RIVA:
Noosphere, Part II: Atheistic Mythologies
In spite of their great diversity, the myths that serve as the foundational elements of the noosphere can all be sorted into categories identified by a member of the following set: {NULL, 0, 1, 2, 3}. These identifiers indicate atheistic, polytheistic, monistic, dualistic and trinitarian mythologies. These numbers do not obey the laws of arithmetic but behave in the following counterintuitive and non-obvious ways:
Atheistic: NULL is NULL
Polytheistic: 0 = ∞
Monistic: 1≠1
Dualistic: 1+1=1
Trinitarian: 1+1+1=1
As promised, we shall now look at each one of these. This week's installment will address atheistic mythologies.
Atheistic mythologies
NULL is NULL is NULL. NULL is different from zero: zero means that there is nothing there; NULL means that we neither know or care what's there. NULL is not equal to anything—not even to itself, since there are no grounds for comparison; therefore, all that can be said about it is that it is NULL—a tautology. There is an almost limitless variety of adherents of NULL, just as there is an almost limitless variety of broken pottery in the world's landfills, dumps and middens, but a particularly pervasive example is Homo trivialis: the degenerate case of a non-sapient Homo sapiens, a man unconcerned with anything more lofty than a full belly, a satisfied libido and a warm, dry place to sleep. The typical Homo trivialis specimen is a satisfied consumer of sudsy beer, starchy and fatty foods and television sports. Or it might be a woman, her concerns laser-focused on her hair, nails and shoes, with surgically enhanced breasts, lips and buttocks as added extras.
Also among the adherents of NULL are the technosphere's eager minions. These are the technophiles who see anything beyond a purely mechanistic conception of the universe as base superstition to be ridiculed, whereas his own idolizing and fetishizing of technology is not ridiculous at all, mind you! Several generations of science fiction writers have constructed an entire technospherical universe which you can traverse aboard the good little spaceship Spinal Tap which goes Warp 11 (but only in your juvenile imagination). In reality humans have never so much as poked their heads outside of low Earth orbit, all of the Apollo mission nonsense notwithstanding, and probably never will. It now turns out that Americans can't go back to the moon because they don't have the spacesuits. Those wonderful spacesuits they used to romp around on the Moon were gnawed to pieces by some space rats and they can't make new ones because they lost the blueprint and then their dog ate it. This is all highly believable, of course, but only if you are gullible as a child.
Among the adult population, there is also some number of philosophical rationalists. They are convinced that an entity whose existence cannot be proved (documented, attested, weighed, measured, made to pee into a cup, interviewed on camera, dragged into court to testify, etc.) does not exist. This stance is particularly humorous if approached from the point of view of a deity: if I were God (which, by the way, I am not; this is purely a thought experiment) then why would I condescend to being trifled with in this manner? As God, I would be well-disposed toward those who believe in Me and worship Me, perhaps even showing Myself to them, but only in purely mystical, ethereal ways so as not to trivialize my godlike nature. But I would mostly ignore those who don't believe in Me and don't worship Me as long as they leave My true believers alone. But I would strike down with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy My brothers. That part Ezekiel [25:17] got right. But they would not know that My name is the Lord when I lay My vengeance upon them; rather, they would not know what hit them and simply call it an "act of God" (in Whom they don't believe). I am done speaking as God now, fun though that is.
From the point of view of the technosphere, these are all ideal clients: either they are indifferent, obedient and easy to manipulate, with no agenda of their own, or they are zealous guardians of the technosphere who wish to technologize everything and would eagerly climb into a space capsule and be shot off into the endless emptiness of space just for the greater glory of it.
Passionate, zealous adherents of NULL are the technosphere's most faithful servants. Their insistence that everything must have a rational basis is very helpful in enlarging the technosphere's scope and enhancing its ability to achieve total control over humanity. A rational approach is, of course, often helpful, especially when deciding how much water to put in a nuclear reactor to keep it from melting down. But it is neither necessary nor sufficient in finding life's meaning; quite the opposite, it is quite helpful in destroying it. The technosphere's long-term goal, then, is to drive all of humanity toward the NULL state.