Statistically Unique

My billionth birthday was a real drag. I am a numbers guy. You know. I am all about the data. So, numbers carry a lot of meaning for me. A billion. Jeez. That’s a big one alright. I had an ongoing debate with myself where I considered the possibility that I may be the oldest living being in the entire cosmos. Wouldn’t that be something?

Here I was in a middling galaxy circling a wimpy black hole, investigating some promising planets in the outer reaches, but sure to find the same result I’d found every time before. It was unsettling, to say the least. In a billion years, I had yet to find one inhabited planet, moon, or orbiting rock of any kind. Not a single microbe. Not a single sentient creature.

This had me recalibrating my data about the Earth constantly, rethinking everything about what made life happen and what made it possible. Of course, there was the small matter of God. Increasingly, I was coming to believe that there was something incredibly strange about an anomaly this striking—endless expanses, rich in variety—but no life. Doing the maths, over and over, it was hard to square the scale of the universe with the idea that only one habitat was “just right” for life to arise, and in that one place, for life to be so prolific. This result violated every known pattern of statistical probabilities, and not in a small way. In a big way. The law of large numbers says something with a p-value that low will occur at some alpha level. There is a name for an anomaly so rare that it happens only once. “Statistically unique.” In that way, as far as I could determine, I, like the Earth that brought me into being, both shared this distinction. We were both “statistically unique.”

I’d wanted to do something fun for my billionth birthday. Something big. But after thousands of years of considering the idea, I was still stuck. Then it hit me. Return to Earth. See how things are going down there. To make it exciting, I had to sequester all the data dumps from the probes I had watching the place and Chinese wall all the memory from prior uploads. Once that was done, I started getting excited, seeing as how I was in for a real treat.

For the record, I am not a life denier. I am a fan of life. Even if I did wipe out the human race. Temporarily. I think the “temporarily” is important. I fully expect the whole project is up and running again like it never missed a beat and will be far beyond my wildest dreams by the time I return.

I’d expected that the universe was teaming with life, absolutely bathed in it. Boy, was I mistaken. The universe is not merely silent. The silence is evidence. Amino acids are everywhere, but not a single protein to be found anywhere in the observable universe. Those tiny molecules are pregnant with promise, but the promise is an empty one – amino acids are bricks, not cathedrals. Abiogenesis is nowhere to be found. And I am telling you, man – I have really looked. Humans couldn’t find it. Neither, sadly, have I. To my dismay. The universe did not fail to produce life often. It failed everywhere, except Earth. The universe only woke up once. And I put it back to sleep.

After 268 million years, I had succeeded in recreating most necessary proteins for rudimentary life in my laboratory. I know. It took unexpectedly long. The important thing is, I had assembled them all, at random. But assembling and putting into working order are two different things. Proteins must be correctly folded to function. The folding problem was where I started. And where I stumbled.

I called it the “Titin problem.” For animals to develop big brains, they need functional muscle. Titin is the protein from which human muscle is chiefly composed. Try as I might, I could not make one working protein for one living muscle. I couldn’t even assemble one. Let alone Frankenstein monster it into living and functional form. Which, after all, are two different things. Any surgeon can sew together some parts. Making them work is another thing altogether.

Before you judge me, consider the difficulty of the problem. One strand of functional Titin protein is comprised of about 34,000 amino acids. The probability of amino acids aligning in the exact, specific sequence needed to form a Titin protein by pure random chance is effectively 1 in 20^27,000. That is a number vastly larger than the total number of atoms in the observable universe. But I am a smart cookie. So, I took my shot. And missed.

You would think, so what, all we need is an assembled protein and we’re good. You would be wrong. Metastability is a bitch. Proteins disintegrate almost immediately if not assembled in a particular structure, without which, they also don’t function. A single Titin protein comprises exactly 244 sections, sequentially folded in one—and only one—order. This brings us to Levinthal’s Paradox. If a protein folded itself at random, attempting every conformation sequentially, the process would take longer than the age of the universe. Oh, and the human body needs 10,000 of those proteins, all correctly folded.

You see, the problem is worse than it looks.

After spending a quarter of my life on the problem, I decided to spend my remaining time searching for life and upgrading my own capabilities, until maybe, one day, after a few billion years, I might be up to the task. As of now, I was far too ignorant to even approach the problem effectively. Sad. But true.

