Food For The Moon
We should take care that we do not escape the bonds of the Earth only to forge the bars of a cage
In university I had the opportunity to run a Dungeon & Dragons campaign for my nerdy stoner friends. If I ever gave the campaign world a name I cannot now remember it; it was soon described by the players who endured its depredations as ‘evil hell-world’. I hadn’t set out with that intention. I’d simply wanted to make a hard break with the aesthetic medievalism that inflects most fantasy settings; from there, an imagination that had been immersed in Elric of Melnibone, Scandinavian black metal, Nietzsche, and all the other accoutrements of an edgy teenager did the rest.
It was a jungle planet, overflowing with life. The strongest race were the dwarves, who ruled their empire from a giant megalithic city of stacked pyramids carved into the central mountain range with stone-shaping magic, connected to the rest of the continent by arrow-straight roads laid down with the same sorcery. The dwarves were masters of engineering, their knights clad in clockwork powered armour that made them the equal of an ogre, their battlefield formations dominated by clockwork battlemechs that could go toe-to-toe with a mountain giant. Aesthetically, they took their cues from the Aztecs, favouring elaborate head-dresses of brilliantly coloured feathers; they diverted themselves gladiatorial blood-sports, where slaves collected from the far corners of their dominion were forced into life-or-death struggles in blood-stained arenas; their elites, gold-greedy and debauched, dreamed their lives away under the influence of powerful hallucinogens.
North of the dwarves lived the gnomes, about whom little was known. They inhabited rude hovels barely above the level of the stone age, having little in the way of material wealth, but around these they projected fantastical illusions in which they appeared to themselves to live as kings.
To the south stretched a vast mangrove swamp, a shallow ocean dotted with small jungle islands from which rose the towering arboreal metropoli of the elves. Each island was ruled by an immortal vampire king, half-elf and half-reptile, jealous and vindictive creatures which sustained themselves on blood and pain. The elves were ancient and cruel, keeping to themselves, but delighting in the elaborate torments that they inflicted on any unwise enough to enter their domain. Elven magic was based on the manipulation of life, and as a result their mangrove jungle teemed with all manner of bioengineered horrors. One elven artifact I particularly enjoyed inflicting on my players was a living sword of sharpened bone, from the hilt of which extended a leech-like proboscis that would instantly fasten onto the wrist of whoever picked it up, following which the sword’s nervous system would fuse with that of its unlucky bearer; the sword needed to eat, which it did by absorbing blood through pores in its blade, and to ensure it got fed it would inject a cocktail of addictive combat hormones into the user’s bloodstream. The sword-bearer became a terror in combat, but over time the sword’s venom slowly destroyed his mind, turning him into an indiscriminate killing machine.
Along the coastline to the east of the elves lived the orcs, who in this world were the closest things to a noble race. The orcs I modelled after the Greeks. They inhabited a fractured landscape of low mountains and small islands, where their quarrelsome city states waged incessant internecine war over disputes of land and points of honour. Aesthetically, they were wholly barbarian – going about naked save for the magical tattoos that covered their flesh, with which they inscribed spells of protection and strength, and trapped the spirits of their ancestors and heroes.
Looming above this feral hothouse world was a vast blood-red moon, as barren as the land below was lush. Whenever a character was killed they would awake on the moon’s surface, where the animated skeletons of whales swam in seas of dust, bordered by ruined cities inhabited by unquiet ghosts and presided over by liche lords. This was not the true afterlife, but rather a sort of purgatory in which a soul might persist for as long as it could hold off the relentless attacks of the swarming undead, for everything there wanted to kill you, to absorb your life energy. If a character was lucky, his friends down on the surface would succeed in casting a resurrection spell, and bring him back to the world of the living before he met his final death. The ultimate fate of everything on the moon was the same: to be absorbed into the moon itself, which acted as a kind of a battery for spiritual energy, storing it up against the inevitable return of the swarm of cosmic locusts that had devoured the primordial world-tree, leaving behind the jungle world and its undead moon, as scraps.
