Calculating God (5 page)

“I wonder why it took so much longer here?”

“As I told you,” said Hollus, “the development of life on both our worlds was manipulated by God. Perhaps his or her goal was to have multiple sapient lifeforms emerge simultaneously.”

“Ah,” I said dubiously.

“But, even were that not true,” said Hollus, “there is another reason for all space-faring races to be comparably advanced.”

Something was tickling at the back of my mind, something I’d once seen Carl Sagan explain on TV: the Drake equation. It had several terms, including the rate of star formation, the fraction of stars that might have planets, and so on. By multiplying all the terms together, you were supposed to be able to guesstimate the number of intelligent civilizations that might currently exist in the Milky Way. I can’t remember all the terms, but I do remember the final one—because it chilled me when Sagan discussed it.

The final term was the lifetime of a technological civilization: the number of years between the development of radio broadcasting and the extinction of the race. Humans had first started broadcasting in earnest in the 1920s; if the Cold War had turned hot, our tenure as a technological species might have been as little as thirty years.

“You mean the lifetime of a civilization?” I said. “The span before it blows itself up?”

“That is one possibility, I suppose,” said Hollus. “Certainly, my own race had a difficult time learning to use nuclear power wisely.” The alien paused. “I am given to understand that many humans suffer from mental problems.”

I was startled by the apparent change of topic. “Umm, yes. I suppose that’s true.”

“As do many Forhilnors,” said Hollus. “It is another concern: as technology advances, the ability to destroy the entire race becomes more accessible. Eventually, it is in the hands not just of governments but also individuals—some of whom are unbalanced.”

That was a staggering thought. A new term in the Drake equation:
f-sub-L,
the fraction of members of your race who are loony.

The Hollus simulacrum moved a little closer to me. “But that is not the principal issue. I told you that my race, the Forhilnors, had made contact with one other technological race, the Wreeds, prior to meeting you; we actually first met them about sixty years ago—by going to Delta Pavonis and discovering them.”

I nodded.

“And I told you that my starship, the
Merelcas,
visited six other star systems, besides the Wreed home one, before arriving here. But what I did not tell you was that each of those six had, at one time, been home to an intelligent race of its own: the star you call Epsilon Indi, the star you call Tau Ceti, the star you call Mu Cassiopeae A, the star you call Eta Cassiopeae A, the star you call Sigma Draconis, and the star you call Groombridge 1618 all once had native intelligent life.”

“But they don’t anymore?”

“Correct.”

“What did you find?” I asked. “Bombed-out ruins?” My mind filled with visions of bizarre alien architecture, twisted and melted and charred by nuclear blasts.

“Never.”

“Then what?”

Hollus spread his two arms and bobbed his torso. “Abandoned cities, some immensely old—some so old, they had been deeply buried.”

“Abandoned?” I said. “You mean the inhabitants had gone somewhere else?”

The Forhilnor’s eyes touched in affirmation.

“Where?”

“That question still vexes.”

“Do you know anything else about the other races?”

“A great deal. They left many artifacts and records behind, and in some cases interred or fossilized bodies.”

“And?”

“And, at their ends, all were comparably advanced; none had built machines we could not understand. True, the variety of body plans was fascinating, although they all were—what is that phrase humans use?—‘life as we know it.’ They were all carbon-based DNA lifeforms.”

“Really? Are you and the Wreeds also DNA-based?”

“Yes.”

“Fascinating.”

“Perhaps not,” said Hollus. “We believe that DNA is the
only
molecule capable of driving life; no other substance has its properties of self-replication, information storage, and compactibility. DNAs ability to compress into a very small space makes it possible for it to exist in the nucleuses of microscopic cells, even though when stretched out, each DNA molecule is more than a meter long.”

I nodded. “In the evolution course I used to teach, we considered whether anything other than DNA could do the job; we never came up with an alternative that was even remotely suitable. Did all the alien DNA use the same four bases: adenine and thymine, guanine and cytosine?”

“Are those these four?” said Hollus. Suddenly, his holoform projector made four chemical formulas float in the air between us in glowing green:

C
₅
H
₅
N
₅

C
₅
H
₆
N
₂
O
₂

C
₅
H
₅
N
₅
O

C
₄
H
₅
N
₃
O

I peered at them; it’d been a while since I’d done any biochemistry. “Umm, yes. Yes, those are they.”

“Then, yes,” said Hollus. “Everywhere we have found DNA, it uses those four bases.”

“But we’ve shown in the lab that other bases could be used; we’ve even made artificial DNA that uses six bases, not four.”

