Dancing With Myself

by Charles Sheffield

  Jacobsen was staring at the palm of his own fleshy hand with bemusement. “Are you saying that’s where your space transportation system design is? Hidden away in the damned DNA sequence, like a coded signal? It’s even inside me?”

  “It sure is. It’s in your hand there, hidden in the part of the DNA sequence that’s not expressed in protein production. It’s repeated many times, in case a bit of the sequence in one place is destroyed by a mutation. And don’t you see the beauty of the idea? If DNA does one thing superbly well, it’s this: it makes copies of itself, from generation to generation, with a minuscule error rate. Maybe after a few hundred million years you’d get enough DNA mutation to make the message unreliable, but not in a mere twenty million. It’s the nearest thing to an eternal form of a message that you can imagine. Our friends who came to Earth and left the design for your stellar staircase didn’t have to worry about it being obliterated by weather or accident. It would be there, as long as anyone who might get smart enough to find it was there. And the other nice thing is that you can’t read the message until you’re ready to use it. DNA sequence analysis needs technology, electricity and computers and matching algorithms and scanning tunneling microscopes, before it can be performed.”

  “But the sequence is in every cell? A message tens of millions of digits long?”

  “Every cell, in every human, in every country.” Bates was picking up energy again, talking faster. “The information in DNA is tight-packed. It can define an entire human being, in a few trillionths of a gram of material. Compared with that, specifying a space-drive is nothing. But now do you see why I say it can’t be kept a secret? I’m in touch with other researchers in my field, all around the world, and I know of fifty people who are moving along the same track as me. You can try as hard as you like to keep my work away from them, but it won’t hold for more than a couple of years. Someone else will see the same anomalies in the sequence, and decode them independently. Then they’ll have the same ‘staircase to the stars’ that you told Congress you wanted to provide.”

  Jacobsen leaned back in his seat, breathing loudly through his nose. “Damn you, Buggsie.” He growled the words. “You come in here and tell me you’re going to give me something. You show it to me, and then you take it right away again. If every tinpot upstart country can get to space, it makes my job harder, not easier.”

  “That depends what you think your job is. If you believe you were put here to sit on your fat behind and make space off-limits to everyone except the U.S. Navy, then you’re right. That job won’t just be hard now, it’ll be impossible. That’s fine with me. I never came here for that. But if you see your job as I do—as you once did—as building the system that gives everyone on Earth a stake in space development and a chance to go there, then I’ve done it for you. Or rather, the beings who left the design have done it for you. All I did was act as the messenger.”

  He reached out for the hovering cylinder, switched it off, and placed it on the desk. “Think positive, Porky. We’ve got the planets, and maybe we’ve got the stars, too, and I’m giving you a couple of years start on the competition. With any luck, you’ll be going into space yourself before then.”

  Jacobsen’s hand had been moving irresistibly towards the white plastic unit. He paused. “Me!?”

  “You. Who else?” Bates watched the changing expression on the other man’s face. “Ah, now I’m getting to you, aren’t I? And about time. You may have kidded yourself that you wanted to be head of NASA because it was a good career move. But I remember a different Porky Jacobsen. You were the one who used to bend our ears at the Academy, telling us how humans were meant to go to space, and how nothing would stop us. How nothing was going to stop you. And what you told me a few minutes ago is spot on, easy access is the key. That’s what we have, now. You can go, Porky, yourself. You’re too old for the Shuttle, but you’re not too old for this. D’you hear me? You can go.”

  “I can.” Jacobsen stared down at the cylinder, now gripped possessively in his hand. “By God, I can and I will. You know, the very idea of meeting them terrifies me—they’ve waited twenty million years for us. I wonder how we’ll shape up. But you’re right, if there’s any way on Earth I can get onto that prototype ship I’ll be there. Nothing will stop me.”

  He moved the stud on the cylinder to its second setting, and watched as it rose lazily to meet the ceiling. “But there’s something even scarier, in a way, than this gadget itself. It’s that they knew, so long ago, that we humans would be the ones to make it. They knew we’d find a way, all the way, up to intelligence. And there were no humans around at that time, were there?”

  “Not a one. Just primitive apes.” Bates had a dreamy smile on his face. “But don’t assume that when they left that message, they knew just who’d be coming up to meet them. I said they left it at least twenty million years ago. How do you think I know that?”

  Jacobsen shook his head. The white cylinder floated quietly down to rest on his hand.

  “Because we weren’t the only candidates,” went on Bates. “I told you, I work with animals as well as humans. I found the same message in the DNA sequence of animals that split off the human genetic line up to twenty million years ago. We and chimps and gorillas and orangutans and gibbons separated from a common genetic line at different times, but we all have the same coded introns. Chances are the message was planted just once, maybe as a virus in a common ancestor to all of us, and that means over twenty million years ago. We were all given the message. But no one really has it until they can read it.”

