[MD] Elders of Tralfamadore

[Gene M]

I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with the writings of Kurt Vonnegut
Jr., but I am currently re-reading the book "Hocus Pocus" by him, and came
across a real gem that I thought might make for some interesting discussion.

The protagonist is re-telling a short story he read in a porn-mag called
"Black Garterbelt", called "The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore",
written by an uncredited author.

It a story about intelligent threads of energy trillions of light-years
> long. They decided they wanted mortal self-reproducing forms to spread out
> through the universe. So the elders got together to have a meeting by
> intersecting near the planet Tralfamadore and agreed that the only practical
> way for life to travel great distances through space was very small
> organisms hitching rides on meteors through the vastness of space.


> Unfortunately none of the germs currently existing in the universe were
> hardy enough to make the trip. At the time of this meeting, humans already
> existed on earth. But we didn't really have a lot going on at the time.
> However the Elders saw in us the potential to devise truly horrific tests to
> breed new kinds of super-organisms.
>
> So it just so happens that on earth the story of Adam and Eve happened to
> be in the process of being written down for the very first time. Passing
> from oral tradition into text. And so it was transcribed exactly as it had
> been known for generations, except at the end of it the Elders possesed the
> body of the human and added a single segment of text. It was a speech by God
> telling Adam and Eve "Fill the Earth and subdue it; and have dominion over
> the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living
> thing that moves on the earth."
>
> So the people of Earth now thought they instructions from the allmighty
> Himself to wreck up the joint! However it was still going too slowly. So the
> Elders told Humanity that They were the ones destined to go out and populate
> the universe. And of course Humans, dim and serious as we are, actually
> believe that hokum! As the unnamed author put it: "How could all that meat,
> needing so much food and water and oxygen, and with bowel movements so
> enormous, expect to survive a trip of any distance whatsoever through the
> limitless void of space?"
>
> So the Elders had us going. And realizing that we would believe anything
> at all that was flattering to us, they convinced us that the whole Universe
> had been created by one big male animal who looked a lot like us. He sat on
> a fancy throne with a lot of less fancy thrones surrounding it. And when we
> died, we got to go there and sit with Him, because we were such close
> relatives of the Creator. Amazingly, we even believed That!!
>
> Another thing about Earthlings the Elders liked was that they feared and
> hated other Earthlings who did not look and act exactly like them. They made
> life a hell for what they called "lower animals". They actually thought of
> strangers as lower animals! So all the elders had to do to ensure that germs
> experienced really hard times, was convince us to make more effective
> weapons by studying physics and chemistry. And they lost no time doing that.
>
> They caused an apple to fall on the head of Isaac Newton.
> They made young James Watt prick up his ears when his mother's teakettle
> sang.
>
> They made us think that the Creator one the big throne hated strangers as
> much as we did, and that we would be doing a favour if we tried to
> exterminate them by any and all means possible.
> That went over big down here.
>
> So it wasn't long before we had made the deadliest poisons in the
> Universe, and were stinking up the air and water and topsoil. In the words
> of the unnamed author: "Germs died by the trillions or failed to reproduce
> because they could no longer cut the mustard."
>
> But a few surived and even flourished, even though almost all other life
> forms on Earth perished. And when all other lifeforms vanished, and this
> planet became as sterile as the Moon, they hibernated as virtually
> indestructible spores, capable of waiting as long as necessary for the next
> lucky hit by a meteor. Thus, at last, did space travel become truly
> feasible.


Above is about half quotes from the book, and half summary by me. Sorry for
the confusion, but the story is somewhat disparate in the narrative and I
felt it'd be better to pull some of it together. For anyone interested, the
story is of course written by the infamous Kilgore Trout himself! Vonnegut's
most notorious recurring character. Although he is never mentioned by name.

I'm a huge, Huge Vonnegut fan, I think reading Kurt Vonnegut is about as
close as I can come to my own internal dialogue, only better. If you're not
familiar with him, you should be! I also highly suggest the short story
"Harrison Bergeron" which is available online. (
http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/hb.html)

So there you have it. The story proposes that the Earth exists as nothing
more than a breeding ground for super-bacteria which will one day be able to
travel the universe for an indefinite length of time, and seed all habitable
planets with life. Humans, nothing more than the trial grounds to breed out
the weak microbes, pawns of the Elders. I'm curious what you all think of
it.

I find Vonnegut at all times thought provoking, and hopefully we can get
some discussion going here based on some of his fantastic ideas!

-Gene