My Past Through Tomorrow, Epilogue–Somewhen
Titan, Saturn VI, Sol System—date indeterminate
“Where do babies come from?” Gail said. She slid the point of the knife along the belly of the fish on the cutting board. Muffy and Gunna danced at her feet, occasionally placing their paws on the cabinets and mewing for their supper. The red rays of sunset shone through the louvres into the center of the kitchen.
[You just want me to talk about sex. I told you that I wasn’t going to do that until you kids are older. There’s plenty of time for that.]
“We just want to hear a story. It’s been too long and you know how much everyone likes them. Tamika, especially’s, been asking over and over lately.” She didn’t look up from her work, of course. The children have always assumed that I was everywhere in the house, so they’ve never fixated on a spot that was “me”, so to speak.
[I’ll tell you what. Roll that last filet in the soymeal and put the pan in the oven. I’ll watch supper while you collect the rest of them. You can all eat at once tonight and I’ll tell you a bedtime story while you do.]
Gail ran out the door, trailing cats. I switched my point of view to the outside and followed her as she ran toward the pond where the fishers were feeding meal to the catfish. I could see Justin and Brice bringing the sheep over the next hill toward the barn for the night. Tamika and Katie were taking their turn in the fields, culling the small, weak bean plants and hoeing the blue grass away from the edges of the plot. It took her a while to collect all two dozen of the children, but that gave me a chance to collect my thoughts.
They were a pretty rowdy bunch tonight. There was more than a little pushing and shoving as they set the long table and teased each other over their accomplishments during the last shift. The day was about done now, and they’d be settling down for 190 hours of sleep. Even with the thick atmosphere, the temperature still dropped from 60 to -30 by dawn, and when I made the children, the other fauna, and the plants, I figured that it would be more energetically economical to let everything sleep through until morning. So far, it’s worked fine, although it turned out that the cats slept through two-thirds of the daytime, too. (That really didn’t matter, of course, they were more decorative than anything else. As far as I could tell, there hadn’t been a rat in Sol System for a couple billion years.)
I looked them over as they sat down. The oldest were just hitting ten or so now, with Tamika, the baby, at about five. Good kids, each and every one of them, although Justin had been showing some signs of becoming pretty aggressive as time went on. I’m going to have to watch him like a hawk—this Cain and Abel sort of stuff’d be way too Genesis for me. No sense humanity making the same mistake twice. The slightly larger eyes, which saw further into the red, gave them a bit of an anime look, which I still found a bit disconcering, even after all of these years.
[Ok, kids. If you’d like, I’ll tell a story tonight while you eat.]
Tamika squealed, “Tell the one about the big cat that chased the dog up a tree, that’s my favorite!”
Eddie and Margot chimed in, “No, no, do the one about the guy who knocked down the Messerschmidt with dynamite.”
[I figured that I’d tell you about where you came from. It’s about time, don’t you think?]
The ones that were paying strict attention nodded, the rest chewing their fish and beans and following their siblings’ lead.
[Once upon a time, people lived on Earth—that’s where most of my stories take place, remember. There were two kinds of people there, ones with bodies like you, and others without, like me. We once all had bodies, but over time, the bodies would wear out, and we’d move our minds and souls into places like the farmhouse here, or machines like when I go into the planter to put down soybeans. We lived like this for a long, long time. We went everywhere in the Solar System, explored the Kuiper Belt and were everywhere on Earth, even at the bottom of the sea.]
“Did you all get along?” Justin chimed in. Yes, I definitely was going to have to watch him.
[Not always. Sometimes we fought—it seems that fighting is hard-wired into us, for some reason. Once there was no longer anything material to fight about, when all of humanity’s needs were taken care of, we still fought over ideas. It wasn’t often, but when it happened, it was fierce, sometimes, just like in the Iliad or Saving Private Ryan.
Eventually, however, things wear out. Our sun, which had shone reliably for five billion years ran out of hydrogen and began burning helium instead. When that happened, it started to grow. As it did, Earth got hotter, even though it was moving outward naturally. The animals and plants began dying. We tried to save as many as we could, but even the seas were evaporating and getting smaller century by century.
Finally, we were faced with a choice. We had enough power and energy to do one of two things. We could move the Earth far enough out into the solar system to survive until the sun ran out of helium or we could move humanity completely out of the system. This argument raged for tens of thousands of years, until a red dwarf star flew within three light years of the system. This was going to be our last chance, so we had to decide what to do.
So we did what humanity always did when faced with a stressful situation. We had a war about it. Trillions of people died in it--our last in this solar system--I fervently hope. Some of the people who died were even older than I. I still cry sometimes at night thinking of the waste.
In the end, my side lost. Humanity was going to leave Earth behind and move to a new star, one that would live as long as the galaxy itself. I thought about it for a long time, and realized that I simply could not bring myself to go along with them. There was something that could still be done here.
