Relativity

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Continued contact between the two universes is at the Neandertals’ discretion, not ours: shutting off their quantum-computing facility will almost certainly sever the link, closing the portal. And once they learn that 40,000 years ago in this universe, our kind drove their ancestors to extinction, will they want to help us? Or, indeed, will they feel justified in letting us die—just as we let their kind die in our own past? Homo sapiens will have to prove its humanity, if it is going to be saved.

  Neandertal Parallax will be an ultimately uplifting novel of first contact, speculative anthropology, world-building, and cutting-edge quantum theory, with the potential for a sequel or ongoing series.

  That outline was written the year the World Science Fiction Convention was in Melbourne, Australia—and Carolyn and I went down under for five and a half weeks. I vacillated about doing a trilogy, or just a standalone, for much of that period, and talked with my editor David G. Hartwell about it at the Worldcon (during a wonderful lunch at which we were joined by Stephen Baxter). When I got back to Canada, I called Ralph Vicinanza, and told him to go for a trilogy contract, based on the existing outline.

  Ralph did just that. It took some time—we were asking for a substantial amount of money—but the deal was finally closed on November 1, 1999, with me getting everything I wanted.

  I spent the next three and half months doing nothing but research on Neanderthals. On February 16, 2002, the idea of opening the novel deep in the nickel mine housing the real Sudbury Neutrino Observatory occurred to me, and the next day I wrote the first words of the first book in the trilogy, a prologue (which ultimately got thrown out) designed to explain the origins of the subterranean nickel, and how it led to physics labs being built on the same site in our version of Earth and the Neanderthal one:

  Everyone has heard about the asteroid that may have felled the dinosaurs, and how if it hadn’t hit, we might not be here.

  But there have been many other asteroid impacts in Earth’s past, and when this one crashed into Earth, the dinosaurs weren’t yet even a twinkle in God’s eye. If it hadn’t hit, we would probably still be here, but they—the others—would not. This flying mountain, a hunk of detritus left over from the formation of the solar system that measured between one and three kilometers wide, brutally slammed into—

  Into what? How to describe the rocks that bore this assault? Today, most of the world calls them the Canadian Shield, a vast horseshoe shaped region covering half the nation we refer to as Canada—but when the impact occurred, Canada, and every other human construct, was still 1.8 billion years in the future.

  Of course, in Canada, where everything would naturally be Canadian-this or Canadian-that, these rocks are sometimes called the Precambrian Shield instead, but—

  But everything was Precambrian back when this colossal boulder, moving at fifteen kilometers per second, slammed into our world, setting it ringing like a giant bell in space. Although Earth had hosted life for two billion years by that point, none of it was yet multicellular. The first worms were another billion years in the future; jawless fish, the first vertebrates, were still 1.3 billion years away; and the first mammals—ancestors to us, yes, and to them as well—wouldn’t appear for an additional three hundred million after that.

  It was a beginning (even if not a very good one), and from there I was off to the races, writing 2,000 new words every day until I had a first draft. Meanwhile, I set about visiting various experts on Neanderthals, including Philip Lieberman of Brown University (who noted that Neanderthals probably couldn’t say the ee phoneme, a fact I make much of in the trilogy), Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History (whose talk “The Origin of the Human Capacity,” a transcript of which I’d found online, had introduced me to the concept of the Great Leap Forward—the dawn of human consciousness—which I gave a quantum-mechanical twist in the series), and Milford Wolpoff of the University of Michigan, himself an SF fan, who believes that we co-opted Neanderthal DNA into our own through interbreeding.

  As I write these words, the first week of January 2003, I’ve just finished the final revisions on Hybrids, the third book in the trilogy. In preparing this essay, I re-read the above outline for the first time in over three years, and am surprised by how much grew from that tiny seed. I’m really proud of how the Neanderthal Parallax trilogy turned out, but I was more than a little surprised when I got an E-mail from Moshe Feder, who had replaced Jim Minz as David Hartwell’s assistant, saying that David would be happy to contemplate a fourth Neanderthal book…

  I was flattered, but felt that would be wrong. I’d wrapped up the story, and I was ready to move on to another challenge.

  Now, all I have to do is figure out a new answer to that ever-vexing question, “What’s next?”

  Privacy: Who Needs It?

  Maclean’s is Canada’s weekly newsmagazine, the northern counterpart of Time. In 2002, Berton Woodward, one of its editors, approached me about writing an opinion piece. I was thrilled—Maclean’s pays $1.25 a word—and I decided to do something that would tie-in with my just released thirteenth novel, Hominids, in which a technologically advanced Neanderthal civilization had all but eliminated crime through a system of “alibi archives” that record the activities of its citizens.

  I described that system in this deliberately provocative essay, which appeared in the October 7, 2002, edition, and which generated more letters to the editor—evenly split between pro and con—than anything else Maclean’s published that year.

  Whenever I visit a tourist attraction that has a guest register, I always sign it. After all, you never know when you’ll need an alibi.

