The Swarm

I'm a reasonable kind of guy. If I hear something that seems to make sense, I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. If the alternative explanation has to be pounded into shape before it fits the mould of our experience, it seems to me that it's unlikely to be true.

But I hope you’re not about to give me some kind of conspiracy theory. This is Norway, not America.

Children in America drew six-legged chickens because drumsticks came in packs of six, while adults drank milk from a carton, and recoiled at the sight of an udder. Their experience of the world was stunted, but it only fuelled their arrogance.

It was the mystery that biologists from Darwin onwards had been longing to solve. How could we understand the ability of fish and seals to survive in the cold dark waters of the Antarctic? How could humans see inside a biotope that was sealed with layers of ice? What would the Earth look like from the sky, if we crossed the Mediterranean on the back of a goose? How did it feel to be a bee? How could we measure the speed of an insect’s wings and its heartbeat, or monitor its blood pressure and eating patterns? What was the impact of human activities, like shipping noise or subsea explosions, on mammals in the depths? How could we follow animals to places where no human could venture?

And yet most people would be lost without the idea that life increases in value the more it resembles our own.

Because it’s all about fear - fear of being alone, fear of never being asked and, worst of all, the fear of having a choice and making the wrong one.

You know the classic lines you get in sci-fi? Whatever it is, it’s coming our way, or Get me the President on the line? Well, there’s always the one about the enemy being superior, though by the end of the story you mostly feel cheated. This time you won’t. The yrr are superior.

We’re so obsessed with assuring our own perpetuity that our goals seldom coincide with what would be good for humankind

¿Qué puede pasar?» A veces uno tenía esos momentos. Demasiado metano e historias de monstruos. Por no hablar del clima. Tal vez tendría que haber desayunado mejor.

Los pueblos originarios siempre viven dosificadamente de algo que los blancos luego despilfarran. Una vez que lo han despilfarrado, se frotan los ojos y quieren protegerlo. Entonces lo protegen de aquellos de quienes nunca fue necesario protegerlo, y presumen de ello.

Take the jelly-like tissue. It’s a highly versatile biological product, but it certainly wasn’t arrived at via standard evolution. Like the worms, it’s there for a purpose - to control other living creatures by invading their neural networks. It’s somehow affecting the behaviour of live whales. The crabs and lobsters are a slightly different story. The jelly steers their movements, but they’re not actually alive. They’re empty shells with incomplete nervous systems - organic spacesuits for the journey on to land.

Imagine an alien spaceship lowering cameras to Earth. Each captures only a few square metres at a time. The first zooms in on the Kalahari desert. The second takes a snap of the Mongolian steppes. A third is lowered over Antarctica, and the fourth hovers over a city and films just a few square metres of grass and a dog peeing up against a tree. What impression would the aliens have? No sign of intelligent life, though primitive life-forms are sporadically present.

And you’re listening to signals from space?’‘We target stars similar to our Sun – a thousand of them, each more than three billion years old. There are other projects like it, but ours is the crucial one.’‘Well, I’ll be damned.’‘It’s not that amazing. You analyse whale song and try to figure out what they’re telling each other. We listen to noises from space because we’re convinced that the universe is packed with civilizations. I expect you’re having more luck with your whales.’‘I’m dealing with a few oceans. You’ve got the universe.’‘It’s on a different scale, but I’m always being told that we know less about the oceans than we do about space.

¿Acaso he estado tanto tiempo sentado frente a un escritorio que ya no puedo imaginar cómo es la realidad?»

Por ahora sólo puedo decirte en qué coinciden los expertos. —¿En qué? Johanson se reclinó hacia atrás y cruzó las piernas. —En que no coinciden. —Muy instructivo.

We live in an age of bacteria. For over three billion years they’ve existed in their present form. Humanity is just a passing fashion, but even when the sun explodes, somewhere, somehow, a few of those microbes are bound to survive. They’re the planet’s real success story, not humans.

Culture is nothing but a set of successful patterns of behaviour grounded in our struggle to survive.

Even the United States of America has been forced to beg for aid. We’re being invaded and poisoned. The population is fleeing inland. I’m having to shelter in this goddamn security bunker like some kind of mole. We’ve got anarchy and looting on the streets, the military and security forces are hopelessly overstretched, and all we can offer our citizens is contaminated food supplies and drugs that don’t work.

