When you first heard about a book covering the science of Dune, you just knew there would be a chapter on prescience. Csilla Csori knew it long before you did, so we let her examine the chaotic nature and implications of seeing into the future … as well as numerous potential variations .
H IS COMING WAS FORETOLD BY PROPHETS. He was the result of ninety generations of selective breeding. Paul “Muad’Dib” Atreides was the Kwisatz Haderach, the “shortening of the way,” the “one who can be many places at once,” the universe’s super-being. To many, he was the prophet of God. To some, he was the Messiah. His godlike powers included prescience, the ability to see the future. But Muad’Dib did not have vague and cryptic visions of what was to come. He could examine the details of possible futures and direct events toward the outcome of his choosing. How real is this mastery of time, where the future can be seen as clearly as the past? Are there conditions beyond divine inspiration which would allow you to glimpse the future? If yes, do you condemn yourself to a predetermined universe without free will? Or does knowing the future give you the opportunity to change it?
Scientists don’t even agree on the definition of time, let alone its nature. It can be described as the relationship between events, i.e. the order in which things happen, but that raises the question of whether time exists when nothing is changing. If time does exist independent of events, then the definition is lacking, whereas if it does not, then some would argue that time itself does not exist except in our perception. And one cannot discuss the nature of time without entering into the realm of religion and philosophy—a delicate area to tread. While scientific and religious beliefs are not necessarily opposed, the underlying assumptions of each stand at opposite poles. How do you know a thing to be true? What is necessary for you to believe that x=y is true? A scientific answer assumes that evidence is key. Not only can evidence prove the truth of the statement, if evidence indicates otherwise, then the statement is assumed to be faulty and a new statement must be sought. A religious answer, on the other hand, assumes the statement to be true based on source, as in doctrine or holy text. If evidence indicates otherwise, then the evidence is assumed to be faulty and new evidence must be sought.
How, then, do you answer questions on the nature of time? Is time like a line, through which your life is a one-way journey, or is it like a circle, wherein the future becomes the past and you are reborn again and again? Your answer will likely fall further into the realm of doctrine than of evidence. Yet you cannot discuss the possibility of knowing the future without first defining what past, present, and future really are and how they relate to one another.
In everyday experience, the future becomes the present, which becomes the past. Muad’Dib described this movement from future to past as the broad vision of the future passing through the narrow door of the present. To him, the future was not a single sequence of events, but rather “countless consequence-lines fanned out” from a single moment. His ability of prescience was twofold: first, to see individual lines of possible futures in stark detail, and second, to know precisely which actions would lead to which future. Whether this holds true in the real world, that the future is an open possibility brought about by your actions, is a question that philosophers have been asking for thousands of years. It is the question of free will. Unfortunately, there is currently no scientific answer to this question, no way to prove that you have a choice of actions and that your future is not predetermined. So you must fall back on the religious answer, to believe in the nature of the future taught by your doctrine. Although some faiths teach that the future is already written, most belief systems allow for some level of free will, even if it is guided by an overarching purpose. You can also assume that you have a choice of actions simply because it feels like you do, or, if for no other reason, because it is the more appealing option. You probably would like to believe that your decisions matter, and that when you choose to make a difference, it is not something that would have happened anyway without you. To believe otherwise is a bleak vision of a pointless existence.
In real world applications, predicting the future is a matter of probability. If you flip a coin and call heads, you have a 1 in 2 (or 50 percent) chance of being correct. Probability is calculated as the number of correct outcomes divided by the total number of possible outcomes. A slightly less trivial example would be rolling a pair of dice and adding them together, like in craps. There are thirty-six possible outcomes (six possible outcomes on the first die multiplied by six possible outcomes on the second die), and six of those outcomes total 7: (6,1), (2,5), (3,4), (4,3), (5,2), (1,6). So the chance of rolling a 7 is 6/36, or 1 in 6 (17 percent). Calculating probability for dice is fairly simple, because the outcome for each individual die is independent from any other dice, and, unless the dice are loaded, each outcome has the same chance of occurring. Consider instead a roulette wheel, in which the variables interact. The speed of the ball moving in one direction and the speed of the wheel spinning in the opposite direction both determine where the ball will ultimately land. Add in the spin on the ball itself, and the problem becomes even more complex. Furthermore, variables like speed and spin are not neatly divided into discrete units like numbers on a die, so the calculations are mathematically still more complicated.