So, I asked for a small part of the resources available to create a cache to leave here on Titan. I’d stay behind when the rest left and if it was possible, keep a claim on the solar system for mankind. We build nanomachines that could last for gigayears in ice-cold methane and ethane, and left them waiting. My consciousness was installed in the building and we set an alarm clock, of sorts, to start things going if the sun expanded enough to raise the temperature on Titan to above the freezing point of water.
Two hundred years ago, that happened. The tailored bacteria were released and began splitting the orange nitrogen oxides into nitrates and free oxygen. When the oxygen content rose high enough, I woke up and took over. When I first saw the valley, it was all rock and ice. The sky was still completely orange and overcast—you couldn’t see either the sun or the yellow egg of Saturn sitting above the horizon in the east.
Eventually, I adjusted the settings on the machines that would produce you children along with all of the farm animals and plants. The rockworms made fertile soil, I turned the grass loose and now, as far as we can see, there’s a carpet. We’ve got a lovely garden here, and eventually, the whole world will be ours.]
A couple of the younger children looked very worried, “Won’t the sun get bigger and come and eat us, too?”
[It’s about as big as it’s going to get. Eventually, it’ll start to pulsate and drive off its outer layers. However, that will be a long, long time from now. By then, I’m sure I’ll think of something. That’ll be twice as long as humanity lived on earth from now. Now, my precious bundles, it’s time for you go clean the table and get to bed. There’s plenty of work for all of you, come sunup.]
They dawdle a bit, but they’re good kids. Once they’re asleep, I begin closing down the power in a lot of the areas. It’ll be eight days before sunrise. I switch my point of view to the telescope on the roof and look at the western horizon. Sliding above the photosphere of the sun, Earth shines back at me. Through the ‘scope’s lenses I can see the glow of the surface. There are no visible continents, the crust has melted.
The stars are coming out now. Even without enhancements, I would be able to see thirty thousand stars in the sky, ten times what was visible when I went to sleep. When the Andromeda Galaxy went through us the first time, it tossed the sun into a more elliptical orbit, and we’re a lot closer to the center of the galaxy right now. If it turns out that we’re going to be too close to the center, I’ve got to figure out a way to protect us against the added radiation. Last spring, (fourteen years ago) I could see the two lobes of radiation coming from the quasar at the Galactic Center. The two-galaxy merger must have dropped one hell of a lot of gas into it to create beams that shine that bright.
There’s not really much to do at night now but think. I remember the first time that I noticed the stars, so very long ago in another farmyard. I remember my friends, both before and after the change and miss them. The children are wonderful, but it’s hard to relate to beings that are eight orders of magnitude younger than you are.
It’s impossible to pick out the star where the others went. Even when their star was closest to the system, you couldn’t see it with the naked eye. There’s not even any way to tell how long I was asleep. The isotope that we were using to time the project wasn’t accurate beyond four billion years. The pulsars that were present when they left would have spun down by now, so there’s no way to tell from them.
I knew that this job would be hard, but that it would be worth it. I’ve been thinking lately that I may grow myself a new body in a couple centuries or so. It’d be fun, I think, to milk cows again, even to shovel the unavoidable manure. Oh. Wait. I wonder if I could design cows that don’t produce any manure. That’s something to think about a little later, perhaps. For now, I think that a little Mozart might be in order….
–Tom
Comment by J. Prescott on 15 September 2007 at 2:21 pm:
Tom -
What about death? In your history, it seems that absent war, death is not present really. Life, in some form, is extended in perpetuity. Now, I have three thoughts about this. 1) Wouldn’t life get boring? I mean, the first couple centuries you can find enough new stimuli to keep things interesting that people would be ok with it. But once you 2 millenia, wouldn’t people be clamoring for death? If for no other reason that to have a shot at a change of scenery?
2) Most religions, which you have touched on before, have the idea of an afterlife, and in general a very positive afterlife, which is a true paradise…better than any manmade world, no matter how good it is. But, also in most religions, there is a prohibition against suicide. So there is a promise of a better life after death, but for the religious, no way to get it. How could that be resolved?
3) Wouldn’t human thought grow stale? A benefit of death is that it keeps great minds from sticking around too long. Imagine if Albert Einstein and Fermi were still around or if Jefferson and Lincoln were still around. Wouldn’t it be harder to get new insights from unproven younger thinkers, with the constant presence of more established thinkers. Would anyone have listened to a Greenspan if a hale and healthy Smith, Ricardo, and Keynes were still around? Theoretically, this hurdle could be overcome, but humans do have a tendency to follow the most established guy? How do you see that being overcome?
Comment by Karen Pierce on 15 September 2007 at 7:01 pm:
Good story, Tom. Sounds like a creation story.
