Rollback
“Okay,” he said. There was a cool breeze; he wished he’d worn a long-sleeve shirt. “But the moral issues they argue about and the ones we argue about aren’t going to be the same.”
Sarah shook her head. “Actually, I bet they will be facing the same sorts of questions we are, because advances in science will always lead to the same basic moral quandaries.”
He kicked a pebble. “Like what?”
“Well, consider abortion. It was advancing science that propelled that into being a mainstream issue; the technology to reliably terminate a fetus without killing or maiming the mother is a scientific innovation. We can do this now, but should we do it?”
“But,” he said, “suppose the Dracons really are dragons—you know, suppose they’re reptiles. I know they probably aren’t; I know the name refers to the constellation they happen to be in from our point of view. But bear with me. If you had a race of intelligent reptiles, then abortion isn’t a technological issue. Smashing the egg in the nest doesn’t physically harm the mother in any way.”
“Yeah, okay, granted,” she said. The pebble Don had kicked was now in her path, and she sent it skittering ahead. “But that’s not the counterpart of abortion; the counterpart of abortion would be destroying the fertilized egg before it’s laid while it’s still inside the mother.”
“But some fish reproduce by having the female eject unfertilized eggs into the water, and the male eject semen into the water, so that fertilization takes place outside the female’s body.”
“Okay, all right,” said Sarah. “Beings like that wouldn’t have the abortion issue in precisely the same way, but, then again, like I said on As It Happens, aquatic beings probably don’t have radio or other technology.”
“But, still, why is abortion a moral issue? I mean, it is for people here because we believe at some point a soul enters the body; we just can’t all agree on what that point is. But the alien message made no mention of souls.”
“‘Souls’ is just a shorthand for discussing the question of when life begins, and that will be a universal debate—at least among those races who practice SETI.”
“Why?”
“Because SETI is an activity that says life, as opposed to non-life, is important, that finding life is meaningful. If you didn’t care about the distinction between life and nonlife, all you’d do would be astronomy, not SETI. And where to draw that distinction will always be of interest to people who value life. I mean, most people would agree it’s wrong to kill a dog for no reason, because a dog is clearly alive—but is an embryo alive? That’s debatable; every race will have to define when life begins.”
“Well, it either begins at conception or at birth, no?”
Sarah shook her head. “No. Even here on Earth, there are cultures that don’t name kids until they’ve lived forty days, and I’ve even heard it argued that babies aren’t people until they turn three or so—until they begin to form long-term, permanent memories. And even then, there’s still room for moral debate. We know the Dracons reproduce sexually, shuffling their genes while doing so; that was clear from their message. And I rather suspect, by the way, that that sort of reproduction will be common throughout the universe: it provides a huge kick to evolution, getting a new genetic hand dealt with every generation instead of having to wait around for a cosmic ray to induce a random mutation in a being that otherwise just reproduces exact copies of itself. Remember, life first appeared on this planet four billion years ago, and it spent the first three and a half billion of those years basically the same. But when sex was invented half a billion years ago, in the Cambrian explosion—boom!—suddenly evolution was proceeding by leaps and bounds. And any race that reproduces sexually might very well still argue about the ethics of destroying a unique combination of genetic material even if they’ve always held that such a thing wasn’t alive until the moment of birth.”
Don frowned. “That’s like saying it’s a moral quandary to worry about destroying snowflakes. Just because something is unique doesn’t make it valuable—especially when everything in that class of entities is unique.”
A chipmunk scampered across the road in front of them. “Besides,” continued Don, “speaking of evolution, doesn’t the abortion issue ultimately take care of itself, given enough time? I mean, natural selection obviously would favor those people who actually put into practice being pro-life over those who actually choose to personally have abortions, because every fetus you abort is one less set of your genes around. You wait enough generations, and being pro-choice should be bred out of the population.”
“Good grief!” Sarah said, shaking her head. “What a revolting thought! But, even so, that’s only true if the desire for reproductive choice is merely one of passing convenience, and has nothing to do with whether the kid will make it to reproductive age without too many resources being invested. I mean, look at Barb and Barry—they’ve essentially devoted their whole lives to raising Freddie.” Barb was Sarah’s cousin; her son was severely autistic. “I love Freddie, of course, but in effect, he’s replaced potential siblings who would have required a fraction of the investment and would have been far more likely to provide Barb and Barry with grandchildren.”
“You know as well as I do that a vanishingly small number of abortions are because the fetus is defective,” said Don. “Hell, we’ve had abortion for centuries, and only had prenatal screening for decades. Infanticide, that’s another thing, but…”
“Postpartum depression has its evolutionary roots in the mother recognizing that she has insufficient resources to insure that this particular offspring will survive to reproductive age, and so the mother conserves her parental investment by cutting her losses and failing to bond with the infant. No matter how you slice it, evolution will conserve mechanisms that don’t always lead to simply having the most offspring. Anyway, setting aside abortion, I still think most races will face very similar moral issues as they develop technology that expands their powers. I know the aliens didn’t mention God—”
“That’s right,” Don said smugly.
