Infinity's Illusion

by Richard Farr

  Note that any one of these universes could include an “Earth” that’s identical to this one, in every feature of its entire history (including you, your past, and this very moment you’re experiencing right now) except the final word at the end of this sqaxit.

  See David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality, chapter 9.

  PART I: THE WORLD IN FLAMES

  “Eyes . . . attuned to a million fine gradations of twilight”

  Certain disabilities can come with strange advantages. Check out Oliver Sacks’s riveting account of Pingelap’s night fishermen in The Island of the Colorblind.

  Pizarro and Atahuallpa

  OK, so this is a bit misleading. It’s true that Pizarro had fewer than two hundred men, and Atahuallpa had eighty thousand. And it seems likely that the invaders’ horses and guns made the Inca think they had supernatural powers. But the victory had more to do with Inca errors, and Spanish guile and ruthlessness, than with force of arms. The central fact of November 16, 1532—the misnamed “battle” of Cajamarca—was that Pizarro invited Atahuallpa to a feast, Atahuallpa arrived with several thousand of his most important leaders and counselors, all unarmed, and the Spanish surrounded and slaughtered them. The rest of Atahuallpa’s army then fled without fighting.

  Theseus in the labyrinth

  According to legend, King Minos of Crete demanded from Athens a regular tribute of seven young men and seven young women. After they’d been shipped south, Minos sacrificed them by imprisoning them in the labyrinth under his palace, where they were killed and eaten by the Minotaur. One year, the hero Theseus arranged to be included in the group. The king’s daughter Ariadne fell in love with him, and gave him a ball of twine, which he used to escape the labyrinth after killing the Minotaur. This story gave Suzanne Collins the idea for The Hunger Games.

  “Store-bought chocolate sauce . . . the work of Satan”

  Undoubtedly. But you can join Daniel in beating back the forces of evil (while fundamentally changing your life for the better) by visiting the longer version of this note at www.richardfarr.net for instructions on how to make your own excellent chocolate sauce, from scratch, in seconds.

  The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius

  Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was Roman emperor from 161 CE to 180 CE. He was that rarest of gems: a powerful ruler who was also intelligent, practical, emotionally insightful, kind, personally modest, and humane. The Meditations are a record of Marcus’s attempts to apply Stoic philosophy to his own life. They’re an easy read, a genuine help when life goes pear-shaped, and endlessly quotable. One of my favorites: “The best revenge? Not being like your enemy.”

  Bird of paradise

  There are thirty nine species of bird of paradise in New Guinea and Australia. New Guinea’s male superb bird of paradise, Lophorina superba, has a courtship dance in which it magically transforms itself from a small, dull-looking black bird into—well, I’m not going to spoil something you have to see. Check it out at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, http://www.birdsofparadiseproject.org, where there’s also a short video introducing all thirty nine species.

  “Angkor . . . biggest city in the world”

  In 2012–2015, lidar surveys of the surrounding jungle revealed that the Khmer capital at Angkor in Cambodia was even bigger than previously suspected. At the height of its power, around 1200–1500 CE, this city of stone temples and paved boulevards may have spread over an area more than half as large as modern London, and could have been home to as many as a million people. At that time, London was a “city” of mud lanes, wooden houses, and perhaps fifty thousand people.

  Angkor was abandoned in about 1431 CE. The actual reason may not have been the Architects but rather a series of increasingly successful attacks by the Ayutthaya dynasty from Siam (Thailand).

  “BBC . . . one of the worst offenders”

  A BBC2 documentary in 2000, and a Discovery Channel documentary in 2002, were among programs promoting the Cumbre Vieja mega-tsunami theory. The Discovery Channel offering was specifically condemned by the Tsunami Society as baseless, scientifically ignorant fear-mongering (http://www.tsunamisociety.org/PressReleases.html). But the BBC was still at it in 2009 (“The World’s Worst Disasters”) and 2013 (“Could We Survive a Mega-Tsunami?”).