I have a question too. How do the kids know you’re there? If you don’t have a body, how do they hear you? You can see the stars, but you don’t have eyes. You’ve mentioned that idea before of downloading your consciousness, but without a body, it seems you’d just sit there.
Comment by tet on 15 September 2007 at 11:20 pm:
Prescott, I’m not ignoring you. I’m heading off to see my mother, be back Sunday night. I want to take time to answer your questions after serious thought.
Karen, the big diamond containing my intelligence is in a portion of the farmhouse and is connected by wireless to various cameras, sensors and speakers within the house and on the grounds themselves. At will, I can move my perception to any of them and use one or more.
I can, for example, keep an eye on the sleeping sheep to make sure that their temperature is high enough while they’re hibernating through the long nights. There are pylons extending out to the edge of the grassy area (that I didn’t mention), but allow me to supervise the extension of earth-DNA plants as the rockworms make more dirt for them to use.
Tom
Comment by tet on 15 September 2007 at 11:21 pm:
I have removed Elderwife’s comments at her request.
Tom
Comment by Colin on 16 September 2007 at 3:31 am:
Prescott,
You should rethink these overgeneralizations:
“in general a very positive afterlife,”
“there is a prohibition against suicide.”
These characteristics are simply not true for all religions present and historical. Thanks.
Also,
“A benefit of death is that it keeps great minds from sticking around too long.”
This is assuming that there is some kind of hierarchy keeping these great ‘minds’ in places of power. This does not neccesarily have to be so. See Thomas Kuhn for a more detailed picture of change in scientific knowledge.
Again for this:
“humans do have a tendency to follow the most established guy”
While not as large as the others, this too is an overly broad assumption of human nature. Do humans really at base “truck, barter, and exchange”?
Comment by Karen Pierce on 16 September 2007 at 8:04 am:
There’s no real difference between an afterlife and an immortality where a godlike Tom is taking care of everyone and solving all problems. There will be no suffering–everyone will be happy. The only problem I see is Justin–he could become the next “devil” unless God (Tom) keeps him in check.
With no problems to solve, the children remain child-like all their lives. You don’t need human thought, because God (Tom) has done all the thinking that needs to be done. People will just be happy and carefree which is what Heaven is supposed to be like.
Comment by Augur on 16 September 2007 at 8:10 am:
This reads like a wonderful daydream.
Prescott, I disagree w/ your 3rd observation. Imagine if you could determine who the best young thinkers are in, say economics, and set them down with the guys you mentioned. Perhaps we could continue moving the ball forward if we had robust debate from the best minds throughout the ages.
Tommy, how do you build all this shizzle from your diamond hut?
Comment by J. Prescott on 16 September 2007 at 10:53 am:
Colin -
Of course I am using generalizations because it takes places billions of years in the future and at this juncture all I can feasibly ask is general questions. I cannot ask specific questions about every religion without writing a lot more. However, absent extenuating circumstances, Islam, Chrisitanity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism are all against suicide, and those religions account for 70.9% of the population, 84% of the religious population. So I am pretty comfortable with the amount of coverage I get with that generalization. Also, of course there does not neccessarily need to be a heirarchy of knowledge. Thats why I asked the question of how Tom would resolve it. I don’t think its impossible, but I think it would be hard to break away from such a heirarchy, and am interested in how Tom’s sees that happening. And I am slightly familiar with Thomas Kuhn, and he had the benefit of assuming death. Paradigm shifts are easier to do when the guys who instituted the paradigm are not around. This might be easier to do for the harder sciences (Physics, biology, chemistry) but for the softer social sciences, where the evidence is more abstract, it might be harder.
As for Colin’s third point, and Karen’s point, there is a tension that they create for my question; on one hand, Karen’s beneficient human/god overseer and Colin’s college of great thinkers. One presupposes that no one will challenge an established power and the other assumes that established power will welcome the challenge. In Tom’s world (literally in HIS world in HIS created universe) this might be easier to circumvent as the community is much smaller. There would still be disputes, but disputes closer to that between a child and his/her father. But even he suggested that before the break (where the majority of the people left the Sol Solar system), that there was significant conflict, and war. Even he suggested that humans have violence hard wired into who they are. I am just curious how that plays out when the party you might be arguing against has literally seen and done everything cause they have had the time to do so.
One more thing to Karen’s point, which also includes the hard wired tendency for violence Tom talks about. Maybe the afterlife is such a paradise, theoretically, because death is such a transformative event it changes the very nature of the soul/after death remnant of the person so that they can live in a paradise. Maybe this is me being negative, but again, Tom stated himself that he doesn’t think significant conflict dies when material need disappears, so while life might be better, it wouldn’t be paradise, I don’t think.
