“That’s right. It will end shortly, however. The revolution worked fine so long as there was always more space to expand into, but now there just isn’t any more.”
“I suppose we could export it to other planets.”
Ishmael shook his head. “Even that would be a stopgap measure, Julie. Let’s say that six billion inhabitants represents a reasonable planetary maximum for your species (though I suspect that six billion is actually much more than a healthy maximum). You’ll reach that six billion well before the end of this century. And let’s say that you had instantaneous access to every habitable planet in the universe, to which you could immediately begin exporting people. At present your population is doubling every thirty-five years or so, so in thirty-five years you’d fill a second planet. After seventy years four planets would be full. After a hundred and five years eight planets would be full. And so on. At this doubling rate a billion planets would be full by the year 3000 or thereabouts. I know that sounds incredible, but, trust me, the arithmetic is correct. By about 3300 a hundred billion planets would be full; this is the number you could occupy in this entire galaxy if each and every star had one habitable planet. If you continued to grow at your present rate, a second galaxy would be full in another thirty-five years. Four galaxies would be full thirty-five years later, and eight would be full thirty-five years after that. By the year 4000 the planets of a million galaxies would be full. By the year 5000 the planets of a trillion galaxies would be full—in other words, every planet in the universe. All in just three thousand years and working under the improbable assumption that every single star in the universe has a habitable planet.”
I told him these numbers were hard to believe.
“Do the arithmetic yourself sometime, then you won’t have to believe it, you’ll know it. Whatever grows without limit must inevitably end by overwhelming the universe. The anthropologist Marvin Harris once calculated that if the human population doubled every generation—every twenty years, as opposed to every thirty-five—the entire universe would be converted into a solid mass of human protoplasm in less than two thousand years.”
I sat there for a while trying to bring it all down to a manageable size. At last I told him about someone I knew, a girl who almost went off the deep end when someone finally got around to telling her where babies come from. “She must have grown up at the bottom of a well or something,” I told him.
He rewarded me with a look of polite inquiry.
“I guess she felt betrayed by God first, that he would have come up with such a nasty method for human procreation. Then she felt betrayed by everyone around her who had known and hadn’t told her. Then she felt humiliated to know that she was the last person on the face of the earth to hear this very simple fact.”
“I take it this has some relevance to our conversation?”
“Yes. I’d like to know if I’m the last person on the face of the earth to hear what you’ve been telling me today in this story of the dancers.”
“First, let’s make sure we know what I’ve been telling you. What does the story accomplish?”
That wasn’t too tough a question. This was what I’d been thinking about as I traveled the air inside Pearson’s. I said, “It demolishes the lie that ten thousand years ago everyone gave up foraging and settled down to become farmers. It demolishes the lie that this was an event that everyone had been waiting for from the beginning of time. It demolishes the lie that, because our way has become the dominant way, this must prove it’s the way people are ‘meant
’ to live.”
“So, are you the last person on the face of the earth to know all this? Hardly. There are many who, on hearing the story, would feel that they ‘knew it all along’ or suspected that it was ‘something like that.’ There are many who might have worked it out—who have all the facts at their disposal—but who didn’t. The will to work it out isn’t there for them.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean that people seldom look very hard for things they don’t want to find. They avert their eyes from such things. I should add that this is not an observation of any great originality on my part.”
“I’m lost,” I told him after a bit. “I think we’ve wandered off the main road again.”
“We weren’t wandering, Julie—at least not aimlessly. Some of what you need to examine can’t be seen from the main road, so we have to take a secondary road now and then. But these always lead back to the main road. Do you see where it’s leading?”
“I have a sense of it, but I’m not sure.”
“The main road leads to why the people of your culture have to look off-planet to find wisdom—into the heavens, home of God and his angels; into outer space, home of ‘advanced’ alien races; into the Great Beyond, home of the spirits of the departed.”
“Wow,” I said. “Is that where we’re heading! It never occurred to me that my daydream fit this sort of pattern. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?”
“That’s what I’m saying. You perceive yourselves to be deprived of essential knowledge. You’ve always been so. It’s your nature to be so. The very inaccessibility of this knowledge makes it special. It’s inaccessible because it’s special, and it’s special because it’s inaccessible. In fact, it’s so special that you can only access it through supernormal means—prayer, s´eance, astrology, meditation, past-life reading, channeling, crystal gazing, card reading, and so on.”
“In other words, hoogy-moogy,” I put in.
Ishmael glared at me for a moment, then blinked, twice. “Hoogy-moogy?”
“Everything you just mentioned. Séances, astrology, channeling, angels, all that stuff.”
He gave his head a little shake, the way you do a salt-shaker to see if there’s anything in it. Then he went on. “What I want you to see is that the people of your culture accept the fact that this knowledge is inaccessible. It doesn’t amaze them or even puzzle them. It needs no explanation. They fully expect this knowledge to be difficult to come by. You, for example, felt sure that nothing less than a galactic tour could deliver it to you.”
“Yeah, I do see that now.”
Ishmael shook his head “I still haven’t quite managed to articulate what I’m getting at. Let me try again. Thinkers aren’t limited by what they know, because they can always increase what they know. Rather they’re limited by what puzzles them, because there’s no way to become curious about something that doesn’t puzzle you. If a thing falls outside the range of people’s curiosity, then they simply cannot make inquiries about it. It constitutes a blind spot—a spot of blindness that you can’t even know is there until someone draws your attention to it.”
“Which is what you’re trying to do here with me.”
“Exactly. The two of us are exploring an unknown territory—a whole continent that lies inside your culture’s blind spot.” He paused for a moment, then said that this seemed like a good place to stop for the day. I guess I agreed. I wasn’t exactly tired, but I did feel as though I’d just finished three pieces of pie.