A Perfect Vacuum (21 page)

But the same reasoning holds for those ancestors of the line of the Kouskas and the line of the nurse who were not at all human yet, being creatures who led a quadrumanous and arboreal existence in the Lower Eolithic, when the first Paleopithecanthropus, having overtaken one of these quadrumanes and perceiving that it was a female with which he had to deal, possessed her beneath the eucalyptus tree that grew in the place where today stands the Mala Strana in Prague. As a result of the mixing of the chromosomes of that lubricious Paleopithecanthropus and that quadrumanous protohuman primatrice, there arose that type of meiosis and that linkage of gene loci which, transmitted through the next thirty thousand generations, produced on the visage of the young lady nurse that very smile, faintly reminiscent of the smile of Mona Lisa, from the canvas of Leonardo, which so enchanted the young surgeon Kouska. But this same eucalyptus could have grown, could it not, four meters away, in which case the quadrumaness, fleeing from
the Paleopithecanthropus that pursued her, would not have stumbled on the tree's thick root and gone sprawling, and therewith, clambering up the tree in time, would not have got pregnant, and if she had not got pregnant, then, transpiring a bit differently, Hannibal's crossing of the Alps, the Crusades, the Hundred Years' War, the taking by the Turks of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Moscow campaign of Napoleon, as well as several dozen trillion like events, undergoing minimal changes, would have led to a situation in which in no wise could Professor Benedykt Kouska any longer have been born, from which we can see that the range of the chances of his existence contains within it a subclass of probabilities that comprises the distribution of all the eucalyptus trees that grew in the location of modern-day Prague roughly 349,000 years ago. Now, those eucalyptuses grew there because, while fleeing from sabertoothed tigers, great herds of weakened mammoths had eaten their fill of eucalyptus flowers and then, suffering indigestion from them (the flower sorely stings the palate), had drunk copious quantities of water from the Vltava; that water, having at the time purgative properties, caused them to evacuate en masse, thanks to which eucalyptus seeds were planted where previously eucalypti had never been; but had the water not been sulfurized by the influx of a mountain tributary of the then Vltava, the mammoths, not getting the runs from it, would not have occasioned the growing of the eucalytpus grove on the site of what is now Prague, the quadrumanal female would not have gone sprawling in her flight from the Paleopithecanthropus, and there would not have arisen that gene locus which imparted to the face of the young lady the Mona Lisa-like smile that captivated the young surgeon; and so, but for the diarrhea of the mammoths, Professor Benedykt Kouska also would have not come into the world. It should be noted, moreover, that the water of the Vltava underwent sulfurization approximately two and a half million years B.C., this on account of a displacement in the main geosyncline of the tectonic formation that was then giving rise to the center of the Tatra Mountains; this formation caused the expulsion of sulfurous gases from the marlacious strata of the Lower Jurassic, because in the region of the Dinaric Alps there was an earthquake, which was caused by a meteor that had a mass on the order of a million tons; this meteor came from a swarm of Leonids, and had it fallen not in the Dinaric Alps but a little farther on, the geosyncline would not have buckled, the sulfurous deposit would not have reached the air and sulfurized the Vltava, and the Vltava would not have caused the diarrhea of the mammoths, from which one can see that had a meteor not fallen 2.5 million years ago on the Dinaric Alps, Professor Kouska then, too, could not have been born.

Professor Kouska calls attention to the erroneous conclusion which some people are inclined to draw from his argument. They think that from what has just been set forth it follows that the entire Universe, mind you, is something in the nature of a machine, a machine so assembled and working in such a way as to enable Professor Kouska to be born. Obviously, this is complete nonsense. Let us imagine that, a billion years before its genesis, an observer wishes to compute the chances of the Earth's coming into being. He will not be able to foresee exactly what shape the planet-making vortex will give to the nucleus of the future Earth; he can compute neither its future mass nor its chemical composition with any degree of precision. Nonetheless he predicts, on the basis of his knowledge of astrophysics, and of his familiarity with the theory of gravitation and the theory of star structure, that the Sun will have a family of planets and that among these planets there will revolve about it a planet No. 3, counting from the center of the system out; and this same planet may be considered Earth, though it look different from what the prediction has declared, because a planet ten billion tons heavier than the Earth or having two small moons instead of one large, or covered with oceans over a higher percentage of its surface, would still be, surely, an Earth.

