by J. P. Landau
“An analogy Yi Meng would have liked is that our genetic code is a Beethoven manuscript. A masterpiece no doubt, but a tortuous and chaotic one full of blots, smudges, notes struck out and rewritten, whole pages of illegible code, cul-de-sacs, and booby traps. Instead, the carbon-silicon genetic code appears to have been composed by Mozart. It seems dictated flawlessly from the heavens to the paper. The vast majority of its genetic code looks functional. It’s simple to read.”
“But enough prelude. Even with our limited equipment and severely limited man-hours on Sophia’s end—after all, she’s the one that must carry out all the experiments—we can assert that once the treasure trove arrives on Earth, many of us gathered here will be working, in one way or another, on or around the Enceladus alien life forms for the rest of our professional lives.
“I’m about to present a few findings today. The first one has to do with our understanding, almost since the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA by Watson and Crick in 1953, that all living beings become increasingly imperfect with time as the continuous cell divisions accumulate corruptions from the original genetic code. Because even though most cells in our body are replaced by new ones every few months, this recycling happens to cells that are themselves ever more corrupted, so the penalty is increasing disease proclivity and eventually one of those diseases causes death to the entire organism, what we call death from old age.
“With Sophia we have learned to control both the speed of cell division and the core temperature of the cell within the carbon-silicon life form, two key molecular triggers of aging. We need not guess at the implications because we are already seeing the results.
“The experiment is straightforward. The organism has an average lifespan of about twenty-three days. We remove a single cell at birth and at the middle of its life we reinsert it with an accelerated biological clock for its division. The cell descendants soon displace the old cells of the entire life form. The result … we have a population of four organisms more than fifty days old, and looking as good as new—”
A collective wow cut her off.
“For the carbon-silicon life forms we think we are on the verge of achieving what in practical terms becomes biological immortality.”
The world had changed again and everybody present heard it first.
The commotion was a sight to behold. Stock prices of biotech companies around the world were already swelling upward in wild speculation.
77 | The Veiled Slayer
June 3 2032. Return Day 614; 1.2 Years to Earth
APPROACHING JUPITER
The one known as Marduk to Babylonians, Zeus to Greeks, Odin to Vikings, and Erentüz to Turks and Mongols stood dead center in front of the Observation Window. Even from this distance, forty times that of the Moon as seen from the Earth, it was already bigger. Don’t get overly cocksure—humility is a virtue, you know—but I’m starting to see why the Romans called you God of the Sky in addition to King of the Gods, thought Derya. They were also prone to poetic embroidery, so keep it cool. The planet’s brief ten-hour day meant its kaleidoscopic clockwise and counter-clockwise cloud belts whirled in front of patient eyes. Like circling drapes of your celestial toga.
Never a superstitious man, over the last few weeks Derya had nonetheless—as countless before him—anthropomorphized and personified the giant. Your crown and aura may be invisible, but not to me. Jupiter’s massive liquid metal core creates a magnetic field 20,000 times stronger than Earth’s, making it the most severe radiation environment outside of the Sun, by a wide margin. Even a cheap amateur radio kit tuned to the right frequency back on Earth encounters Jupiter’s crackling radiation shrieks. It had been weeks since he last heard the spooky drifting tone of white noise, oscillating from screeching to roaring, like synthesizer chords in a horror movie soundtrack. I acknowledge it’s a social construct, but hearing The Exorcist was a welcome mat a few shades too dark for my liking, Jup.
His mind could picture what his eyes could not: a hair-raising, flooding, electric-blue magnetic field discharged from the north pole and regained by the south pole via a giant perpetual closed loop in the shape of a torus, or doughnut, surrounding the planet. There’s no way to bypass that one. We’ll take the full dose, ranging from bad to awful. But there was another much smaller doughnut of slightly larger diameter than Jupiter surrounding it at the orbit of the innermost of its Galilean moons, Io. The really ghastly one: Io’s plasma torus. If crossing the large one is running through a water curtain, crossing the smaller one is diving to the bottom of the sea. And yet the Maneuver & Trajectory Team on Earth, the ones threading the Shackleton needle around Jupiter, could only avoid plunging but not skimming the smaller torus.
The challenge was multifold. They were about to risk their lives in order to achieve a reverse gravitational slingshot, an invisible pull where the gas giant would steal speed from Shackleton. However, the further they were from the planet and the steeper their angle with respect to its equator, the less speed they could shave. Additionally, all planets in the Solar System are coplanar—on the same plane. Their orbits around the Sun are so flat they could be drawn on sheets of tracing paper and simply placed on top of each other. The conceptual problem is a sphere surrounded by a doughnut with a wider inner hole. The ideal trajectory to minimize radiation exposure is approaching the sphere by entering right under the doughnut and exiting over it. But such a steep angle would equate to both jumping off the plane and rendering the slingshot ineffective. Therefore, Shackleton would briefly enter the smaller torus both on the way in and on the way out.
