Читать книгу Sum - David Eagleman - Страница 8

The afterlife is all about softness. You find yourself in a great padded compound. Everything appears designed for quietness and comfort. Your feet fall silently on the cushioned floor. The walls are pillowed. Echoes are dampened by foam ceiling tiles. A hard surface is impossible to find; feathers pad everything.

When you enter the grand hall, the first thing you notice is a sizable and princely man. He looks just as you might expect a god to appear, except that he is noticeably skittish and strained with worry around the eyes. He will probably be explaining that he is greatly disturbed by the nuclear arms proliferation on Earth. He says that he often awakens in a cold sweat with the sounds of colossal blasts hammering in his ears.

“To be clear,” he says to you, “I am not your God. Instead, you and I are galactic neighbors; I am from a planet associated with the star you call Terzan Four. So we are all in the same mess.”

“What mess?” you ask.

“Please don’t talk so loudly,” he softly admonishes. “For a long time we have been studying our neighbors: you Earthlings and thirty-seven other planets besides. We have developed highly accurate systems of equations to predict the future growth and social directions of your planets.” Here he fixes your eyes. “It turns out that you Earthlings are among the least tranquil and content. Our predictions indicate that your weapons of war will grow increasingly loud. Your space exploration programs will produce thousands of noisy vessels that will thunder throughout the heavens with their deafening rocket propulsion. You Earthlings are like your explorer Cortez, standing atop a mountain peak and preparing to perturb every beach at all the lapping fringes of the Pacific.”

“We’re in a mess of expansionism?” you manage.

“That’s not the mess,” he hisses. “Allow me to illustrate the larger picture. You and I, our planets, our galaxy—we’re part of what you should think of as an immeasurable living mass. You might call it a Giantess, but summarizing the concept in a word might give you the illusion that you can have a hint of a notion of her enormity.

“To give you a sense of scale, you are the size of an atom for her. Your Earth—sprouting with its untold layers of furiously fecund species—your Earth is tantamount to a single protein in the shadowy depths of a single one of her cells. Our Milky Way constitutes a single cell, but a small one. She consists of hundreds of billions of such cells.

“For millions of years, my people had no notion of her, just as a flatworm is unlikely to discover that the planet is round; a colony of bacteria will never know the walls of the flask; a single cell in your hand will not know it is contributing to a concerto on the piano.

“But with advancing philosophy and technology, we came to appreciate our situation. Then, a few millennia ago, it was theorized that we might be able to communicate with her. It was proposed that we might decipher her structure, deploy signals, influence her behavior in the manner that infinitesimal molecules—hormones, alcohols, narcotics—influence a creature like you.

“So we organized and educated ourselves. Instead of fretting through the doomed ignoble cycles of local politics, we dedicated our economy and sciences toward understanding the biochemistry of universal scales. We methodically mapped out the signaling cascades and stellar anatomy of her nervous system, and at last discovered how to transmit a signal to her consciousness. We sent a sharply defined sequence of electromagnetic pulses, which interacted with local magnetospheres, which influenced asteroid orbits, which nudged planets closer and farther from stars, which dictated the fate of lifeforms, which changed the gases in the atmospheres, which bent the path of light signals, all in complex interacting cascades we had worked out. Our calculations told us that it took a few hundred years for the transmission to arrive at her consciousness. At the time of the Arrival, I was sad to be traveling away from the planet while everyone was so excited to see what would happen.”

His face twitches with painful trickles of reminiscence.

“But no one would have guessed what happened next: a great sheet of meteors rained down, incendiary hydrogen clouds crushed in, and these were followed by a multitude of black holes that mercilessly swallowed up the flying chunks and dust and the last light of remembrance. No one survived.

“In all probability, this was neutral to her. It might have been an immune system response. Or she might have been scratching an itch, or sneezing, or getting a biopsy.

“So we discovered that we can communicate with her, but we cannot communicate meaningfully. We are of insufficient size. What can we say to her? What question could we ask? How could she communicate an answer back to us? Perhaps that was her attempt to answer. What could you ask her to do that would have relevance to your life? And if she told you what was of importance to her, could you understand her answer? Do you think it would have any meaning at all if you displayed one of your Shakespearean plays to a bacterium? Of course not. Meaning varies with spatial scale. So we have concluded that communicating with her is not impossible, but it is pointless. And that is why we are now hunkered down silently on the surface of this noiseless planet, whispering through a slow orbit, trying not to draw attention to ourselves.”