“Doubtless extraordinary intervention was required to accomplish that,” said Hollus.

“I don’t know; I guess.” I thought about everything. “Six other worlds,” I said, trying to picture them in my mind.

Alien planets.

Dead planets.

“Six other worlds,” I said again. “All deserted.”

“Correct.”

I sought the right word. “That’s . . . frightening.”

Hollus did not dispute this. “In orbit around Sigma Draconis II,” he said, “we found what seemed to be a fleet of starships.”

“Do you suppose invaders had wiped out the indigenous life?”

“No,” said Hollus. “The starships were clearly built by the same race that had constructed the abandoned cities on the planet below.”

“They built starships?”

“Yes.”

“And they all left the planet?”

“Apparently.”

“But
without
using the starships, which were left behind?”

“Exactly.”

“That’s . . . mysterious.”

“It certainly is.”

“What about the fossil records on these planets? Do they have mass extinctions that coincide with ours?”

Hollus’s eyestalks moved. “That is difficult to say; if one could easily read fossil records without decades or centuries of searching, I never would have had to reveal myself to you. But as far as we have been able to tell, no, none of the abandoned worlds had mass extinctions at 440, 365, 225, 210, and 65 million years ago.”

“Were any of those civilizations contemporaneous?”

Hollus’s command of English was remarkable, but occasionally it did fail him. “Pardon?”

“Did any of them live at the same time as any of the others?”

“No. The oldest seems to have ended three billion years ago; the most recent, on the third planet of Groombridge 1618, about five thousand years ago. But . . .”

“Yes?”

“But, as I said, all the races seemed to be comparably advanced. Architectural styles varied widely, of course. But, to give you an example, our engineers dismantled one of the orbiting starships we found at Sigma Draconis II; it used different solutions to several problems from the ones we employ, but it was not fundamentally much better—perhaps a few decades beyond what we had developed. That is the way it was for all the races that had abandoned their worlds: they were all only slightly more advanced than the Wreeds or the Forhilnors—or
Homo sapiens,
for that matter.”

“And you think this happens to all races? They reach a point where they just leave their home planets?”

“Exactly,” said Hollus. “Or else something—perhaps God himself—comes along and takes them away.”

5

Hollus’s presence was being touted by the ROM’s membership department (“Support the museum that attracts visitors from all over the world—and beyond!”), and attendance was up substantially for the first week following the Forhilnor’s arrival. But when it became apparent that his shuttle was unlikely to land again and that an alien wasn’t going to stride along the sidewalk, up the outside stairs, and through the lobby, the crowds tapered to more normal levels.

I never saw the CSIS agents again. Prime Minister Chrétien did indeed come by the ROM to meet Hollus; Christine Dorati, of course, turned that into quite the photo-op. And several journalists asked Chrétien, for the record, to give his assurance that the alien would be allowed to continue his work unmolested which was what the
Maclean’s
opinion poll said the Canadian people wanted. He did indeed give that assurance, although I suspected CSIS operatives were always still around, lurking just out of view.

On his fourth day in Toronto, Hollus and I were back in the collections room in the basement of the Curatorial Centre. I’d pulled open a metal drawer and was showing him a shale slab containing a beautifully preserved eurypterid. We moved the specimen to a work table, and Hollus used his right eyestalk to look through one of our large magnifiers on an articulated metal arm, with a fluorescent tube encircling the lens. I wondered briefly about the physics of that: the magnified image was being looked at by a simulated eye, and the information was somehow transferred to the real Hollus, in orbit over Ecuador.

I know, I know—I probably should have let it alone. But, dammitall, it had been keeping me up nights ever since Hollus had mentioned it. “How do you know,” I said to him at last, “that the universe had a creator?”

Hollus’s eyestalks curved to look at me. “The universe was clearly designed; if it has a design, it must therefore have a designer.”

I moved my forehead muscles in a way that used to lift my eyebrows. “It looks random to me,” I said. “I mean, it’s not as if the stars are arranged in geometric patterns.”

“There is great beauty in randomness,” said Hollus. “But I speak about a much more basic design. This universe has had its fundamental parameters fine-tuned to an almost infinite degree so that it would support life.”

I was pretty sure I knew where he was going with this, but I said, “In what way?” anyway; I thought maybe he knew something I didn’t—and indeed, to my shock, that was precisely the case.