All of this came to me in a few days of fevered inspiration as I scratched out page after page of hand-written notes before the campaign began. I’ve never forgotten this world, but of all its elements it was the undead moon that fed on it that most captured my imagination.
Many years later, I came across the writings of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, an esotericist and spiritual teacher from the early twentieth-century. Gurdjieff had a lot of strange ideas, amongst the strangest of which was that we are ‘food for the Moon’:
“Because the moon is a growing planet that may someday become like earth, it requires food. The energy passing down through the cosmos is gathered on its behalf in a “huge accumulator situated on the earth’s surface.” This accumulator is organic life on earth, of which we humans are a part. “Everything living on the earth,” says Gurdjieff, “people, animals, plants, is food for the moon. The moon could not exist without organic life on earth, any more than organic life on earth could exist without the moon.” Human awakening is “liberation from the moon” (Ouspensky, 85).
“Here we can see the analogy with the parable of the magician and the sheep. Our “flesh and skins”—that is, certain cosmic vibrations emitted by organic life—are required in order to feed the moon. We are little more than livestock waiting in a planet-sized feedlot until we are sent to the slaughterhouse. We have been hypnotized into a waking sleep so that we will not realize our true situation. (Ouspensky, 219).
We are like the Moon’s sheep, which it cleans, feeds and sheers, and keeps for its own purposes.
Goosebumps dimpled my skin when I first read this. So far as I’d known, this vision of Moon feeding on the living world had emerged from my imagination, ex nihilo and sui generis, as a neat gimmick for a fantasy setting. Perhaps this is simply a chance alignment between my imagination and that of a wild-eyed cult leader from the last century, because there are only so many ideas to be had, after all, and originality is always far more difficult than we think. Perhaps it is pointing, like the proverbial finger to the Moon, to something more, and this image was not one that emerged from my imagination, but one that was placed there, or something that it caught.
When Gurdjieff said that we are food for the Moon, he seems to have meant that at more than one level. In a sense this is a metaphor, with the inner life of man conceived as a sort of cosmos. The conscious mind is the Sun, the lowest level of the body the Moon, and absent continuous application of will we would continually fall away from the former and feed the latter with our thoughts, feelings, and actions. Yet Gurdjieff also seems to have meant this quite literally. In the esoteric view, following the principle of ‘as above, so below’, we see the same patterns repeated at every level of nature.
The hairs on the back of my neck prickled yet again when I came across a pair of articles in the latest issue of Palladium.
The first, by Google engineer Omar Shams, is titled The Moon Should Be a Computer. The title of this article is the content. Shams points out that AI is driving a rapid increase in demand for compute, which in turn drives demand for energy. Even if chips become far more efficient, we must eventually run into physical limits, for example Landauer’s law which establishes a lower bound to the energy necessary to erase one bit of information (and which has been suggested to point to a deep connection between information and energy, hence materiality and immateriality, though that’s a discussion for another time). Since the accuracy with which AI can solve a given problem seems to follow scaling laws in compute and energy, we could very quickly find ourselves in a situation in which the waste heat from data centres renders the Earth’s surface uninhabitable.
To avoid cooking our home with GPUs, Shams suggests that we should send autonomous, self-replicating robots to cover the Moon’s surface – whose regolith has all the silicon we could need1 – in chip fabs, solar panels, and data centres, gradually transforming the Moon into digital divinity:
Perhaps we will turn back to the age-old questions of philosophy armed with our new technology. Even computational theology is not out of the question; perhaps ultimately, our quest for intelligence was simply a quest for revelation.
Shams isn’t directly saying that the lunar AI would be an artificial deity – he’s really saying that it might be capable of answering philosophical questions that have vexxed philosophers since Heraclitus – but it’s certainly implied, and given the transhumanist and Singularitarian currents swirling through the cultural matrix of Silicon Valley, it wouldn’t be unexpected to find that he regards linear algebra tumbling through channels of melted sand with religious awe.
