Mm
Voltaire’s seminal short story Micromegas (1752), aside from being one of the first science fiction stories that postulated interstellar travel and outer space forms of life, is also arguably the first short story that problematizes the notion of allometry on different orders of magnitude. If we allow for a generalized concept of space and its corresponding metrics (or dimensions) to be more than spatial determinations then, much earlier than Edwin’s Abbott’s Flatland (1884), Voltaire’s Micromegas can claim the subtitle: ‘A Romance of Many Dimensions’. Voluntarily or not, within it Voltaire highlights the tension that local metrics produce when applied incommensurably at a universal scale.
Named after its protagonist, Micromegas is the fictional name of an interstellar explorer whose philosophical quests brought him to our solar system to visit Saturn and Earth. His name, a plural conflation of distant metric prefixes (micro- at a factor of 0.000001, mega- at a factor 1,000,000) resulting into a product 1; his habitat, a planet orbiting star Sirius1 that is approximately 24,000 times larger than planet Earth; hence, his stature, 24,000 geometrical paces of 5 feet2 each, which is tantamount to 8 leagues, which is to say that if Micromegas were to lay back on the ground we would need 8 hours to walk across his side. And yet, despite his size, Voltaire alludes to manmade sculpture and asserts that Micromegas body proportions are adequate; that he preserves isometry.
Micromegas is knowledgeable in several fields: in mathematics he had ‘solved 50 propositions of Euclid –18 more than Blaise Pascal’ and he even wrote a book on biology in which he argued that different species are in fact made of the same material substance. Because his materialist view deviated from what the spiritual leader of his planet preached, his writings were condemned and ultimately banned3. Ostracized from court for his scientific findings Micromegas decides to travel across galaxies and study other species.
During his stop on Saturn, after overcoming the difference of magnitude with Saturnians, he befriends the secretary of the Academy of Saturn. In one of their conversations, so the story goes, Micromegas confesses to the secretary that his journeys made it clear ‘that nature is full of variety’. In an attempt to contribute to the conversation the secretary uses romantic metaphors and similes to describe nature only to be shut down instantly by Micromegas response: ‘Nature is like nature. Why do you seek for comparison?’ to which the secretary responds: ‘To please you.’
Instead of being pleased by transcendent comparisons, Micromegas asks for facts about the Saturnians’ subjective experience of nature. He is interested in their specificity: the number of their senses, the number of years of life expectancy, the number of primary colors perceived and how many different modes of existence Saturnians can enumerate. Micromegas is interested in what was immanent to their globe so that he could relate them to his own. Their differences appear unbridgeable.
Even before they reach Earth the paradox in Micromegas epistemology is evident. In an attempt to interrogate the factual character of subjective experience on Saturn, Micromegas rejects the domain of similes for that of enumeration. It may not appear so, but some sort of metric is at stake in both cases. The former exists at the level of imaginatio by presupposing a shared lived experience upon which the simile is used to link the descriptor to its descriptum, whereas the latter exists at the level of ratio by assuming a scalar system upon which number is used to infer what the subjective character of experience would have been at different scales. In other words, because Micromegas assumes experience to be isometric he opts out for metrics that can be objectively agreed upon even after transformations. That has always been the subsumptive function - and danger, for that matter - of metrics.
Riding on a meteorite, Micromegas and the Saturnian finally reach Earth. Its significantly smaller scale leads the secretary to proclaim that our planet is uninhabited. He justifies his claim by referring to the chaotic character of nature on our planet: the total absence of “straight lines”4. They examine various islands (continents) and “lakes” (one of which we call the Mediterranean Sea) until they distinguish Earth’s largest specimen of life: a humpback whale.
How did that first recognition of life on Earth take place? Not surprisingly, in a contingent manner. In an accident, the Saturnian’s diamond necklace breaks and in an attempt to pick up its pieces the diamond magnifies what he could not see earlier: this is a moment of transvaluation. What could not have been revealed through external metrics becomes evident through internalized value. Value becomes a new free variable, independent of orders of magnitude. Hence, in Micromegas, life, matter and their valuation provide the middle ground that will make comparison and philosophical discourse possible.
The recognition of life on Earth triggers further examination with their microscopes of different types of whales, until Micromegas picks up what would later be identified as a ship carrying some philosophers who were returning from an exploration of the North Pole. From an allometric point of view, this is the story’s critical moment: a rare moment in literature of actual self-similarity in which the extraterrestrial philosophers encounter earthbound ones, both during their respective explorations.
Through out the story, incommensurability repeatedly upsets metricality, and Voltaire masterfully accommodates those differences through imaginative literary maneuvers. What remains unchallenged up until this moment is the intrinsic metrics assigned to our system of value, and in Voltaire’s attempt to bridge order of magnitudes he ends up assuming that system. This slip off suggests something much more interesting: life, as value, becomes visible under the spectrum of value assigned. In other words, the variability of metrics makes comparison between localities possible.
This is not however the path that Voltaire takes, hence, the disappointment in the remaining part of the story. To summarize its ending: the group of philosophers engages in a philosophical discussion that results into a series of name-droppings and quasi-theological platitudes that simply affirm the very philosophical discourse in dispute. To humble the high esteem that humans have of their own kind Micromegas promises them a book intended to solve the point of everything. The book turned out to be a blank slate.
1 At the time this is written, NASA’s Voyager 2 mission is at a distance of 16,820,324,865 km from Earth. The scientific community seems to agree that by the time it reaches Sirius, and given that we survive artificial intelligence, the human species would have already mutated into another kind.
2 The foot as a measuring unit - in all its variation - has been a true universal invention. But as empires change, so do the metrics used by royal sciences. So, at different periods, the ‘natural’ foot became imperial (i.e. Greek foot replaced by Roman foot), nationalized (i.e. Italian piede), sacralized (St. Paul’s foot), modernized, royalized (royalfoot or pied de roi) legally treated (Treaty of the Meter, 1866) and internationalized (Weights and Measure Act,1963).
3 Much like Voltaire himself.
4 Or better, of a Euclidean metric. Here, the secretary effectively equates civilization with the formal intervention it has on nature to which Micromegas responds: “Everything here seems irregular, you say; but you judge by the standards of Saturn and Jupiter. Have I not told you that in the course of my travels I have always found variety?”
Published in Peter Eramian's publication, for his exhibition: Here's to my Sweet Satan.