But both the craps table and the roulette wheel are still rather basic examples when compared to real-life events, because each event is independent from those that came before it. No matter if the shooter just rolled a 7 on the last throw, the chances of rolling 7 on the next throw is still 1 in 6. For an example of dependency, consider a game of blackjack. As each hand is dealt, the cards are removed from the deck, so the next hand has fewer and fewer possible cards from which to draw. As the game progresses, it is possible to keep track of which cards have already been dealt and therefore more accurately predict the next card based on what remains in the deck. (This, by the way, is known as counting cards and will get you thrown out of any casino in Las Vegas.) Understanding how previous events will affect the chances of future events forms the basis for making accurate, real world predictions.
Any system for predicting the future is only as good as the mathematical model it uses. A good model must accurately identify all of the variables affecting the outcome, what possible values the variables can have, how those variables interact with one another, and what all the possible outcomes are, and then determine which combination of variables leads to which outcome. Consider meteorology. It has come a long way since the days of using jars of bear fat to predict the onset of spring, but it can still only tell you that there will be a 40 percent chance of rain in your general area sometime this afternoon, not that it will downpour on your street for twenty-two minutes at exactly 4:31 P.M. Variables include temperature, precipitation, wind speed and direction, humidity, air pressure, cloud cover, warm and cold fronts, ocean currents, etc., all of which interact with one another in complex patterns. Not only are the variables non-discrete—so are the outcomes. Forecasters may say it’s sunny, partly cloudy, or overcast, but in truth there are many more possibilities between the extremes of “not a cloud in the sky” and “totally socked in.” Sophisticated computer models try to take into account all of the data, but even if weather forecasters were to have a perfect system model, it would only give a definite answer for a limited period of time—a function of the computational precision used to calculate the results.
In our world, only computers can perform these calculations in real time, but in the Dune universe, computers had been outlawed after a crusade against thinking machines and conscious robots. This lack of computers forced human minds to develop instead, giving rise to different training schools. One such school conditioned talented people to perform “supreme accomplishments of logic,” which effectively transformed them into human computers, called Mentats. Muad’Dib received the beginning of this training in his youth, and his prescient awareness had its roots in probability mathematics. However, his talent went beyond the abilities of an ordinary Mentat, “as a computation of most probable futures, but with something more, an edge of mystery—as though his mind dipped into some timeless stratum and sampled the winds of the future.”
Beyond the sheer number of variables, the main difficulty in creating an accurate model for predicting weather stems from the fact that weather is a chaotic system, as are most physical systems. Chaotic does not mean random; weather does behave according to specific rules, and there are definite mathematical equations to describe its behavior. A chaotic system, or dynamic nonlinear system, is one in which small changes cause proportionately larger changes, which cause even larger changes, and so on, growing exponentially over time. This is often called the butterfly effect, based on the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas. This happens because the mathematical equations describing weather are nonlinear.
In a non-chaotic system, described by linear equations, small changes or errors will lead to small deviations. For example, returning to the roulette wheel, if the dealer spins the wheel a tiny bit faster, then the ball will travel a little bit further before dropping. Up until the moment when the ball drops, the system behaves similarly to a non-chaotic system, in that the changes in results are in proportion to changes in the initial conditions. If the ball has the same exact speed and spin in two separate tests, under no circumstance will a small change to the speed of the wheel cause a wildly large change in the distance the ball travels before dropping.
Once the ball drops, however, all bets are off, because the system becomes chaotic. A slight variation in timing of the second drop can cause the ball to strike a ridge and bounce in a completely different direction, with subsequent bounces tracing a path increasingly deviated from the first path. This exponential growth of changes over time is what makes detailed long-range weather prediction impossible with current models. The models cannot take into account every tiny detail of initial conditions. A slight change in one variable will not alter the immediate forecast very much, so it can give an accurate range of a few degrees in temperature. As time increases, however, that small initial change will cause an exponentially increasing range of possible outcomes, until at some point the forecast becomes so widely varied that it is essentially chaotic and unpredictable. It is, in theory, possible that computing power and mathematics will eventually combine to form a perfectly complete system model which measures every detail of every air molecule, but it would still have to account for the final variable—individual decision.
Free will is the most difficult variable to predict in any model. It is not restricted to humans; dogs or even butterflies have some level of decision-making in their actions. According to chaos theory, if you decide that today is the perfect day to go cruising around town, then the exhaust fumes spewed out by your SUV will affect the weather pattern. It won’t affect the weather tomorrow or next week, but it might start a monsoon in India six months from now. Any accurate model for predicting the weather far in advance would have to incorporate the effects of individual decisions.
