He paused.
“Where we come from…is not nearly as startling as where we are going.”
CHAPTER 94
The sound of running footsteps echoed through the subterranean basilica as a Guardia agent sprinted toward the three men gathered in the deepest recesses of the church.
“Your Majesty,” he called out, breathless. “Edmond Kirsch…the video…is being broadcast.”
The king turned in his wheelchair, and Prince Julián spun around as well.
Valdespino gave a disheartened sigh. It was only a matter of time, he reminded himself. Still, his soul felt heavy to know that the world was now seeing the same video that he had seen in the Montserrat library with al-Fadl and K?ves.
Where do we come from? Kirsch’s claim of a “Godless origin” was both arrogant and blasphemous; it would have a ruinous effect on the human desire to aspire to a higher ideal and emulate the God who created us in His image.
Tragically, Kirsch had not stopped there. He had followed up this first desecration with a second, far more dangerous one—proposing a profoundly disturbing answer to the question Where are we going?
Kirsch’s prediction for the future was calamitous…so disturbing that Valdespino and his colleagues had urged Kirsch not to release it. Even if the futurist’s data were accurate, sharing it with the world would cause irreversible damage.
Not just for the faithful, Valdespino knew, but for every human being on earth.
CHAPTER 95
No God required, Langdon thought, replaying what Edmond had said. Life arose spontaneously from the laws of physics.
The notion of spontaneous generation had long been debated—theoretically—by some of science’s greatest minds, and yet tonight Edmond Kirsch had presented a starkly persuasive argument that spontaneous generation had actually happened.
Nobody has ever come close to demonstrating it…or even explaining how it might have occurred.
On-screen, Edmond’s simulation of the primordial soup was now teeming with tiny virtual life-forms.
“Observing my budding model,” Edmond narrated, “I wondered what would happen if I let it run? Would it eventually explode out of its flask and produce the entire animal kingdom, including the human species? And what if I let it run beyond that? If I waited long enough, would it produce the next step in human evolution and tell us where we are going?”
Edmond appeared again beside E-Wave. “Sadly, not even this computer can handle a model of that magnitude, so I had to find a way to narrow the simulation. And I ended up borrowing a technique from an unlikely source…none other than Walt Disney.”
The screen now cut to a primitive, two-dimensional, black-and-white cartoon. Langdon recognized it as the 1928 Disney classic Steamboat Willie.
“The art form of ‘cartooning’ has advanced rapidly over the past ninety years—from rudimentary Mickey Mouse flip-books to the richly animated films of today.”
Beside the old cartoon appeared a vibrant, hyperrealistic scene from a recent animated feature.
“This leap in quality is akin to the three-thousand-year evolution from cave drawings to Michelangelo’s masterpieces. As a futurist, I am fascinated by any skill that makes rapid advances,” Edmond continued. “The technique that makes this leap possible, I learned, is called ‘tweening.’ It’s a computer animation shortcut in which an artist asks a computer to generate the intermediate frames between two key images, morphing the first image smoothly into the second image, essentially filling in the gaps. Rather than having to draw every single frame by hand—which can be likened here to modeling every tiny step in the evolutionary process—artists nowadays can draw a few of the key frames…and then ask the computer to take its best guess at the intermediary steps and fill in the rest of the evolution.
“That’s tweening,” Edmond declared. “It’s an obvious application of computing power, but when I heard about it, I had a revelation and I realized it was the key to unlocking our future.”
Ambra turned to Langdon with a questioning look. “Where is this going?”
Before Langdon could consider it, a new image had appeared on-screen.
“Human evolution,” Edmond said. “This image is a ‘flip movie’ of sorts. Thanks to science, we have constructed several key frames—chimpanzees, Australopithecus, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Neanderthal man—and yet the transitions between these species remain murky.”
Precisely as Langdon had anticipated, Edmond outlined an idea to use computer “tweening” to fill in the gaps in human evolution. He described how various international genome projects—human, Paleo-Eskimo, Neanderthal, chimpanzee—had used bone fragments to map the complete genetic structure of nearly a dozen intermediary steps between chimpanzee and Homo sapiens.
“I knew if I used these existing primitive genomes as key frames,” Edmond said, “I could program E-Wave to build an evolutionary model that linked all of them together—a kind of evolutionary connect-the-dots. And so I began with a simple trait—brain size—a very accurate general indicator of intellectual evolution.”
A graphic materialized on-screen.
“In addition to mapping general structural parameters like brain size, E-Wave mapped thousands of subtler genetic markers that influence cognitive abilities—markers like spatial recognition, range of vocabulary, long-term memory, and processing speed.”
The display now flashed a rapid succession of similar graphs, all showing the same exponential increase.
“Then E-Wave assembled an unprecedented simulation of intellectual evolution over time.” Edmond’s face reappeared. “?‘So what?’ you ask. ‘Why do we care about identifying the process by which humans became intellectually dominant?’ We care because if we can establish a pattern, a computer can tell us where that pattern will lead in the future.” He smiled. “If I say two, four, six, eight…you reply ten. I have essentially asked E-Wave to predict what ‘ten’ will look like. Once E-Wave has simulated intellectual evolution, I can ask the obvious question: What comes next? What will human intellect look like five hundred years from now? In other words: Where are we going?”
Langdon found himself spellbound by the prospect, and while he didn’t know enough about genetics or computer modeling to assess the accuracy of Edmond’s predictions, the concept was ingenious.
“The evolution of a species,” Edmond said, “is always linked to that organism’s environment, and so I asked E-Wave to overlay a second model—an environmental simulation of today’s world—easy to do when all of our news about culture, politics, science, weather, and technology is broadcast online. I asked the computer to pay special attention to those factors that would most affect the future development of the human brain—emergent drugs, new health technologies, pollution, cultural factors, and so on.” Edmond paused. “And then,” he declared, “I ran the program.”
The futurist’s entire face now filled the screen. He stared directly into the camera. “When I ran the model…something very unexpected happened.” He glanced away, almost perceptibly, and then back to the camera. “Something deeply upsetting.”
Langdon heard Ambra draw a startled breath.
“So I ran it again,” Edmond said, frowning. “Unfortunately, the same thing happened.”
Langdon sensed true fear in Edmond’s eyes.
“So I reworked the parameters,” he said. “I retooled the program, altering every variable, and I ran it again and again. But I kept getting the same result.”
Langdon wondered if maybe Edmond had discovered that human intellect, after aeons of progress, was now on the decline. There were certainly alarming indicators to suggest this might be true.