Waiting for the Explosion

Why we’re living in limbo — too late to prevent catastrophe, but not quite there yet.

Kurt Vonnegut’s experience surviving the allied firebombing of Dresden during WWII as a prisoner of war provided him a unique lens through which to examine the human condition.

In his novel Slaughterhouse Five (or the Children’s Crusade), through the story of Billy Pilgrim — a kind-hearted optometrist and military chaplain who also happened to survive the bombing of Dresden, Vonnegut perfectly employed his style of flippant fatalism to delve into the nature of violent conflict.

At one point in the story Billy is abducted by an alien species, the Tralfamadorians, and brought to their home planet as a research specimen/public spectacle. One distinct feature of Tralfamadorians is that they experience the universe in four dimensions, meaning that for them time does not unfold in a linear sense, one moment after another, as it does for humans.

Instead the Tralfamadorians see all of time at once — just as we can perceive an object’s physical shape in three dimensions, they can perceive every moment as if reality has been projected onto a frame-by-frame reel of images all around, each depicting a different point in time.

This was an overwhelming paradigm shift for Billy, who struggled wrap his head around the concept — much like a being limited to experiencing life in two dimensions would struggle to understand the concept of height without ever being able to move up or down.

Billy came to understand that as a human being, he was inherently limited to the confines of the reality his senses allowed him to experience.

What really drove home the point was when one of Billy’s Tralfamadorian tour guides informed him…

‘We know how the universe ends.’

Curious, Billy asked the logical follow up question to which the guide issued a blunt, informative response:

‘We blow it up, experimenting with new fuels for our flying saucers. A Tralfamadorian test pilot presses a starter button, and the whole Universe disappears.’

So it goes.

Somewhat unsettled, Billy wondered why they didn’t try to stop the pilot from pressing the button. He was obviously still struggling with the notion of a fourth dimension. The Tralfamadorian response was simple:

‘He has always pressed it, and he always will. We always let him and we always will let him. The moment is structured that way.’