"Tom Purdom - Fossil Games" - читать интересную книгу автора (Purdom Tom)

Morgan had turned his attention to the turmoil created by the Eight. Over the
next few decades the messages became more decipherable. Fifty years after the
problem with the Eight-- one hundred and sixty two years after the ship had
left the Solar System-- almost all the messages reaching the ship came from
members of Ari Sun-Dalt's communion.
The believers in the Doctrine of the Cosmic Enterprise were communicating
with the starships because they were becoming a beleaguered minority. The
great drive for enhancement and progress had apparently run its course. The
worldviews that dominated human civilization were all variations on the
EruLabi creeds.
Ari spent long periods-- as much as ten or twelve tendays in a row-- in
the communications module. The human species, in Ari's view, was sinking into
an eternity of aimless hedonism.
Ari became particularly distraught when he learned the EruLabi had
decided they should limit themselves to a twenty percent increase in skull
size-- a dictum which imposed a tight restriction on the brainpower they could
pack inside their heads. At the peak of the enhancement movement, people who
had retained normal bipedal bodies had apparently quadrupled their skull
sizes.
"We're the only conscious, intelligent species the Solar System ever
produced," Ari orated in one of his public communiques. "We may be the only
conscious, intelligent species in this section of the galaxy. And they've
decided an arbitrary physiological aesthetic is more important than the
development of our minds."

****

The messages from the Solar System had included scientific discussions.
They had even included presentations prepared for "nonspecialists". Morgan had
followed a few of the presentations as well as he could and he had concluded
the human species had reached a point of diminishing returns.
Morgan would never possess the kind of complexified, ultra-enhanced brain
his successors in the Solar System had acquired. Every set of genes imposed a
ceiling on the organism it shaped. If you wanted to push beyond that ceiling,
you had to start all over again, with a new organism and a new set of genes.
But Morgan believed he could imagine some of the consequences of that kind of
intellectual power.
At some point, he believed, all those billions of superintelligent minds
had looked out at the Universe and realized that another increase in brain
power would be pointless. You could develop a brain that could answer every
question about the size, history, and structure of the universe, and find that
you still couldn't answer the philosophical questions that had tantalized the
most primitive tribesmen. And what would you do when you reached that point?
You would turn your back on the frontier. You would turn once again to the
bath and the banquet, the harp and the dance.
And changes of raiment.
And love.
And sleep.

****