there were hypotheses about the self-destructiveness of intelligence—such as von Höorner's, which connected the psychozoic "density" of the Universe with its barrenness, claiming that suicide threatened every civilization, as nuclear war was now threatening humanity. The organic evolution of life took billions of years, but its final, technological phase lasted barely a few dozen centuries. Other hypotheses pointed to the dangers that the twentieth century encountered even in the peaceful expansion of technology, whose side effects devastated the reproductive capacities of the biosphere.</bq> <bq caption="Location 990-992">He certainly did not conceive such devices in any concrete way; but we, reading his words today, not only know that they have come true but also expand their meaning with a multitude of details familiar to us, which only adds weight to his statements.</bq> That is <i>literally</i> what I just did with the previous citation. <bq caption="Location 1165-1167">It is even more difficult to foresee what will become of our system when it leaves the calm space that stretches between Perseus and Sagittarius, between the stellar clouds of the two galactic arms. Assuming that the difference between the speed of the Sun and the spiral equals one kilometer per second, we shall reach the next spiral in five hundred million years.</bq> <bq caption="Location 1199-1201">The key question in re-creating the history of the solar system and life on Earth is: Did something happen on the order of simple bottle-breaking, which could be put into statistics, or was it, instead, something like the football and the aquarium?</bq> <bq caption="Location 1201-1205">Phenomena that are statistically calculable do not become statistically incalculable suddenly, at a well-defined boundary, but, rather, by degrees The scholar takes a position of cognitive optimism, that is, he assumes that the subjects he studies will yield to calculation It is nicest if they do so deterministically: the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection, a body immersed in water loses exactly as much of its weight as the weight of the water it displaces, and so on It is not quite so nice if calculable probability has to substitute for certainty But it is not nice at all when absolutely nothing can be calculated</bq> <bq caption="Location 1207-1211">Even in the tale of the bottle and the football there is no chaos. Every event, taken separately, obeys the laws of physics, and of deterministic physics, not quantum physics, because we can measure the force with which the child kicked the ball, the angle of impact between bottle and ball, the speed of both bodies at that instant, the path the bottle described when it bounced off the ball, and the speed with which it fell into the aquarium and filled with water Each step of the sequence, taken separately, is subject to mechanics and statistics, but the sequence itself is not (that is, one cannot establish how often a thing that has happened will happen).</bq> <bq caption="Location 1212-1215">The initial states have to be brought into the theory from the outside It is obvious, however, that when some initial state must be achieved precisely by chance in order to produce the initial state of the next occurrence, also precisely defined, and so on, then a certainty that transcends the realm of probabilities becomes an unknown, about which nothing can be said except that "something very unusual took place.”</bq> <bq caption="Location 1216-1217">To the question "How often does what happened with the Sun and the Earth happen in the Universe?" there is no answer yet, because we are not sure in which category of events to place the case.</bq> <bq caption="Location 1241-1243">This factor reduces the enigma of the initial state of the Universe to an argument ad hominem: if conditions had been very different, the question would not have arisen, since there would have been no one to ask it.</bq> <bq caption="Location 1263-1264">The similarity of my speculations to the theories that appeared later gives me courage to speculate further.</bq> <bq caption="Location 1369-1373">Faith as well as science endowed the visible world with properties that eliminated blind, incalculable chance as the author of all events. The war of good and evil present in all religions does not always end, in every faith, with the victory of good, but in every one it establishes a clear order of existence. The sacred as well as the profane rest on that universal order Thus, chance, the ultimate arbiter of existence, was not present in any of the beliefs of the past.* Science, too, long resisted acknowledging the creative and incalculable role of chance in the shaping of reality.</bq> <bq caption="Location 1380-1382">Culture exists and has always existed in order to make every accident, every kind of arbitrariness, appear in a benevolent or at least necessary light The common denominator of all cultures, the source of ritual, of all commandments, of every taboo, is this: for everything there is one and only one measure.</bq> <bq caption="Location 1389-1393">The huge clouds of dark, cold gases circling in the arms of galaxies are slowly undergoing fragmentation into parts as unpredictable as shattered glass The laws of Nature act not in spite of random events but through them. The statistical fury of the stars, a billion times aborting in order to give birth once to life, a life slain by a chance catastrophe in millions of its species in order to yield intelligence once—this is the rule, not the exception, in the Universe.</bq> <bq caption="Location 1405-1407">The history of science shows that each picture of the world, in turn, was thought to be the last; then it was revised, only to crumble eventually like the pattern of a broken mosaic, and the labor of putting it together was taken up anew by the next generation.</bq> <bq caption="Location 1416-1419">It may be that someday a deus ex machina will cope with these inhuman, overcomplicated measurements, inaccessible to our poor animal brains: an alienated, human-initiated machine intelligence—or, rather, the product, pretermechani-cal, of a human-launched evolution of synthetic mind. But here I overstep the twenty-first century into a darkness that no speculation can illumine.</bq>