“Your science knows of four fundamental forces; there are actually five, but you have not yet discovered the fifth. The four forces you know about are gravitation, electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force; the fifth force is a repulsive one that operates over extremely long distances. The strengths of these forces have wildly varying values, and yet if the values were even slightly different from their current ones, the universe as we know it would not exist, and life could never have formed. Take gravity as an example: were it only somewhat stronger, the universe would have long since collapsed. If it were somewhat weaker, stars and planets never could have coalesced.”

“ ‘Somewhat,’ ” I echoed.

“For those two scenarios, yes; I am talking about a few orders of magnitude. You wish a better example? Very well. Stars, of course, must strike a balance between the gravitational force of their own mass, which tries to make them collapse, and the electromagnetic force of their own outpouring of light and heat. There is only a narrow range of values in which these forces are in sufficient equilibrium to allow a star to exist. At one extreme blue giants are produced, and at the other red dwarfs form—neither of which are conducive to the origin of life. Fortunately, almost all stars fall in between those two types—specifically because of an apparent numerical coincidence in the values of the fundamental constants in nature. If, for instance, the strength of gravity were different by one part in—give me a second; I must convert to your decimal system—by one part in 10
⁴⁰
, this numerical coincidence would be disrupted, and
every
star in the universe would be either a blue giant or a red dwarf; no yellow suns would exist to shine down on Earthlike worlds.”

“Really? Just one part in ten to the fortieth?”

“Yes. Likewise the value of the strong nuclear force, which holds the nucleuses of atoms together even though the positively charged protons try to repel each other: if that force were only slightly weaker than it actually is, atoms would never form—the repulsion of protons would keep them from doing so. And if it were only slightly stronger than it actually is, the only atom that could exist would be hydrogen. Either way, we would have a universe devoid of stars and life and planets.”

“So you’re saying someone
chose
these values?”

“Exactly.”

“How do you know that these aren’t the only values those constants could possibly have?” I said. “Maybe they are simply that way because they couldn’t possibly be anything else.”

The alien’s round torso bobbed. “An interesting conjecture. But our physicists have proved that other values are indeed theoretically possible. And the odds of the current values arising by chance are one in the number six followed by so many zeros that if you could engrave a zero on each neutron and proton in the entire universe, you could still not write out the number in full.”

I nodded; I’d heard variations on all this before. It was time to play my trump card. “Maybe all the possible values for those constants do exist,” I said, “but in
different
universes. Maybe there are a limitless number of parallel universes, all of which are devoid of life because their physical parameters don’t allow it. If that’s the case, there’s nothing remarkable about us being in this universe, given that it’s the only one out of all the possible universes that we
could
be in.”

“Ah,” said Hollus. “I see . . .”

I folded my arms smugly.

“I see,” continued the alien, “the source of your misunderstanding. In the past, the scientists of my world were mostly atheists or agnostics. We have long known of the apparently finely tuned forces that govern our universe; I form the impression that you were already somewhat familiar with them yourself. And that same argument—that there are perhaps an infinite number of universes, manifesting continuums of alternative values for the fundamental constants—was what allowed previous generations of Forhilnor scientists to dismiss the notion of a creator. As you say, if all the possible values exist somewhere, there is nothing noteworthy about the existence of one universe governed by the particular set of values that happens to make life possible.

“But it turns out that there are
no
long-term parallel universes existing simultaneously with this one; there cannot be. The physicists of my world have attained what those of yours presumably currently seek: a grand unified theory, a theory of everything. I could find little on human beliefs about cosmology in your television and radio, but if you hold the belief you just stated, I will guess that your cosmologists are currently at the stage where they consider a hot, inflationary big-bang model to be the most likely scenario for the origin of the universe. Is that correct?”

“Yes,” I said.

Hollus bobbed. “Forhilnor physicists cherished the same belief—many reputations depended on it—until the fifth interaction, the fifth fundamental force, was discovered; its discovery was related to the energy-production breakthrough that allows us to accelerate ships to within a tiny fraction of lightspeed, despite the relativistic fact that their masses increase enormously as we approach that speed.”

Hollus shifted his weight on his six feet, then continued. “The hot, inflationary big-bang model requires a flat universe—one that is neither open nor closed, one that will essentially last an infinite amount of time; it does, however, allow for parallel universes. But accommodating the fifth force required modification of that theory in order to preserve symmetry; from that modification came the coherent, grand unified theory, a quantum theory that embraces all forces including gravity. That grand unified theory has three important provisions.

“First, that this universe is not flat, but rather that it is
closed:
it did indeed start with a big bang and will expand for billions of years more—but it will eventually collapse back down to a singularity in a big crunch.