“—but every race that survives long enough will eventually struggle with the ramifications of getting to play God.”
It was growing dark; the streetlights flickered on. “‘God’ is a very loaded term,” he said.
“Maybe so, but we don’t have a lot of synonyms for the concept: if you define God as the creator of the universe, all races that live long enough eventually become Gods.”
“Huh?”
“Think about it. We’ll eventually be able to simulate reality so well that it will be indistinguishable from…well, from reality, right?”
“One of my favorite authors once said, ‘Virtual reality is nothing but air guitar writ large.’”
She snorted, then continued: “And a sufficiently complex virtual reality could simulate living beings so well that they themselves will actually think they’re alive.”
“I suppose,” he said.
“For sure. Have you seen that game The Sims that Carl likes to play? The simulations of reality we can make today are already amazing, and we’ve only had digital computers for—what?—sixty-five years now. Imagine what sort of reality you could simulate if you had a thousand or a million or a billion times more computing power at hand—which we, or any technological race that lives long enough, eventually will. Again, where do you draw the line between life and nonlife? What rights do those simulated lifeforms have? Those are moral issues all races will have to face.”
Another couple, also out for a walk, was coming toward them. Don smiled at them as they passed.
“In fact,” she continued, “you could argue there’s even some evidence that we ourselves are precisely that: digital creations.”
“I’m listening.”
“There’s a smallest possible length in our universe. The Planck length: 1.6 × 10-35 meters, or about 10-20 times the size of a proton, you can’t measure a length any smaller than that, supposedly because of quantum eff
ects.”
“Okay.”
“And,” she said, “there must be a smallest unit of time, too, if you think about it: since a particle of light has to be either here, at Planck length unit A, or next to it, at Planck length unit B, then the time it takes to move from one unit to the next—the time it takes a photon to click over from being in this Planck space-unit to that Planck space-unit—is the smallest possible bit of time. And that unit, the Planck time, is 10-43 seconds.”
“The Clock of the Short Now,” said Don, pleased with himself.
“Exactly! But think about what that means! We live in a universe made up of discrete little bits of space that’s aging in discrete little chunks of time—a universe that has pixels of distance and duration. We are digital at the most fundamental level.”
“Quantum physics not as the basic nature of reality, but rather as the—how would you put it?—as a by-product of the level of resolution of our simulated world.” He made an impressed face. “Cool.”
“Thanks,” she said. “But that means our world, with its pixels of time and space, might be nothing more than some far-advanced civilization’s version of The Sims—and that would mean there’s a programmer somewhere.”
“I wonder what his email address is,” Don said. “I’ve got some tech-support questions.”
“Yeah, well, just remember once you open the seal on the universe, you can’t get your money back.” They turned a corner. “And speaking of making universes, with particle accelerators we may eventually be able to create daughter universes, budding off from this one. Of course, we won’t create a full-blown universe, with stars and galaxies; we’d just create an appropriate singularity, like the one that our universe burst forth from in the big bang, and then the new universe will make itself from that. Physics says it’s possible—and I rather suspect it’s only a matter of time before someone successfully does it.”
“I get it,” said Don. “If you take a step back, that means we could be living in a universe created by a scientist in some parent universe’s particle accelerator.”
“Exactly!” said Sarah. “And, look, you know I love following all those debates in the U.S. about the teaching of evolution and intelligent design. Well, I’m an evolutionist—you know that—but I don’t agree with the testimony that the scientists on the evolution side keep giving. They keep saying that science cannot admit supernatural causes, by which they mean that any scientific explanation has to, by definition, be limited to causes intrinsic to this universe.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Everything is wrong with it,” she said. “That definition of science prevents us from ever concluding that we are the product of the work of other scientists, working in a reality above this one. It leaves us with the cockeyed mess of having a scientific worldview that on the one hand freely acknowledges that we will eventually be able to simulate reality perfectly, or maybe even create daughter universes, but on the other hand is constrained against ever allowing that we ourselves might exist in one of those things.”
“Maybe science isn’t interested in that question simply because it doesn’t really answer anything,” Don said. “I suspect somebody like Richard Dawkins would say, so what if we are the creation of some other intelligent being? That doesn’t answer the question of where that other intelligent being came from.”
“But science—and in particular, evolutionary science, which is Dawkins’s forte—is largely about tracing lineages, and filling in the stages. If you took a comparable view of evolution, you’d have to say that wondering whether birds really evolved from dinosaurs is a dumb question to bother with, as is wondering whether Lucy was one of our ancestors, since the only truly interesting question is how the original, common ancestor of all life came into being. That’s wrong; it’s one interesting question, but it’s hardly the only one worth asking. Whether we live in a created universe is an inherently interesting question, and it’s worthy of scientific investigation. And if a creator does exist, or if a race becomes such a creator itself, that immediately raises the moral question of what, if any, accountability or obligation the creations have to that creator—and the flipside, and the part that I think we don’t spend nearly enough time debating, which is what if any accountability or obligation our possible creator has to us.”
