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“A terrible beauty has been born”
Aug. 5th, 2014 05:12 pmHe's six and perched in front of the TV.
His mother is just about done making the casserole, and calls him to dinner — once, twice, and then again — before she sighs, rolls her eyes, and comes to fetch him. But when she comes into the living room, she stops and smiles, and lets the countdown finish.
Three— Two— One— Houston, we have lift-off.
His eyes are glued to the screen, watching as the flames light, as the smoke billows around the bright lance that jumps into the sky. And his eyes follow it intently, not looking away for a second, until the news report cuts away from the launch, going back to other programming.
Only then, after his mother calls him yet again, does he turn to look at her. And then he jumps to his feet, tugs his mom out to the patio door, and points out at the stars.
"Up there?" he asks, "It went up there?"
"Yes," she says. "It went up there, and farther."
He's sixteen, and he's sitting in an AP physics class his senior year, reading Heinlein. He doesn't care for the philosophy so much, but he eats up the descriptions of the rocket ships, nuclear-powered and making their way from planet to planet, star to star. He compares and contrasts it to Haldeman and Hubbard, and devours Clarke and Asimov in short order, remembering keenly each type of ship he comes across, each new technology for reaching the cosmos.
Someone clears his throat, loudly, and then repeats his name.
He looks up, suddenly, slipping a bookmark in the novel and hoping his textbook hides it adequately.
"Yes, Mr. Grissom?" he says, anxiously.
"Since you found your textbook so fascinating, I was wondering if you could tell us about the forces that act on an object when it's falling."
"Well, er—" he pauses for a second. "It depends on if there are external forces acting on it. If there aren't, and it's just falling, it will retain its horizontal velocity but the vertical velocity will change due to gravity, at nine-point-eight meters per second squared in a downwards direction. There's also drag, which is air friction, which can be figured out using the drag equation, which is the half the density of the fluid — in this case air — times the square of the velocity of the object multiplied by—"
His teacher holds up a hand and he stops. "That's not in the textbook until Chapter 12. Have you been reading ahead?"
Everyone else is silent, and staring.
"Oh. Yeah. I did some external reading, I guess," he says, and then looks back down. The teacher pauses for another moment, shakes his head, and then moves on with the class.
After a few moments of hearing the teacher talk, he opens up the novel again.
He's twenty-six, and DAPRA's funding three separate projects that he's running out of Los Alamos as the principal investigator. He's corresponding regularly with the greats in the field, and has enough papers as first author that he doesn't need to update his CV anymore.
He still reads: Le Guin, Scalzi, Gibson, and Miéville line his shelves, but he has far less time than he used to. His coworkers remark — occasionally in earshot — that he seems consumed by his work.
Sometimes, when he leaves the lab at three in the morning, he agrees with them.
But at the same time, he also feels like he's on the cusp of a new discovery, and his lab is driven by this urgency.
One day, there's a breakthrough in one of his projects: his research group finds a wormhole system. More accurately, they locate a wormhole generator, one just outside of the solar system. He spends sixty pages simply describing the mechanics of it in the latest version of Nature. It doesn't change the world, really, but it changes his world, as they slowly try and suss out the details of what they refer to casually as the 'portal', where it might lead, and if there's any chance of transmitting or returning information back from it.
He's thirty-six, and the world has changed.
Global warming, Ebola, war, terrorism — all of the spectres of humanity's future seem to choose the same decade to descend, and suddenly, what was once the most stable world there had been in centuries — with poverty, crime, and illness at a historical low — was anything but. Virulent plagues appear out of nowhere, ravage cities, nations, continents, and then disappear before the anti-virals can even be produced. Famines start across the world as a shortage in grain yields is exacerbated by the discovery that much of the arable topsoil in the world is being overfarmed to destruction.
The conclusion is chilling: there simply isn't enough food for everyone.
His work on the wormhole system is continuing, now with a different goal — maybe, if they could send something through it, they might be able to find another world. It's a long shot, of course — perhaps even an impossible shot — but it's also starting to look like the last shot. So he works, and the Hegemony keeps him and his lab safe as the world slowly destabilizes around them.
It pays off surprisingly quickly: there's some measure of efficiency that comes from desperation. After categorizing the wormholes, they realize that there is one that's promising. It's a tunnel, of sorts, one that allows something straight out of the science fiction of his youth: it looks like it opens back on Earth, thousands of years ago.
