Last week, we reached the last episode, "Abaddon's Gate," of the third season of The Expanse, a TV show that's set in the middle of the fourth century of this millennium. In this distant time, humans have not only colonized Mars but also parts of the asteroid belt and Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede. Racism has vanished from all human societies and been replaced by what I can only call solarism: the closer you are to the sun, the higher your social standing. As a consequence, those who live on the belt are, generally, of a lower status than those who live on Mars, and those who live on Earth are above Martians.
Earthlings have a basic income, something which was brought up twice in the show's three seasons and appears to be the source of resentment for the warrior classes on Mars and the working classes on the belt. The Martians are basically hi-tech Spartans: they are harsh, bitter, and always ready for battle. They view the Earthlings as pampered. The Belters have basically transformed some rocks in the middle of the solar system into a hood (as in Boyz in the Hood) and have, for reasons that are never explained (outside of the context of the books, which explain the evolution of this belter speak), a manner of speech that resembles that of black West Indians. The consequence of not explaining this similarity is it naturalizes it. Meaning, it appears to be the outcome of being oppressed by anybody. White mon oppress ya, ya talk like dis; Eart' mon oppress ya, ya talk like dis, too.
All of that said, season three of The Expanse was amazing, from beginning to end. It has two parts, the first of which is about a war between Earth and Mars; and the second concerns the ring (SPOILER ALERT), a massive something that forms in space from what's called a 'protomolecule' and changes the nature of space within it. Is this thing friendly? Is it even alive? Is it god? Christians aboard the spaceships are hopeful and fearful. They travel to it. They want to know if this is the maker of all things, this ring. At one point in the first half of the third season, I feared that the plot was heading in this direction, that the story was going to fuse with that buggy theology of the androids in Battlestar Galactica. The Expanse would become another Spinoza in space. Another Meister Eckhart of the stars. But it was clear by the last three episodes that God was not there for the astro-Christians.
The ring is just a piece of technology made billions of years ago by a life form that is, it appears, extinct. My brother, Kudzai Mudede, who has read all of the books, likens the ring to a huge smartphone in space, in the sense that it contains all of this information about its user, but this user is not there and so it can't function properly. But at the same time, this sophisticated technology is not self-aware. And so it needs a self-conscious living form to understand its own operations and history. My brother explained this aspect of the protomolecule in a message he left on my smartphone not too long ago. You can listen below:
For me, however, the thing that made The Expanse a great show was its tone. How might it feel to be a human who spends much of his or her life in space, or on lifeless planets or rocks? What is the tone of such an existence? You must always keep in mind that life on Earth owes everything to the gradient between energy spreading from the sun and the cooler mass of the Earth itself. We are dissipative systems. We take in high-grade energy and reduce it to lower grades of energy. This spontaneous process decreases a gradient more efficiently. This is a tornado, a whirlpool, a convection cell. But we living things are the mad tornado that remembers and insists it persist, the whirlpool that brazenly leaves one bathtub for another and another and another. We live by acting on a gradient, an activity that keeps us far from equilibrium and in a metastable state. Go to Mars, and you are on a planet whose surface is much closer to equilibrium than the surface of Earth. This is why life would be so hard there. Equilibrium is a state of disorder, which is much, much, much more probable than a state of order. The harder it is to extract high-grade energy from the surroundings, the harder it is to maintain order. This is why Martians hate Earthlings so much, and Belters hate Martians and Earthlings even more. This is also, for me, the tone-source of The Expanse. In space, you have to work so hard to keep, to maintain, to sustain what life is: improbable order.
With these thoughts in mind, I want to conclude the post with something that the great American physicist David Bohm wrote in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order:
On this stream [of energy], one may see an ever-changing pattern of vortices, ripples, waves, splashes, etc, which evidently have no independent existence as such. Rather, they are abstracted from the flowing movement, arising and vanishing in the total process of the flow. Such transitory subsistence as may be possessed by these abstracted forms implies only a relative independence or autonomy of behavior, rather than absolutely independent existence as ultimate substances.