  I’ve been doing this since I was a kid, but these days you don’t have to take any positive action to leave a trail behind. Almost everything we do is recorded. Closed-circuit cameras watch us in most public places. Our credit-card purchases, telephone calls, and web surfing are all tracked.

  Editorialists have decried these losses of privacy, as if it were the most sacred of human rights. But just what is the value of privacy? Do we really need it? And, indeed, can we afford it? After all, everything from your son’s shoplifting to the destruction of the towers at the World Trade Center could have been prevented if we had less of an ability to do things in secret.

  And yet we continue to insist that honest people need to have that ability. The founders of the United States, for instance, believed that governments have to be overthrown from time to time. That’s the rationale behind their second amendment, allowing private gun ownership: the people need to be able to take up arms against an oppressive regime.

  But oppressive regimes are crumbling all over the world, and there are so many checks and balances in most governmental systems these days that there’s no need for bloody overthrow. And yet by making it a fundamental right to plot and conspire to violently oust democratically elected authorities, you’re bound to have terrorists.

  We Canadians peacefully negotiated our independence—and have shown the world how such things should be handled in the 21st century by agreeing in turn to peacefully negotiate Quebec separation, if most people there want that. But the U.S. still makes a big deal about having to fight for independence. And indeed they did—but that was hundreds of years ago. In this, the Third Millennium, do we really need a social system based on allowing for armed uprisings and backroom conspiracies?

  Surveillance and the collection of personal information are unavoidable in this closed-circuit, computerized world. Rather than trying to end them, we should be striving to find ways to maximize their benefits for the average citizen.

  Recently, I was keynote speaker at the 12th Annual Canadian Conference on Intelligent Systems, Canada’s principal gathering of experts on robotics and artificial intelligence. The two tasks most of the researchers there were concentrating on were pattern recognition and data-mining.

  So far, most applications for these technologies have been commercial: if you buy a Walkman and are enrolled in a night-school co
urse, you might be interested in buying textbooks on tape. True enough—and certainly irritating if someone calls while you’re eating dinner to sell you the unabridged audio version of McLuhan’s Understanding Media.

  But I can’t see the downside of an RCMP or CSIS computer noting that my neighbour has bought all the materials to make a pipe bomb and has booked a one-way flight to Tahiti. About the only government entity routinely looking through personal data for patterns is the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency, hunting for unusual values on tax returns that might indicate a cheater. Frankly, I’d much rather the government was tracking down potential terrorists, sex offenders, and so on.

  George Orwell scared the bejeebers out of us with his Big Brother. But when I was a kid, it was actually a comfort knowing that my own big brother was watching over me while I played in the park. With proper safeguards, there’s no reason why any honest person should fear a little benign oversight.

  Indeed, our pets already benefit from this. Dogs routinely have chips implanted to make them easy to find when lost—whereas our own children often disappear without a trace. Ask any parent who has had a son or daughter abducted if some abstract notion of privacy really is more important than the life of their child.

  Still, Luddites will continue to insist that monitoring of humans means giving up too much. Perhaps. But as Scott McNealy, CEO of computer giant Sun Microsystems, says, “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” In other words, such monitoring and tracking is already going on to benefit big business. Why not take advantage of it to improve our own lives?

  Sure, no one wants people they don’t know looking over their shoulder. But most of us take holiday photos, make home videos, keep a diary, or otherwise record what we know will be important moments of our lives. And yet the truly crucial moments—when a punk sticks a gun in your ribs, when another car sideswipes yours, when you accidentally leave your favorite hat somewhere—go unrecorded simply because we didn’t know they were about to happen.

  But imagine a permanently activated recorder: a small implant, say, that keeps track of your whereabouts using signals from the satellite-based Global Positioning System. Suppose the implant constantly broadcasts your exact location to a centralized facility. At that facility—call it the Alibi Archives—you would have your own personal black box, keeping track of your movements.

  No one but you, or, if you disappeared, your family or the police, could access the contents of your black box. But if you did disappear—kidnapped, lost, fallen down a hole, wandering aimlessly because of Alzheimer’s—you could be quickly found. No more missing persons; no more desperate searches.

  Sounds useful, no? Now, what about adding a constant transmission of your vital signs. If they indicated you were having a heart attack or stroke, an ambulance could be automatically dispatched.

  That’s not too scary, is it? Okay: let’s take it a step further. Add a tiny audiovisual recorder to the implant, and you could have a permanent home video of your life made automatically. Everything from demonstrating to your wife that you really did say, “That dress makes you look hot,” not “fat,” to finding that lost favorite hat would be easy.

  Ah, but it gets better. If everyone’s actions were recorded—for their eyes only, unless a proper court order demanded otherwise—think of the reduction in crime. Who would assault, murder, or rape, if they knew that the victim would have a complete off-site record of the event made by their own implant?

  And imagine the further reduction in crime, when the criminal knows that his location and actions are being tracked. Maybe you couldn’t identify your own assailant—but computers could scan the archives and find out precisely who was standing next to you at 9:04 p.m., when you were forced to hand over your diamond jewelry.