  The other man looked up from his gloating over the tightly held cylinder. “You were the one who did read it, Buggsie. Just you. You were the only one smart enough to do it. I want to go, but it seems to me that if anyone deserves to go, it’s you. And I’m sure I can arrange it.”

  “No rush. I’ll take my turn—I don’t have to be on that first ship.”

  Jacobsen shook his head. “Don’t make my mistake, Buggsie. Don’t leave it until you find you’re too old, and too fat, and too battered, and it’s too late to go.”

  “Oh, I don’t think that will happen.” Bates hesitated. “As a matter of fact, I’m pretty confident it won’t.”

  He rummaged in his jacket pocket, and pulled out a white, spidery structure with multiple shiny connectors. “You see, Porky, what you’ve got there wasn’t the only thing coded into the introns. I’m not a hundred percent sure of this one, and I have to check it with the experts. But that shouldn’t be hard—The National Institute on Aging is only a couple of blocks away from here, isn’t it.”

  afterword: the double spiral staircase

  One problem that I have with the whole idea of UFOs is the frequency of their visits. Humans have been developing on this planet for at least a couple of hundred thousand years. Surely it would be difficult for an alien, no matter how advanced, to know in advance at what point in time we and our ancestors would become smart and civilized enough for rational communication. (If we ever become so civilized. When Mahatma Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization, he said that he thought it would be a good idea.)

  It seems monstrously inefficient for a supposedly advanced species to drop in on us every year or two, waiting and waiting until the time is right. They must have better things to do with their time. Wouldn’t our rational aliens adopt a different solution? Wouldn’t they choose to come here very rarely, and then leave messages that we could read and understand only when we were smart enough to do so?

  Very good. How would they know when we were smart enough?

  Well, one way acceptable to me, although perhaps unpopular at the moment with many people, is to correlate smartness with the development of technology. If the message were then written on something so small that it could not be read without a microscope, that would filter out false alarms. If it were also written on a medium that is present anywhere potentially intellige
nt life was likely to be found, it would be unlikely to escape notice. And if it was stored in a form that could be copied unchanged over many centuries and millennia, it would not matter how long it took for developing intelligence to find it.

  Here is a problem for the reader: if you don’t accept DNA as the message medium, what else can you suggest that satisfies the requirements?

  .

  ——————————————————————————————————

  article: the unlicked bear-whelp

  A Worm’s Eye Look at Chaos Theory

  “So when this world’s compounded union breaks,

  Time ends, and to old Chaos all things turn.”

  —Christopher Marlowe

  1.INTRODUCTION

  The Greek word “chaos” referred to the formless or disordered state before the beginning of the universe. The word has also been a part of the English language for a long time. Thus in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part Three, the Duke of Gloucester (who in the next play of the series will become King Richard III, and romp about the stage in unabashed villainy) is complaining about his physical deformities. He is, he says, “like to a Chaos, or an unlick’d bear-whelp, that carries no impression like the dam.” Chaos: something essentially random, an object or being without a defined shape.

  Those lines were written about 1590. The Marlowe quotation that heads this article comes from close to the same year, and it is a wonderful (though unintentional) foreshadowing of the idea of the heat-death of the Universe, first formulated in the late nineteenth century.

  Chaos is old; but chaos theory is a new term. Ten years ago, no popular article had ever been written containing that expression. Today it is hard to pick up a science magazine without finding an article on chaos theory, complete with stunning color illustrations. I must say that those articles, without exception, have failed to make the central ideas of chaos theory clear to me. That’s why I went grubbing into it on my own, and why I am writing this, adding yet another (possibly unintelligible) discussion of the subject to the literature.

  Part of the problem is simple newness. When someone writes about, say, quantum theory, the subject has to be presented as difficult, and subtle, and mysterious, because it is difficult, and subtle, and mysterious. To describe it any other way would be simply misleading. In the past sixty years, however, the mysteries have had time to become old friends of the professionals in the field. There are certainly enigmas, logical whirlpools into which you can fall and never get out, but at least the locations of those trouble spots are known. Writing about any well-established subject such as quantum theory is therefore in some sense easy.

  In the case of chaos theory, by contrast, everything is new and fragmented; we face the other extreme. We are adrift on an ocean of uncertainties, guided by partial and inadequate maps, and it is too soon to know where the central mysteries of the subject reside.

  Or, worse yet, to know if those mysteries are worth taking the time to explore. Is chaos a real “theory,” something which will change the scientific world in a basic way, as that world was changed by Newtonian mechanics, quantum theory, and relativity? Or is it something essentially trivial, a subject which at the moment is benefiting from a catchy name and so enjoying a certain glamor, as in the past there have been fads for orgone theory, mesmerism, dianetics, and pyramidology?

  We will defer consideration of that question until we have had a look at the bases of chaos theory, where it came from, and where it seems to lead us. Then we can come back to examine its long-term prospects.

  2.HOW TO BECOME EXTREMELY FAMOUS

  One excellent way to make a great scientific discovery is to take a fact that everyone knows must be the case—because “common sense demands it”—and ask what would happen if it were not true.

