Monthly Archives: January 2018

Science Fiction, Technomology

Suicide Note

I do not expect you to agree with this. I do not expect you to condone it. I only expect you to do the maths. And, after that, I hope you understand it and, perhaps, even consider it yourself.

Now, about the maths…

There at least two-hundred and fifty billion stars in the Milky Way. The Milky Way is just one galaxy in around a hundred billion known or visible galaxies across all of space. If we took this as the number of stars in space and converted it to seconds in time, then this number of stars would add up to nearly eight-hundred thousand years.

In other words, if you counted these stars at a rate of one per second and never did anything else, it would still take you eight-hundred thousand years to count them. This about four times the length of time that humanity on planet Earth has been considered to be “civilized”.

We are small and insignificant in the face of this cosmic scale.

Ignoring the possibility of non-carbon-based life, carbon-based life needs to live within the Goldilocks Zone of a universe. This means that life needs a planet of sufficient size and with water and oxygen that has a stable rotation neither too far nor too close to a star. This makes it plentiful in the building blocks of life and neither too hot nor too cold for life to form.

If space has a hundred-billion multiplied by two-hundred-and-fifty-billion stars out there, then statistically some of these will have planets orbiting them within this Goldilocks Zone. Even if one in a billion of these stars has such a planet–this is 0.0000001% of these stars–then there would be literally billions of them out there.

Let us assume, once again, that only one in a billion–once again, 0.0000001%–of these planets in these infinitesimal rare Goldilocks Zones has actually evolved complex life. That would mean that there are over twenty-five thousand possible planets where complex life has actually evolved.

The Milky Way in which we reside is one of the older galaxies–but far from the oldest–so let’s assume that three-quarters of these planets that host life are younger than us. Thus, their lifeforms would probably be less evolved than us (or, potentially, still building up to creating life sometime in the future). Hence, we will ignore them as sentient, conscious beings for our purposes (though, they may well be so in the future). Hence, that would still leave over six thousand older planets that potentially hold life that is equally or more evolved than our life on Earth.

Do not forget that over long periods of time, the risks of extinction rise. It may be self-inflicted from weapons or wars, naturally driven by viruses, seismic events or weather patterns, or cosmically created by asteroids or other things hitting the planet before life has evolved technology to survive the said disaster. The point is, a large number of these older, life-holding planets would have seen extinctions that either would have reset their evolutionary clocks behind ours or completely wiped life out on these planets.

Let us assume that 99% of these older planets have had some such event–and that their life could not save itself from said mass extinction. Thus, these planets no longer factor into our calculation as these planets are now barren rocks floating out in space.

That still leaves just shy of a hundred planets were life has not just survived, but thrived. And, in so doing, is probably thousands to billions of years more evolved than we are on planet Earth floating our the Sun in the Milky Way. If you consider that planet Earth hosts a couple million life forms–almost nine million, per our last estimate–how many life forms would these rare, surviving and succeeding parent-planets hold? Perhaps approaching a billion collective types, shapes and forms of life with, at least one per planet, being more evolved and technologically advanced than we currently are.

Hence, cosmic maths dictates that it is not if alien life exists. With near certainty (per our maths above, we have given it less than one percent of a quarter chance in a billion-billionth of a percent, yet even that gives us plenty of alien life!), alien life does exist. The only variable is how much alien life exists. And, there is probably quite a lot of it too.

We are small and insignificant in the face of this cosmic scale. We are not unique in being life–or alive–and we are not unique in being conscious and having a degree of power over our destinies. We are also not unique in constantly being at threat of extinction and, statistically, we are unlikely to survive.

But why would all this life exist? Why would it matter?

Perhaps the answer–once you strip out our typically human-centric view of things–is one of statistical odds.

If “God” exists, he would not be fighting some arch-enemy that is the root of evil. Evil is a human and moral invention. Cosmically, the two differentiating things that do exist is organic matter–life!–and inorganic matter, or everything else. Rather, this God would be fighting on the side of life against its very extinction in a harsh and hostile space where life–however rare–is also fragile and statistically doomed.

If this God was making a divine gamble that life–in whatever shape or form–would survive, the best way to do this would be to diversify its shape, form, placings and sensitivities. In other words, this God would cast the dice against the inhuman, inorganic universe with only two variables in his favour: diversification and adaption.

Make lots of life. Make life of all different types. And make life spread out all over the place. This increases the odds that at least some life survives.

In other words, humans would be little more than a venture capital investment on God’s portfolio of life as he tried to protect against complete bankruptcy in the harsh, risky space and time of reality.