  Notice I said jewelry, and not your wallet. That’s because an implant could also serve as an irrefutable personal ID. Your car wouldn’t start for anyone but you; no more car theft. You’d never get locked out of your own home again. And a true cashless society would become possible, with implants communicating with each other to debit and credit accounts. Paper money is beloved of drug dealers and tax evaders; recorded electronic transfers could put an end to all that.

  Such implants would start off as a consumer-electronics item in peaceful democratic nations, not as an enforced requirement under oppressive regimes. But, as such regimes continue to disappear, we might soon enough end up with everyone everywhere being required to have one. And why not? You’re already required to have a license to drive and a passport to travel.

  There are only two reasons we desire privacy. The first is because of the ridiculous shame societies have heretofore heaped on natural human activities and nudity.

  Yes, our Victorian ancestors might have been desperate to hide things from their families and neighbors, because so many activities were proscribed. But who really cares today if someone is gay, smokes pot, or likes to watch porno films? It’s not the freedom to do things that would disappear with constant black-box monitoring; it’s the silly laws that make victimless activities illegal.

  The only other reason to need privacy is so you can get away with something unethical or illegal. It was privacy, not the lack of it, that made Paul Bernardo’s depredations possible. It was privacy, not the lack of it, that made al-Qaida possible. It was privacy, not the lack of it, that made the current crisis in the Catholic Church possible.

  But what about the bogeyman of totalitarianism? Again, it was privacy that made Hitler’s Final Solution come within a hair’s breadth of succeeding. But it was the lack of privacy—the openness of communication through the Internet—that prevented the Chinese government from covering up the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square, or from trying anything similar since.

  Besides, if you have your own personal implant communicating constantly with the central computerized archives, democracy becomes more powerful, not less, with everyone being able to instantaneously vote in an ever-increasing number of referenda and plebiscites.

  Still, some might argue that governments do have legitimate needs for privacy—but, come now, our politicians have long since lost any of their own. We know all about Ralph Klein’s drinking habits and Bill Clinton’s sexual escapades.

  Ah, but what about military secrets? Oh, perhaps there’s some value in being able to shunt Dick Cheney off to an “undisclosed location,” but, really, it’s the aggressors who benefit from the ability to do things clandestinely. If the Japanese had been privy to the July 16, 1945, A-bomb test explosion in Alamogordo, New Mexico, I doubt they would have needed to be surprised by bombs dropping on Hiroshima and Nagasaki before surrendering.

  The message of history, most spectacularly driven home last September 11, is that preserving society as a whole is much more important than preserving an illusory personal freedom. And if our species is going to survive, we must wake up to that fact.

  See, there’s a long-standing problem in astronomy called the Fermi Paradox, named for physicist Enrico Fermi who first proposed it in 1950. If the universe should be teeming with life, asked Fermi, then where are all the aliens? The question is even more vexing today: SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence with radio telescopes, has utterly failed to turn up any sign of alien life forms. Why?

  One chillingly likely possibility is that, as the ability to wreak damage on a grand scale becomes more readily available to individuals, soon enough just one malcontent, or one lunatic, will be able to destroy an entire world. Perhaps countless alien civilizations have already been wiped out by single terrorists who’d been left alone to work unmonitored in their private laboratories.

  We’ve already seen what one crazed suicide bomber can do with twentieth-century technology; imagine the devastation he or she might manage with the ordnance and genetic capabilities that will be freely available within the next few decades. We can be sure that those who wish society harm will be taking full advantage of advanced technologies. Why shouldn’t we take advantage of technol
ogy to protect ourselves?

  Instead of having a knee-jerk reaction that says any loss of privacy is bad, let’s discuss the potential pitfalls and work out ways to relieve them. Canada’s Privacy Commissioner is a model worldwide for avoiding abuses; there’s no reason why we can’t devise a system of implants and personal black boxes that really works.

  Whether we want American-style life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or Canadian peace, order, and good government, clinging to privacy at all costs is the worst thing we can do. For, as the silence from the stars attests, not only is an unexamined life not worth living, it may be that unexamined lives are too dangerous for us to allow them to be lived. The very future of humanity may depend on giving up the outmoded notion of privacy, rather than fighting to retain it.

  The Age of Miracle and Wonder

  CBC Radio has always been wonderfully supportive of me, letting me write and narrate documentaries, host programs, and be a guest on just about every major show it produces, from the flagships Morningside and Sounds Like Canada, through the science series Quirks and Quarks and the scholarly Ideas, to the pop-culture extravaganza Definitely Not the Opera; I even used to have my own weekly on-air column, Science FACTion: Commentaries from the Cutting Edge of Science.

  In November 1999, I wrote and recorded this commentary for CBC Radio One about life in the next millennium.

  As a science-fiction writer, I’m used to thinking in realistic terms about the future, extrapolating from what we know to what might be. But the new millennium is going to put me and my colleagues out of our jobs.

  Forty years ago, Arthur C. Clarke, the author of the quintessential millennial work 2001: A Space Odyssey, coined “Clarke’s Law,” which says: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”