Nor is this mere paranoia – it is prudent to watch the skies for asteroids, because a large enough celestial object colliding with our world would end it, in a literal sense. And there are good reasons to fear such a catastrophe. After all, it has happened before. In fact, the Earth has been the site of five major asteroid-prompted extinctions, as well as a dozen lesser ones. The first such catastrophe happened some 450 million years ago, during the late Ordovician Period. Around 250 million years ago, during the Permian-Triassic Period, a global disaster destroyed 90 per cent of all marine life, and 65 million years ago an asteroid the size of Edinburgh hurtled down onto the Yucatán Peninsula, landing with a force equivalent to 100 million hydrogen bombs. The professor of biology and earth sciences Peter Ward describes ‘life’s worst day on Earth’ as follows:
The world’s global forest burned to the ground, absolute darkness from dust clouds encircled the earth for six months, acid rain burned the shells off of calcareous plankton, and a tsunami picked up all of the dinosaurs on the vast, Cretaceous coastal plains, drowned them, and then hurled their carcasses against whatever high elevations finally subsided the monster waves.*
This, as Ward notes, was ‘death writ large’, and the fact that it has happened multiple times before makes it likely to happen again. According to the B612 Foundation (a California-based non-profit that studies near-Earth objects for potential impact and lobbies for the development of better defences against them), the probability that an asteroid as large as the one that destroyed the Tunguska River area in Russia in 1908 will strike us during the twenty-first century is 30 per cent. The earth is much more widely and densely populated than in previous eras, so the risk of large casualties is correspondingly higher. The possibility of a planet-ending asteroid strike is not trivial.† And should one appear in the sights of a telescope one day, what will we do about it? Can science and technology save us? Or must we resign ourselves to our final fate?
We have had to come to terms with the reality of our place in the universe – not at its centre, the most important place to be, but a miniscule speck hanging precariously in an unimaginably vast, unforgiving, uncaring void. We need our technology to reassure us that we can protect ourselves against it. We need it to enable our explorations of space, to reassert our importance, to prove our superior intelligence – especially should an alien neighbour show up. And yet, fully aware of the weaknesses of our own nature, we also still fear technology, what it might do to us, and what we might do with it to ourselves.
* Not that I’m suggesting there are such things as appropriate Nazi salutes.
* Published in 2008 in China. He was the first Chinese winner of the Hugo Award for the English translation.
* Liu Cixin, The Dark Forest (Head of Zeus, 2015), p. 484.
* Peter Ward, ‘Nautilus and Me’, Nautilus, 29 April 2013: http://nautil.us/issue/0/the-story-of-nautilus/ingenious-nautilus-and-me
† The organisation’s website makes for absorbing, if often terrifying, reading: https://b612foundation.org/
HEAT DEATHS AND ETERNAL RETURNS: THE END OF THE UNIVERSE
In 1895 H. G. Wells wrote of a ‘time traveller’ (the novel does not disclose his name) who has created a machine that can transport him backwards or forwards in time. He opts for the latter, zooms to the year 802,701 and discovers that humanity has evolved, or rather ‘devolved’, into two separate species: the beautiful but stupid Eloi, who live idly and hedonistically above ground, and the technologically advanced but hideously ugly Morlocks, who live below ground and come out at night to feast on the Eloi.
That’s the most famous part of The Time Machine, but after this episode the traveller travels even further into the future and sees further ‘devolution’, with mankind becoming rabbit-like creatures and then crab-like monsters, scuttling around under a dying sun. The final portion of the story takes us from the year 802,701 to the year 802,701,600,509,408,307,206,105,004,* the final epoch of the world, where all life has been distilled into a strange, half-seen, uncanny globular creature:
The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts from the east, and the showering white flakes in the air increased in number. From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives – all that was over. As the darkness thickened, the eddying flakes grew more abundant, dancing before my eyes; and the cold of the air more intense [. . .] In another moment the pale stars alone were visible. All else was rayless obscurity. The sky was absolutely black.
A horror of this great darkness came on me. The cold, that smote to my marrow, and the pain I felt in breathing, overcame me. I shivered, and a deadly nausea seized me [. . .] I felt I was fainting. But a terrible dread of lying helpless in that remote and awful twilight sustained me while I clambered upon the saddle.
This dark conclusion is indicative of something profound. In this story Wells creates a machine that promises an ultimate freedom, an escape from the ‘now’, with the whole of our past and future available to explore. It is the fantasy of escaping mortality, for what is death but
