April,
The properties you describe . . . hard, resonant, shiny, heavy, extremely low thermal conductivity, do not sound peculiar, they sound impossible. There are no known materials that have these properties. It is difficult to imagine a material that could have these properties. I managed to access the Carl in Oakland and did my own inspection. His thermal properties make no sense. He’s showing 0% thermal conductivity. Nothing. All energy that hits him just bounces right back. It’s basically impossible, so it must just be that my instruments aren’t sensitive enough. I was also in line with a bunch of tourists getting selfies, so I couldn’t stay too long without attracting a lot of attention. My research is mostly nonstandard semiconductors, so this is a little outside of my expertise, but I’ve asked around and no one I talk to thinks this is possible. How energy moves around is what we do in this lab, and we have studied a lot of materials. He’s like an aerogel but more dense than uranium. It doesn’t make sense.
Anyway, we’re left with three possibilities.
I have forgotten something very basic about a topic I know a great deal about, and so has everyone else I’ve talked to about this, including people who are smarter and know more than me.
Someone has constructed a new material that behaves unlike anything that currently exists, or should be able to exist, and then put it on the sidewalk for everyone to see.
Carl is alien. And I don’t mean alien like “weird.”
I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Occam’s razor but, basically, it’s a principle that the simplest solution tends to be the correct one. It’s BS. If there’s an objective measure of simplicity (outside of, like, entropic ones), I haven’t seen it. Every person will have a different opinion regarding which explanation is simplest. So when I say that the “external origin” hypothesis is the simple one, that’s informed by my bias. But I also recognize that it’s the least likely, just because so far there have been a lot of things that have happened, and “external origin” has never been the reason.
So, like, external origin has a 0% success rate at explaining stuff, which means it is unlikely. But I do not have a simpler explanation. I am not the only person who will have understood this, but I have also not heard anyone credible saying “external origin.” To be fair, I have also not been saying it because, well, it sounds ridiculous and is unlikely.
In any case, I think we can rule out the “art installation” angle, since, even if it were possible (which it isn’t), producing sixty-four ten-foot-tall robots out of a completely novel material like this would cost, at minimum, billions of dollars.
Look, I don’t know you but I feel like I have a responsibility here since I’m potentially breaking this news to you. There is a very real chance that you made First Contact. In case you aren’t a nerd, I’m saying that you were the first human to discover extraterrestrial technology . . . possibly extraterrestrial life. So . . . congratulations?
I’m weirdly honored to have your email address. You should change your email address. You should do a lot of things. This is not something that can unhappen to you. I’m willing to say that there’s a 90% chance that I’m wrong and that your life will be normal in a few weeks. But a 10% chance at being the first to meet an ambassador from another world is a pretty big deal. So . . . maybe do a little prep work.
I’m CAMiranda on Skype if you want to chat,
Miranda
I immediately started writing a response, but after half a sentence I opened up Skype to see if she was online. She was. Seconds after I requested her as a contact, a call from her came through. I answered, and her face popped up on my screen.
She was at a desk in what appeared to be an office. Bluish fluorescent light beat down on her wispy, uncontrolled, red-blond hair. Huge brown eyes looked at me with excitement.
“APRIL MAY! This is wonderful!”
“Are you still at work?” My brain was still on East Coast time, but it was after ten on the West Coast.
“The lab, yeah, not really work. Tides and spectrometers wait for no one! You know. I live on campus, so it’s barely worth going home.”
She was bright and seemed perfectly well rested. Skype is never the most flattering, but she was, like, adorable. Way cuter than I would be interested in. Frankly, I’ve worked my whole life to not be adorable with only limited success, and two adorable people dating is waaaay too cute for me.
“So, I have to apologize, I only just got your email. And, well . . .” I had no idea what else to say.
“Indeed. I’ve gone back and forth about six hundred times since I sent the message, but the longer they remain unexplained, the more obvious it seems.”
“Obvious?”
“Yeah, I think no one’s saying it because everyone’s thinking it.”
“I mean, I was on a late-night show tonight, it should be on here soon, and the host actually joked about Carl being from space. But, like, just because that’s the simple solution doesn’t mean it’s the solution. Are you sure you’re not being . . .” I trailed off. I didn’t want to insult her.
“I agree. I am there with you. Like I said in my email, explaining something by saying ‘aliens’ has a 0 percent success rate. I just think that ‘external origin,’ which is what I’ve been calling my hypothesis because it doesn’t necessarily mean intelligent others, should be taken seriously because, like, I don’t have any others.”
“What do you mean, ‘it doesn’t necessarily mean intelligent others’?” I said, already feeling a couple of steps behind the conversation.
“Well, the only thing I know is that these things are really far outside of how stuff works. I don’t want to say ‘aliens’ because I don’t know anything. But it doesn’t seem possible that this was done by any man-made technology, and it certainly didn’t happen naturally. Like, the Carls didn’t grow from seeds. So the vaguest, most general thing I can say is ‘external origin.’ Meaning, basically, this doesn’t make sense.”
“So you’re not saying Carl is a space alien.”
“No, but I am saying it looks increasingly likely that the Carls weren’t made by humans or by nature.”
“So you are saying Carl is a space alien!” I started to freak out again.
“No, I . . . I don’t know, April! It’s exciting, but space aliens are a very specific explanation for a very broad circumstance. There’s more to the universe than humans and aliens. Maybe they’re made by humans but sent from the future. Maybe they are a kind of projection through space-time. Maybe they’re proof that our universe is a simulation and someone is changing the code. Mostly, I don’t pretend an explanation is correct just because I haven’t thought of any others that fit with current data.”
She seemed very sure of herself, even if she looked a little timid and freaked-out talking to me.
“Well, Miranda, speaking of the current data. We haven’t told anyone about this, but there’s more.”
Her eyes, impossibly, got bigger.
I took her through the procedure of the Wikipedia clue.
“This is deeply impossible,” she said after we had gone through the whole sequence, “and nonsensical as well. I-A-M-U.”
“I know. I’ve been racking my brain over this for days, so I don’t expect you to—”
“Elements,” she interrupted.
“What?”
“Elements. I, Am, U—those are all elements. Iodine, americium, uranium.”
“OK, that’s another lead to add to the fifty-mile-long list of guesses as to what this might mean.”
She looked a little dejected, and I felt bad for immediately dashing her first try at explaining it. I mean, of course Miranda would find a sciencey explanation—she did sciencey stuff. So I said, “I mean, that’s interesting, though—we hadn’t thought of it.”
Her smile came back.