Accidental Gods (3 page)

Larry said, “I hate to be the practical one, but we’re going to need a lot more memory.” When he saw no one react to that, he added, “I’m talking
huge
, like no one’s ever put together before.” Still, no one reacted. “
Massive
amounts of memory?” he said, hoping for a response. “Like ten to the
positive
forty-three of anything anyone’s got today.” Still no one paid much attention. Larry’s jaw muscles clenched, and he set his hands flat on the table.

“What about that first second?” Catherine asked. “The supernatural event?”

A few in the group chuckled.

“Fine, I’ll answer your question,” Ajay huffed. “Hawking said it this way: ‘Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning because it smacks of divine intervention.’ But the only particularly mysterious part of that first second of the big bang is the time between zero and the first tick of Planck time. Well, there’s also a lot of mystery about what happens at zero and before, but that’s perhaps better left for a different discussion.” He winked conspiratorially at Lisa.

Ajay turned toward the entire group. “I believe we will have to prime the pump, so to speak. Events happen so fast during that first second and there are so many initial conditions that set all these events in motion that I believe we will have to effectively contrive the first era—that first ten to the negative forty-third of a second. However, after we set up those initial conditions and push that first figurative domino, a chain reaction should begin that spawns a new universe and sets it on its way. What we see after that first Planck time should look much like the birth of our own universe and its subsequent expansion…” Ajay paused for a moment before continuing, “That is, of course, assuming we get everything right.”

Lisa asked, “So you might say that priming the pump is us defining what happens in the singularity? Fabricating Catherine’s supernatural event? We are the supernatural.”

Ajay frowned. Catherine smiled.

“Yes, we said it before,” Ajay said. “It’s setting the parameters of the universe.”

Stephen chuckled. “Who would have thought? This really will be like starting up the universe with a bunch of predefined command-line parameters. Using our universe’s constants gives us a lot of what we need to set those initial conditions.”

“It helps a lot,” Ajay agreed.

Thomas smiled.

Larry seemed to be working out some vast calculation in his head.

Thomas said, “Well, I think this is the breakthrough we needed. Time to start the real work.”

He clapped, and the rest of the team joined him.

Chapter 3

Year 2

If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives.

—
Freeman Dyson

The entire team was gathered in the Rack’s large auditorium. A palpable sense of excitement permeated the group. Almost eighteen months had passed since the launch of IACP. Dozens of professors from other departments, along with at least one dean, were also in the audience.

“We think we have it,” Thomas opened.

Behind him, on top of and near the back of a large stage that ran the full width of the auditorium’s front, a large screen displayed a wall-sized IACP logo, the opening slide of a PowerPoint presentation.

The four rows of main overhead lights dimmed, with the rear two rows stopping at half illumination and the front two going out completely. The auditorium’s recessed perimeter lights, however, though small and aimed more directly onto the side and back walls than the audience, remained bright.

Thomas pressed a button, and a new slide appeared.

It was a picture of the Great Pyramid; the two smaller pyramids and the Sphinx were also visible.

“This is a digital picture from my last vacation.”

He clicked the button again.

The image zoomed in on the Sphinx.

“As with any digital picture, I can zoom in. In this case, the image quality is still good.”

Click.

The image now showed just the head of the Sphinx—its ears and eyes, its missing nose, the cobra figure on its forehead.

“You can now see, partially because this is such a large screen, the beginnings of pixelization. You can see the tiny squares that make up the image itself.”

Click.

Now the image showed just the cobra on the Sphinx’s forehead.

“As you look now, you can really see the squares that make up this image. This is why megapixels are important in a digital camera. They determine the number of pixels in the image, which determines how big of a printout or view you can have before the pixels are visible.”

Click.

It zoomed in even more, the individual squares now clearly visible.

Click. Click.

Each step zoomed in further.

Soon, on the screen, there was only one brown square.

“This is the end of the line. We cannot zoom in any further. At this point, this specific element of the original image is just a single square of a single color—one pixel.”

He zoomed all the way back out in one click.

“From millions of individual pixels, each by itself without meaning, this picture is assembled.” He paused for emphasis. “But what does this have to do with us?”

He clicked again. An image appeared on the screen that looked like a picture of the night sky.

“This is the universe,” he said. “Each of these dots is a galaxy. There are hundreds of billions of galaxies in our universe.”

Click.

An image of a single galaxy.

“This is the Milky Way, our own galaxy.”

Click.

An image of the sun and the solar system.

“Our solar system.”

Click.

An image of Earth from space.

Click.

A satellite image of North America.

Click.

A satellite image of Texas.

Click.

An aerial view of Austin.

Click.

A picture of the auditorium.

Click.

A picture of Thomas.

Click.

A picture of DNA, a drawing of the famous double helix next to it.

Click.

A drawing of an atom.

Click.

A drawing of a proton.

Click.

A drawing of a quark.

“The end of the line. That’s it. We cannot get any smaller.”

Click.

A slide divided into four equal sections appeared. In the upper right was the picture of the Sphinx and below it the single brown square—one pixel of the digital photo. In the upper left was the picture of the universe. Below it was the drawing of a quark.

“Just like how the single brown square is the absolute smallest detail of the digital picture, the quark is the absolute smallest detail of the universe.
It is the pixel of the universe
.”

Ajay added, “Well, technically, fermions are the smallest detail of which quarks are a type and bosons of which photons, or light, are a type.”

Thomas said, “There is another element. Our universe has another dimension—time. That also needs to be considered.”

Another slide appeared, showing boxes with arrows connecting them. The boxes grew larger across the slide from left to right, the arrows pointing from each box to the next larger one—a much fancier representation of Ajay’s original four lines.