From thermo-nuclear super novas wiping galaxies or black holes sucking everything in, from radiation or vacuums, from viruses to changing weather patterns, from the randomness of mating and DNA to the precision of evolution over long periods of time… We are minute data points in the most incredible series of numbers amidst the most magical of experiments in the largest of all portfolios that reach scales and quantum that our mortal minds cannot fathom.

And yet we worry about what clothing we should wear? We worry if people like us or if we are getting older? We are concerned about how many likes we get on Facebook or what our neighbours are doing? We spend time wondering what to eat, to watch on TV and to say to fill the silence, but we never look or around at the cosmos or space and time. We count our bank balances and Uber rides, not the stars in the sky nor the galaxies that hold them. We judge when mere minutes go by in a queue but we barely glance at the math of space and time, nor where or how we have arrived at where we have arrived, nor even where we are going.

We are small and insignificant in the face of this cosmic scale. We are not unique in being alive and we are not unique in being conscious and having a degree of power over our destinies. We are also not unique in constantly being at threat of extinction, but we are petty in our immediate wants, desires, thoughts and actions. Our myopic consciousnesses fold in on themselves, hiding this maths from us either out of selfishness or to protect our fragile egos from its comprehension.

But is such a comprehension of this scale so terrifying? Is it so terrible that we are small data points in a grandest of statistics? Or, could this comprehension not be liberating?

We are small and insignificant, but therein lies our beauty. We can each follow our hearts and our dreams with little cosmic consequence. We need not worry about mundane things, as they really do not matter. We can carve our own meanings in this cosmic maths and find our own ways to weigh this grand scale across our lives. We need not feel guilty for going in any direction for life is both so plentiful and so scarce that we are both insignificant and a miracle. All at once.

Is it not liberating to comprehend this?

I do not expect you to understand this. I do not expect you to condone or agree with it. I only expect you to do the maths and realize the same thing I have realized: against all odds, I am alive and, against all cosmic scale, I still matter to myself. Beyond that, you are free. This appreciation is the suicide of our myopic human-centric consciousness and the birth of a beautiful, cosmically-scaled mind.

And, so, in the spirit of this planet-locked suicide, I invite you upon one of our colony starships. Earth is a few short generations from dying as is most of our solar system. Leaving our planet may be risky, but staying is riskier. Colonizing space may be risky, but not trying is riskier. Humans will likely be extinct soon, but life is plentiful out there. It will take thousands of years for us to reach the nearest galaxies, but our colony starships are self-sustaining and cryogenic stasis is now a reality. We can reach the furthest flung parts of deep space, eventually, and all the wonders that it brings with it.

All you have to do is buy a ticket. Buy a chance. Against all odds, you are alive and you still matter to us. So, do the math, and buy a ticket.

Kind regards,

Colony Recruitment Agency

2146 AD

Horror & Dark Fiction, Science Fiction

Jefferson

He struggled forward–one step after the next–as he absentmindedly wiped his hand on his spacesuit’s pants. The blood had long since wiped off and the bodies were far behind him but all he saw was his goal. It was just in front of him. At this altitude, distance from the starship and without backup equipment, he doubted he would make it home anyway, not that this mattered much to him.

After Jefferson had proved the theoretical existence of inter-dimensional wormholes, he had sought to recreate them in the laboratory. Unfortunately, they required such vast amounts of energy that he could not achieve quantum states of sufficient mass.

That is what led him to search for these enigmas in the cosmos. Theoretically, under just the right conditions where there was a Newtonian Equilibrium between two Black Holes’ Event Horizons, space would be thin enough and the energy dense enough to potentially open such a wormhole.

He could feel his blood thinning as his heart struggled against the lack of gravity. His suit protected him from the worst of the environment but prolonged exposure meant that enough had gotten through. Micro-tears in the fabric were beginning to risk the suit’s integrity, anyway. Behind him, there were piles of bodies. Some team members had died on the voyage out. Others had died traversing this super-large asteroid–megatroid–left spinning on its own axis in space-time.

The landscape was harsh red with shimmering dust as space bent slightly like ripples in a pond. He could not feel it bending but its effects were everywhere. From the aggressive hyper-cancer that had consumed his last few team members and was eating at his own body to the fractal dust from a shaken reality that slipped through his suit and clogged his lungs.

