| Another interesting story featuring enhanced intelligence is Poul Anderson's novel "Brain Wave". Briefly, there is an energy damping field that projects in a beam from something near the center of our galaxy. One of the effects of this field is to slow down the speed of neural activity. The Sun's orbit around the galaxy takes it through this field periodically. When it enters the field the effect is to make everything with a brain about 1/5th as smart as it was, which usually results in a mass extinction of any species that depended on its brain to survive. That's what did in the dinosaurs for instance which had been near human intelligence before that (the book is from 1954 which is before we figured out what really did them in). Humans evolved while the Earth was in the field, evolving neurons and brain structures that can get to normal human intelligence even with the degrading effects of the field. The start of the novel is set when Earth moves out of the field and so over the next few weeks everything with a brain gets about 5 times smarter than it was before. That has lots of consequences. For example a lot of how we handle animals is based on the animals not being smart. It gets a lot harder to be a pig farmer, say, when your pigs get human genius level intelligence. Of course the farmer is a lot smarter too, but still it will take some time to upgrade the farm to deal with super-genius pigs and the pigs aren't going to just idly wait for that. The novel looks at that and a ton of other changes as Earth adapts and develops to deal with this. |