  The Hindenburg Wall

  The Hindenburg Wall has been described as one of the natural wonders of the world. In writing this scene, I took the liberty of shifting its location a bit—in reality it’s south of the central spine of the Highlands.

  “The bite of a six-inch yellow-and-black-striped centipede”

  Ethmostigmus rubripes, probably—one of the world’s largest and most unpleasant centipedes. See www.richardfarr.net/gallery.

  PART II: THE BEGINNING OF THE END

  “Fretting the heavens with golden fire”

  In Hamlet (act 2, scene 2), the prince speaks of “this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire.”

  “Lumps as small relative to an atom as an atom is to the solar system.”

  That’s probably an understatement. The “big” solar system, measured out to its remote dwarf planets, is about 1013 meters in diameter. A hydrogen atom is 10-10 meters in diameter, which means the solar system is twenty-three orders of magnitude (x 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) bigger. But a “seed” twenty-three orders of magnitude smaller than a hydrogen atom is still around a hundred times as big as the Planck length.

  If this boggles your mind in a pleasant way, check out my little book You Are Here: A User’s Guide to the Universe. And buy copies for all your friends.

  Slipher Space Telescope

  See Ghosts in the Machine. The Slipher and its planetary survey are fictional. But I drafted this section just after reading a report on an early test of South Africa’s MeerKAT Radio Telescope. This was a search for galaxies, not planets, but the point is the same: with MeerKAT working at only one-quarter power (sixteen of sixty-four dishes operational), they pointed it at a lonely patch of sky that had 70 known galaxies. It found 1,300. Shortly afterward, in separate research, astronomers published a revised estimate of the total number of galaxies: not 100 billion, or 200 billion, but at least 1 to 2 trillion.

  “Those convenient packages for delivering genes into the future, known to the zoologists as offspring”

  For the idea that we are merely vehicles built by our genes for their own purposes, read another Richard Dawkins classic, The Selfish Gene. It’s one of the best-written, most accessible, and most influential popular science books ever written.

  “Before their time comes, you wouldn’t guess there’s something big in store for them”

  It seems unlikely that alien zoologists, dropping into Africa with their clipboards to do a species-count two hundred thousand years ago, would have paid much attention to our small, vulnerable ancestors. Apparently the unprecedented stuff that happened to our species, and made us “masters of the planet” (to quote the title of Ian Tattersall’s excellent book), was still in the future.

  “Wind civilization up like an old-fashioned clock . . .”

  This is nearly plagiarism. After writing it, I realized that I must have been thinking of Sylvia Plath’s wonderful line “Love set you going like a fat gold watch.”

  Elysium, Aaru, Asgard . . .

  I may perhaps have invented one or two of these.

  Einstein and “spooky action at a distance”

  Einstein had realized by 1930 that there was a problem making quantum mechanics and relativity theory work together, because entanglement (a term coined later) was a quantum property that seemed to violate locality—the idea that no two regions of space could communicate faster than the speed of light. Einstein concluded—and the Einstein Podolsky Rosen paradox of 1935 argued—that quantum theory must be incomplete. Einstein was almost certainly wrong, but this wasn’t shown clearly until Bell’s theorem in 1964, and the successful testing of Bell’s theorem in the 1980s.

  The Tibesti Mountains a
nd Sahelanthropus

  The Tibesti Massif remains one of the most alien, rugged, desolate, and poorly explored regions on the planet. Go to Google Earth, zero in on the little town of Faya-Largeau in northern Chad, and check out those deep canyons to the northwest. Spooky.

  As for Sahelanthropus tchadensis, there are few fossils, and so far they have failed to settle a debate over whether the species predates the human-chimpanzee split (which occurred at about seven million years ago) and is an ancestor of both species, or postdates the split and is an ancestor of humans only, or is only a distant cousin of both and an ancestor of neither.