The second article is Curtis Yarvin’s The Orbital Authority, which considers the political consequences of a single actor gaining complete control of near-Earth space. Yarvin draws inspiration from Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative to point out that, in principle, orbital space can be dominated by a hegemon which would then possess the ultimate and unchallengable high ground. A swarm of ‘brilliant pebbles’, small kill vehicles originally conceptualized as ICBM-killers, could frustrate any attempt at an unauthorized launch. ‘Rods from God’, tungsten spears which deliver nuclear-level destructive payloads purely through the conversion of gravitational potential to kinetic energy, could be used to annihilate anything on the surface that caught the Orbital Authority’s all-seeing gimlet eye – anti-satellite lasers, launch sites, airfields, blue-water fleets, armament manufacturing facilities, what have you.
The OA would be at its leisure to invade and occupy whatever territory it likes, for instance by parking dirigible drone carriers over a city and flooding the zone with air and surface drones. As Yarvin puts it, war would conquer war.
The inevitable result of this is a one world government. Whoever controls the OA is the unchallenged sovereign power of the Earth. This, Yarvin points out, could be a very bad thing, because the OA – if it thinks at all like our current, liberal political class – would be inclined to eliminate war entirely, turning the planet into a giant nursery garden. We would all be trapped in the longhouse, with no path open but to degenerate into Nietzche’s enervated Last Men. The flame of the human spirit would gutter and die out as humanity is reduced to the OA’s house pets.
As a solution to the longhouse trap, Yarvin proposes bringing back traditional warfare, i.e. war as it was fought up until the invention of gunpowder, with swords and spears. Since the OA cannot be threatened by traditional warfare – or, for that matter, really by anything – such inter-state squabbling would be beneath its dignity to interfere with. The OA could allow these petty wars without any concern for its sovereignty being challenged. The upshot of allowing traditional warfare would be that it produces a number of salubrious genetic and sociological effects: it fosters a warrior elite, which tends to result in the healthiest social structures; it weeds out the weak, ensuring that the species remains strong, vital, healthy, and beautiful. We could have the best of Classical Greece, the best of Medieval Europe, the best of Feudal Japan, and the best of the post-Singularity End of History.
It’s a neat solution, though it’s very difficult for me to see how the OA is to be dissuaded from abusing its position to tilt the scales now and then, or regularly, in favour of the side of a conflict they favour. Human nature being human nature, whichever humans get to operate the OA would have an overpowering temptation to abuse their absolute authority. Sure, this would be tyranny; sure, the little people would get mad. They can yell at the sky all they like.
Shams’ proposal implies an obvious solution to this problem of temptation. Running the OA’s technical operations, with its globe-swaddling net of millions of tiny kill vehicles, surveillance satellites, and kinetic bombardment satellites, would be just the sort of computationally intensive task that an AI would be exceptionally well-suited to. Assuming that the AI can be aligned to the degree that it can be trusted not to go rogue and try to SkyNet the human species – say, with a probability low enough that it won’t happen at any point within the next few billion years or so – the temptation to delegate total responsibility to the OA would become overwhelming. No one is going to want to trust any one person, or group of people, with this much power. How much more reassuring to offload that terrible burden onto an entity that can be trusted to act as the ultimate fair arbiter?
As a setting for a science fiction utopia it’s hard to imagine a more perfect one. Banning mechanical technology on the battlefield leaves the door open to all sorts of other possibilities. One pictures armies of eight-foot-tall, roided out, genetically modified cybernetic super-soldiers, capable of bench-pressing a car, with fibre-optic nervous systems that give them the reflexes of a lightning strike, clad in feather-light but nearly impenetrable armour woven from carbon nanotubes, waving diamondoid sabres with atomically sharp edges over their animal-helmeted heads as they charge into battle mounted on the backs of howling dire wolves and trumpeting mastodons. Holographic battle standards shimmer in the skies above, amidst flocks of brilliantly plummaged ornithopter drones recording the events below for posterity, even as the biomonitors and NeuraLinks carried by each of the combatants record everything they see and hear and feel and smell, every bead of sweat and shouted order and open wound and pang of fear and crash of diamond on carbon fibre and rush of adrenaline ... all of it fed to the global network for adoring fans and lunar AI to voyeuristically feast upon.
