Soul of the World (20 page)

Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective positions of the beings which compose it, if moreover this intelligence were vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in the same formula both the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom; to it nothing would be uncertain, and the future as the past would be present to its eyes.

Laplace was voicing the hubris of scientific rationalism at one of its most exciting periods. In this passage, he envisaged how a God-like intelligence would be able to calculate the future, given a thorough enough knowledge of the past and present. It speaks much of Newtonian and Cartesian idealism, where elegant formulae paralleled the perfect harmonies of the golden proportions. But the universe has become a much stranger and more turbulent place in the intervening decades. Here, at the beginning of the third millennium, scientists make highly reasonable speculations rather than bald declarations. Kurt Gödel’s unprovability theorem took the wind out of the sails of absolute knowledge in the mid-twentieth century. A few decades later came the mathematicians of chaos theory—among them Edward Lorenz, who discovered the “butterfly effect,” which is more or less the ability of a very small
event to have catastrophic consequences. It turns out that accurately and absolutely predicting the behaviour of large numbers of anything, be they atoms or stars, is pretty much impossible, at least on the specific level.

If an omniscient scientist were able to have complete access to a universe in which he could stop time, and if that same scientist, like Laplace’s hypothetical intelligence, had a colossal supercomputer that could register the position of every particle in his universe and then calculate the future trajectory of every atom, electron and quark, what would happen when the universe was restarted? According to chaos theory, the universe would obey his calculations for about one, maybe two seconds before unforeseen turbulence set in. No matter how complete our knowledge or how perfectly predictive our calculations, we can never, ultimately, forecast for more than a second or two what will happen in such a large region. Time is equivalent to turbulence in such deterministic systems; it introduces randomness. We can know the general picture of the universe, we can even predict its ultimate fate with utter certainty, but we cannot know what will happen along the way.

T
WILIGHT OF THE
D
AWN

My palm tree was picked up yesterday afternoon. Two men carried it through my garage and out to a white truck parked in the lane. I accompanied them, helping to keep the leaves from tearing on the doorways. In the lane I could see that the truck was already partially filled with other potted tropical plants: mandevilla vines, hibiscus shrubs and a spreading bougainvillea. They were crowded in like refugees being evacuated before an invasion. Just in time, as it turned out. The attack, in the form of a killing frost, came last night. Early in the
evening, as ice crystals began to sparkle on my lawn, I put a makeshift greenhouse—clear plastic stapled over a slender wooden frame—over my basil plants. But this morning, despite my precautions, I noticed that some of the leaves had wilted. The banana tree looked disastrous. Its collapsing leaves were mottled with large brown patches.

Although it was sunny this afternoon, it was also cool, the late October sun too low to warm my skin. Most of the trees in the neighbourhood have lost their leaves, though the towering willow in the backyard across the street is still green, as if it were sheltering the last remnants of summer in its leafy depths. I put on my jacket and walked over to the park. The air was dusted with the scent of dry leaves, and there was a faint, intoxicating background of leaf smoke. High piles of bronzed oak leaves were on the street in front of several homes. I riffled a hand through one of the piles and noticed that, like snowflakes, no two oak leaves were the same. At one house, a man was decorating his front porch for Halloween, stringing thick artificial cobwebs over the banisters and pillars. His next-door neighbour had placed a diminishing set of bright orange pumpkins on his steps, starting at the bottom with a pumpkin the size of basketball and finishing at the top with one as small as a tennis ball. The pumpkins worked like an optical illusion, making his steps appear deeper and longer than they actually were.

In the park, dogs chased balls and sticks thrown by their owners and children screamed in the little playground. Each of the trees had a wide circle of brown leaves beneath it. Even though it was only five o’clock in the afternoon, the light was already starting to fade. Tonight we set the clocks back. Over the next few days, people will have stationary jet lag—a direct, physical consequence of our chronometric abstraction. Monday morning rush hour will witness a few more fender-benders than usual. But it’s not just the end of daylight saving. The gloom closes in more quickly this time of year because the encroachment of
darkness accelerates in mid-autumn, as the shape of our orbit around the sun conspires with the tilt of the planet to speed up the shortening of the days.

On the way home I bought a pumpkin at the little grocery store around the corner and carried it home on my shoulder. I like Halloween. It’s one of the few purely secular and nocturnal celebrations in North American culture. But as the children are out trick-or-treating, employees in retail stores will be burning the midnight oil to make sure that Christmas displays are in the windows when the doors open next morning. The retail economy has always been locked into a cyclical calendar, except now it’s looking further and further ahead. Fashion designers bring out their seasonal lines six months in advance. Magazines arrive in stores and mailboxes at least a month ahead, and by the time the month printed on their covers has rolled around, they are off the shelves. But the future will not be harnessed. It has its own agenda.