On the other hand, a Professor Kouska predicted by someone half a million years B.C., should he be born as a two-legged marsupial or as a yellow-skinned woman, or as a Buddhist monk, would obviously no longer be Professor Kouska, albeit—perhaps—still a person. For objects such as suns, planets, clouds, rocks, are not in any way unique, whereas all living organisms are unique. Each man is, as it were, the first prize in a lottery, in the kind of lottery, moreover, where the winning ticket is a teragigamegamulticentillion-to-one shot. Why, then, do we not daily feel the astronomically monstrous minuteness of the chance of our own or another's coming into the world? For the reason, answers Professor Kouska, that even in the case of that which is most unlikely to happen, if it happens, then it happens! And also because in an ordinary lottery we see the vast number of losing tickets along with the single one that wins, whereas in the lottery of existence the tickets that miss are nowhere to be seen. “The chances that lose in the lottery of being are invisible!” explains Professor Kouska. For, surely, to lose in that sweepstakes amounts to not being born, and he who has not been born cannot be said to be, not a whit. We quote the author now, starting on line 24 on page 619 of Volume I
(De Impossibilitate Vitae):

“Some people come into the world as the issue of unions that were arranged long in advance, on both the spear and distaff sides, so that the future father of the given individual and his future mother, even when children, were destined for each other. A man who sees the light of day as a child of such a marriage might receive the impression that the probability of his existence was considerable, in contradistinction to one who learns that his father met his mother in the course of the great migrations of wartime, or that quite simply he was conceived because some hussar of Napoleon, while making his escape from the Berezina, took not only a mug of water from the lass he came upon at the edge of the village but also her maidenhead. To such a man it might seem that had the hussar hurried more, feeling the Cossack hundreds at his back, or had his mother not been looking for God knows what at the edge of the village, but stayed at home by the chimney corner as befitted her, then he would never have been, or in other words that the chance of his existence hung on a thread in comparison with the chance of him whose parents had been destined for each other in advance.

“Such notions are mistaken, because it makes absolutely no sense to assert that the calculation of the probability of anyone's birth has to be begun from the coming into the world of the future father and the future mother of the given individual. Making
that
the zero point on the probability scale. If we have a labyrinth composed of a thousand rooms connected by a thousand doors, then the probability of going from the beginning to the end of the labyrinth is determined by the sum of all the choices in all the consecutive rooms through which passes the seeker of the way, and not by the isolated probability of his finding the right door in some single room. If he takes a wrong turn in room No. 100, then he will be every bit as lost and as likely not to regain his freedom as if he took the wrong turn in the first or the thousandth room. Similarly, there is no reason to assert that only my birth was subject to the laws of chance, whereas the births of my parents were not so subject, or those of their parents, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, grandmothers, greatgrandmothers, etc., back to the birth of life on Earth. And it makes no sense to say that the fact of any specific human individual's existence is a phenomenon of very low probability. Very low, relative to what? From where is the calculation to be made? Without the fixing of a zero point, i.e., of a beginning place for a scale of computation, measurement—and therefore the estimation of probability—becomes an empty word.

“It does not follow, from my reasoning, that my coming into the world was assured or predetermined back before the Earth took form; quite the contrary, what follows is that I could not have been at all and no one would have so much as noticed. Everything that statistics has to say on the subject of the prognostication of individual births is rubbish. For it holds that every man, howsoever unlikely he be in himself, is still possible as a realization of certain chances; meanwhile, I have demonstrated that, having before one any individual whatever—Mucek the baker, for example—one can say the following: it is possible to select a moment in the past, a moment prior to his birth, such that the prediction of Mucek the baker's coming to be, made at that moment, will have a probability
as near zero as desired.
When my parents found themselves in the marriage bed, the chances of my coming into the world worked out to, let us say, one in one hundred thousand (taking into account, among other things, the infant mortality rate, fairly high in wartime). During the siege of the fortress of Przemyśl the chances of my being born equaled only one in a billion; in the year 1900, one in a trillion; in 1800, one in a quadrillion, and so on. A hypothetical observer computing the chances of my birth under the eucalyptus, at the Mala Strana in the time of the Interglacial, after the migration of the mammoths and their stomach disorder, would set the chances of my ever seeing the light of day at one in a centillion. Magnitudes of the order of giga appear when the point of estimation is moved back a billion years, of the order of tera, back three billion years, etc.

