Divine Plagiarism

"The world has changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost, for none now live that remember it." - Lord of the Rings.

Once upon a time, I had a Nintendo gaming console. Super Mario Brothers and all of that. I remember that the system used to lock up, generally when you were at some super-critical point in the game. At that point, you'd have no choice other than to press the reset button and lose all your hard-earned progress. The residual charge drained from the capacitors, all the carefully ordered ones and zeros all became zeroes, and all the lives and continues and power-ups you'd accumulated were all consumed in an instant by Ohm's law. As frustrating as it was to restart the game from scratch, it was better than staring at a frozen television screen with Mario stuck forever in midair. After all, the only way to beat a malfunctioning game is to press reset and play it through again.

Of course, Noah's Flood carries with it a bit more gravitas than a locked up game of Donkey Kong (given the minor little detail that 'pretty much everybody died.') It does have this one similarity, though: the post-reset characters know nothing about the progress made before the reset. Any prediluvian marvels of technology, architecture or scholarship would have all been consumed. Yet, with the sole surviving technological marvel of domesticated agriculture and livestock (three if you count boats and clothes,) it took humanity only a millennium or two to re-conquer the Earth. Ferocious tigers and enormous elephants populate our zoos; the great killer Smallpox still survives, but only at our own behest. Not only have we conquered the Earth, we've conquered each other. Families became tribes, tribes became cities, cities became nations, and nations became empires. And all of that only brings us to the dawn of history and the hazy memory of the Kiengir people (named Sumerians by their Akkadian successors.) It begs the question: if we did so much in so little time since the Flood, how far had we gotten before the big Nintendo reset?

What follows is nothing more than a whimsical intellectual exercise; I am not attempting to define any new doctrine. I just find it curious that for all the value we place on progress, the author of Genesis sees no need to record any of the marvels and monuments of the men that lived between Adam and Noah. I picture a Bedouin's humble tent pitched at an oasis within view of Ozymandias' statue. A thirsty traveler approaches the Bedouin seeking water and shelter, and takes no notice of the great and forgotten king who can offer neither. So whatever happened before the Flood is of as little consequence as Ozymandias' reign. Nonetheless, I find the prospect of forgotten marvels fascinating in the light of our triumphalist technological hubris. The very few documents that survived from the library in Alexandria demonstrate a very advanced understanding of mathematics and philosophy on the part of the ancients. The West's Renaissance was born out of the rediscovery of a few works of the Ancient Greek world. Imagine the Renaissance that would have been born from the complete set of ancient works. If that was only the ancient Antediluvian world, how many of Prediluvan man's marvels were claimed by the deep? We'll never know. And it doesn't matter in the least. Progress couldn't save prediluvian man any more than it can save antediluvian man.

Just for fun, though, we'll explore the possibilities for a bit. First, the Noah Almighty scenario. Imagine that God tells you to build a boat, and you and your family (along with all the animals) are the only ones that end up boarding. As a brief aside, notice the dimensions of the Ark. The man lived a long time, and he had his family to help him, but the fact remains that the guy built an aircraft carrier in his back yard. Even if I was in the best shape of my life, and had a couple hundred years to work with, I doubt I could amass the capital to build a boat of that size, much less build it myself. It causes one to wonder what kind of technology was available to Noah. Anyways, back to the experiment. You get to bring with you whatever you want. You can bring your hairdryers, iPods, toothpaste, wristwatches, books and even your espresso machine. Here's the problem. When you land, there's not going to be a 110V power grid, or AA batteries, or gasoline to run your generator. So pretty much you're back to sixth-grade-camp, no matter what you brought. Furthermore, even if you were smart enough to bring along some solar cells, within a generation or so they'll break and your kids won't be able to fix them. Even if they somehow get an entropy waiver and don't ever break, at some point your kids will forget how to use them, and there's no Internet for finding instructions. When you tell your grandkids about skyscrapers and TV shows and air conditioning, they'll have no frame of reference. They'll do well to spend their brain bytes learning how to hunt with spears, or plant barley, because they're going to get awfully hungry and hearing about McDonald's isn't going to make them any more full. Pretty much, if we re-ran the Noah scenario today with modern people, the story turns out about the same.

