Jump
371 Jump Time travel serves as outer limit of long distance. In other words or worlds, it offers a model for the mode of transportation—beyond distance—that interstellar travel necessarily requires. Gotthard Günther contemplates in another science fiction spread of three installments the meaning of motion that gets seconded or skipped in the space-warp notions of outer-space fiction and is already concept-limited to the paradox of Achilles’s futile race against the tortoise. Logically, in terms of denumerable material units of distance, the tortoise must remain, since in constant motion, one point ahead of its pursuer. Achilles could catch up with and overtake the tortoise only if, like the mode of transport interstellar travel would entail, he could move with infinite speed and thus cover the distances between identifiable points in zero time. The race would be overcome or won—or one—from start to finish: “if there is a race—with finite speeds for the racers—no overtaking could ever take place” (I, 3). “The day of interstellar space travel will be here when Achilles overtakes the Tortoise in our thoughts as well as in nature. In other words, when we have unravelled the secret of motion” (I, 13). We have always only been getting around infinity, which is left off limits as “unthinkable for human thought” (I, 4), while harnessing motion and seconding it as function of common sense. The space warp of science fiction designated a new frontier of motion in terms of something other than distance or time units. Günther turns to Cantor’s golemesque introduction of “transfinite” numbers, set off and set apart by the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, Aleph. To initiate interstellar travel the notion or law of relativity—that nothing can move in space faster than light—must be overcome as limitation. Cantor’s “transfinite system of real numbers” 372 Jump “provides us with a picture of space which is allowed to shrink without limits” (II, 7). Distance must be shrinkwrapped. “Interstellar travel is, theoretically speaking, an undeniable certainty because the secret of motion is that it does not happen on the basis of quantized physical conditions where distances gradually pile up to almost immeasurable orders of magnitude” (II, 8). Günther quotes John W. Campbell’s summary of Cantor’s intervention: “a line of any length is equal to a line of any other length” (II, 9). Only in this way can we shoot for the stars—once matter proves to be as relative as space and time. “In our present universe time has two directions. It stretches toward the past as well as toward the future. But in an empty universe time would have only one direction—toward the future. A past would not exist. The possibility of ‘passing’ time demands the presence of matter” (III, 7). But if you keep on adding matter, “then gravitation becomes stronger than expansion , and the universe will start to shrink” (III, 8). “Distance is a property of quantized matter but not of a continuum like space or time” (III, 10). Günther quotes from an Asimov novel (The Stars Like Dust): “It is only the Jump which makes interstellar travel possible” (III, 11). Of the three components of the universe, two are continua (space and time) and one is regularly quantized. In the continuum, however, length of distance or interval is meaningless. A technique is required for the elimination of the quantized component “by substituting non-quantized features” (III, 13). We are operating here according to the logic of inoculation or elimination by proxy. It is an artificial state of existence that the three components support. However, as artificial, this state of existence is based, bottom line, on an operation that needs to be raised to consciousness as the fourth basic component. We thus enter a redundancy that allows omission of one of the four interchangeable components. (Oh my God! The universe is transference!) If we eliminate the operation or process (P), then “we have the universe just as it is without man’s action” (III, 13). “Of course, P is still there as far as the objective world is concerned but it is distributed over MST.” At the same time as the introduction of P as independent parameter, “as a fourth degree of freedom for action, we add human creative procedure to the natural events as a means of producing something which has not existed before.” Thus the...
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