Their closest encounter with Jupiter would happen in eight days.
There was little to be done to prevent the hazardous ultrafast charged particles from damaging the ship’s electronics, besides turning off every system not absolutely essential for the sporadic but critical nudges by the ship’s thrusters to fine tune its trajectory and keep the crew alive.
As for the crew, there was more or less one thing that could be done to protect Sophia, Derya, and Sergei from certain death: wrapping themselves in water. Here the simplest solution was also one of the best. Water is dense. It packs a lot of atoms in a small area. A radiation shield blocks particles by interacting with them. The thicker the shield, the higher the probability a given particle hits a hydrogen or oxygen atom, losing part or all of its energy. Because there would be untold high-energy electrons and ions slamming against them, and because this is the realm of quantum mechanics, there was no clear measure of how radiation poisoning would play out. But without water protection the calculations showed a person falling into a coma ten minutes after entering the torus. Even with water protection there will be contamination, thought Derya, while looking unimpressed at the igloo. Even in the best of cases our life expectancy will be shortened.
The igloo was a roundish cage made of the rubberized fabric of inflatable boats filled with water between its outer and inner walls. It had been designed as an emergency shelter in case of an improbable solar flare. Very improbable, because it looks like shit.37
* * *
37 A day later
“Scored. 0-0-1,” exclaimed Sergei. After minutes with their eyes closed, he was the first to experience a small explosion of light inside his eyeballs as a cosmic particle hit his optical nerve.
Tonight, all worries were put aside to celebrate James and Yi. Shortly after leaving Saturn they instituted a day per quarter dedicated to remembering their friends through their own pursuits. This time it was about astronomy while listening to Debussy, Gershwin, and Scriabin.
Sophia, Derya, and Sergei floated by the flight deck’s Observation Window, right by Derya’s telescope.
“Yi … that childlike curiosity he had, remember? He used to get so enraptured whenever I retold the story,” said Derya. “Formidable storytelling skills helped, no doubt,” he added.
The occurrence was well documented and began happening as soon as astronauts and cosmonauts ventured outside Earth’s atmo
spheric cocoon in the mid-1960s. The chance of it happening on Earth’s surface was extremely improbable as the atmosphere acts as an exceedingly effective shield and filter.
“The particle that just hit Sergei’s retina may have originated during the Big Bang,” continued Derya, “traveling unimpeded without encountering a single atom for 13.7 billion years, crossing endless galaxies until it suddenly finished its journey by vanishing against your optical nerve. Here’s where things get even more interesting because of general relativity. For the Universe, 13.7 billion years have evidently elapsed. But for the particle? Not quite. Elementary particles such as photons have no age because time does not apply to them. Let’s assume a clock traveled almost along the ray of light, arriving at your optical nerve a second later. It would have measured only 1,600 years! And had it arrived a millionth of a second later, twenty-six years, time almost frozen. And if we violated the laws of physics and traveled alongside, no time would have passed. Time traveling is not only legal but real and pervasive across the Universe. The only requirement is to be moving near the speed of light or being close to a monstrous gravity well, such as a black hole. I say cheers to you, Yi Meng.”
* * *
They recreated another of Yi’s staples: locating the blue speck amid a sea of night and then reciting from memory what Carl Sagan, that scientist and poet who painted words with stardust, said of the famous Pale Blue Dot photograph, taken by Voyager 1 from beyond the orbit of Pluto on February 14 1990 as it turned its cameras one final time, across the great expanse of space, to look back at the Solar System.
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
“Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic darkness. In our obscurity—in all this vastness—there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
“It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that Pale Blue Dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
“Such a perspective shift,” said Sophia. “I wish we could snatch and capture it inside a bottle. Not the outer beauty but its deeper meaning, and then give a sip to every human being on the planet.”
“There’s this famous quote by Alexander von Humboldt,” said Derya. “‘The most dangerous worldviews are the worldviews of those who have never viewed the world.’ If the 8 billion of us could be sitting here, looking back at our home, I think it would achieve the communism that two other compatriots, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, authored and theorized and you, the Russians, experimented with and practiced. The self would dissolve within the collective. From here the simplicity of things is so … transparent. I wonder who I will be once we’re back.”
* * *
The telescope emitted four long beeps.
