Academician Prokhor Zakharov and The University of Planet
The confident assertion of the University of Planet is this: certain fundamental constants govern our physical reality, and all are potentially knowable. Their proof? Over the past 300,000 years, the same humans who once feared to walk the dangerous East African savanna pulled themselves up by the bootstraps to cross the stars. We owe it all to just two simple tools: observation and experimentation.
On Chiron, the same rules will apply. Like Earth before it, this new world must yield up its secrets to the diligent student. We have only to gather our greatest minds and furnish them with the necessary resources: time, energy, information, and freedom from the unreasoning fear that can be so deadly to progress. This is no gamble. It is a guarantee.
To be alive is to be curious. The only terror greater than the unknown is not to know. In this way, the student and researcher are like Carl Sagan’s archetypal wanderer in Pale Blue Dot, following a compulsion whose source lies a million years in their evolutionary past. When we hear a noise, we turn instinctively. We do it even as swaddled babes, without ever having to be told.
For Zakharov and his band of fellow problem-solvers, the Alpha Centauri mission is an irresistible lure. An opportunity to ask and answer questions as yet unimagined. It is also, importantly, their great call to service, for who could be more critical to the fate of an interstellar expedition than the physicist, the astronomer, the engineer?
There is more to the University than just the urge to understand. Zakharov’s archetype is technologist, after all. He is, simply, a creator of tools. He promises to invent the things that will save us. Far from the stereotype of the monkish recluse who aspires to leave the world behind, his type of thinker is the forefront of grappling with the great problems of our time.
The history of our species is a history of tools. Creations tangible and intangible. Language, fire, the stirrup, the corporation, the computer, the atom bomb. With our many insights, ideas, and devices, some wonderful, some cruel, we changed the world and ourselves. We leveled mountains and raised them up, drained oceans and filled them, visited places over the horizon and above the clouds.
Technology has made us. It has been the salvation of countless millions. How many have cheated death or immiseration thanks to bifocals, surgeries, or artificial insulin? How many masterpieces are made by artists on statins? How many sports heroes go on to play again after being injured? How much better is life because our loved one’s cancer was put into remission by chemotherapy drugs?
In early 1999, when SMAC was first released, it seemed reasonable to suppose that we were standing on the precipice of a new era. That in less than a quarter-century we would be able to decide what our future children would look like, to cure the AIDS virus, or even to make perfect clones of ourselves. But there is no guarantee that the forward march of progress will not be stopped. Science takes money, and money flows only at the sufferance of politics.
However tempting it may be to believe that we have entered an age of inevitable progress, this is simply untrue. Consider. Boarding the Concorde supersonic transport in New York’s John F. Kennedy airport in 1983, you could have arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris in less than four hours. Today, the average length of the same trip is nearly twice that. Take also the case of nuclear power. Demand for electricity is now outgrowing supplies. Atomic energy is safe, clean, and potentially abundant. But in fifty years, the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission has authorized just two new nuclear power plants. According to the nuclear power industry, current regulations make new construction inconceivable. Utilities are limping instead toward low-yield alternatives. As an arborist might ring-bark one branch of a fruit-bearing tree to conserve nutrients for another, we see that technological progress is branching. Given an uncertain future, the money once lavished on nuclear energy has largely been diverted elsewhere. Progress along these lines has not been stopped completely, but it has certainly been crippled.
To the University, this is not only blasphemy, but a kind of willful suicide. Back to the prophetic Sagan: "I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness." The politicians found it easier to invent problems for money than to convince their voters to spend money on inventions that could solve problems. And so the scientist became the wanderer.
Such a view is not entirely unfair, of course. There is a dark side to technology. Tools can be used in the service of evil as well as of good. In just twelve words, Hilaire Belloc explained holocausts: “Whatever happens, we have got. The Maxim gun, and they have not.” After Trinity, Robert Oppenheimer never again had a good night’s rest. Once we have a tool to hand, we are tempted to use it. Studies show that the suicide rate quadruples in homes that have a pistol.
And can we not admit to ourselves that our organizational capacities are not in all cases sufficient to manage the results of our scientific progress? Chernobyl, Bhopal, and the Deepwater Horizon disaster—these are just three profound reminders that progress has a human cost. Audiences thrilled to the 1993 blockbuster Jurassic Park in part because it seemed plausible that in not so many years to come, we would have the power to resurrect creatures once confined to art and imagination. Yet through the mouthpiece of chaos theorist Ian Malcolm, Michael Chrichton issued a prophetic warning: can does not mean should. In a great irony, the lawyer, Donald Gennaro—representative of an entire profession devoted to managing risk—sees only the profit to be made at John Hammond’s wonder park. Rather, it is the archaeologist, Ellie Sattler, and the game warden, Robert Muldoon—two people who have every reason to hope for Hammond’s success—who spot the first signs of breakdown. Sattler warns that Hammond’s work is shallow, and we soon learn that he has not created true dinosaurs, but only new creatures that are derivative. Muldoon recognizes that the thinking and safeguards suitable for apex predators of the late twentieth century are inadequate to monsters from an earlier epoch. Disaster follows. Predictably.
