Cognitive Ability And The Light Bulb by Brian W. Aldiss The arrival of the spaceship Conqueror into Arcopian space proves ironic. However, it provides us with an opportunity to look back on our distant predecessors and understand something of their combative and jerry-built societies. Once the dead bodies had been cleared from the Conqueror, and preserved in our museums, mechs were dispatched to examine the ship as part of our phylogenetic record. The ship was fitted with old-fashioned quantum-computers. The Conqueror had left the old solar system late in 2095. It carried ten thousand human embryos in cryogenic conditions, and several million embryos, similarly frozen, of terrestrial animal genera, together with numerous plant species. There were also twenty crew, supported by anti-thanatonic drugs. Technologists had designed the ship to accelerate to twelve per cent of the speed of light. By their computations, it was due to reach this system (where only two planets capable of supporting carbon-based life had been identified) in one hundred and ninety-six years. The power source was a fusion engine. In those rather primitive days, attention concentrated on the hardware. It was the bacteria on the Conqueror which brought about disaster, killing crew and embryos alike. Advances in radiotelescopy revealed no less than fifteen planets orbiting the Arcopia main sequence sun. At least five sustained suitable environments. In the Second Renaissance taking place in the third decade of the twenty-second century, the spiritual order of God's Exiles perfected an ion drive and equipped another interstellar ship, Pilgrim. Pilgrim was launched from Plutonian orbit in 2151. It carried with it the embryos of new species of animals, fruits and human beings. The entire journey was governed by quantors; God's Exiles did not inflict years of imprisonment on humans, as the Conqueror had done. This journey took one hundred and thirty-eight years to complete. Thus the arrival was in 2289, two years before the Conqueror reached us, despite starting fifty-six years later. In these improved drives we see symbols of the expansion of human consciousness. Everything is subject to change, and living things to evolutionary change, marking their passage through time. Study of the evolution of human consciousness was scarcely recognised as a discipline until interstellar flight was proved to speed conceptual processes. The necessity for understanding and dealing with totally new environments was responsible for this rapid acceleration in human mentation. A similar acceleration is recorded some forty thousand years ago in Europe, when fresh environments brought about a great expansion in the metaphors of art and sculpture - all of which represent an upward surge in cognitive ability. Which is to say that to produce art or science is to experience a coming together of previously somewhat isolated faculties, which combine to make a greater whole. Another well-known example of such a quantal happening is the First Renaissance, a time of great advances in arts, sciences, warfare, and political management. The twenty-second century philosopher, Almond Kunzel, has used an analogy between human consciousness and a light bulb of an old-fashioned order. Early consciousness could be likened to a forty watt bulb - sufficient dimly to illumine a room, though insufficient to study details by. The Renaissance marks a shift in brightness to sixty watts. Much more can be discerned, although illumination is not cast very far. With the Twentieth Century, often referred to as the Savage Century, owing to its horrifying record of war, threats of war and genocide, the bulb brightens to one hundred watts. Despite the savagery, humanity is for the first time developing a form of remote awareness (remware, as we know it) to aid its exploration of all environments. Those environments included, of course, the solar system to which our predecessors were then confined, and also the human brain. The brain was almost completely mapped by the end of the Savage Century. With the ability to genetically engineer brain function, many irregularities, caused by the jerry -building of this organism, were eradicated. Clearer thinking emerged as a result. War was obviated. We now reached the stage of, in Kunzel's terms, the one thousand watt brain. Our offspring are born with an understanding of fractals. This great expansion of cognitive ability led to the new perception of the universe as a series of contiguities, and to the terrestrial construction, in the year 2162, of the photon drive. The fleet of ships launched in 2200 arrived here in the planetary system of Arcopia the next year. Our culture was thus firmly established when the old ships of 2095 and 2151 arrived, fossils of a former time. They harbour in orbits far from the planet on which humanity began - long before there was even a light bulb to light our way. Records on these gallant old hulks demonstrate how, sadly, the human world once contained less order, less joy and less fulfilment than now.