Now that we've explored the effects of the reset button, let's imagine how far we could have gotten in the game before it froze up. We'll set our constraints using a very literal interpretation of scripture. Adding together all the Prediluvian 'begats,' we set our timeframe's minimum bound at about a millennium and a half. We've got a good amount of time to play with at the very least. Now throw in the demographic differences of the world before the flood. Man lived to about nine hundred years or so, and was fertile between (at a minimum) 50 and 500. That's 450 years of childbearing, which when you throw in the geometrically expanded lifespan pretty much blows the demographic transition model right out of the water. Doing some very rough pilot math, you can easily surpass our present world population by orders of magnitude. Whether that was the case or not, no one can say. But it is at least a possibility. In addition to this, a millennium is a long time to learn. Imagine how much more progress we would make if our Newtons and Einsteins stuck around for a couple hundred more years. Add in the pre-Tower of Babel detail, where man can collaborate and communicate without having to invest in Rosetta Stone software, and the possible advances in knowledge would be staggering. Finally, newly-exiled mankind had fresh memories of the wonders of the Garden, and entropy had only just begun to wear away at him. Fallen man is certainly less than undiminished man; perhaps in the same way, tired long-fallen man wrapped in scar is not nearly as sharp as newly-fallen man with his wounds still fresh. Given just a millennium, prediluvian man could have easily overtaken our vaunted modern technologies.

This is not to say they would have followed the developmental paths that we've chosen. Every society and technology makes a number of largely arbitrary choices about which branches of technology they want to develop. Since technology is self-catalyzing, your next set of choices is determined by your last set of choices, so even one choice can shape your future developmental alternatives. AC power vs. DC power, rice or wheat, Betamax or VHS, oxcarts or human porters, all of these were relatively arbitrary choices in one place or another, and all of these shaped the development of future technologies. At some point, we decided that metal was the way to go, starting with an iron age, and then moving to bronze, and then to copper (or the other way around, I forget,) and then to steel, and then to gears, and axles, and aluminum. And from that construct, we used metal to shape our information technologies through magnetic fields and circuits. From there, we created human networking technologies tied irrevocably to the straight-line constraints of plastic and metal.

Perhaps a mankind with a fresh memory of the Garden would have opted for different choices. Perhaps they would have stayed with biotechnology, and used some mix of life and death (the building blocks of the post-fall world) to vicariously accomplish their will. Having forgotten the Garden, we use all-dead metal and plastic tools and consider agrarian technologies backwards and inferior. For all the wonders of the industrial age, I know of no factory that can convert solar energy, water and carbon dioxide into high grade carbohydrates with anything near the efficiency of the ancient wheat plant, nor of any process that can synthesize high-grade protein from low-grade carbohydrates nearly as effectively as old Bessy (or whatever you call your cows.) The ultra-nouveau field of nanotechnology attempts to build 'designer molecules' and particle-level machines. Cells have been doing that for as long as any of us can remember. The DNA-RNA protein synthesis process creates custom-built molecules perfectly suited for remarkably complex processes within an incredibly complex organism. The Krebbs cycle performs combustion far better than any high-bypass turbofan I know of. The pop-scientist (de-emphasis on 'scientist') Carl Sagan hails nanotechnology as the crowning achievement of technology. Even if we succeed beyond our wildest dreams in this field, all we will have done is recreate biology. Perhaps our forgotten ancestors skipped this whole circular process and found ways to directly subjugate nature to their will, rather than working via proxy as we do. Perhaps they would view our machines as clunky and primitive. The world is not Sid Meier's Civilization IV: there are many possible technological paths, and we choose them together through competition and cooperation. Nothing says that our ancestors had to choose ours. Nonetheless, whatever path they chose, they seemed to fare well upon it. In the course of two generations, Cain's children had already invented musical instruments, ironworking and cities. Given that they had at least twenty more generations before the flood, I venture to guess they would have gone pretty far down the path of technological progress.

And here is the problem with progress. Whether they used similar or different technologies than ours, they seemed to have used them for the same things that we use our own. We've achieved unprecedented connectivity through the Internet, integrating an incredible amount of real-time knowledge and reference material. We use that technological marvel to more efficiently exploit and objectify women and children. We set out to discover the world, and we proceed to enslave the men we discover. We finally vanquish Smallpox, and then we bring it back to life in order to kill each other. And what technological advancement have we not converted into a weapon? From the Genesis account, it seems the men of Noah's time were not so different from us. For whatever progress they had achieved, they could never progress beyond themselves.

Progress raises questions that it cannot answer. It's like a key. The question is whether you're using it to open a treasure chest or Pandora's box. Progress without an end becomes a monster: "We do what we must because we can." Technology is simply another means of power, and power is simply the ability to do stuff you want to do. But what tells you what you want to do? This is the problem… more often than not, humanity seems to want to destroy itself. Until the middle half of this last century, humanity did not yet have the collective ability to destroy itself. Are we any the better for having it? And were we not out of time, this would segue-way nicely into a discussion on the Tower of Babel. But we are.