Perhaps the “something more” in Muad’Dib’s visions were an ability to predict individual actions with some degree of accuracy. Still, even he was subject to limitations, and he admitted that “a single obscure decision of prophecy, perhaps the choice of one word over another, could change the entire aspect of the future” (Dune 218).
One emerging field of science which attempts to predict events taking place over large time scales is threshold and pattern dynamics. Rather than looking at everyday events like weather, it examines uncommon and important events such as volcanic eruptions, tsunami, algae blooms, and disease epidemics. These types of events occur suddenly, but they have telltale signs of buildup which often go unnoticed because they take place over long periods of time. Threshold and pattern dynamics attempts to model the factors driving these events using mathematics and computers to identify critical thresholds where the system will shift dramatically. Not only must scientists recognize which factors influence an event, they must develop methods to observe and measure these factors. Then, the next challenge lies in identifying patterns in the observations which indicate where a future threshold will be crossed.
This new field started with efforts to predict earthquakes. For many years, teams of scientists have been collecting data from seismic sensors in earthquake-prone regions. Joining this data with information about geological makeup of the region, they are able to create computer models of stress buildup and movement along fault lines. The enormous number of calculations required for this modeling can only be done on very powerful and fast computers. Today’s supercomputers operate in the terabytes (TB) range. (1 TB equals 1,024 gigabytes or over 1 million megabytes. In comparison, the average home computer has 512 megabytes to 1 gigabyte of RAM.) Scientists use this computing power to run detailed computer simulations of earthquakes, such as the TeraShake simulations run by the Southern California Earthquake Center. Using data on how different types of soil and bedrock move in earthquakes of varying depth and magnitude, and how seismic waves travel through these rocks and soils, TeraShake predicted the widespread effects of a future earthquake occurring along the San Andreas Fault. (TeraShake required 1 TB to run, took five days, and output 47 TB of data. It ran on DataStar at the San Diego Supercomputer Center.)
Studies of threshold and pattern dynamics can provide the key information for making these types of projects true earthquake predictors—the key is where and when an earthquake is likely to happen. To do this, a team at the University of California, Davis has developed simulations of entire fault systems, showing the geologic activity over thousands of years. The program simulates the constant rate of tectonic plate movement along a fault, which causes stresses to build up until the rocks slip, triggering an earthquake. By identifying the threshold at which the stress becomes too great, this program can predict when and where an earthquake will occur. Due to the difficulty of modeling complex systems, current simulations can’t yet predict exact times and locations of earthquakes. However, they can show that an earthquake is likely to occur in one of a small number of areas and within a specific window of time. The geologic time scale is very long compared to human life, but as the methods of modeling improve and computing power continues to increase, the window of prediction will get smaller.
Research into thresholds holds promise for predicting far more than just natural disasters. It is being used along with network theory to understand the most complicated of systems—those involving people and their individual decisions. Individual actions add up and impact the whole system, making the results impossible to predict in a direct way. Instead, network theory looks at the pattern of connections between people, whether through social or economic ties, and examines how things like disease epidemics (which are the result of the system reaching a threshold) spread throughout the network. For example, studies of the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak in English livestock herds revealed that it was primarily due to an increase in contacts between different herds. Animals were being trucked longer distances, so that farms all across the country became interlinked. The livestock network passed a connectivity threshold, so that once one animal contracted the disease, the infection was able to spread very quickly to other herds throughout the country. This type of study could be used to analyze, and perhaps prevent, the possibility of a global pandemic. While network theory cannot predict an initial outbreak, it can show how quickly a disease would spread, as well as how and if it could be contained. The results of such a pandemic study could indicate where containment efforts would be most effective once an outbreak occurred. Also, if the analysis was to show that the connectivity threshold has already been passed, and that containment would be impossible once the disease started spreading, changes could be made to the network in advance, to prevent any outbreaks from getting out of control.
Whether Muad’Dib had an awareness of threshold dynamics as part of his prescient vision is unclear, but he did recognize when he crossed a threshold of influence within Fremen society and religion. He spoke of a “terrible purpose” that was gathering strength and momentum, and from which he eventually realized he could not escape. He first sensed it as a “wild race consciousness that was moving the human universe toward chaos” (Dune 220). By the time he understood what it was—that legions of fanatics would carry out a jihad in his name and that his banner would become a symbol of terror—Muad’Dib also understood that it would continue with or without him. There was no going back from the threshold.