“Each of these boxes represents a pixel of the universe for another dimension: time. In fact, each represents a Planck unit of time, exactly one ten to the negative forty-third of a second, the most granular slice of time. The boxes increase in size each step because the universe is expanding.

“Now, for how it will work,” Thomas continued.

The slide switched to one showing two computers labeled “Universe Processing” and “Universe Rendering.” A dual-headed arrow connected them.

Thomas gestured Stephen forward, stepped off the stage without going around to the stairs at either end, handed Stephen the remote, and sat in the front row next to Jules.

Stephen started to climb onto the stage where Thomas had stepped off it and then hesitated. He turned first toward one and then toward the other set of stairs and then finally did step up onto the stage where Thomas had stepped down.

Stephen ran his hands through his hair before he turned around toward the audience. “There will be two parts to the process,” he said as he tried to brush the wrinkles from the front of his shirt. “First, the system processes events—which we’re calling ‘universe processing.’ That’s done by the latest quantum computing systems. Second, we render it using a massively parallel, physics-processing supercomputer.”

He seemed to forget his shirt then and pushed a button on the remote, pointing it toward the screen instead of toward the projector. A more detailed slide titled “Universe Processing” appeared on the screen.

Stephen seemed in his own element then. His voice took on an authority that many members of the team hadn’t heard before, but Thomas remembered it from his early days of working with him.

“There are four key components to our universe processing system,” Stephen said. The first system is an equation processor. It is a cluster of quantum computers capable of doing all the math required to simulate a big bang and the underlying mechanics of a universe. Second, we have a massively parallel physics supercomputer to take that raw data and ‘create the physical world’ out of it. Third, we have a storage system, a very, very large storage system—roughly ten petabytes or ten million gigabytes—which is used to record every slice of time as it is created. Finally, we have a smaller set of supercomputers that we are calling renderers. These will be used to ‘view’ our universe.”

Stephen paused for a moment, looked around the room, and ran his hand through his hair. Clearly his brilliant technical architecture was wasted on the academics. He sighed and ended his speech abruptly: “I could go into infinite details about this, but I suppose it doesn’t matter as long as the system works.”

Thomas smiled, as Stephen had managed to notice the boredom lingering in the air.

He clicked a button, and the next slide appeared. It showed another system, this one focused on graphics.

“So the most interesting aspect of this, to normal people at least, is allowing users to observe things inside the simulated universe as if they are there. They aren’t there—you can’t touch things, but you can see and hear everything. Touch is a little harder. We’ll see about that later. For now, you are strictly an observer.”

He couldn’t tell who, but someone in the audience asked, “Why not?”

“Three reasons…” He began counting off on his fingers. “First, the technology to put you in there doesn’t exist…
yet
. Second, it would require processing power we don’t have…
yet
. Third, there is a problem of time.”

“What problem?” the same person asked.

“Well…this is where it gets weird. Everyone talks about time travel and whatnot in science fiction.”

Someone else shouted, “Yeah! Cool.”

Too many geeks in this group,
Thomas thought.
Count on them to ask the way-out-there questions.

“The problem is that, in a simulated universe, there is a time horizon. Think of it as an advancing wave.” Stephen paused for a second and then said, “Imagine a pool of water. Dropping a pebble into that pool is the big bang. Ripples expand outward, but in our case, there is only one ripple. As that ripple moves outward, the universe grows. That ripple is the time horizon. Beyond it, time does not exist. In our case, this simply means our computer has not processed beyond that point. That ripple is where our system is…” He smirked. “…in the process of processing the universe.”

“So we can’t jump into the future,” the same person asked, more soberly.

“Exactly. No.”

“But the past?”

“We will be able to step into the universe at any point prior to the time horizon. So to some extent, we can go back in time, jump around, et cetera—but remember, we are just observers. However, should we ever choose to modify anything, it would effectively wipe everything in front of that time out, starting a new path forward. Everything in the simulated universe would need to be reprocessed from that time forward, like moving the ripple back to that point.”

A third person asked, “Could we fork time?”

Stephen jutted the remote toward the person. “Interesting question. Theoretically, yes. We could start a new path forward from the point of change and run them in parallel. I guess it would be like creating an alternate or parallel universe.

“But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. First, we have to make it work.”

Thomas stood up, and Stephen handed him the remote before stepping down from the stage.

“Yes,” Thomas said, “first we have to make it work. Then we can think about all the second-order things we could do. Ajay?”

Ajay took the remote from Thomas and aimed it at the projector as he walked back to center stage.

A new slide appeared, labeled “Universal Constants,” that defined Planck time, Planck length, and the universal constants: the speed of light, Planck’s constant, the gravitational constants, and finally, a cosmological constant, which was listed as open to debate.

Ajay stopped at the edge of the screen and said, “These represent the fundamental building blocks that define the functionality of a universe or, as Stephen here thinks of them—probably like the rest of the computer types in the audience—they are the parameters that we will set before our big bang.”

The next slide showed two universes, one on the left labeled “Our Universe” and one on the right labeled “Simulated Universe.” A double-tilde joined the two.

“We will use the same constants as the seed for our simulated universe, which will make it roughly equal to our own. That way, once we have our simulated universe up and running, we can tell if we did everything right. The universes will
not
be identical. The initial start-up phase will inherently have far too many random variables. Even a minuscule difference in that first second will mean that our simulated universe could end up dramatically different, but they should develop on roughly the same timeline. Don’t expect to see Earth.”

Lisa added, “Not to mention that seeing something like Earth would take somewhere between thirteen and fifteen billion years.”

Ajay laughed. “Good point.”

Thomas stood up and closed the presentation. “Great start. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”