What is the purpose of that Zonal Firewall and how does it work?
The basic effect of the Zonal Firewall is to not let anything in from the outside that doesn’t look like coming from a “purely natural” an lifeless cosmos. If you pass the Zonal Firewall, you cannot get back in. Also, no kind of alien signal has reached the inside of the Zone. Back in the days of the Black War the more prevalent idea was that it is supposed to stop the spread of wars of primitive civilizations to the whole galaxy or even beyond. But the Firewall persisted even way after the Proof has safeguarded cosmic peace. The more recent most popular interpretation is that it’s supposed to prevent cultural contamination of “young” civilizations. Since the Cosmics are presumably ancient beyond measure, they represent a threat to the "natural cultural development of the Zonal Coherence.
To me that sounds like the Cosmics want to let the people in the Zone want to figure out how to come a truly advanced culture on their own. If they interfered, the members of the Zone would have to be integrated into a culture that is so advanced that it is basically incomprehensible to them. Is that about right?
Well, the wise might make sense of what the Cosmics are doing, but the simple and complex would find themselves in a system that is much more alien that the one set up by the wise of the Zonal Coherence. There’s are conspiracy theories that the wise are actually in contact with the Cosmics and can safely traverse to their realm and actually come back. Yet, these conspiracy theories are completely baseless.
Hehe. Is there any official evidence for communication between the Cosmics and the Zonal Coherence?
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No, not any form of classical communication. There is of course the communication in the form of the artifacts of the Cosmics, with the Zonal Firewall being the most prominent one. There are also the Star Gems, indestructible enigmatic microscopic artifacts made out of neutronium-like artificial matter resting at the core of any star in the Zone.
What is the purpose of the Star Gems?
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The Star Gems are not much more that monuments of the Cosmics stating “WE ARE HERE!” They don’t serve any other apparent purpose. They use technology on the same level as the Zonal Firewall, which makes nearly everyone believe that both types of artifacts were made by the same cosmic civilization.
So, there’s the possibility that the Star Gems and the Zonal Firewall were actually made by two different entities? Maybe even entities at war with each other?
War is a concept that doesn’t befit civilizations capable of creating such advanced artifacts. There are theories that there are sub factions of the Cosmics with apparently different (sub)goals, with one factions having made the Zonal Firewall, and another faction (or multiple) having made the Star Gems. But in the end, such theories don’t change much. The Cosmics appear as a monolithic and awfully aloof entity to the inhabitants of the Zone.
If the Cosmics are more advanced than the people in the Zone, are there entities even more advanced than the Cosmics?
That depends on whether you prefer drawing lines in terms of capability. The Cosmics are already so advanced that they are effectively omnipotent. Anything above that level is already pretty much incomprehensible from our perspective. Yet there is one particular world that is at the absolute pinnacle of power. That world is the fictional world of La’ea . The La’eans are as powerful as any logically consistent entity can ever be. They simulate all possible worlds. I’ve recently coined a specific word for that: They are modapotent . It stems from modal realism , the theory that all possible worlds actually exist.
Is modal realism a real theory in our world?
Yes, it has been expressed most definitely in the book On the Plurality of Worlds from 1986 by the philosopher David Lewis. In that book he explained why it’s a relatively natural assumption to think that any possible world is also real. Or at least that this way of thinking is more elegant in certain ways. I’ve followed that line of thinking when I studied mathematical logic and model theory at university. There’s a certain logical elegance to this line of reasoning, which lead me to the conclusion that thinking that modal realism was false was a more complicated way of modelling the world for which there is no necessity.
Fascinating! So do you think that beings like the La’eans are actually possible?
It’s certainly a very speculative idea, much more speculative than the idea that we might live in a simulated world, but I don’t see strict reasons why such beings should be impossible. Perhaps the La’eans do exist outside of my own imagination and they actually simulate you and me, and everyone else, and infinite variations of all of us. Such thoughts definitely represent the outermost reaches of human imagination, but I gladly test the limits of imagination.
You certainly seem to be the kind of person who likes to challenge the limits of human imagination. It’s a rare trait that a certain class of science fiction authors seems to possess. Do you have any role models in that respect?
When it comes to sci-fi authors there are Iain M. Banks with his Culture series and Greg Egan with his incredibly imaginatively hard sci-fi stories. And then there is Olaf Stapledon who was just phenomenally far ahead of his time and basically came up with some of the most exotic ideas in science fiction even before WW2 had begun!
To many readers these names will probably be quite unfamiliar. After all, most people are rather familiar with productions like Star Trek or Star Wars. Do you have any thoughts about those franchises?
I think Star Trek did a lot of things very right. There is at least some scientific plausibility to the technologies of Star Trek. Yet, the technical requirements aren’t so strict that not many writers could participate in contributing Star Trek stories. It’s a quite romantic vision of the future, in which humanity has overcome most of its vices. As that, it’s lovely, but it does shy back from embracing the consequences of transhumanist technologies. AIs only play a marginal role in Star Trek, and immortality could have been a thing by backing up people in the pattern buffer of the transporter. Star Trek sacrifices continuity and logical cohesion in favor of accessibility.