=1 "10^57 = 1"

10⁵⁷ = 1

by F. Radiata

The ancient Greeks said that only a geometrician should enter their schools, because only he could understand the universe and God. They had just discovered geometry. Then they discovered that God was also an arithmetician.

As long as there was only one earth, God seemed understandable even to a non-mathematician. It was still conceivable that you could talk to Him in a filial way on some psychic telephone. This was of course in the pre-population-explosion era. And then man discovered that there were a trillion planets in our galaxy alone. And the discoverer of this, Giodarno Bruno, was promptly burned at the stake. Naturally, because if that were true God couldn't be the fatherly artiste which man had imagined Him to be, but rather a monomaniac, a manic-compulsive creator of planets, a dangerous escapee from some universal lunatic asylum who in deliriums of creation, in a frenzy of big numbers, creates worlds after worlds after worlds, to make even an archangel dizzy.

To the father of a planet you could still imagine a privileged saint or a pope having access, but how can you ask a private audience with a father of 10⁵⁷ planets? The universe is not infinite, mathematicians assure us. The number of its planets cannot exceed 10⁵⁷. But still to understand such an insane number you need a computer. A mere biological brain shudders at such a relationship. Even a prayer becomes a nightmare. Our brains are delicate mechanisms, and simply by reciting, “Our Father who art in 10⁵⁷ Heavens, Thine are the 57th powers of 10” – ‘whooosh’ goes a mere biological brain. To a computer, however, such a god presents no difficulties; a computer can count to the fifty-seventh power before breakfast.

Thus it came about that theological problems were more and more turned over to computers for solution. As man discovered nuclear power he understood less and less about God and why he left such dangerous stuff lying around. Finally this led to the computer churches of the 21st century where prayers were computerized and put on tape 10¹⁰ bits per second; and computers preached, computers took confession, computers baptized, and computers read the mass and buried the dead, – all on tape of course.

By the 22nd century nobody knew any longer what the computers were talking about, and the church ceremonials were understood only by a few doctors of mathematics to whom the computers could explain why the infinite root of aleph zero was equal to the infinite power of an empty set. Finally came the great yogi mathematician, Sankhayananda, in the 23rd century, with his famous formula ∞=1. Indians always had a liking for big numbers, and the bigger, the more they liked them. So

10¹⁰¹⁰

put them into an absolute ecstasy. Sankhyananda and acquired even as a body, by long and strenuous meditations, the needle sharpness of the intellect, the famous diamond point.

“Either,” he said, “you believe in God, or you believe in creation, but you can't have both. Either you take yourself seriously or you take God seriously, but both can't be serious.”

He discovered that God was not in a delirium tremens counting down the universes through eternity, but was merely a practical joker who liked to entertain himself by giving himself the impression or illusion of being many – to see what would happen. But in his infinite wisdom he had never gone beyond the number 1.

There was a great sense of relief, and the computer churches had to close.