“Second, that this current cycle of creation follows no more than
eight
previous big-bang/big-crunch oscillations—we are not one in an infinitely long string of universes but, rather, are one of the very few that have ever existed.”

“Really?” I said. I was used to cosmology presenting me with infinities or with values that were precisely one. Eight seemed an unusual number, and I said so.

Hollus flexed his legs at their upper joints. “You introduced me to that man named Chen—your staff astronomer. Talk to him; he will likely tell you that even your hot, inflationary big-bang model, with its requirement for a flat universe, allowed for a very limited number of prior oscillations, if any had occurred at all. I suspect he will consider it quite reasonable to learn that this current iteration of reality is one of only a tiny number of universes that have ever existed.”

Hollus paused, then continued. “And the third provision of the grand unified theory is this:
no
parallel universes exist simultaneously with ours or any of the previous or subsequent ones, save virtually identical universes with exactly the same physical constants that split briefly from the current one then almost immediately reintegrate with it, thus accounting for certain quantum phenomenons.

“The math to prove all the foregoing is admittedly abstruse, although, ironically, the Wreeds intuitively came to an identical model. But the theory of everything made numerous predictions that have subsequently been confirmed experimentally; it has withstood
every
test it has been put to. And when we found that we could not retreat into the notion that this universe is one of vast number, the argument for intelligent design became central to Forhilnor thought. Since this is one of a maximum of just nine universes that have ever existed, for it to have these highly improbable design parameters implies they were indeed chosen by an intelligence.”

“Even if maybe, perhaps, the four—excuse me, the
five—
fundamental forces have seemingly wildly improbable values,” I said, “that still is only five separate coincidences, and, although granted it is hugely unlikely, five coincidences could indeed occur by random chance in just nine iterations.”

Hollus bobbed. “You have intriguing tenacity,” he said. “But it is not just the five forces that have seemingly designed values; many other aspects of the way the universe works appear likewise to have been minutely adjusted.”

“For instance?”

“You and I are made up of heavy elements: carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, potassium, iron, and so on. Practically the only elements that existed when the universe was born were hydrogen and helium, in a roughly three-to-one ratio. But in the nuclear furnaces of stars, hydrogen is fused into heavier elements, producing carbon, oxygen, and so on up the periodic table. All of the heavy elements that make up our bodies were forged in the cores of long-dead stars.”

“I know. ‘We are all star-stuff,’ as Carl Sagan used to say.”

“Precisely. Indeed, scientists from your world and mine refer to us as carbon-based lifeforms. But the fact that carbon is produced by stars depends critically on the resonance states of the carbon nucleus. To produce carbon, two helium nucleuses must stick together until they are struck by a third such nucleus—three helium nucleuses provide six neutrons and six protons, the recipe for carbon. But if the resonance level of carbon were only four percent lower, such intermediate pair-bonding could not occur, and no carbon would be produced, making organic chemistry impossible.” He paused. “But just producing carbon, and other heavy elements, is not enough, of course. Those heavy elements are here on Earth because some fraction of stars—what is the word? When a large star explodes?”

“Supernova,” I said.

“Yes. Those heavy elements are here because some fraction of stars become supernovas, spewing their fusion products into interstellar space.”

“And you’re saying that the fact that stars do go supernova is something that also must have been designed by a god?”

“It is not as simplistic as that.” A pause. “Do you know what would happen to Earth if a nearby star became a supernova?”

“If it were close enough, I suppose we’d be fried.” In the 1970s, Dale Russell had favored a nearby supernova explosion as the cause of the extinctions at the end of the Cretaceous.

“Exactly. If there had been a local supernova anytime in the last few billion years, you would not be here. Indeed, neither of us would be, since our worlds are quite close together.”

“So supernovas can’t be too common, and—”

“Correct. But neither can they be too rare. It is shockwaves made by supernova explosions that cause planetary systems to start to coalesce from the dust clouds surrounding other stars. In other words, if there had been no supernovas ever anywhere near your sun, the ten planets that orbit it would never have formed.”

“Nine,” I said.

“Ten,” repeated Hollus firmly. “Keep looking.” His eyestalks waved. “Do you see the quandry? Some stars must become supernovas in order to make heavy elements available for the formation of life, but if too many do, they would wipe out any life that got started. Yet if not enough do, there would be precious few planetary systems. Just as with the fundamental physical constants and the resonance levels of carbon, the rate of supernova formation again seems precisely chosen, within a very narrow range of possibly acceptable values; any substantial deviation would mean a universe without life or even planets.”

I was struggling for footing, for stability. My head ached. “That could just be a coincidence, too,” I said.