For instance, while some insist that human life begins at the very moment of conception, others ideologically proclaim it absent until birth itself. Neither extreme represents the uncomfortable majority, who—supported by embryology-sense that the issue of abortion is being waged across a murky swamp, bereft of clear borders or road signs.
More quandaries abound. Has mankind yet “made life in a test tube”? That depends on how you define “life” of course. By one standard, that milestone was passed way back in the seventies. By another, it was reached in the mid-eighties. By yet a third, perhaps it hasn’t happened yet, but definitely will soon.
As the aged grow more numerous in industrial societies, and as the power and expense of modern medicine grow ever more spectacular, the question of death will also come to vex us. We’ve already spent a decade agonizing over the terminal patient’s “right to die” if faced with the alternative of prolonged, painful support by machinery. A consensus appears to be coalescing around that issue, but what about the next inevitable predicament … when young taxpayers of the next century find themselves paying for endless herculean care demanded by millions of octogenarian former baby-boomers who outnumber them, outvote them, and have spent all their lives used to getting whatever they wanted?
What will it even mean to be “dead” in the future? Some predict it may soon be possible to cool living human bodies down to near (or even past) freezing, suspending life processes, perhaps so people could be revived at a later date. In fact, by primitive standards, it’s already happened—for example, in cases of extreme hypothermia. The can of worms this might open is boggling to consider. And yet, enthusiasts for this nascent field of “cryonics” answer moral quandaries and strict definitions of death by asking, “Why pass binary laws for an analog world?” (In other words, most moral codes say “either-or” … while the universe itself seems to be filled instead with a whole lot of “maybes.”)
To some, this accelerating layering of complexity seems no more than a natural part of our culture’s maturation. To others, the prospect of all certainty dissolving into a muddle of ambiguity seems horrifying. If I were forced to make just one hard prediction for the twenty-first century, it would be that we have seen only the first wave of these puzzling, sometimes heartbreaking conundrums.
Will we face these issues head-on? Or flee once more to the shelter of ancient simplicities? That, I believe, will be the central moral and intellectual dilemma ahead of us.
Finally, let me close this rambling screed with a note on the central topic of this book. Much has been said in recent years about the so-called Gaia hypothesis, which though credited to James Lovelock, actually has a modern history stretching all the way back to the 1780s and the Scottish geologist James Hutton. Lately, there have been signs of compromise. Proponents have backed off a bit from comparing the planet tob closely to a living organism, while critics like Richard Dawkins and James Kirchner now admit the debate over Gaia has been useful to ecology and biology, stimulating many new avenues of research.
In this novel, of course, I portray Gaia as more than a mere metaphor. Some of my scientist colleagues will surely shake their heads over my dramatic denouement, accusing me of “teleology” and other sins. And yet, doesn’t the renowned physicist Ilya Prigogine suggest that the ordering processes of “dissipative structures” almost inevitably lead to increasing levels of organization? Cambridge philosopher John Platt illustrates this progressive acceleration with one telling example—life’s ability to encapsulate itself.
It began with membranes enclosing the chemistry of a single cell, perhaps four billion years ago. For a long time, single cells were the limit, drifting and duplicating themselves in the open sea. But then, just four hundred million years ago, a big change came about. Creatures began moving onto land, covered with thick scales, or shells, or bark.
In the last half million years, clothing and artificial shelters provided the next opportunity, enabling humans to greatly expand their range … which in the most recent tenth of that time swelled to include even high mountains and arctic wastes. Finally, in the last few decades we’ve even learned to take our climate with us, in self-contained, encapsulated environments, to explore outer space and the bottom of the sea.
In fact, there is nothing mystical or teleological about this speedup. Each species builds on the suite of hard-won techniques accumulated by its ancestors, and for us this process isn’t merely genetic. Our culture profits from insights slowly gathered by prior generations, who labored in semi-ignorance toward a distant light just a few only dimly perceived. If we now find ourselves on a launching point—poised toward either despair or something truly wonderful—it is only because there were always, amid those bickering, shortsighted people of past times, some who believed in gathering that light, in nurturing it and making it grow.
So, indeed, those who follow in our footsteps may think of us.
We search for solutions, arguing vehemently over ways to save the world. Amid all the self-righteous speechmaking, we tend to forget that yesterday’s passionately held “solutions” often become tomorrow’s problems. For instance, nuclear fission was once seen as a “liberal” cause. So were wind and ocean power. (Though now that windmills and tidal barrages are being built—- and money being made from them—there are those pointing out drawbacks, penalties, and tradeoffs.) It never used to matter to us what types of trees were planted by logging companies after they finished clear-cutting a forest, only that they planted “replacements.” (And this was enlightened, compared with still-earlier attitudes.) Now, though, we see vast, sterile stands of trash pine as just another form of desert.
How many other favored solutions will this happen to? We’re becoming so sensitized to making mistakes—will this soon leave us too paralyzed to act at all?
If so, it would be a pity. To quote Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University, “the situation is running downhill at a truly frightening pace. On the other hand, our potential for solving the problem is absolutely enormous.”