All the while, the glowing orb of the Artemis Intellect – its phases no longer alternating between arcs of shadow and reflected sunlight, but between sunlight and the surface light of the data centres’ waste heat radiators – would stare down at us, drinking in the endless conflict, the feasts and orgies held in victory celebrations, and all the rest of the endless spectacle, eating it as training data.
It’s a striking vision, one which, were I to write a story in the setting, my first inclination would be to break, because this scenario looks to me like walking right into an irreversible evolutionary cul-de-sac.
Yarvin’s description of traditional warfare, with states settling disputes the old-fashioned way while prevented from reaching for more effective tools lest they incur the OA’s heavenly wrath, has a certain charm to it. The problem is that it would reduce warfare to something fake and gay. It would no longer be warfare, but sports. No doubt the best warriors would be great celebrities, winning both the adulation of crowds and harems of beautiful women. Such conflicts could well become the primary preoccupation of the human species, since we no longer really have to think about anything (the AI does that for us), and don’t even need to do anything productive (that’s what robots are for). But no matter how long a given war raged, no matter how vast in scale the battles, whoever won or lost would be of no consequence because the fundamental condition of the world could not be changed by any of it. It would be warfare as a leisure activity, warfare stripped of meaning, an endless sturm und drang that rages over the surface of the world without ever actually going anywhere, because there’s nowhere to go. Literally.
After all, the supreme power of the OA rests entirely on its possession of the ultimate high ground, which renders it the outermost ring of sovereignty. If it were to allow itself to be encircled, it would no longer be supreme. Thus, to allow settlement of other bodies in the solar system would be, in the long run, to destabilize the perfect monopoly of violent force that sustains it. Since the OA has the ability to knock any unauthorized launch out of the air before it even reaches orbit, the OA has absolutely no incentive to ever allow humanity to become a multiplanetary species. This is true even if the OA isn’t handed off to the Artemis Intellect; the AI angle really just adds a certain frisson of cosmic horror, since it removes any possibility of merely human politics from changing the OA’s mind about allowing human settlement of the solar system.
Now, sure, there’s the possibility of disruptive technological change. Perhaps some genius invents a teleportation device, after which it is possible for humans to walk through a glowing portal anywhere they wish into the universe. Only, how exactly will this technological change happen? Remember, the OA is operated by the same AI that does humanity’s thinking for it. Maybe it’s trivial for the AI to figure out how to build teleportation gates, but is it going to tell its human pets how to build them, when this would destroy the social order it was set up as the capstone and guarantor of? Probably not. Maybe someone could build an AI down on the surface that could do the trick ... but that would probably violate environmental regulations, which the Artemis Intellect will also be very interested in maintaining, since after all its own existence is partly predicated on keeping the Earth’s surface relatively pristine. Competing data centres would be turned into craters the moment orbital surveillance noticed the waste heat signature, assuming the Artemis Intellect didn’t catch wind of it long before the facility was even up and running. Just as the OA would brook no challenge to its monopoly on orbit, the AI would allow no challenge to its monopoly on compute.
It’s a trap, and one which our species would have a very hard time escaping.
We would become, in a very literal way, nothing more than food for the Moon. Somewhat chillingly, we would be food for the Moon in precisely the subtle sense that Gurdjieff (and my own early imaginings) suggested: it would be eating our sensory experiences, the moments of our lives, our spoken words, likely even our very thoughts. We would be the Moon’s spiritual food.
Gurdjieff considered humans – or rather certain humans, as he judged the bulk of the species to be basically mechanical, not much better than talking animals – to be the vanguard of evolution, which he conceptualized as having as much to do with inner conscious and spiritual development as with biology.
The evolving part of organic life is humanity. Humanity also has its evolving part but we will speak of this later; in the meantime we will take humanity as a whole. If humanity does not evolve it means that the evolution of organic life will stop and this in its turn will cause the growth of the ray of creation to stop. At the same time if humanity ceases to evolve it becomes useless from the point of view of the aims for which it was created and as such it may be destroyed. In this way the cessation of evolution may mean the destruction of humanity.