Derya looked triumphant. “Gazing at the Earth was the appetizer. This is the main course. We’re replicating the Hubble Deep Field, one of the three most important space pictures of all time. If 1968’s Earthrise stirred the environmental movement and the Pale Blue Dot reminded us of our fleeting existence as a species, this one ballooned the immensity and weirdness of the cosmos. See, the trick is worthy of Houdini or Copperfield except there’s no illusion, only magic. You take a soda straw, look through it at a spot in the Big Dipper completely devoid of stars—an area less than 1 percent that of the Moon—and keep staring at it for ten more days. That’s what the Hubble telescope did in 1995, and that’s what the Terzi telescope finished doing just now. TiTus, run the ten days of footage in two minutes, s’il vous plaît.”
“Any particular reason you switched to French, Derya?” asked TiTus. “You have never done that before.”
Derya rolled his eyes at Sophia and Sergei. “We better have made some major artificial intelligence inroads over the last five years ’cause this makes me pretty ambivalent about technological progress. All looks and no brains.”
“Derya!” said Sophia, embarrassed at the abuse.
TiTus waited in vain for clarification and after three seconds dimmed the ambient lights and turned on the screen over the cockpit. A black display gradually became a cluttered, multicolored Kandinsky of roughly circular shapes, as the scant photons traveling across intergalactic space for millions to hundreds of millions to billions of years slowly collected over the previous ten days in the back of the telescope’s primary mirror, which now traveled again from the screen to their eyeballs at the speed of light, becoming a signal imprinted on their brains.
“Each one of those thousand blobs is a galaxy, each one housing billions upon billions of stars. The 3,000 galaxies that appeared seemingly out of thin air changed physics forever … and yet the Hubble Deep Field almost didn’t happen. Nobody knew a priori what to expect. Who would dare throwing away ten days of the most sought-after instrument in science, with reams-long waiting lists of astronomers, on looking at an utterly empty patch of the sky? Well, Robert Williams, the Hubble director at the time, did.”
“I really wish Yi was here,” said Sophia, almost to herself.
“Before Edwin Hubble, one of the greats in astronomy, our galaxy was our Universe. He was the first to identify that the nebulas that kept sprouting in the ever more powerful telescopes weren’t clouds of gas but galaxies beyond our Milky Way. Our Universe was suddenly vastly bigger. He didn’t stop there. In the 1920s, he discovered the Universe was not static but expanding, which meant it had been born somewhere in the very ancient past, what decades later would become the Big Bang theory. Over the following decades, calculations showed the expansion of the Universe from that original explosion should be slowing down due to gravity. The Hubble Deep Field showed unequivocally the opposite. Implausible as it sounded, the Universe is inexplicably accelerating its expansion. Decades hence, it remains one of the greatest mysteries in science. Whoever cracks it will join the likes of Newton and Einstein. And while we wait for an explanation, we have inferred that the Universe is composed of three things: ordinary matter, dark matter, and dark energy—E=mc2 reminds us energy and matter are one and the same.
“Ordinary matter is what we can see, everything from galaxies to atoms. Dark matter is a hypothetical type of matter that has never been directly observed, but whose existence would explain a number of otherwise perplexing astronomical observations, particularly a gravitational pull much larger than that explained by ordinary matter. The other black horse, dark energy, is a hypothetical type of energy that has never been directly observed, and which we have charged as the unknown force driving the accelerating expansion of the Universe. The current consensus model exposes our abysmal i
gnorance: dark energy represents 68 percent of the total mass-energy of the Universe, dark matter 27 percent, and ordinary matter 5 percent. Therefore, 95 percent of the Universe is not only unexplained, but thoroughly imperceptible to us.”
“Now I really wish Yi was here,” said Sergei.
“What if that 95 percent is how much Heaven and Hell weigh?” said Sophia.
“Look back at Earth, right there,” said Derya. “Convince me that an Almighty created the whole Universe not solely for our planet, not solely for humans among a million other species, but exclusively for Christians, or Hindus, or Muslims? I think espousing that is awfully disrespectful to the rest of the Universe. We—Sergei and I—have found two strains of life on Enceladus. Life has started independently, just in our trifling Solar System—our own backyard—three times! A third-rate moon has created life two times, putting Earth to shame, and you tell me ‘God’ was only thinking about us? How outrageous, how insulting is that? The implications of our discovery means there’s life everywhere … and I bet the Universe is teeming with intelligent life as well. Probably right now there’s an intelligent life form gazing in our direction from the Andromeda galaxy. How seriously do you think he, it, they would take your claim? Or the parody of God sending His son to us so we could kill him? And while we’re at it, He better be printing Jesuses by the billions to shuffle them around the Universe.”
“The Laws of Nature may not require a Designer but they do not forbid one—or indeed many,” said Sergei. “What if God is in fact subject to the constraints of this Universe like the rest of us? If so, to be all-seeing and extend tentacles across the Universe, It or They would need a stunning amount of everything. Maybe that’s where all the missing energy and matter is …”