The future opens up into possibility. Anything can happen. A meteor could streak from the sky and land in the middle of the street next to the park. A poor labourer in South Africa could unearth a giant diamond on a dirt road and have his life changed forever. The field of potential that is the future is also fallow ground for fantasy. We live in its thrall. “The future enters into us,” wrote the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, “in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.”

Just as there is a deep past, there is also a deep future, one that in terms of human destiny is beyond individual comprehension. As a species we are just getting started. H. G. Wells had an inkling of our destiny when he wrote in
The Discovery of the Future
, “The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.” It’s really a question of how much time we have,
and according to cosmologists there are billions and billions of years ahead for this universe. All the time in the world.

Today, October 31, I cut back the dead stems of the peonies and ornamental grass, leaving the bare earth of my garden beds. Even the weeds have shrivelled away. The only green left in my yard is the deep emerald of the lawn, the viridian leaves of the bamboo, the mossy green of the rhododendron and the paler green of the big yuccas under the kitchen window.

After lunch I sat outside and carved the pumpkin with a thin-bladed knife. Every year I cut the same design—a wide, grinning demon’s head crowned in flames. The motif works well with the yellow-orange of the candlelit pumpkin’s interior, and I get compliments from some of the trick-or-treaters. “Your pumpkin’s cool,” one little girl said last year. I have a bowl of candy by the door ready for dusk, which is when the first toddlers will appear in their oversized costumes. As the evening wears on, the trick-or-treaters will get older, and by ten or eleven o’clock, teenagers in quickly improvised get-ups will clean up what’s left of my hoard. My pumpkin will glow malevolently into the night until, sometime past midnight, the light in its head will go out.

Swiftly the years beyond recall

Solemn the stillness of this fair morning

I will clothe myself in spring clothing

And visit the slopes of the Eastern Hill.

By the mountain stream a mist hovers

Hovers a moment, then scatters

There comes a wind blowing from the south

That brushes the fields of new corn.

—
T’ao Ch’ien

In 1986 two cosmologists from Oxford University—John D. Barrow and Frank Tipler—published an astonishing book called
The Anthropic Cosmological Principle.
Within its painstakingly researched 706 pages, they argue that, in a strange and wondrous way, the destiny of life on our planet is intrinsically linked to that of the universe. They write, “The realization that the possibility of biological evolution is strongly dependent on the global structure of the Universe is truly surprising and perhaps provokes us to consider that the existence of life may be no more, but no less, remarkable than the existence of the Universe itself.”

It seems that our presence here is no accident. If any of the basic elements of the universe were even slightly different, say Tipler and
Barrow, human life would not have arisen. And they go further. They demonstrate that because of these razor-thin constraints—the precise relativities between basic forces such as light and gravity as well as the availability of certain elements—intelligent life, and specifically human life, was inevitable. They make this contention even though the statistics seem to argue against human life having occurred. According to the algebra, human life is inevitable, but only in one location (and possibly two) in the entire universe. Everything Barrow and Tipler looked at, from atomic bonds to the composition of stars, pointed in a single direction. Eerily, hair-raisingly, everything was precisely tailored to create on our planet one instance of carbon-based life—ourselves. The odds against our existence mean that the presence of life on our planet is almost supernatural. The universe, they suggest, exists for us.

Time, it seems, also has a hand in this remarkable convergence. Not only is this the only possible universe in which we could have existed, this is the only possible time. They write, “For there to be enough time to construct the constituents of living beings, the Universe must be at least ten billion years old and therefore, as a consequence of its expansion, at least ten billion light years in extent. We should not be surprised to observe that the universe is so large. No astronomer could exist in one that was significantly smaller.” These aren’t just speculations. They are based on the same kind of spit-and-polish mathematics that underlies nuclear reactors and planetary motion.

Using the same reasoning, Tipler and Barrow then look billions of years into the future to see what the logical conclusion of their anthropic principle will be. They maintain that because the universe was “fixed” to create intelligent life like ourselves, it was also designed to nourish us at each stage of our evolution. So, as our technology and intelligence evolve, we will discover that every constituent of matter will become useful to us at every successive stage of our progress, as if it had been
designed that way. And apparently it was. Eventually, life will expand to fill first our universe, and then “all universes that are logically possible.”