  Erupting out of Africa in successive waves

  Pretty much all we know for sure is that Homo heidelbergensis left Africa at least six hundred thousand years ago, giving rise to the Neanderthals in Eurasia, and that Homo sapiens followed much later, starting roughly a hundred thousand years ago. Not only are the dates sketchy, but there may have been many crossings, by these and other species, almost certainly including crossings back into Africa. Our own ancestors may even have gone from Africa to Asia, evolved substantially, gone back into Africa, and evolved some more, before leaving again. We don’t know. See “Some Dates.”

  The Toba event

  The explosion of Mount Toba, in about 70,000 or 72,000 BCE, created Sumatra’s Lake Toba. Other supervolcanoes like Toba will blow in the future—Yellowstone National Park is a likely candidate. There’s a good chapter about this in Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. You may want to avoid reading it if you live within about a thousand miles of Wyoming.

  In our beginning is our end

  The poet T. S. Eliot grew up in the United States, but moved to England in 1914 at the age of twenty-six. The refrain “In my beginning is my end . . . in my end is my beginning” is from his poem East Coker, the second of the Four Quartets. Appropriately, they were chosen for the plaque beneath which his ashes are buried: they lie in the parish church at East Coker, the English village from which his ancestors had emigrated to America in the 1600s.

  The Fermi paradox . . . lots of explanations

  There are many ingenious solutions to the Fermi paradox. Iona’s thesis is a version of the super-predator hypothesis. This explains the absence of alien visits by hypothesizing that one advanced civilization has colonized the galaxy already, and it is now busy (a) eating everyone else, (b) destroying all other advanced life for roughly the same reasons that make us reach for the cockroach spray, or (c) destroying all other advanced life before it becomes competition. Iona’s thesis combines (c) with a supernatural—or perhaps, rather, a “super natural”—twist on (a).

  As the text indicates, another solution could be that aliens are already here, but invisible. Within that scenario, Daniel’s “like-wow cloaking technology” is just one possibility. Consider this: just since the era of the Apollo missions, our own electronic components have shrunk to perhaps a thousandth of their former size, and we routinely manufacture working devices that our immediate ancestors could not even have seen with the naked eye, much less recognize for what they are. So we can’t be confident that advanced aliens don’t have, say, fully autonomous robot spacecraft the size of small viruses. There could be one orbiting your head right now. For that matter, there could be a hundred of them building a research station on the surface of your eye. You’d never notice.

  Mars and “all life is doomed”

  Careful readers of Ghosts in the Machine, or anyway the notes, will already know that I took this argument from Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom. See his thought-provoking argument in “Where Are They? Why I Hope the Search for Extraterrestrial Life Finds Nothing” (MIT Technology Review, 2008, and available online at https://www.technologyreview.com/magazine/2008/05/.) Apart from anything else, it’s a nice example of what a smart person can do by taking a few obvious ideas and actually thinking clearly—as no one else seems to have done, in this case—about their implications.

  Interstellar travel and fresh steak

  I took Morag’s counterintuitive idea that aliens might not be much interested in us, or our resources, from physicist David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality. As for how far we are from mastering interstellar travel, first note that even being able to travel at the speed of light would be almost useless: Betelgeuse, a fairly close neighbor in our galaxy, would require about a thousand-year round-trip. And the fastest objects humans have ever made to date are spacecraft capable of about a fiftieth of 1 percent of light speed.

  PART III: ANABASIS

  The original pronunciation of Seattle

  You can find it online, spoken by Skagit elder Vi Hilbert. The final phonemes are so different from anything in a European language that they’re hard for an English speaker to hear, much less say correctly. This is a common problem for language learning: by the age of seven or eight, our brains have been wired for sensitivity to the phonemes in our native language, at the expense of other phonemes. This process makes distinguishing unfamiliar phonemes virtually impossible.

  How to interpret quantum mechanics like the preference for baggy or skinny trousers

  Once you’ve accepted that quantum mechanics is in some sense true, you’re going to have to decide what the innocent-looking expression “quantum mechanics is true” actually means. Is your personal version of quantum mechanics Niels Bohr’s old-school Copenhagen interpretation? Or maybe the unfashionable de Broglie-Bohm model? If you don’t like those, there are other options with cool names too, such as Quantum Bayesianism and Consciousness Causes Collapse. (The great Eugene Wigner thought this last view meant consciousness could not be material.) Or you could really bet the farm, and defend Hugh Everett’s beautifully consistent but stonkingly outrageous Many Worlds interpretation.