Don took a big step sideways, and looked up at the dark sky. “Hey, God,” he said, “be careful with your aim…”
“No, seriously,” said Sarah. “Technology gives a species the power to prevent life, to create life, to take life on scales small and large; technology ultimately gives the power to be what we would call Gods, and, even if our definition of science is blind to it, it raises the possibility that what we are is the result of the work of some other being that would, by virtue of having created us, also deserve that term God. Doesn’t mean we have to worship it—but it does mean that we, and any other technologically advanced race, will have to deal with ethical questions related both to potentially being Gods ourselves and potentially being the children of Gods.”
They jogged across the street, beating an oncoming car. “And so the aliens from Sigma Drac wrote to us asking for our advice?” asked Don. He shook his head. “Heaven help them.”
–-- Chapter 26 --–
SARAH HAD SAID one of the appeals of becoming young again would be having time to read all the great books. Don couldn’t quite say that the book he was looking at now—a thriller of the type that would have been sold in drug-store spinner racks when he’d been young the first time—was great, but it was a pleasure to be able to read for hours without getting eye fatigue, and without having to put on his cheaters. Still, eventually, he did get bored with the book, and so he had his datacom scan the TV listings for anything that might interest him, and—
“Hey,” he said, looking up from the list the device had provided, “Discovery is showing that old documentary about the first message.”
Sarah, seated on the couch, looked over at him; he was leaning back in the chair. “What old documentary?” she said.
“You know,” he said, a little impatiently, “that hour-long thing they did when you sent the initial reply to Sigma Draconis.”
“Oh,” said Sarah. “Yeah.”
“Don’t you want to watch it?”
“No. I’m sure we’ve got a recording of it somewhere, anyway.”
“Doubtless in some format we can’t read anymore. I’m going to put it on.”
“I wish you wouldn’t,” she said.
“Oh, come on!” said Don. “It’ll be fun.” He looked at the panel above the fireplace. “TV on; Discovery Channel.” The picture was razor-sharp and the colors vibrant. Don had forgotten they’d had high-definition TV that long ago; he found lots of older shows unwatchable now, because they’d been videotaped in low-res.
The documentary was already under way. Some aerial footage of the Arecibo radio telescope was being shown, and the voice of a Canadian actor—was it Maury Chaykin?—was doing the narration. Soon, that was replaced with a potted history of SETI: the Drake equation, Project OZMA, the Pioneer 10 plaque, the Voyager records—which, it was duly noted, this being the Canadian version of Discovery Channel, had been designed by Toronto’s own Jon Lomberg. Don had forgotten how much of the documentary wasn’t about Sarah and her work. Maybe he’d go into the kitchen to get a drink, and—
And suddenly, there she was, on the screen, and—
And he looked over at his wife, seated on the couch, then back at the monitor, then shifted his gaze between the two once more. She was steadfastly staring at the fireplace, it seemed, not the magphotic panel above it, and she was red in the face, as if embarrassed, because—
Because she looked so much younger, so much less frail, on the monitor. After all, this had been recorded thirty-eight years ago, back when she was forty-nine. It was a sort of rollback, a regressing to a younger state; oh, to be sure, not nearly as far back as he had gone, but still a bitter taste of what might have
been.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he said, softly, and then, more loudly, into the air: “TV off.”
She looked over at him, her face expressionless. “I’m sorry, too,” she said.
AS THE DAY wore on, Sarah went up to Carl’s old room, to work through the giant stack of papers Don had brought her from the University.
Don, meanwhile, went down to the basement. He and Sarah had almost given up on using the rec room as they’d gotten older. The stairs down to it were particularly steep, and there was a banister only on the wall side. But he now had no trouble going down there, and, on these hot summer days, it was the coolest place in the house.
Not to mention the most private.
He sat on the old couch there, and looked about, a fluttering in his stomach. History had been made here. Right over there, Sarah had figured out the meat of the original message. And history might be made in this house again, if she could decrypt the Dracons’ latest transmission. Perhaps someday there’d be a plaque on their front lawn.
Don was holding his datacom tightly in his hand, and its plastic shell was now moist with his perspiration. Although he’d fantasized about seeing Lenore again, he knew that could never happen. But she’d made him promise to call, and he couldn’t just ignore her, couldn’t leave her hanging. That would be wrong, mean, petty. No, he had to call her up and say good-bye properly. He’d tell her the truth, tell her there was someone else.
He took a deep breath, let it out slowly, opened the datacom, snapped it immediately shut, and then, at last, opened it once more, gingerly, as though lifting the lid on a coffin.
And he spoke to the little device, telling it who he wanted to contact, and—
Rings. The tolling of a bell. And then—
A squeaky voice. “Hello?”
“Hi, Lenore,” he said, his heart jackhammering. “It’s Don.”
Silence.
“You know, Don Halifax.”
“Hello,” Lenore said again, this time her tone icy cold.