Barrow and Tipler don’t invoke God to explain their extraordinary form of manifest destiny, though their assertions seem to require precisely that kind of faith. (Such assertions are as close as science gets to the notion of divinity.) But they do foresee a problem with our eventual omniscience. No matter how like immortals we become, we will never be able to reverse the arrow of time. The universe will eventually end. What will happen to life then?

This past week has been cold, almost like winter. On the few nights when the sky is clear, the stars have an icy clarity—sparks struck from the black flint of space. The seasonal march of the constellations has taken Andromeda from just above the horizon, where I saw it in June, and parked it directly overhead. Nestled in the curve of the Andromeda constellation is the faint glow of the Andromeda galaxy. Aside from being the only galaxy visible to the naked eye, it is also almost the mirror image of our own, the Milky Way. Not only do both galaxies have a spiral shape, both have the same tilt relative to the other. Astronomers on a planet located in the Andromeda galaxy, looking at the Milky Way, would see something very similar to that which our astronomers see when we look at them. The sister galaxies are connected in another way as well. They are nebulaic ballroom dancers that are circling a common centre of gravity, drawing nearer to each other at the rate of fifty miles per second. In a few billion years the Andromeda galaxy will loom twice as large in our sky.

These time scales relativize my own existence. I find them inspiring and reassuring. As the physicist Freeman Dyson wrote in his book
Infinite in All Directions
, “Letting our imagination wander among the
stars, we too may hear whispers of immortality.” By day, the window on the galaxies is replaced with a grey November sky—a featureless, ashen plain that scrolls from horizon to horizon. This is the season that ends seasons. The bare trees look like abandoned scaffolds left over from a carnival that has yet to be disassembled. But the Austrian pine down the street beside George’s house is as green as it ever is. It has a low, spreading crown and its long needles are set in thick, bushy clumps. When it catches the late-afternoon sun, even on the coldest winter days, it is refulgent with semitropical green that remains steadfast despite the temperature.

In terms of my calendar of life on earth, the seasons have caught up to the present. For me, the first snow marks the beginning of the glacial age and of our own era, the Holocene. There is something aqueous, and a little clinical, about the grey, shadowless light of cloudy November afternoons. Bare branches, the armatures that supported the stage sets of summer foliage, are exposed, and the soil is naked. The glacial ages marked the migration of humans out of Africa northwards into Europe, and they must have huddled in early winter geographies not unlike this one. The deserted November landscape has a post-apocalyptic quiescence. What few remaining islands of green there are, like the Austrian pine, seem to glow. My eyes rest there, slaking their thirst for the colour of life.

On a cool afternoon earlier this week I saw a little cloud of small moths dancing in the air above the table on the patio. It was a mating flight, even though the temperature was only a few degrees above freezing. Still, there they fluttered, a fragile yet hardy species eking out an existence at the final margins of life before winter. November is the month at the end of time—and it is timeless. A photograph of my yard would look the
same whether it was taken in in November, December, March or early April. My bedraggled rose bush has one final bud; if we get a few warm days, it may blossom. There is bravery in this evacuated panorama.

G
ÖTTERDÄMMERUNG

Only a few religions incorporate the idea of Armageddon—most notably Christianity, with its doctrine of the End of Days. But for most of them doomsday is not final—a new order always rises out of the ashes. It seems that true fatalism only existed in early Norse mythology. The Vikings created a belief system that dealt not only with human mortality but also with the mortality of the universe, which they believed would be destroyed in the final battle of the gods. As set forth in the
Gylfaginning
, their mythology was a precocious forerunner of our current knowledge of the fate of the universe.

You’ll recall that, according to the
Gylfaginning,
the universe was embodied by a giant ash tree: Yggdrasil, or the world tree. In his book
Hammer of the North
, the Norse scholar Magnus Magnusson writes, “Yggdrasil holds the fabric of the universe together, a living and sentient being.” Magnusson then goes on to describe the “fearful torments” that the world tree suffered, noting that “Yggdrasil reflected the parlous condition of the world, a world that was flawed and doomed from the start.”

Yggdrasil is fertilized with celestial hydromel, and its three great roots draw nourishment from three sources. One root taps into Urd’s Well, a fountain of youth tended by the three Nornir, the goddesses of fate who rule past, present and future; another root draws water from the Hvergelmir Fountain, the source of all water (in Niflheim); while a third root taps into the Fountain of Mimir in the world of the giants.