  Panpsychism

  Panpsychism hasn’t been taken seriously in the West for a long time—but some contemporary philosophers argue that it becomes a whole lot more tempting when you understand how hard it is to make sense of the smugly prevailing theory, materialism.

  The monad theory of Newton’s great contemporary Leibniz is a form of panpsychism that prefigures both quantum entanglement and the idea that consciousness is an underlying feature of reality. A Leibnizian monad isn’t an atom, but an “atom of consciousness.” Since monads don’t exist in space and time, all of them are aware of all the others, instantly. The great Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza entertained a similar idea—that each of our minds is a tiny region of an infinite mind.

  Panpsychism is a commonplace in Indian philosophy, and that’s probably where Erwin Schrödinger, pioneer of quantum physics and half-dead cats, got the idea. The Catholic philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was another thinker who believed that mind, or spirit, is present in all matter. (He was also one of the first Catholics to take evolution seriously, and recognize that accepting it posed major problems for a theology involving immortal souls.)

  A major contemporary defender of panpsychism is the British philosopher Galen Strawson. The podcast Philosophy Bites has a good interview with him on this.

  Philosophical zombies

  To quote philosopher David Chalmers, “It’s all dark inside. There is nothing it is like to be a zombie” (my italics). So your friend Phil Z might give every appearance of loving his family, disliking broccoli, and wishing his injured leg didn’t hurt—but this inner self he describes so plausibly, this realm of emotions, isn’t there. (He isn’t trying to fool you. That’s not the point. On the contrary—there’s no “he” in there to do any fooling.) Listening to Phil will seem like listening to someone talk about their experiences, while what’s really going on is much more like listening to a recording.

  You might ask: How do I know this isn’t true of my own parents, sibling, or best friend? Sorry, but the simple answer is: you don’t! This is the ancient philosophical “problem of other minds.” But in the story, Hideo Murakami gives a reason for thinking that the problem is far less worrying when we’re considering people who really are kno
wn to be people (in the biological sense), and should only start to give us the creeps when we have good reason to think they might not be real people in this sense.

  Chalmers has argued that because (a) it’s in some sense possible that philosophical zombies could exist, and (b) we’re not philosophical zombies,* therefore (c) it can’t be true that consciousness is a physical phenomenon: consciousness must be an extra thing, in addition to any complete physical description of us. Other philosophers, keen to make themselves useful, have said that the zombie argument is a lurching heap of BS—barely hanging together, stinky, and long overdue for reburial.

  If this brief introduction to the debate leaves you feeling a bit philosophically undead, you can slake your craving for mind-blood by lurching over to Chalmers’s website, consc.net. There you’ll find links to the philosophical literature, but also to zombie movies, bands, novels, games, and more.

  * You will perhaps have noticed that, in saying “we” are not philosophical zombies, strictly I can speak only for myself. Heck, I know that I’m certainly not one, because I experience stuff. But I don’t know about you—and by definition I can’t know about you. For the same reason, though, you have no reason to believe what I’m saying—by definition, you can’t know about me. In turn, I can only console myself with the thought that maybe this shouldn’t bother me much. After all, maybe you say you don’t believe me, but in truth you don’t have any beliefs—because you’re a zombie. Welcome back to the problem of other minds.

  The United States, cyber-warfare, and Iran

  In about 2008, probably with help from Israel, the US managed to get a software worm called Stuxnet into the control computers inside Iran’s highly secure nuclear fuel enrichment plant at Natanz. The software was designed to destroy the centrifuges crucial to the enrichment process, while making it look as if they were malfunctioning due to operator error or material defects. It did just that. But in 2010, the code, intended only for Natanz, somehow got out and spread all over the world, allegedly infecting a Russian nuclear power plant. See Alex Gibney’s documentary Zero Days.