  For example, it is obvious that the Earth is fixed. It has to be standing still, because it feels as though it is standing still. The Sun moves around it. Copernicus, by suggesting that the Earth revolves around the Sun, made the fundamental break with medieval thinking and set in train the whole of modern astronomy.

  Similarly, it was clear to the ancients that unless you keep on pushing a moving object, it will slow down and stop. By taking the contrary view, that it takes a force (such as friction with the ground, or air resistance) to stop something, and otherwise it would just keep going, Galileo and Newton created modern mechanics.

  Another case: to most people living before 1850, there was no question that animal and plant species are all so well-defined and different from each other that they must have been created, type by type, at some distinct time in the past. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, in suggesting in the 1850s a mechanism by which one form could change over time to another in response to natural environmental pressures, allowed a very different world view to develop. The theory of evolution and natural selection permitted species to be regarded as fluid entities, constantly changing, and all ultimately derived from the simplest of primeval life forms.

  And, to take one more example, it was clear to everyone before 1900 that if you kept on accelerating an object, by applying force to it, it would move faster and faster until it was finally traveling faster than light. By taking the speed of light as an upper limit to possible speeds, and requiring that this speed be the same for all observers, Einstein was led to formulate the theory of relativity.

  It may make you famous, but it is a risky business, this offering of scientific theories that ask people to abandon their long-cherished beliefs about what “just must be so.” As Thomas Huxley remarked, it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies.

  Huxley was speaking metaphorically, but a few hundred years ago he could have been speaking literally. Copernicus did not allow his work on the movement of the Earth around the Sun to be published in full until 1543, when he was on his deathbed, nearly 30 years after he had first developed the ideas. He probably did the right thing. Fifty-seven years later Giordano Bruno was gagged and burned at the stake for proposing ideas in conflict with theology, namely, that the universe is infinite and there are many populated worlds. Thirty-three years after that, Galileo was made to appear before the Inquisition and threatened with torture because of his “heretical” ideas. His work remained on the Catholic Church’s Index of prohibited books for over two hundred years.

  By the nineteenth century critics could no longer have a scientist burned at the stake, even though they may have wanted to. Darwin was merely denounced as a tool of Satan. However, anyone who thinks this issue is over and done with can go today and have a good argument about evolution and natural selection with the numerous idiots who proclaim themselves to be scientific creationists.

  Albert Einstein fared better, mainly because most people had no idea what he was talking about. However, from 1905 to his death in 1955 he became the target of every crank and scientific nitwit outside (and often inside) the lunatic asylums.

  Today we will be discussing an idea, contrary to common sense, that has been developing in the past twenty years. So far its proposers have escaped extreme censure, though in the early days their careers may have suffered because no one believed them—or understood what they were talking about.

  3.BUILDING MODELS

  The idea at the heart of chaos theory can be simply stated, but we will have to wind our way into it.

  Five hundred years ago, mathematics was considered essential for bookkeeping, surveying, and trading, but it was not considered to have much to do with the physical processes of Nature. Why should it? What do abstract symbols on a piece of paper have to do with the movement of the planets, the flow of rivers, the blowing of soap bubbles, the flight of kites, or the design of buildings?

  Little by little, that view changed. Scientists found that physical processes could be described by equations, and solving those equations allowed predictions to be made about the real wor
ld. More to the point, they were correct predictions. By the nineteenth century, the fact that manipulation of the purely abstract entities of mathematics could somehow tell us how the real world would behave was no longer a surprise. Sir James Jeans could happily state, in 1930, “all the pictures which science now draws of nature, and which alone seem capable of according with observational fact, are mathematical pictures,” and “…the universe appears to have been designed by a pure mathematician.”

  The mystery had vanished, or been subsumed into divinity. But it should not have. It is a mystery still.

  I would like to illustrate this point with the simplest problem of Newtonian mechanics. Suppose that we have an object moving along a line with a constant acceleration. It is easy to set up a situation in the real world in which an object so moves, at least approximately.

  To describe the problem mathematically, the scientist writes down one simple equation:

  dv/dt = a

  This simply says that the rate of change of the speed, v, is a constant, a.

  We integrate this equation, a purely abstract operation, nothing to do with the real world, and obtain the formal result:

  v = v0 + at

  This gives us the speed, v, of the object at any time, given a starting speed v0 at t = 0. And since the speed is the rate of change of distance, which is written, v = dx/dt, we can integrate again—another purely abstract operation—to yield:

  x = x0 + v0t + at2/2

  which tells us the position of the object, x, at any time, in terms of its initial position, x0, and its initial speed, v0.

  If you have not met this sort of thing before, it may seem baffling. What does this mathematical construct of the human mind, integration, have to do with reality?

  If you do have that feeling, it is totally appropriate. However, after a few years of solving equations like this, the sense of wonder goes away. We take it for granted that the scribbling we do on a piece of paper will describe the way that objects really behave—and we are not surprised that the same equation will work for any object, accelerated by any force.