It is from Urd’s Well, the fountain of youth, that Yggdrasil derives its longevity. The secret of time, guarded by the Nornir, appears to be the great tree’s elixir. Yet despite being nourished by time itself, Yggdrasil is doomed. At the top of the great tree, a gold cock scans the horizon to warn the gods if it sees the giants mounting an attack that will signal the beginning of the end of the gods. The other lookouts are a giant eagle surveying the entire world from Yggdrasil’s branches and a hawk perched on the eagle’s beak, ready to fly wherever necessary. The
agent provocateur
in this limited ecology is a mischievous squirrel, who constantly runs up and down the trunk, creating discord between the eagle and the serpent that lives at the roots of the tree.

Our present-day scientific version of the end of everything is on a scale that would be incomprehensible to the Vikings. I think, though, that they would be impressed with both its fatalism and its apocalyptic grandeur. Will there be gods to battle the giants at the end of our universe? Perhaps. Happily, doomsday for the cosmos is a long, long way off, trillions and trillions of years away, and the Anthropic Principle tells us that we have an extraordinary future before us.

Hans Moravec, founder of the world’s largest robotics program, at Carnegie Mellon University, has lingered thoughtfully in the corridors of the future. Tempering his astonishing imagination with scientific rigour, he has painted visions of the future that are as fantastic as they are invidiously plausible. In his seminal book
Mind Children
, which takes a look at the future of artificial and human intelligence, he chronicles a destiny where inconceivably vast engineering projects and powerful computers combine to reshape planets and the basis of life itself.

One of his more extraordinary scenarios envisages what might happen if a sufficiently large and sophisticated computer were able
to simulate the whole surface of our earth—not just at a large scale, but down to the atomic level. Everything—dirt, coral, human consciousness and flies—would be replaced with perfect copies of itself. The total information contained in every cell, every atom, would be extracted and transferred to a computer bank. Human beings in such a simulation would be indistinguishable from you or me.

All this could take place without our even being aware of it. (Of course, if you were a little paranoid, you might think, “How do we know that we aren’t already simulations, imprisoned in a superintel-ligent computer like the pod-bound humans in
The Matrix
?” But that is an unanswerable question, one about which we could speculate for years without solving its riddle. For now, let’s assume that we’re not.) Moravec knows from his experience with today’s complex simulations, such as planning the trajectory of unmanned space probes to other planets or modelling nuclear explosions, that simulations obey the basic laws of physics, one of which states that time is symmetrical. A simulation can be as easily run backwards as forwards.

So, Moravec asks, once the simulation of earth has reached complete saturation—with every atom, every quark, captured in a replication—why not run the whole planet backwards in time? As each past inhabitant of the earth was resurrected, he or she could be uploaded into a new, immortal body. All the people who ever existed could live again, their infirmities cured and their minds restored. In this way, Moravec claims, even our most distant ancestors would be able to share our fantastic destiny. As he sees it, “Resurrecting one small planet should be child’s play long before our civilization has colonized even its first galaxy.”

Perhaps Judaism has it right: the righteous will be resurrected. Although in Moravec’s vision the not-so-righteous will rise up again as well. The point is, if we survive as a species, if we don’t succumb to our own imperfections, our future literally has no limits. Running time
backwards on planet earth, if indeed this ever happens, will be only the first in a series of almost inconceivable scientific and engineering accomplishments—the harnessing of stars, the towing of black holes for use as power—that, given the trillions of years left to us, will inevitably produce superbeings with the powers of gods…or perhaps a single entity stretching from one side of the universe to the other.

The Irish physicist J. D. Bernal had an intimation of how the rise of superbeings might come about. Predicting that humans would transform themselves beyond recognition, he wrote, “Finally, consciousness itself may end or vanish in a humanity that has become completely etherealized, losing the close-knit organism, becoming masses of atoms in space communicating by radiation, and ultimately, perhaps resolving itself entirely into light.” This adaptation, Bernal said, would allow these post-humans to colonize vast areas of otherwise inhospitable space. He goes on: “As the scene of life would be more the cold emptiness of space than the warm, dense atmosphere of the planets, the advantage of containing no organic material at all, so as to be independent of both these conditions, would be increasingly felt.” Since Bernal published his visions of the future of humanity, other scientists have speculated on what post-humanity may look like. It is certain that it will be nothing we can now imagine. But there are inevitabilities about which we can speculate with some assurance. And Barrow and Tipler make a convincing argument that eventually life will spread to inhabit the entire universe. It will be then, when no other frontier is possible, that the only door locked to these godlike beings will be the one that opens to eternity. For the universe has an expiration date.