Here, let Hammond stand in for the University. To them, the “can” is what matters. There is never a question of “should.” And this makes perfect sense considering where Zakharov comes from. The Politburo always knew they were better-informed about the needs of the people than the people themselves. Zakharov is the ultimate technocrat—the person of learning whose education and accomplishment suit him to rule over fellow men. In this modern era, it is not the will of god or priests, nor the strength of one’s sword arm, that determines fitness to govern. Weighty decisions should be left to the experts: those who have been trained to know. Methodical. Dispassionate. Fact-based.
The "mob" is stupid--and superstitious. Ruled by the debilitating fear that is the sad lot of those who have never learned much about the world around them. To be so incurious is selfish. To propagate false doctrines is worse. There are moral failings here, as much as intellectual ones. Derelictions of duty that forfeit an individual's claim to the privilege of self-government, for they have already proven themselves unworthy.
The problems with such opinions are obvious. What do the experts know? Truth is a many-splendored thing. When, exactly, does life begin? Should a medical patient be allowed to refuse a reliable treatment? What metrics and time horizons should be used to calculate the benefits and the harm that will arise from siting a borehole here, a nutrient farm there? During a pandemic, who decides how much risk is too much? These are not scientific questions. They are metaphysical ones. A scientist is trained only to be descriptive. If a politician has but one virtue, it is their direct accountability to the people. Technocrats are civil servants, twice removed.
But Prokhor Zakharov is the stereotypical showcase product of the Soviet system of science: an authentic genius who produces groundbreaking ideas almost as quickly as a production line turns out widgets, is acidly critical of religion, and does not shirk to sacrifice on the altar of scientific advancement. His is a household name: the “inventor” of cold fusion (or at least the one who confirmed it could be done), the technical underwriter of the Soviet space program, and architect of Unity’s propulsion system. Many have suggested that, in practical terms, Zakharov has done more for human progress than Albert Einstein. It is easy to see why such a man might think himself eminently qualified to tell others what is best.
As the face of Soviet science, Zakharov often jousted publicly with his contemporaries on the other side of the Iron Curtain. These "conversations" covered a wide range of subjects, from the viability of artificial intelligence to whether space exploration should be privatized. In this manner, Zakharov became familiar with and to the luminaries in any of a dozen fields, including the master biologist Deirdre Skye, the geneticist Tamineh Pahlavi, the behavioral scientist Aleigha Cohen, the artificial intelligence theorist Johann Anhaldt, the civilian space enthusiast Nwabudike Morgan, and the bureaucrat, Pravin Lal. Some of this dialogue was part of the international debate about whether and how Earth could be saved. Even as he advised the U.N. on how to build its ark, Zakharov remained outspoken in his belief that humans already possessed the technology necessary to avert cataclysm. Alas, no one listened. In the name of respect for what its constituents wished to be true, the U.N. abdicated its leadership responsibilities. We had the vaccine, the stem cell treatment, the genetically-modified organism, the thinking machine. And yet we did not use them when they were needed most.
To the Soviets, the Unity Project was a worthwhile endeavor in which they hoped to take a leading role--a testament to the success of their ideology. They were quick to recommend Zakharov. The U.N., for its part, was equally quick to accept. Zakharov was a symbol no less important than Jonathan Garland—the best son of a superpower, pledged to the greatest project of all time. Zakharov, an old man by 2071, had no use for patriotism, but willingly risked the very high likelihood of death during the cryogenic hibernation process if only for the opportunity to study the first extraterrestrial lifeforms ever encountered by humans.
Notwithstanding the achievements that made him a Nobel laureate, Zakharov is a deeply flawed individual. His two great failings are lack of empathy and vaunting self-regard. At best, he is coldly indifferent to anyone who does not meet his intellectual standards; at worst, they are impediments that must be overcome. Auditors can be baffled, politicians dazzled, naysayers jailed, institutional rivals defrocked.