Some solutions really are obvious. “There’s no such thing as garbage,” says Hazel Henderson. “We have to recycle … as the Japanese do. One reason they are so successful is that they recycle over 50%.”
Other solutions might prove controversial, even heartbreaking. The next fifty years may lead to pragmatism on a scale that would seem abhorrent by today’s standards. As Garret Hardin of the University of California puts it, we may even “… stop sending gifts of food to starving nations. Just grit your teeth and tell them ‘You’re on your own and you’ve got to make your population match the carrying capacity of your own land.’ ”
A harsh way of looking at things, and terrifying in its implications for today’s fragile consensus of tolerance. Is it any wonder I wanted to experiment in this novel with a somewhat kinder tomorrow? One where people have grown at least a little wiser, in tempo with their growing problems?
After all the philosophy and speculations are finished, we’re still left with just words, metaphors. They are our tools for understanding the world, but it’s always well to remember they have only a nodding acquaintance with reality.
Reality is this world, the only oasis we know of. Every astronaut who has had a chance to see it from above has returned a fervent convert to saving it. As glimmers of peace and political maturity break out here and there around the globe, perhaps the rest of us will turn away from ideologies and other self-indulgences and start to take notice as well.
Quoting Hazel Henderson again, “It’s almost as if the human family is being nudged by Mother Nature to grow up. We are all in the same boat now, and it’s no good playing these games of which end is sinking.”
What our grandchildren inherit is entirely up to us. And frankly, I’d rather they remember us as having left them a bit of hope.
—David Brin, August 1989
And now, to reward those who actually stuck it out through the afterword, here’s an encore of sorts … a special bonus story,
set in the same universe as Earth, but a few years later.
AMBIGUITY
1.
Back when he was still a student, Stan Goldman and his friends used to play a game of make-believe.
“How long do you think it would take Isaac Newton to solve this homework set?” they would ask each other. Or, “If Einstein were alive today, do you think he’d bother with graduate school?”
It was the same sort of lazy, get-nowhere argument he also heard his musician friends debate on occasion: “What d’you figure Mozart would make of our stuff,” they’d pose over bottles of beer, “if we snatched him from his own time to the 1990s? Would he freak out and call it damn noise? Or would he catch on, wear mirror shades, and cut an album right away?”
At that point, Stan used to cut in. “Which Mozart do you mean? The arriviste social climber? The craftsman of the biographies? Or the brash rebel of Amadeus?”
The composers and players seemed puzzled by his non sequitur. “Why, the real one, of course.” Their reply convinced him that, for all their closeness, for all their well-known affinity, physicists and musicians would never fully understand each other.
Oh, I see. The real one … of course …
But what is reality?
Through a thick portal of fused quartz, mediated by a series of three hundred field-reinforced half mirrors, Stan now watched the essence of nothingness. Suspended in a sealed vacuum, a potential singularity spun and danced in nonexistence.
In other words, the chamber was empty.
Soon, though, potentiality would turn into reality. The virtual would become actual. Twisted space would spill light and tortured vacuum would briefly give forth matter. The utterly improbable would happen.
Or at least that was the general idea. Stan watched and waited, patiently.
Until the end of his life, Albert Einstein struggled against the implications of quantum mechanics.
He had helped invent the new physics. It bore his imprint as fully as Dirac’s or Heisenberg’s or Bohr’s. And yet, like Max Planck, he had always felt uncomfortable with its implications, insisting that the Copenhagen rules of probabilistic nature must be mere crude approximations of the real patterns governing the world. Beneath the dreadful quantum ambiguity, he felt there must be the signature of a designer.
Only the design eluded Einstein. Its elegant precision fled before experimentalists, who prodded first atoms, then nuclei, and at last the so-called “fundamental” particles. Always, the deeper they probed, the fuzzier grew the mesh of creation.
In fact, to a later generation of physicists, ambiguity was no enemy. Rather it became a tool. It was the law. Stan grew up picturing Nature as a whimsical goddess. She seemed to say—Look at me from afar, and you may pretend that there are firm rules—that here is cause and there effect. But remember, if you need this solace, stay back, and squint!
If, on the other hand, you dare approach—should you examine my garments’ weft and warp—well, then, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
With this machine, Stan Goldman expected to be looking closer than anyone ever had before. And he did not expect much security.
“You ready down there, Stan?”
Alex Lustig’s voice carried down the companionway. He and the others were in the control center, but Stan had volunteered to keep watch here by the peephole. It was a vital job, but one requiring none of the quickness of the younger physicists … in other words, just right for an old codger like himself. “I’m ready as I’ll ever be, Alex,” he called back.
“Good. Your timer should start running … now!”
True to Alex’s word, the display to Stan’s left began counting down whirling milliseconds.
After the end of the Gaia War, when things had calmed down enough to allow a resumption of basic science, their efforts had soon returned to studying the basic nature of singularities. Now, in this lab far beyond the orbit of Mars, they had received permission to embark on the boldest experiment yet.