Desde 1959, los soviéticos han depositado en el Ártico cantidades inmensas de basura atómica, incluyendo reactores desguazados. Más de un millón de toneladas de armas químicas se amontonan en los fondos marinos, en profundidades que van de los quinientos a los cuatro mil quinientos metros. Especialmente peligrosos se consideran los contenedores de gases tóxicos hundidos en 1947 por orden de Moscú, que van dañándose lentamente debido a la corrosión. Frente a España están depositados cientos de miles de recipientes con residuos ligeramente radiactivos procedentes de la medicina, la investigación y la industria. En el Atlántico medio, a más de cuatro mil metros de profundidad, los investigadores marinos han comprobado la presencia de plutonio de las pruebas nucleares del sur del Pacífico. El Servicio Hidrográfico británico contabiliza 57.435 restos de naufragios en las profundidades oceánicas. Entre ellos, los pecios de varios submarinos atómicos americanos y rusos. El

Pese a la prohibición de 1994, se siguen arrojando desechos atómicos al mar. En el desagüe de la planta de reprocesamiento francesa de La Hague, los buzos de Greenpeace han verificado una radiactividad diecisiete millones de veces superior a la de las aguas no afectadas. En las aguas costeras de Noruega, las algas y los cangrejos están contaminados de tecnecio, un elemento radiactivo.

For us to perceive intelligence, it has to fit within our behavioural framework.

Your life doesn’t stop unfolding because you take a longer route. No time is wasted.

Averages might mean something to bureaucrats and engineers, but the sea had no truck with statistics: it was a succession of unpredictable circumstances and extremes. A particular stretch of water might have an average wave height of ten metres, but if you were hit by a one-off thirty-metre monster that statistically didn’t exist, the average would be of precious little comfort: you would die.

Hay formas similares de comunicación entre las bacterias. Por ejemplo en Myxococcus xanthus, una especie que vive en el suelo y que está formada por pequeñas asociaciones laxas. Cuando algunas células no encuentran alimento, emiten una especie de señal para indicar que sienten hambre. Al principio, la colonia prácticamente no reacciona, pero cuantas más células hambrientas hay, más intensa es la señal, hasta que supera un cierto umbral. Entonces, los miembros de la colonia comienzan a juntarse. Poco a poco se va formando una unión compleja de tipo multicelular, una unión fructífera que puede verse a simple vista. —

No, the Yrr haven’t changed the world. They’ve shown us how it really is.

The message left Kiel at a speed of 300,000 kilometres per second. The sequence of words keyed into Erwin Suess’s laptop at the Geomar Centre entered the net in digital form. Converted by laser diodes into optical pulses, the information raced along with a wavelength of 1.5 thousandths of a millimetre, shooting down a transparent fibreoptic cable with millions of phone conversations and packets of data. The fibres bundled the stream of light until it was no thicker than two hairs, while total internal reflection stopped it escaping. Whizzing towards the coast, the waves surged along the overland cable, speeding through amplifiers every fifty kilometres until the fibres vanished into the sea, protected by copper casing and thick rubber tubing, and strengthened by powerful wires. The underwater cable was as thick as a muscular forearm. It stretched out across the shelf, buried in the seabed to protect it from anchors and fishing-boats. TAT 14, as it was officially known, was a transatlantic cable linking Europe to the States. Its capacity was higher than that of almost any other cable in the world. There were dozens of such cables in the North Atlantic alone. Hundreds of thousands of kilometres of optical fibre extended across the planet, making up the backbone of the information age. Three-quarters of their capacity was devoted to the World Wide Web. Project Oxygen linked 175 countries in a kind of global super Internet. Another system bundled eight optical fibres to give a transmission capacity of 3.2 terabits per second, the equivalent of 48 million simultaneous phone conversations. The delicate glass fibres on the ocean bed had long since supplanted satellite technology.

obsessed with assuring our own perpetuity that our goals seldom coincide with what would be good for humankind.

He shrugged. ‘Worms. Two big ones.

Ese mismo año, a la altura de las Falkland, el Endeavour, un barco de noventa metros de eslora, estuvo a merced de un fenómeno que la ciencia conoce como «las Tres Hermanas»: tres olas sucesivas, pegadas, de treinta metros de altura cada una. El Endeavour sufrió serios daños, pero logró llegar a puerto.

That’s why Fenwick and Oliviera went for the noise theory,’ said Palm. ‘Years ago, when the navy started experimenting with sonar, there was an upsurge in beachings all over the world. Large numbers of whales and dolphins died. They all showed signs of heavy bleeding in the brain and in the inner ear - injuries consistent with noise damage. In each instance, environmentalists proved that NATO military exercises had been going on close to where the bodies were found. But tell that to the navy!