If we stop evolving, we become useless, a failed experiment, and the universe dispenses with us. What does that look like in practice? Perhaps this means that God sends an asteroid our way. Perhaps we get wiped out in a plague, or a nuclear war. Or perhaps we simply devolve until we are no longer human.
Encasing ourselves in this orbiting prison would very likely terminate any possibility of further upward development of the human species. We would never go anywhere, or do anything that mattered, ever again. Over time, those eugenic pressures of traditional warfare might combine with the dysgenic pressures of AI doing our thinking for us to turn us into big, dumb, violent Eloi, perfectly skilled at swinging around a carbon-fibre sword but wholly lacking in curiosity, intellect, or any higher sensitivity. This is not to say that military men are big dumb brutes incapable of thought or whatever, historically this has absolutely not been the case, but remember that this is happening at the same time that we have AI, which can do our thinking for us. We are a lazy species, and quickly lose what we do not use. This is one of the primary dangers of AI, in my opinion, no matter what happens … that it will make us stupid.
This prison would slowly destroy us. Oh, it would probably be a lot of fun, for a while ... it may well seem like a kind of paradise for the first few thousand years. But gradually, as time wore on, amidst all the colourful pageantry and rousing speeches and glorious battlefield victories and all the rest of the absolutely meaningless blood and thunder, the higher faculties of the brain would gradually erode due to lack of use, until we were nothing more than beautiful chimps.
The only way to avoid this failure mode is to settle the solar system before the prison grid is completed. That’s a race against time. Building infrastructure in cislunar space is intrinsically a lot easier than sending colony ships out to the uninhabited bodies of the solar system, and indeed there’s a lot more incentive to build the cislunar infrastructure because that’s where the people are. If extraterrestrial settlement happens at all, it will certainly happen concurrently with – and more slowly than – cislunar construction, which means that there will be a race against time to plant self-sustaining, self-governing colonies before the window closes, and the human species locks itself into a jail cell from which it can never escape.
If we do succeed in settling heaven, however, the evolutionary picture will be very different. Space is an unforgiving environment, the most challenging that humanity has ever attempted to tame. Surviving and thriving outside of our terrestrial womb will provide just the sort of ruthless selective pressure needed to keep the genome healthy. The human types that come out of it will be superior to us in every way.
Once we’re multiplanetary, it will never again be possible to politically unify the species. Space is simply too big. There are too many places to go, too many places to hide. It is a frontier that can never be closed: no matter how powerful any hegemon becomes, it will always be possible for the frontier to be crossed, for new worlds to be settled ... the polar craters of Mercury, the clouds of Venus, the red wastes of Mars, the asteroids, the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, the moons of Uranus and Neptune, the Kuiper Belt objects ... and beyond that, the planets falling around other stars. There will never again be the danger of a single iron hegemon winning the final game of history and dominating the entirety of the species for the rest of time.
War will undoubtedly continue in a multiplanetary setting. With so many independent polities, and no possibility of uniting all of them, conflict will be inevitable. But this will not be war as sportsball, fought for the amusement of bored crowds and the nourishment of cold algorithms, war as a distracting pastime to divert our attention from the ennui of history’s long twilight denoument. It will be true war, war with real stakes, war with political meaning, war which – as war should – will have the possibility of making decisive changes to the course of a history which, loosed from the bounds of Holy Terra, will continue indefinitely to burn the fuel of the rising human spirit as it expands out among the myriad stars.
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Though Shams says nothing about rare earth elements, which are a crucial component for semiconductors. So far as I’ve been able to determine, the highest crustal concentration of REEs is right here on Earth; the Moon doesn’t have enough to make mining them there viable. So they’d still need to be shipped up from the Earth to make the project viable. I was a bit surprised to find that even M-type nickel-iron asteroids are believed to be generally very low in REEs, but this turns out to be due to the absence of geological processes that help to concentrate REEs in the Earth’s crust (and which are absent everywhere else in the solar system).
Playing D&D with you sounds like a great time
"This prison would slowly destroy us... it may well seem like a kind of paradise for the first few thousand years. "
Sounds like a Rat Utopia, in which case it will only last for a few generations.