The jihad also acts like an attractor, a state to which a dynamical system will evolve regardless of small changes to the system. Even though the butterfly effect shows that slight changes can lead to vastly different outcomes, certain events are momentous enough that nothing will stop them. These events are constant and unchangeable. An extreme example is the death of our Sun. When the Sun goes nova, it will wipe out everything on the Earth’s surface, and nothing that humans do prior to that day will stop this event from occurring. The state of the Earth after that day is an attractor—a constant that we cannot change. Being able to see attractors would give some stability to visions of an ever-changing future. Muad’Dib sensed his “terrible purpose” before he ever set foot on Arrakis, long before he had worshippers or followers. History seems to have been leading toward a jihad, and if it had not been Muad’Dib that precipitated it, someone or something else would have done so eventually.
Muad’Dib described his visions as “prediction of the waveform,” which is a reference to a concept in quantum mechanics. Quantum theory attempts to describe the behavior of very small objects (i.e., subatomic particles), which behave differently than larger, everyday objects. This behavior can be observed in a classic physics experiment, the double-slit experiment, which was originally designed to determine if light travels as waves or as particles. In the experiment, light is directed at a barrier with two slits in it, with a detection screen behind it. The pattern the light makes on the screen should indicate if it is a wave or a particle. For example, if the experiment used water instead of light, then a water wave passing through the two slits would cause two sets of ripples to radiate outward and interfere with one another where they overlap. At points where both waves create a crest or a trough, the crest or trough increases, and at points where one wave creates a crest and the other a trough, they cancel each other out and the water remains level. This interference forms a regular pattern on the detection screen. If, on the other hand, bullets were fired at the barrier, then some of the bullets would pass through the slits and strike the detection screen behind it. Those bullets would hit in two clusters, one in line with each of the slits.
When this experiment is performed with light, the results are strange and counterintuitive. Light consists of individual particles, called photons. When photons are fired at the slits one at a time, they build up in an interference pattern of light and dark bands as if they are waves, rather than forming a cluster pattern indicating particles. However, if one slit is closed, then the photons do form a cluster pattern behind the open slit. Each photon passing through one slit behaves as if it is aware of the other slit. Furthermore, if detectors are placed at the slits to record which one a photon goes through (or whether it goes through both at once), then the photons always behave exactly like particles, passing through one slit or the other and forming cluster patterns on the barrier. This holds true whether there is a detector on both or on just one of the slits. Even if a photon passes through a slit with no detector on it, the photon behaves as if it is aware of the detector on the other slit. This duality of particle-wave behavior is not restricted to photons. The experiment has been repeated with electrons and even atoms, which are definitely observable particles with mass, and the results have been the same. Although strange, this behavior is well-documented and is the basis for many real world applications, including lasers, computers, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines.
The most widely accepted concept which provides an explanation for this odd behavior is the “collapse of the wave function” as described in the Copenhagen interpretation. It posits that what is passing through the slits is a probability wave. Instead of having a definite location, the particle has a probability of being in any particular location. When the photons form the interference pattern of light and dark bands, it is because some locations, the light bands, have a greater probability, and other locations, the dark bands, have less probability. The particle does not really exist as a particle, but as a wavelike property covering the areas where it might be found. The probability wave is spread out and passes through both slits at the same time, with a 50 percent chance of the particle passing through the first slit and a 50 percent chance of it passing through the second slit. These two probability waves recombine with each other on the detection screen and form the interference pattern. That is, until the particle is observed. The particle can only exist as a non-distinct probability when no one is looking at it. Direct observation forces the particle to reveal its actual location, causing the probability wave to collapse into a particle. An observed particle has 100 percent chance of passing through one slit and 0 percent chance of passing through the other. There can be no interference pattern because there is only one probability wave, the 100 percent which has collapsed into an actual particle. So the path of the particle only comes into existence when it is observed. This means that at the quantum level, there can be no outside observer, because the act of observing changes the behavior of that which is being observed.
This concept can be used, as Muad’Dib did, to describe the experience of peering into the future. The future doesn’t really exist. It is only a probability wave until the moment when the wave function collapses and the future becomes the present, when probability collapses into actuality. Muad’Dib had the ability to predict the waveform, in other words, to understand and “see” quantum mechanical probability waves without collapsing them. However, his actions were still subject to quantum limitations, and “the expenditure of energy that revealed what he saw, changed what he saw” (Dune 296).
Three factors converged in the life of Muad’Dib to give him his special power of prescience: genes, training, and drugs.