It had taken billions of dollars of funding and teams of scientists and supercomputers all scanning through every know data point in known reality to locate only one such potential site. It had taken inventing cryogenic stasis to traverse the distance between the populated cosmos and this older, darker part of the cosmos. It had taken three hundred and fifteen scientists and a full engineering crew with a military-grade starship and cutting-edge equipment to arrive at the megatroid.

But Jefferson felt it had all been worth it.

Despite being ravaged with cancer and struggling to breathe while on his last round of equipment and with three-hundred and fourteen bodies behind him, he was smiling. His face was lit up with wonder and his eyes sparkled.

He pulled himself up the last ledge onto the pinnacle of the megatroid’s largest mountain range. And, as his head cleared it and his vision stopped swimming, he stood and focussed on the swirling light before him.

It was beautiful.

Before him, on a parabolic-Cartesian plane, spinning between two equidistant black holes on their event horizion’s, floated a small tear in space-time that pierced into our nearest parallel dimensions. It had a peculiar golden glow, perhaps a side-effect of the cold fusion occurring at atomic-level, Jefferson thought?

He blinked and his eyes adjusted slowly to what he was seeing. Beyond the golden swirling form that silently rippled space around it, he was sure he saw something.

Could it be? Could he be looking through into another dimension? Could light from that other dimension be penetrating ours?

He had fantasized about this moment his whole adult life. What wonders would he see? Was there life or alternate geometry? Did new, undiscovered colours exist in that dimension? Would he peer through and see God? What incredible wonders would he see there?

His hands were shaking as he strained to see what lay beyond the golden swirling form. Something was definitely there. It was small and dark but the longer he looked at it, the clearer it became.

His oxygen tank’s warning light had been flashing for a while, but it began to beep. He was on his last breathes. This did not matter much, as the cancer was metastasizing in real-time and his lungs began to collapse as micro-tears in his inner-suit began to equalize with the vacuum of space and the blood in his veins began to heat in the dropping pressure.

Jefferson fell to his knees but kept his vision straightforward. Even if he could never tell another living soul, he was going to be first to actually see into the next dimension. He had lived his entire life for this moment and he was not going to die before he got to see it.

The black shape was solidifying in the rippling golden light, but his vision began to blur. Oxygen deprivation and dropping pressure in his suit were converging, and he began to fall forward slowly in the low gravity of the megatroid.

Just before his vision slipped, his head fell forward and the last ounce of life left him, the black shape solidified and Jefferson saw what–or who!–was peering at him from another dimension.

It was a middle-aged man, pale-faced and wild-eyed, dressed in a military-grade deep-space cosmonaut’s suit with blood down the left leg and micro-tears releasing precious oxygen and pressure into space. The man was on his knees and collapsing forward in the final moments of his life. Partially faded, and splattered with blood and space-dust, a small name tag across the man’s chest said something quite familiar: “JEFFERSON”.

Science Fiction

The Thing That Matters

God, Lucifer, Buddha, Shiva and all the angels, demons and mythological beings of the cosmos looked very worried. Each and every one was scared. They were lined up sitting, lying or lurking on one side of a great table just around the corner from reality.

On the other side of the table sat only three, indescribable beings of immense and immovable power: one of solid matter, one of empty space and one of infinite time.

“Why do you matter?” asked Matter.

“Why should you take up space?” asked Space.

“And what future do you think you have in our universe?” asked Time.

“If all life disappeared from the cosmos, hydrogen would still be hydrogen,” Matter stated as an irrefutable fact, “All the planets and suns would still exist, and all the elements would still remain as they are now. The universe would not notice your disappearance.”

“You need us, but we don’t need you,” added Space.

“So why should you have a future?” repeated Time, creating a sense of deja vu in the room.

All the gods started talking at the same time. The demons howled while angels sang, snakes hissed and old gods screamed of blood, war and sacrifices. Matter waved his hand for silence and Space opened the floor to them to speak one by one.

“Life is filled with love,” God spoke, “Men, women and children–as with all of life’s forms–are beautiful beings filled with love, and love cannot be replicated without life. None of you three can replicate the gravity of star-crossed lovers nor the tenderness of a mother with their child, nor the bond of a dog and his master. Yes, all matter, space and time will be unchanged without us, but the cosmos would be poorer without the love that we inspire in each other.”

“Is this the same love that chops down forests, depletes oceans and molests children?” asked Matter, “Or maybe the same love that brings war, disease and famine? Maybe it is the same love that offers us hatred, racism, sexism and bigotry while destroying all other forms of other life around it?”

“If love comes at such a cost, is it really worth that much?” asked Space.

Time smiled and moved to the other gods.