“In other words, one can always find a point on the time axis from which an estimate of the chances of any person's birth yields an improbability as great as one likes, that is to say, an impossibility, because a probability that approaches zero is the same thing as an improbability that approaches infinity. In saying this, we do not suggest that neither we nor anyone else exists in this world. On the contrary: neither in our own being nor in another's do we entertain the least doubt. In saying what we have said, we merely repeat what physics claims, for it is from the standpoint of physics and not of common sense that in the world not a single man exists or ever did. And here is the proof: physics maintains that that which has one chance in a centillion is impossible, because that which has one chance in a centillion, even assuming that the event in question belongs to a set of events that take place every second, cannot be expected to happen in the Universe.

“The number of seconds that will elapse between the present day and the end of the Universe is less than a centillion. The stars will give up all their energy much sooner. And therefore the time of duration of the Universe in its present form must be shorter than the time needed to await a thing that takes place once in one centillion seconds. From the standpoint of physics, to wait for an event so little likely is equivalent to waiting for an event that most definitely will not come to pass. Physics calls such phenomena ‘thermodynamic miracles.' To these belong, for example, the freezing of water in a pot standing over a flame, the rising from the floor of fragments of a broken glass and their joining together to make a whole glass, etc. Calculation shows that such ‘miracles' are nevertheless more probable than a thing whose chance is one in one centillion. We should add now that our estimate has so far taken into account only half of the matter, namely the macroscopic data. Besides these, the birth of a specific individual is contingent on circumstances which are microscopic, i.e., the question of which sperm combines with which egg in a given pair of persons. Had my mother conceived me at a different day and hour from what took place, then I would have been born not myself but someone other, which can be seen from my mother's having in fact conceived at a different day and hour, namely a year and a half before my birth, and given birth then to a little girl, my sister, regarding whom it should require no proof, I think, to say that she is not myself. This microstatistics also would have to be considered in the estimation of the chances of my arising, and when included in the reckoning it raises the centillions of improbability to the myriaillions.

“So, then, from the standpoint of thermodynamic physics, the existence of any man is a phenomenon of cosmic impossibility, since so improbable as to be unforeseeable. When it assumes as given that certain people exist, physics may predict that these people will give birth to other people, but as to which specific individuals will be born, physics must either be silent or fall into complete absurdity. And therefore either physics is in error when it proclaims the universal validity of its theory of probability, or people do not exist, and likewise dogs, sharks, mosses, lichens, tapeworms, bats, and liverworts, since what is said holds for all that fives.
Ex physicali positione vita impossibilis est, quod erat demonstrandum
.”

With these words concludes the work
De Impossibilitate Vitae,
which actually represents a huge preparation for the matter of the second of the two volumes. In his second volume the author proclaims the futility of predictions of the future that are founded on probabilism. He proposes to show that history contains no facts but those that are the most thoroughly improbable from the standpoint of probability theory. Professor Kouska sets an imaginary futurologist down on the threshold of the twentieth century and endows him with all the knowledge that was then available, in order to put to this figure a series of questions. For instance: “Do you consider it probable that soon there will be discovered a silvery metal, similar to lead, capable of destroying life on Earth should two hemispheres composed of this metal be brought together by a simple movement of the hands, to make of them something resembling a large orange? Do you consider it possible that this old carriage here, in which Karl Benz, Esq. has mounted a rattling one-and-a-half-horsepower engine, will before long multiply to such an extent that from its asphyxiating fumes and combustion exhausts day will turn into night in the great cities, and the problem of placing this vehicle somewhere, when the drive is finished, will grow into the main misfortune of the mightiest metropolises? Do you consider it probable that owing to the principle of fireworks and kicking, people will soon begin taking walks upon the Moon, while their perambulations will at the very same moment be visible to hundreds of millions of other people in their homes on Earth? Do you consider it possible that soon we will be able to make artificial heavenly bodies, equipped with instruments that enable one from cosmic space to keep track of the movement of any man in a field or on a city street? Do you think it likely that a machine will be built that plays chess better than you, composes music, translates from language to language, and performs in the space of a few minutes calculations which all the accountants, auditors, and bookkeepers in the world put together could not accomplish in a lifetime? Do you consider it possible that very shortly there will arise in the center of Europe huge industrial plants in which living people will be burned in ovens, and that these unfortunates will number in the
millions
?”