The journals aren't sure what it is exactly — some claim that it's a direct portal back, while others think that it's a hole into a parallel universe that just happened to be delayed due to various atomic differences. But their research shows that the wormhole may permit passage of something — nothing more than a few millimeters, though.
Still, a few millimeters is enough for a chip, encoded with all of human knowledge. To make sure they don't make the same mistakes, he suggests to the remaining leaders of the world.
The only problem is that interaction with the wormhole like that — and he's run the calculations a thousand times, now — will almost certainly erase this world, the one they all live in.
The leaders are divided, so he makes a suggestion: it's the end of the world, and it's something that the people deserve to weigh in on directly. So they open it up to a vote of every man, woman, and child—
—and the vote fails. There are still those who believe there's a breakthrough that will save them, or who think that a smaller population will stabilize. So the plan is tabled.
He's forty-six, and the world population has gone from ten billion people to one billion.
It's still falling.
There's still some nominal form of government because the population decline has mostly been slow and steady, though there have been bursts of violence here and there. But in this decade, war has been infrequent — there's so little to rule that no one's willing to fight for another barren plot of land or another ghost city that's slowly being reclaimed by nature. It's uncertain if the population decline will stabilize, if the crop yields will ever plateau, or if there are any technological breakthroughs left.
And there are so many who have died.
What is clear to everyone now that there's no hope, and his suggestion — his plea, really — is put to the world again.
This time, it passes.
He knows that the information may not make it to the new world — that the world might not even get the chance to know what its predecessors had done. He knows that their message might make it, but that those who receive it might never make it to a stage where they can understand how the information is encoded. He knows — he fears — that they might understand it, but will disregard it anyway, thinking themselves better than this world's people.
And he wonders, for a brief second, if there was a chip that they missed, that they could've benefitted from.
But it's too late for all of that. And so he presses the button and watches the last spaceship humanity will send count down to launch.
Three— Two— One— Houston, we have lift-off.
And he presses the transmit button, and speaks, briefly.
Good luck, Pandora.
It starts with a young scientist, studying Minkowski spacetime and Lorentz transformations, hoping to change the world.
It ends with the same scientist watching the night sky, waiting for the world to be reborn, thinking in his last moments of a message from an old world to a new one, and hoping that it will make a difference.
His mother is just about done making the casserole, and calls him to dinner — once, twice, and then again — before she sighs, rolls her eyes, and comes to fetch him. But when she comes into the living room, she stops and smiles, and lets the countdown finish.
Three— Two— One— Houston, we have lift-off.
His eyes are glued to the screen, watching as the flames light, as the smoke billows around the bright lance that jumps into the sky. And his eyes follow it intently, not looking away for a second, until the news report cuts away from the launch, going back to other programming.
Only then, after his mother calls him yet again, does he turn to look at her. And then he jumps to his feet, tugs his mom out to the patio door, and points out at the stars.
"Up there?" he asks, "It went up there?"
"Yes," she says. "It went up there, and farther."
-
He's sixteen, and he's sitting in an AP physics class his senior year, reading Heinlein. He doesn't care for the philosophy so much, but he eats up the descriptions of the rocket ships, nuclear-powered and making their way from planet to planet, star to star. He compares and contrasts it to Haldeman and Hubbard, and devours Clarke and Asimov in short order, remembering keenly each type of ship he comes across, each new technology for reaching the cosmos.
Someone clears his throat, loudly, and then repeats his name.
He looks up, suddenly, slipping a bookmark in the novel and hoping his textbook hides it adequately.
"Yes, Mr. Grissom?" he says, anxiously.
"Since you found your textbook so fascinating, I was wondering if you could tell us about the forces that act on an object when it's falling."
"Well, er—" he pauses for a second. "It depends on if there are external forces acting on it. If there aren't, and it's just falling, it will retain its horizontal velocity but the vertical velocity will change due to gravity, at nine-point-eight meters per second squared in a downwards direction. There's also drag, which is air friction, which can be figured out using the drag equation, which is the half the density of the fluid — in this case air — times the square of the velocity of the object multiplied by—"
His teacher holds up a hand and he stops. "That's not in the textbook until Chapter 12. Have you been reading ahead?"
Everyone else is silent, and staring.
"Oh. Yeah. I did some external reading, I guess," he says, and then looks back down. The teacher pauses for another moment, shakes his head, and then moves on with the class.
After a few moments of hearing the teacher talk, he opens up the novel again.