Stan wiped his palms on his dungarees and wondered why he felt so nervous. After all, he had participated in the manufacture of bizarre objects before. In his youth, at CERN, it had been a zoo of subatomic particles, wrought out of searing heat at the target end of a great accelerator. Even in those days, the names physicists gave the particles they studied told you more about their own personalities than the things they pursued.
He recalled graffiti on the wall of the men’s room in Geneva.
Question: What do you get when you mix a charmed red quark with a strange one that’s green and a third that’s true blue?
Underneath were scrawled answers, in various hands and as many languages:
I don’t know, but to hold them together you’ll need a gluon with attitude!
Sounds like what they served in the cafeteria, today.
Speaking of which, anyone here know the Flavor of Beauty?
Doesn’t it depend on who’s on Top and who’s on the Bottom?
I’m getting a hadron just thinking about it.
Hey! What boson thought of this question, anyway?
Yeah. There’s a guy who ought to be lepton!
Stan smiled, remembering good times. They had been hunters in those days, he and the others, chasing and capturing specimens of elusive microscopic species, expanding the quarky bestiary till a “theory of everything” began to emerge. Gravitons and gravitinos. Magnetic monopoles and photinos. With unification came the power to mix and match and use nature’s ambiguity.
Still, he never dreamed he might someday play with singularities—micro black holes—using them as circuit elements the same blithe way an engineer might string together inductors and resistors. But young fellows like Alex seemed to take it all in stride.
“Three minutes, Stan!”
“I can read a clock!” he shouted back, trying to sound more irritated than he really was. In truth, he really had lost track of the time. His mind now seemed to move at a tangent to that flow … nearly but not quite parallel to the event cone of the objective world.
We’re told subjectivity, that old enemy of science, becomes its ally at the level of the quantum. Some say it’s only the presence of an observer that causes the probability wave to collapse. It’s the observer who ultimately notes the plummet of an electron from its shell, as well as the sparrow in a forest. Without observers, not only is a falling tree without sound … it’s a concept without meaning.
Of late Stan had been wondering ever more about that. Nature, even down to the lowliest quark, seemed to be performing, as if for an audience. Arguments raged between adherents of the strong and weak anthropic principles, over whether observers were required by the universe or merely convenient to it. But everyone now agreed that having an audience mattered.
So much, then, for the debate over what Newton would say if he were snatched out of his time and brought to the present. His clockwork world was as alien to Stan’s as that of a tribal shaman. In fact, in some ways the shaman actually had it hands down over prissy old Isaac. At least, Stan imagined, the shaman would probably make better company at a party.
“One minute! Keep your eye on—”
Alex’s voice cut off suddenly as automatic timers sent the crash doors hissing shut. Stan shook himself, hauling his mind back and making an earnest effort to concentrate. It would have been different were there something for him to do. But everything was sequenced, even data collection. Later, they would pore over it all and argue. For now, though, he had only to watch. To observe …
Before man, he wondered, who performed this role for the universe?
There appears to be no rule that the observer has to be conscious. So animals might have served without being self-aware. And on other worlds, creatures might have existed long before life filled Earth’s seas. It isn’t necessary that every event, every rockfall, every quantum of light be appreciated, only that some of it, somewhere, come to the attention of someone who notices and cares.
“But then,” Stan debate
d himself aloud, “Who noticed or cared at the beginning? Before the planets? Before stars?”
Who was there in the pre-creation nothing to watch the vacuum fluctuation of all time? The one that turned into the Big Bang?
In his thoughts, Stan answered his own question.
If the universe needs at least one observer in order to exist. Then that’s the one compelling argument for the necessity of God.
The counter reached zero. Beneath it, the panel of fused quartz remained black. Nevertheless. Stan knew something was happening. Deep in the bowels of the chamber, the energy state of raw vacuum was being forced to change.
Uncertainty. That was the lever. Take a cubical box of space, say a centimeter on a side. Does it contain a proton? If so, there’s a limit to how much you can know about that proton with any sureness. You cannot know its momentum more precisely than a given value without destroying your chance of knowing where it is. Or if you find a way to zoom in on the box until the proton’s location is incredibly exact, then your knowledge of its speed and direction plummets toward zero.
Another linked pair of values is energy and time. You may think you know how much or little energy the box contains. (In a vacuum it tends toward baseline zero.) But what about fluctuations? What if bits of matter and antimatter suddenly appear, only to abruptly disappear again? Then the average would still be the same, and all account books would stay balanced.
Within this chamber, modern trickery was using that very loophole to pry away at Nature’s wall.
Stan glanced at the mass gauge. It sped upscale rapidly. Femtograms, picograms, nanograms of matter coalesced in a space too small to measure. Micrograms, milligrams … each newly born hadron pair shimmered for a moment too narrow to notice. Particle and antiparticle tried to flee, tried to annihilate. But before they could cancel out again, each was drawn into a trap of folded space, sucked down a narrow funnel of gravity smaller than a proton, with no more personality than a smudge of blackness.