The Stone Loves the World

open and the dream proved to be as dead as the fourth astronaut in Planet of the Apes. He was in his office at the university, putting on his coat to go home on a wintry March afternoon. The lining of his coat had started to detach at several points simultaneously, and he was intrigued by the fact that the threads of the various seams had a roughly equivalent longevity regardless of the amount of friction or tension to which they were subjected (shoulder seams, for example, enduring more daily wear and stress than bottom-hem seams). This led him to ponder the inevitable degradation of cotton at the molecular level, from oxidation, dust mites, bacteria, etc. This led to a general thought-bromide about entropy, energy loss, the eventual end of the universe, and so on, and that in turn led to the daunting problem of fuel requirements, and therefore the necessity of additional mass, in spaceflight, an issue he was familiar with, lecturing on it annually in his Introduction to Astronomy course. But for some reason, this time—was it because the coat had belonged to his father, who was sixteen years into Parkinson’s, now wheelchair bound, laid out at night in his bed like a stone effigy?—this time, out popped genuine shock, a stab of loss. He stopped shrugging on the coat. He would die, never having left Earth.

Not just him. Sure, a few cocky test pilots and politically savvy scientists will probably set foot on Mars someday. But a colony? Given human shortsightedness and folly, he doubts it. And beyond? When he was a kid, not just science fiction writers but real scientists, in the main, confidently predicted that man would one day “reach the stars.” How, exactly? Faster-than-light travel is almost certainly impossible. And given the enormous time and energy required to reach even the nearest star at sublight speeds, plus the highly debatable benefit of doing so, Mark suspects that humanity will never leave the solar system.

He is gazing out the attic window, down at the eighty-year-old one-car detached garage that’s slowly falling apart. The new owners will have to figure out what to do about that. Zoning, bringing up to code, grandfathered footprint, blah blah. Good luck to them.

As for a visit or phone call from the neighbors—after forty years of SETI, we’ve heard nothing. Which, granted, also means little. We’ve monitored only a tiny fraction of the stars in our neighborhood, forty years is nothing on the cosmic timescale, and who says civilizations reliably produce radio emissions? The one civilization we know of, with the advent of fiber optics, may go radio silent in the next few decades. But Mark is one of those who finds Enrico Fermi’s question unsettling: Where is everybody? Fermi reasoned that, if intelligence were not vanishingly rare in the galaxy, then given the fact that planetary formation likely began eight to ten billion years ago, there would almost certainly have been civilizations that formed billions of years in the past. Some fraction of them, with thousands of years of technological development at their disposal, would surely have devoted energy to exploring the galaxy. Even we puny humans, with a mere two centuries of industrialization, can glimpse the technological feasibility of von Neumann probes that would multiply and spread from star system to star system. With nothing more than our present-day rocket technology for transport, such a scheme could fill the entire galaxy in less than 300 million years.

All right, then: Where are they?

Maybe intelligence is common, but equally common are catastrophic climate change, resource depletion, technological self-destruction. In 5,000 years, when serene bubble-boy imagined opening the time capsule of the 1965 New York World’s Fair and mulling over the contents in euphoric peace, it probably really will be all over, at least in Flushing Meadows, under a mile of ice, or 200 feet of water, or two inches of radioactive ash. Humans will still exist somewhere, but will they be theorizing about von Neumann probes or trapping rats for dinner?

Intelligence that’s out there, but of which we will never be aware, is scientifically equivalent to intelligence that’s not out there.

Mark comes down the attic stairs. He imagines a poster for a movie they’ll never make, showing a radio telescope and a dejected scientist, with the tag line, Turns Out We’re Alone After All.

He stops for a moment in the bedroom his parents shared while he was growing up. One could make an unpleasant joke. Move along, folks, nothing to see here.

He continues down. The only part of the house he hasn’t contemplated yet is the basement. Through the living room, off the kitchen, down again; rough wooden steps, exposed joists, bare lightbulbs. If the kitchen was Mom’s domain, this was Dad’s. In addition to his study, he had his workbench, his storage boxes, his tinkering notebooks. As soon as he went into the nursing home, Mom asked Mark if he could, at long last, clear out all Dad’s “crap down there.” It was so neatly stored, there was more than Mark realized. Boxes of rescued vacuum tubes, sash weights, pipe collars, doorknobs, lamp sockets, transistors, porch balusters, old-style fuses, circuit breakers, brakelight bulbs. There was a box filled with electric cords his father had cut from every house appliance he’d finally thrown away after Mom complained long enough about deteriorating performance. One box was marked “TV speakers,” and there they all were, from five generations of living room consoles and four of kitchen-table portables. Mark recognized the twin speakers from the 1959 black-and-white Motorola on which he had first watched Lost in Space. There were the ingenious, simple tools his father had made to help him in his tinkering. Artful stands to hold a tool or component at the right height and angle, so that he could accomplish a three-handed job. Hooks of various lengths and shapes set in homely carved wooden handles. Even the simplest things had a marvelous, seemingly effortless precision: pieces of boxboard cut to function as