-
He's twenty-six, and DAPRA's funding three separate projects that he's running out of Los Alamos as the principal investigator. He's corresponding regularly with the greats in the field, and has enough papers as first author that he doesn't need to update his CV anymore.
He still reads: Le Guin, Scalzi, Gibson, and Miéville line his shelves, but he has far less time than he used to. His coworkers remark — occasionally in earshot — that he seems consumed by his work.
Sometimes, when he leaves the lab at three in the morning, he agrees with them.
But at the same time, he also feels like he's on the cusp of a new discovery, and his lab is driven by this urgency.
One day, there's a breakthrough in one of his projects: his research group finds a wormhole system. More accurately, they locate a wormhole generator, one just outside of the solar system. He spends sixty pages simply describing the mechanics of it in the latest version of Nature. It doesn't change the world, really, but it changes his world, as they slowly try and suss out the details of what they refer to casually as the 'portal', where it might lead, and if there's any chance of transmitting or returning information back from it.
-
He's thirty-six, and the world has changed.
Global warming, Ebola, war, terrorism — all of the spectres of humanity's future seem to choose the same decade to descend, and suddenly, what was once the most stable world there had been in centuries — with poverty, crime, and illness at a historical low — was anything but. Virulent plagues appear out of nowhere, ravage cities, nations, continents, and then disappear before the anti-virals can even be produced. Famines start across the world as a shortage in grain yields is exacerbated by the discovery that much of the arable topsoil in the world is being overfarmed to destruction.
The conclusion is chilling: there simply isn't enough food for everyone.
His work on the wormhole system is continuing, now with a different goal — maybe, if they could send something through it, they might be able to find another world. It's a long shot, of course — perhaps even an impossible shot — but it's also starting to look like the last shot. So he works, and the Hegemony keeps him and his lab safe as the world slowly destabilizes around them.
It pays off surprisingly quickly: there's some measure of efficiency that comes from desperation. After categorizing the wormholes, they realize that there is one that's promising. It's a tunnel, of sorts, one that allows something straight out of the science fiction of his youth: it looks like it opens back on Earth, thousands of years ago.
The journals aren't sure what it is exactly — some claim that it's a direct portal back, while others think that it's a hole into a parallel universe that just happened to be delayed due to various atomic differences. But their research shows that the wormhole may permit passage of something — nothing more than a few millimeters, though.
Still, a few millimeters is enough for a chip, encoded with all of human knowledge. To make sure they don't make the same mistakes, he suggests to the remaining leaders of the world.
The only problem is that interaction with the wormhole like that — and he's run the calculations a thousand times, now — will almost certainly erase this world, the one they all live in.
The leaders are divided, so he makes a suggestion: it's the end of the world, and it's something that the people deserve to weigh in on directly. So they open it up to a vote of every man, woman, and child—
—and the vote fails. There are still those who believe there's a breakthrough that will save them, or who think that a smaller population will stabilize. So the plan is tabled.
-
He's forty-six, and the world population has gone from ten billion people to one billion.
It's still falling.
There's still some nominal form of government because the population decline has mostly been slow and steady, though there have been bursts of violence here and there. But in this decade, war has been infrequent — there's so little to rule that no one's willing to fight for another barren plot of land or another ghost city that's slowly being reclaimed by nature. It's uncertain if the population decline will stabilize, if the crop yields will ever plateau, or if there are any technological breakthroughs left.
And there are so many who have died.
What is clear to everyone now that there's no hope, and his suggestion — his plea, really — is put to the world again.
This time, it passes.
-
He knows that the information may not make it to the new world — that the world might not even get the chance to know what its predecessors had done. He knows that their message might make it, but that those who receive it might never make it to a stage where they can understand how the information is encoded. He knows — he fears — that they might understand it, but will disregard it anyway, thinking themselves better than this world's people.
And he wonders, for a brief second, if there was a chip that they missed, that they could've benefitted from.
But it's too late for all of that. And so he presses the button and watches the last spaceship humanity will send count down to launch.
Three— Two— One— Houston, we have lift-off.
And he presses the transmit button, and speaks, briefly.
Good luck, Pandora.
-
It starts with a young scientist, studying Minkowski spacetime and Lorentz transformations, hoping to change the world.
It ends with the same scientist watching the night sky, waiting for the world to be reborn, thinking in his last moments of a message from an old world to a new one, and hoping that it will make a difference.