By the time of Muad’Dib’s birth, the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, an ancient school of mental and physical training specializing in politics, had been running a selective breeding program on the human population for ninety generations. The goal of the program was to breed a new type of human, a super-being they called the Kwisatz Haderach, which translates as “one who can be many places at once.” They were trying to create a person with increased mental abilities, who could understand and manipulate the complex mathematics of quantum physics. Such a person would, in essence, be able to think as a perfect system model, calculating all possible variables and their probable outcomes. The Bene Gesserit were breeding for a super-Mentat—a human computer with the prescient abilities found in Guild Navigators.
The Spacing Guild was another of the ancient training schools, one that emphasized pure mathematics. Using a form of prescience, Guild Navigators could “quest ahead through time to find the safest course” for guiding ships through space. Their ability to see the future was limited, however, by nexus points—moments where too many variables compressed too close together in time, so that the results were chaotic and unpredictable. By their nature, navigators always chose a clear, safe path, and they were loath to act when they foresaw a nexus for fear of causing a catastrophe. Muad’Dib could not see beyond a nexus with certainty either, but he was not constrained by the need to choose a safe course, and, in fact, saw that as a path to stagnation.
The combination of Mentat capabilities and navigator-like prescience would make a powerful and formidable person, one that the Bene Gesserit hoped they could control for their own purposes. They believed that they were only two generations away from their goal, so they instructed Muad’Dib’s mother to bear only daughters, one of whom they hoped would bear the Kwisatz Haderach. However, the program was closer to its goal than the Bene Gesserit had calculated, and when Muad’Dib’s mother bore a son in defiance of orders, he turned out to be the Kwisatz Haderach they were looking for. Whether they could control him was another matter.
Genetics provided Muad’Dib with a better brain, but that alone would not have been enough for him to realize his full potential and powers. From birth, he was given special Mentat training to develop certain parts of his brain for complex computing. He learned to observe minute details about a person’s physiology and behavior, and to analyze those details and draw conclusions about the person’s motives, intentions, and future behavior. In addition, Bene Gesserit conditioning gave him precise focus and control over his mind and body. He could replay an event in his mind in slow motion and focus in on particular details. He could control specific muscles and nerve bundles for perfectly timed movement and placement of his body. Using a precise pitch and tone of his voice, coupled with the proper choice of words, he could even manipulate a person into behaving one way or another. This specialized training prepared his mind and paved the way for him to master his powers of prescience.
Even in childhood, Muad’Dib displayed prescient ability in the form of dreams. Not all of his dreams were visions of the future, but he could tell which ones were, and those were correct down to the smallest detail. The catalyst which brought his visions from dreams into the waking world was the mind-altering drug known as melange, or simply, the spice. In small quantities, spice extended life. In larger quantities, it expanded the mind. Guild navigators consumed enormous amounts of spice in order to gain their prescient abilities. As Muad’Dib spent more time on Arrakis and became exposed to greater quantities of spice, he began to have “waking dreams” and visions of different possible futures. For a person with the inherent ability to calculate the future, the spice was creating a positive feedback loop in the pattern-reading portion of his brain.
In a positive feedback loop, the output of a system is fed back in to the input, which accelerates the results. A common example is feedback in a microphone that is placed in front of a speaker. The microphone picks up sounds and the speaker amplifies and broadcasts them. The microphone in turn picks up the amplified sounds and the speaker amplifies them further…until the system overloads and we hear a loud, unpleasant screeching.
A similar loop occurred in Muad’Dib’s spice-saturated brain. As the drug expanded his consciousness, he was able to see possible futures. This information was fed back into his mental calculations, which further expanded his ability to predict what was to come. A positive feedback loop has a snowball effect, increasing over time, and, for a while, Muad’Dib’s prescience became stronger and more detailed. Obsessed with knowing every aspect of the future, he consumed ever-increasing amounts of spice. However, as with any drug, his body acquired a tolerance for spice, and as a result, he had fewer, dimmer visions. In addition, a nexus would always form around anyone with prescient abilities; the prescient could not see one another with clarity, because the act of looking at the future changed what they saw, and thus the ability to see possible futures made them inherently more difficult to predict. To counteract these problems, Muad’Dib decided to take the Water of Life, a concentrated liquid form of spice, which could cause a permanent consciousness-expanding experience in the user, but which was poison to most people who tasted it. Some Bene Gesserit women were able to consume it and transmute the poison, but all men who had attempted it had died painfully. The Water of Life accelerated the feedback loop in a person’s brain to a such a great rate that the person consuming it would either have to alter their brain chemistry to survive, or their brain would overload and break down, like a blown speaker.
