A Slow Fall Into Madness, Part 3 (Unfiltered)
Still on this.
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Science, Dethroned
Earth’s physicists in 2047 were still trying to reconcile the obvious existence of faster-than-light travel with its impossibility. Some of them feverishly worked on coming up with a viable theory, for their own pride’s sake; the rest developed a certain passivity, since clearly they would be educated in the new physics anyway. The other scientific disciplines were likewise grappling with the idea that humanity was on the cusp of simply being told what the mysteries of the universe were, instead of laboriously working it out for itself. Even the ‘soft’ scientists were certain that the Amalgamation must have developed sociology or communications to heights not yet reached by humans. The existence of a peaceful, enlightened, multi-species galactic civilization would require such things.
The horrid news from the Enrico Fermi was a blow to Earth’s scientific community that it still has not yet entirely recovered from. It was a perfect combination of incomprehensibility, terror, and futility. The Amalgamation was far more advanced than Earth, but there was nobody left to explain their technology or science. Worse: what use was any of that, anyway? It obviously hadn’t saved them from their fate.
The Process is not programmed to be helpful in this matter, but it estimated once that Amalgamation technology was about three conceptual leaps above humanity’s, at the time of Zeroth Contact. To use an analogy, trying to analyze galactic tech at that time was like Sir Isaac Newton trying to comprehend quantum computing. Not only would he have no referent for things like electromagnetic theory, what he observed would call into question the accuracy of Newtonian physics itself. Progress would also slow to a crawl without teachers to explain the seeming contradictions. It would be enough to drive a man mad.
Which is what happened. The rate of scientific progress dropped tremendously over the next three decades, aided by the skyrocketing suicide rate of scientists. An entire generation of humanity grew up associating science with aimlessness and frustration, because that’s how all the scientists themselves acted. There was still plenty of funding, because the first ones to crack Amalgamation science would reap incalculable rewards. Unfortunately, with that funding came a plethora of pseudoscience (and outright fakery). It seemed that anyone with a theory could get money for research, and keep getting it. And why not? Nobody else was getting results, either.
Ironically, it took the Consolidation Wars to put science back on a proper footing again, and only then because governments were insistent that scientific research had to have practical results.
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