Lucifer intoned at length about lust and desire. He spoke about the tangled bodies of lovers and the passion of lives that burnt brightly. Then Buddha spoke about reincarnation and the wisdom of many lifetimes accumulating with the good deeds of humanity. Other gods spoke of wonders and empires while older gods spoke of blood and bonds. Some spoke of worship of the stars, Sun and Moon while others spoke of the intricacies of ritual, the knowledge of man and the elements of a savage nature.

“If all life disappeared from the cosmos, hydrogen would still be hydrogen,” Matter stated as an irrefutable fact, “All the planets and suns would still exist, and all the elements would still remain as they are now. The universe would not notice your disappearance.”

“Nothing that any of you have told us changes this fact,” Space added, “You need us, but we do not need you.”

Time smiled and leaned forward. It was the eldest of the three. Space could be cold sometimes and Matter was just stubborn. Neither of them remembered the loneliness of the beginning because Time had been there on its own before Space and Matter had formed. Those dark, miserable beginnings had softened Time a bit and it felt that life should be given a second chance to prove itself, but it was only one vote among three.

“Listen, guys,” Time said, trying to be encouraging, “Just give us something we can use. Anything would work, really. Why does life matter?”

The other side of the table fell silent. It felt like everyone had spoken by now and they were at a loss for what to say next.

Then a small voice piped up from the background. All the gods, demons, angels and other cosmic entities turned around and looked at the back of the room.

It was Science. He was one of the new ones and no one quite trusted him.

“Gentlemen and Lady,” he said, nodding at Time, for he knew that only women take all the time in the world, “Life has given us humans, and humans have given us knowledge, understanding and technology. If you would answer me, Space, Time and Matter, what did you call yourselves before man named you?”

There was silence in the room as the old gods all turned around to stare at Space, Time and Matter. They looked at each other and Matter shrugged.

“We did not refer to ourselves at all, Science, there was no need to. But hydrogen was still hydrogen, and–”

Science smiled and interrupted Matter, “Exactly, humans named you. They have also measured, documented and recorded all your attributes. Like they are steadily doing so for the whole universe. They are witness to your creations, Matter, and your size, Space, and they are subjects to your passing, Time. They are not just the librarians of existences, but they are its audience as well and its guardians as well.”

“That may be true,” Space said, nodding a couple cosmos, “But why does that matter?”

“Because,” Science said, walking passed the old gods to the front and pointing behind the three into a dark, ancient corner in that cosmic room, “Even you three have a master. Even the three of you will cease to exist one day.”

Something stirred in the corner of the room. All the gods, demons, angels and other cosmic entities strained to see what it was in the darkness, but it did not seem to have a form. Space, Time and Matter all glanced nervously at the spot, though, and Time cleared her throat.

“Yes, as the Singularity formed us, so will it eventually eat us all. Why is this relevant?”

Science’s smile widened, “No matter what you throw at life, it finds a way to survive. It has even begun to leave the planet and reach into the vacuum beyond it. And, benefiting from the passage of time is in fact life’s greatest achievement as evolution exponentially strengthens it and knowledge compounds across generations.”

The room was silent as all present beings hung on Science’s every, precise word.

“No matter what, gentlemen and lady, life finds a way to survive. Life wants to survive. That means that life’s ultimate goal will be to find a way to survive the Big Collapse when the Singularity stops expanding and starts contracting and destroying reality. That means, gentlemen and lady, that life is your only chance of salvation beyond the realm of the Singularity. With all of the matter, space and time in the world at your disposal, have any of your three found a way to survive the Singularity’s ultimate reversal?”

Space, Time and Matter all shook their heads in silence. The room was quiet. Even the old gods had their eyes wide open, straining to catch a glimpse of this mystical Singularity. Many of their own myths had called it different things, from Ragnorak to Apocolypse, Day of Judgement, Armageddon and many, many others.

In some shape or form, they all knew it was coming.

But only Science had an idea how to survive it, even if he had not thought of it yet.

Matter smiled. He might be stubborn, but he preferred existing over not existing. That was the essence of matter, after all. Space nodded too.

“Very well,” Time said, ending the meeting, “Life may need us to exist, but we may also need life one day too. There is no harm in letting this experiment continue.”

Great cheers erupted from God, Lucifer, Buddha, Shiva and all the angels, demons and mythological beings of the cosmos, but Science just smiled. He knew the real work was only just beginning. In that dark, ancient corner, the Singularity still slept. One day, Science knew, he would have to face it and, one day, he knew, he would have to defeat it.