Successfully consuming the Water of Life was the final step for Muad’Dib to reach full prescience. The drug amplified the signals in his genetically advanced brain, while his strict and rigorous training allowed him to take control of the process. The tremendous final output resulted in a true mind-altering experience, one which changed his brain chemistry permanently and gave him the power to see past, present, and future with almost absolute clarity. He described himself as “a net in the sea of time, free to sweep future and past. I am a moving membrane from whom no possibility can escape” (Dune 506).
Of course, everything has its limits. Even though Muad’Dib could see immediate futures in perfect detail, he could not extend his vision through infinite time. But he could see far enough that, even when he lost his eyes, he could still walk around like a sighted person, playing out the memory of his prescient vision. This feat amazed everyone around him, even those who already believed him to be the Messiah. They marveled that he no longer needed eyes to see, not realizing that he had been living in his prescient vision for a long time. For that is the ultimate pitfall of the oracle: being locked into his vision. Knowing the future with absolute certainty robs a person of free will. Muad’Dib said of himself, “I meddled in all the possible futures I could create until, finally, they created me” (Dune Messiah 319). His son Leto, understanding how this could lead the entire human race into stagnation, dedicated his life to undoing it. He took control of the Bene Gesserit breeding program to create humans whose actions prescient people could not predict, thus preserving an unknown and unknowable future.
At what point do predictions of the future change from prescience to prophecy? Muad’Dib was more than just a talented man who could calculate quantum physics probabilities in his head. He was more than just a mystic experiencing drug-induced visions of the future. He was a prophet, worshipped by fanatical followers who took his holy war across all the planets of the known universe. Whether or not the hand of God was behind it, millions of people believed that it was. Does a scientific explanation of his abilities necessarily make them less divine?
Many events in Muad’Dib’s life mirror those of our own prophets and messiahs. His coming was predicted by other prophets. He was marked as special from the moment he was born. He faced obstacles and trials, including betrayal by a close friend. He led his people to freedom. He passed proverbs and wise teachings on to his followers. And, most notably, he had the power to see the future. How do you determine who is a man with prescience, and who is a prophet of God? Ultimately, his followers decide.
The Guild Navigators had prescient abilities, but they were not revered as prophets. They were part of a business corporation, living separate from any culture or society. Motivated by profit and the preservation of their monopoly, their limited interaction with other people worked only to serve those ends. Muad’Dib, on the other hand, immersed himself in the affairs of the Fremen people. Their fight for freedom became his fight. Before he became their leader, he lived as one of them, embracing their culture and living by their rules. The Fremen considered Muad’Dib to be one of their own, even though he was born an outsider. It is this connection with his people that led the Fremen to follow him with such devotion.
How then, would you recognize a modern prophet? If you met a man with Muad’Dib’s extraordinary abilities, would you believe his words to be prophecy? His predictions would be accurate. Is that enough to consider his words to be divinely inspired? Divine or not, would his ability to see the future make you listen to what he has to say? If science could provide an explanation of his abilities, would you be more or less inclined to listen?
Although, by definition, prophecy is divinely inspired, the modern world’s various religious beliefs define the concept of divinity in many different ways. If you consider prophecy in simple terms as a statement about the future in which you choose to believe, then what makes a prophet? Does a person have to share your culture or religion in order for you to believe that they are worth listening to? Or is there a universal truth which transcends human differences?
The Dune series shows what can happen when belief in a prophet is taken to the extreme. Muad’Dib tried to escape his “terrible purpose” and prevent the religious war, but ultimately his followers grew into the fanatics he had foreseen, and he could not stop them. In the end, he railed against the religion which gave him godhead and then killed people in his name. But he knew that, even after his death, the jihad would follow his ghost. Muad’Dib was, after all, just a man. In his own words, “There exists no separation between gods and men, one blends softly casual into the other” (Dune Messiah 11).
CSILLA CSORI is a programmer/analyst at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. She works primarily on database and software development for business applications, and she also moonlights as a gremlin hunter for her colleagues when their computer programs start acting funny. Recently, she released version 5.1 of ProBook grant application software she authored for the University of California. It’s one of those pesky projects that started small but took on a life of its own, and now, like Doctor Who ’s Cybermen, keeps coming back to demand more upgrades. She gained an interest in quantum physics in college while interning at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. In her spare time, she enjoys playing softball, kayaking, and any other excuse to be outdoors in San Diego’s perfect weather.