Slime Dynamics by Ben Woodard

Author:Ben Woodard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zero Books

1.3

Extra-Galactic Terror

“They knew that every system, whether mechanical or biological, eventually runs down [...] The tyranids had found the only possible remedy for this. They moved from galaxy to galaxy, harvesting fresh, newly evolved DNA with which to renew and reinvigorate their own. They were the universes’ ultimate life form. Quite possibly they had existed forever, and would continue to exist forever.”93

“The cosmos...is simply a perpetual rearrangement of electrons which is constantly seething as it always has been and always will be. Our tiny globe and puny thoughts are but one momentary incident in its eternal mutation.”94

Life as we have formulated it so far is subdued by the forces of time and space and yet the intensive interiority of the viral seems to challenge these bounds as does the externality of the fungal. The question that remains is what is life, what is the force of life, and what are the forces that act on life. The task is to answer these questions without venturing too much towards the immaterial or unscientific. The issue becomes the thinkability of life, thinking life, and the life of thought. Or, put in other words how do we define life, what is it about life that allows it to think, and what is the future of thought’s rootedness in life. We will pursue these issues through fictional superorganic entities.

The superorganic is conceptually constructed by combining the devastating emergence of the miniscule (such as the virus) coupled with the spatial expansion found in the fungoid – it is, in other terms, the exacerbated capacity of the swarm on a colossal scale. As was discussed in the introduction the swarm is the form of life that presents itself as most problematic for thinking; both by producing the results of thought without intelligence (we observe non-thinking entities acting as if they can think) and as being hard to think-as-life (we are not sure if the swarm itself is a thing), as we saw in the introduction, because of the indeterminacy between the part and the whole of life.

The hybridization of the viroid and fungoid (creating a life that transmogrifies and creeps) can be tied to the theory of exogenesis. The theory of exogenesis holds that life has always already existed and that life on earth has come from elsewhere. At some point in the distance past a gaia spore, or object carrying early forms of, or the necessary ingredients for creating life, would have reached the early earth seeding it.

Concepts of panspermia have been suggested for hundreds of years: the theoretical biologist Frederick Kielmeyer suggested such a concept in the 1800s.95 While romantic notions of cosmic ancestry can be taken from such a concept the more troubling suggestion is the possible age of certain forms of life and the rampancy of any particular form of extremophile, of a creature which can exist in seemingly impossible conditions. The fungal spores of last chapter and the viroids of the first being examples of such lifeforms.

As we have seen however,

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