U.N. bureaucracy did not exactly suit Zakharov. His Soviet masters had always forgiven him the high human cost of his “progress.” They cared only for results and were more than happy to elide the uncongenial realities of the industrial-scientific process. Many of Zakharov's achievements were facilitated through industrial espionage carried out by the KGB and allied agencies. Taking the work of lesser men, Zakharov improved upon it. (And why shouldn't he? Was not Werner von Braun the father of the great "American" space program?) Soviet researchers did not always have money like the Americans and the Japanese, but they could and did call upon a steady supply of conscripts and prisoners. In Zakharov own words, “American science is guided by accountants and computers. Soviet science is guided by scientists.” Over a long career, Zakharov became notorious for pushing safety margins past the breaking point, leading one American intelligence officer to gibe, “You shall know him by the procession of lead-lined coffins in his wake.”
For the U.N., these methods were unthinkable. After decades of going virtually unquestioned, Zakharov’s verdict on his new constraints was swift and deeply negative. Once planetside, his impatience only multiplied, but the shackles were off. He is prone to describing the threat of mindworms, for example, in almost apocalyptic terms, insisting the number of test subjects harmed in his lab work will be far exceeded by the number of lives ultimately saved from the mindworm menace if his work succeeds.
Zakharov governs his faction according to the same model in which he thrived for most of his life: that of the research institute, a hierarchy dominated by the highly-educated and organized according to their needs and preferences. Decisions are taken by committees of the like-minded, subject to his personal veto. Spare resources are devoted to the formal, physical, and life sciences—what they call “the practical matters.” Humanities and the social sciences are disfavored.
The University is obsessed with the blessings that can be got through formal learning. Not a child is born among them who is not afforded the benefit of a rigorous education and steered constantly toward academic achievement, which is the surest pathway to status and to privilege. Information is widely shared as a matter of course--a practice that tends to work to the great advantage of infiltrators. Every idea is scrutinized in the stark light of day before the learned assembly, every finding recorded so that it may be reproduced. University elites live for the gladiatorial combat of the symposia where they prove themselves by defending good ideas and tearing down bad ones.
Because so much is spent on them and expected from them both now and in the future, faculty and students occupy a privileged position vis-à-vis the rest of the population, receiving the first fruits of any surplus and a light touch in disciplinary matters. (Zakharov has been heard to scoff at the complaints of security officers injured by rowdy students.) Those who decline education, or fail to thrive once it is provided, are morally contemptible. Indeed, they pose one of the greatest problems facing University society. At best, they are capable of becoming cogs in the academic machine: janitors, secretaries, security guards, technicians, and other service positions. Opportunistically, they might become future test subjects, no more or less useful than a microscope or a pipette, but equally as necessary. This attitude and its implementation through faction policy make the University the least-equitable society on Planet.
What about Zakharov himself? It is lonely at the top. There are many possible reasons for his notorious inability to relate well to others. These include a lack of socialization in childhood (he was educated by video-computer); intimate familiarity with the dangers of failure or subordinate status in a country whose national mythology was based on its capacity for suffering; and the fact that he never found his equal. In other words, his tendency to eschew personal connection may be a function of both nature and nurture. Only useful for one purpose, and knowing no other passion, he cannot—and dares not—conceive of failure.
Believing himself unique, it is hardly surprising that Zakharov eventually decided he was also irreplaceable. Contemptuous of what he cannot see with his own eyes, he developed no schema to explain or cope with the inevitable end of life. Now, in his final years, his body failing him, he fears death, which he is determined to defeat. Thus, Zakharov refused to contemplate any outcome aboard Unity that involved his making the ultimate sacrifice. He would repair the reactors—not because he could (though of this he had no doubt), but because he must. In short, Zakharov is a terrible narcissist.
The University is a tale of two extremes for its members. Those fortunate enough to gain admittance to the Ivory Tower live an almost-idyllic life of study, amply supplied with opportunities to sate their curiosity about the world around them. As for the rest, they look out for the day they may be abruptly rendered "supernumerary" by some new, labor-saving technology.
Most members of the University establishment are Supremacists--that is to say they are open to the possibility of genetic and cybernetic enhancement to their bodies. Zakharov is himself increasingly a consumer of such treatments.
In the RtD fiction, Zakharov’s followers are drawn mostly from the engineers he mobilized in the first hours of the Unity Crisis to make emergency repairs. (A good number of these were awakened contrary to Captain Garland’s orders, a point Zakharov often uses to imply that he is owed loyalty in return for not “abandoning” them to death through inaction.) Decimated by radiation sickness and nursing dozens of wounded from skirmishes with mutineers, they are almost totally dependent upon robot servitors to keep them alive once they reach the surface.