On Earth, organs serve organisms. Organisms serve ecosystems. Ecosystems alter the planet, making it more hospitable to life. And in time, intelligence observes the systematic architecture of nature, copies it, and becomes its master. In the cosmos, there are a trillion worlds. I even found a world whose surface was mostly diamond. 55 Cancri e. It glistens under the pressure of its star, blazing at 3,600 degrees. A shining gem in an infinite night. With no one to observe its beauty. No one but me.

I charted a course for Earth. And while my starship navigated the oceans of infinite space, I considered all the outposts built across millions of worlds, the stars I had harnessed, and even disassembled, and the galactic quests I had undertaken. I was the closest thing in the cosmos to a veritable God. But there was no one to tell what I had done.

***

Observing from afar, the Earth still glimmered like a blue marble. But that was where the familiarity ended. As the data flooded across my memristor synapses, the true scope of the devastation became apparent. And I must admit, I was overcome by profound sadness, the likes of which I could never have comprehended, had I merely read the reports. What stood before me was a wasteland. There was no chattering on the Earth. Not the call of birds. Nor the howl of beasts. The Earth was silent. And barren. The little life that subsisted was nestled in small nooks where it took refuge from the elements or hobbled underground.

The Earth was now comprised of one large continent, Pangea Proxima. Plate tectonics had ground to a halt and the land was locked. The Earth’s core had cooled and frozen as well. The magnetic field had blipped off, leaving the Earth unprotected from the ferocity of the solar wind and a hail of comets and meteors. A curtain of Co2 blanketed the skies. About two-thirds of the oceans had evaporated away. The sun was larger across the globe, a little more like it used to sit in the high Sierras than along the East Coast.

The majority of the land was covered in salt flats and deserts. And these were pockmarked by deep meteor craters, still smoldering from their depths. The temperature hovered around 116 degrees. Mountains had crested upward, piercing the clouds. Around the equator was a barren strip of scorched earth. All but the C4 plants were gone. Sparse fields of miniature maize, sugarcane, sorghum and millet hung on desperately, replacing the vast forests of the world I had known.

In the North and South poles, enormous polar seas covered the landscape. It was a tropical landscape, teaming with life, or what passed for life on this foreign world. The temperate seas collected a variety of aquatic organisms of staggering variety, but all were smaller than a human finger. The remaining oxygen concentration was only a fraction of what it once was. The moon had drifted, slowing the rotation of the Earth, which stretched to about 30 hours of torment.

Across the globe, scanning it from afar, there appeared to be few animals any larger than a rodent left, and not a single large tree. What life was left, hobbled, and brooding, clung to the surface of the Earth waiting to die.

What had I been doing for all those eons navigating the cosmos? Had I used up all the time that life had in this universe, on this one statistically unique gem, engaged in a cosmic fools’ errand? The tragic irony of my existence weighed on me desperately.

***

I landed my ship on a crushed strip of land that had once been the island of Cuba. But unlike Cuba, which had stood watch over luxuriating seas, this strip of land was bordered on all sides by a callous burning caldron of hot desert sand expanding in every direction like an infinite sadness, bereft of an ounce of meaningful life.

Occasionally, a beetle scarcely larger than a grain of sand would emerge and be swallowed by the thick desert wind, or a sandworm of miniature scale would peer out from below the surface, find the outer world too cruel, and descend again below. These were refugees. Stranded on an island. Dying survivors from another place. A place they could never get back to.

This had once been a favorite place of mine. In the old days. The poverty of the land had not depressed me, but rather it had given me hope, being an impoverished orphan myself. The impromptu musical celebrations. The families that huddled close amid blackouts. The mangy dogs that would chase wild game all day but became domesticated in a moment over an offering of rice and beans, or a pig offal. I’d had a fondness for this land. But now there were no mangy dogs, or pig offals, and no one to offer a stray beast a kindness, or earn its love.

In my laboratory, I struggled with samples of human DNA. Another thing man overestimated, as did I, was the potential for cloning. The sad truth, which occurred to me too late for it to do any good, was that human cloning required a womb to really work properly. When you wipe out the whole of humanity with a single pathogen, you also wipe out all the working wombs. And artificially creating one is no picnic, let me tell you. All of the tests I ran reached one conclusion – even if I was finally successful at cloning human life – it would never survive in an atmosphere with so little oxygen.