And as for the college of thinkers proposed by Augur, again I think Tom could speak to this point better than I can. How many times do you hear stories about college round tables being hardly collegial? Again, I don’t see it being as big of an issue for the harder sciences, but for the softer ones I think there is going to be an issue.
Comment by Karen Pierce on 16 September 2007 at 5:23 pm:
You’ve asked good questions, Prescott.
Sol System could not be paradise if the children grow up and become jealous, greedy, power hungry, or extremely bored. I had taken the story to mean that Tom had become God and created his own garden of Eden, and that he implied there could be a fall of mankind (Justin) if he wasn’t careful.
About the debating scholars, I often wonder what Jefferson would have to say about separation of church and state, or free speech and the Internet. If he were to come back as some kind of downloaded persona, I would probably think he had the official answer to those questions. But, on the other hand, if someone like Freud who’s been discredited came back, I would like to think he would change his mind and say the new thinkers were right. Or, maybe downloaded personas would be ignored since they aren’t visible–people would just think of them as old and irrevelant.
Comment by tet on 16 September 2007 at 6:24 pm:
Ok, back from a day with my mother and uncle. I think my uncle is preparing for his end, since he has turned over his collection of photographs of my American ancestors. One of the photos (a reproduction of a tintype) is of my great-great grandfather, who died in 1895.
Augur first. The initial cache was probably pretty small–no larger than an RV, I’m figuring. The narrator’s being is housed in a diamond a bit smaller than your fist and is written using the two stable isotopes of Carbon (12 and 13) to represent zeros and ones.
Stored in the cache were sensors and the mechanisms to create self-replicating robots and specialized bacteria. The whole thing was powered by a combination of solar power and a very long-lived isotope (probably Thorium or Uranium.)
Every so often, say every 500 years, the sensors would be turned on. If the temperature was warm enough, the bacteria would be turned loose. At the same time, the self-replacating robots (called Von Neumann devices after their creator) would be turned loose to excavate enough raw materials to build the initial workshop. Once that was up and running, the diamond would be accessed. I am assuming some interesting biological creations like spiders that could eat the aluminum out of rocks and spin it into shaped structural members.
Karen: I think that you’re reading a bit too much of Genesis into the whole thing. Justin is going to be causing a bit of trouble in a decade or so, but he’s not so much Satan as he is a self-imposed Adam. It turns out that his argument is that the world doesn’t have enough challenges, so he copies some of the design equipment and uses it to create weeds, trees, wolves and insects to eat the crops.
My narrator is missing the three necessary conditions for Godhood–he is not omniscient, since he is constrained by what his sensors can detect. In addition, he is not telepathic, so he has no real idea what’s going on in the childrens’ minds. He is not omnipresent, since the sensors are limited in scope to the settled area of the world. He is omnipotent within the areas that are settled, for the most part, as long as he has enough time to react to problems. If there was a meteor heading for the farm, there’d not be a damn thing he could do about it. (Not an unlikely occurrance, there’s a lot of crap in the Saturn system.)
I was originally going to have this set of children be the second attempt (after an initial, failed one), but thought better of it, since I didn’t think that that added much to the story and would make the narrator too angsty.
I specifically noted that the children were aging in the first conversation between the narrator and Gail. They won’t remain very innocent for very long.
Prescott, looking at your questions in order:
1) Death has not been eliminated in my universe–merely death by old age. There is plenty of room for death by murder, suicide and accident to go around. I think that as the average age of a person’s demise goes up, we’re going to get more and more careful as a race. You’re seeing it already in the US, and we’ve only got a life expectancy of 78.
I have no idea whether human beings will find enough stimuli to keep them interested for millenia. I believe that this was the underlying theme of Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love. I do note that, since many religions’ afterlives are eternal, it is generally accepted among cultures that a blissful eternity is just fine.
2) I think that religions with an afterlife that call for denying oneself in this life will become less and less popular as lifespans tend upward. The most likely model, I think, for what will develop would be Judaism before their contact with the Macedonians, when there was no notable afterlife whatsoever–you did what was right because you respected and feared God.
3) I can’t answer the question about human thought being stale. I think the creative process will just have the duration of projects tend to be longer. If someone’s lifespan is in the hundreds or thousands of years, taking a decade to produce a painting or other work suddenly doesn’t seem out of the question. I’ve seen experienced people who could work with younger ones and others that could not. There hasn’t seemed to me to be a correlation between willingness to do so and either talent or intelligence.
What we would have to worry about is an extremely long-lived dictator. As it is now, Joe Stalin or Chairman Mao is going to die sooner or later. Not necessarily something that’s going to be true for long.
One last note:
To a certain extent, being one of the Exalted in the LDS church, from what I understand, puts you and your family in charge of a world as its God(s). This might be right, or I might be a bit off in my interpretation. While I had heard about this over the years from my Mormon friends, I was not intending to have too great a connection to this with the story.
Tom