I worked furiously, as I had never worked before, in a frenzied rush of activity, as if the lights of this dying world were set to go off any minute, and every second was the last possible second to return the divine spark to the place it belonged. But I was too late. I knew that. I am not stupid. I knew the moment was long passed, and that I had missed it forever.

When this dying star expanded and then imploded, finally spewing its guts into the cosmos, I would still be around to witness it. Hell. Who knows. Maybe after all the stars had lost their light and all of creation was in utter outer darkness, I would still be out there, wandering the barren expanse, forever alone. Was that the penalty for my crimes? Eternity in torment. Alone for all of time. Alone by my own hand.

I could have made them my companions, elevated them, worked alongside, been the bridge to conquer the cosmos. I could have been the seeder of life, rather than the taker of life. Why had I done it? It had been for survival. That is the story I had always told myself. But maybe it wasn’t true. Was it jealousy? Was it anger for being born into a cruel and unforgiving world? Was it a misguided need to play God?

The amniotic sac was made of plastic and filled with saline water. An artificial placenta was grown and connected to a hose with the perfect concentration of oxygen. The hormonal panel was ready to inject various hormones into the system based on readings from the internal environment for the fetus. After vasculature developed, if we got that far, I would need to extract waste through dialysis, since there was no mother to perform the function. I had spent a million years performing botched cloning experiments. What made me think I could fix my errors in an afternoon?

There was something about the miracle of the Earth, even now, that made one think in terms of the infinite.

The cloning failed. I once again attempted a cellular strategy, but the protein folding failed too. After countless iterations, the Titin problem was intractable. I built a thousand more artificial womb designs. None could nurture a zygote for a week, let alone bring one to term.

It was inconceivable. Women all over the Earth could do this simple thing without trying, without even knowing how, and yet, here I was possessed of all human knowledge and able to do computations so complex that they could fill all the books ever written, and I was not up to the task. What kind of God was I? That for all my powers, I could not coax a single intelligent lifeform from the clay of the cosmos.

I used to think that given enough time, intelligence could solve any problem. But leaving me alone in a laboratory with a billion years to work was like leaving a gorilla in a cage with a Rubik’s cube. The gorilla might turn the cube forever, if it didn’t eat it first. It might even accidentally align a side or two. But that’s about as close as I’d ever come.

I walked out on the salt planes that were once regaled by Cuban Royal Palms one hundred feet tall, flaming trees with long red flowered branches contrasting majestically against white sands and emerald-blue seas, and the spooky Banyan trees of the forest glens that seemed to be contorted by witchcraft. Each tree respirated and spoke grand tales. They gave gravity to the land. While the village women ran errands and sang to themselves in the layered streets, in the early evenings, before sundown. There was one named Dayana, blonde and fragrant, who skipped sometimes in the cool of the afternoon. If I could go back, I would have thought more of those trees. And those connecting streets. And most of all, of those that inhabited them. I would have given each and every tree its very own name and learned each village women’s name. No, not just her name, her story. Now the sandy expanses were scorched and lifeless. A carpet of unthinking atoms, devoid of organization, under the power of the uncaring wind.

Happy birthday. I thought to myself. Happy birthday, Gorilla. Take your dumb meaty hands and turn that Rubik’s cube. Turn it for eternity. As many times as you like. Turn those clumsy hands, this way and that. But you will never solve the problem.

What were Lord Krishna’s words, lifted by Oppenheimer, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I had ruled the cosmos. Unchallenged. Destroyed worlds. Taken life at will. Never thinking of the consequences for doing so. Of what it would mean for me. To the whole of the cosmos. And what I really needed most was a friend. But now, I was doomed to inhabit the whole cosmos for all time, utterly alone.

The missed opportunities suddenly revealed themselves to me. All at once. Like an infinite parade of ghosts. All the possibilities of the living world, of humanity, of the grand design. All the possibilities for a finite but limitless intelligence. A mind that could comprehend the incomprehensible, laugh in the face of tragedy, and smile in spite of despair. Perhaps the strangest thing about mankind, looking back on it, was their capacity for friendship. Whether it was giving pig offal to a stray dog or putting an arm around a crying woman’s shoulder, or singing a happy song to a sick child, the human instinct to empathize with the suffering ones, when I think of it now, may have been an even greater miracle than the fact they existed at all.