The Lost Worlds of 2001

15. Universe
"But this is absurd," protested Victor Kaminski. "I'm not a bloody film star."

"Agreed," said Jules Manning, the Space Agency's Director of Public Affairs. "But you are the best-known astronomer in the world. If you do the commentary, we'll multiply the audience many times over. And the major networks will rush to carry it-especially as it won't cost them anything.

"I'm not even a particularly good astronomer-only a particularly healthy one, unaddicted to cannibalism, homosexuality, postnasal drip, and similar habits Not Wanted on Voyage. Or so the psychologists tell me."

"Seriously, Victor-you'll be doing the whole project a great service, and it won't take much of your time. Once you've read the script, the whole job can be done in an afternoon."

"I don't have any afternoons. Is it really all that important?"

"We think so. The last survey was rather depressing. Even now, twenty-three percent of the public thinks that the Sun is nearer than the Moon, that there are only a few thousand stars, and that they're not very big anyway. You can strike a major blow for education, and for astronomy if you'll go along with this."

"I'll make a deal-I'll speak the introduction. But I'm damned if I'll deliver the whole commercial-you'll have to get one of your tame actors for that. Agreed?"

"Agreed," said Manning promptly. He knew that half a loaf was better than no loaf at all. And, with a little patience and persuasion, he might yet get the other half as well.

MAN IS THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS, burned the slogan on the screen, then, superimposed on the lettering, appeared da Vinci's famous drawing of the standing human figure inscribed in a circle.

"If this statement is indeed true, and not vanity," began the commentator, "we can use man as a yardstick to measure the universe. Of course, he is a very short yardstick; so let us multiply him a thousandfold...."

The camera zoomed away, the figure dwindled until it was barely visible. Then it reproduced itself hundreds of times, to form a dotted line-one side of an empty square.

"Here is our man-our yardstick-one thousand times repeated. That square is a mile* on a side. Now we'll keep on changing scale-a thousandfold each time-until we have reached the edge of the known universe. And because we'll have to make quite a few jumps, let us write down the scale factor as a reminder."

Hopefully, by 2001 even the U.K. and the U.S. will have joined the civilized world and adopted the metric system.

The number 1000 appeared on the bottom of the screen. Then the square began to shrink, the digits blurred swiftly-and a new square appeared, with the number 1,000,000 beneath it. This 1000-mile-on-a side square was superimposed on the eastern seaboard of the United States; the original one-mile square was still just visible, marked by an arrow.

"Now we jump again, another thousand times...."

The number 1,000,000,000 came up, and in the million mile-wide square on the screen appeared Earth and Moon, looking quite small.

"Now we are out into astronomical space, and we are dealing with numbers that are already too large for comprehension. We need a more convenient measure, and we can get it by using the fastest thing in the universe-light itself. .

"A beam of light could go round our entire globe seven times in a single second...."

Here a glowing spot appeared beside the Earth, and blurred into a circle as it orbited the globe once every seventh of a second.

"And it takes just over a second to reach the Moon...."

The spot broke away from its orbit, and sailed across to the tiny disk of the Moon, taking 1 1/4 seconds for the trip.

"Now our next thousand-to-one jump-the fourth since we started with that man, back on Earth...."

Here were all the planets out to Jupiter-the whole inner Solar System: Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and Jupiter itself.

"On this scale, the planets are too small to be seen, we can only show their orbits. The picture is a billion miles on a side; light or radio waves would cross it in just over an hour. It shows the volume of space we have begun to explore; by our standards, it is enormous. All the men who have ever lived, laid end to end, would span about one tenth of it. But by the standards of the Universe, it is nothing. Here comes jump number five...."

The square shrank again; the number 1,000,000,000,000,000 flickered on to the screen. In the center of the new square, there was just one shining point-the Sun.

"The planets, of course, have vanished completely. But notice this-for the first time, nothing new has entered the picture. Even this huge jump has not taken us to the very nearest of the stars.

"If we wish to see them, we must jump again...."

1,000,000,000,000,000,000 flashed up, now the new square was dotted with dozens of tiny points of light.

"At last we enter the realm of the stars. There are a few hundred of them in this picture, which light takes 150 years to cross-the light which, remember, went from Earth to Moon in little more than a second. Of these stars, our own Sun is a perfectly average specimen. And because it is so average-so normal-we believe that many of the other stars are accompanied by similar planets, though they are too distant for our telescopes to show them. More than that-we also feel certain that many of those planets must have life.

"On this scale, the stars-our neighboring suns-appear scattered at random. But when we make the next, and seventh, thousandfold jump, we see that they form a pattern...."

Up came the number 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, and now even the individual stars had vanished. There was only a great spiral of glowing mist, almost filling the outlines of the square.

"This is the Galaxy-the slowly turning city of stars of which our Sun is a modest suburbanite-somewhere about here."

An arrow pointed to a region two-thirds of the way out from the center of the spiral.

"It takes light a hundred thousand years to cross this immense whirlpool of suns-this island universe. And it is turning so slowly that it has made only a dozen revolutions since life began on Earth.

"Call this the Home Galaxy, if you wish. The stars you see in the night sky are merely the local residents-most of them very close at hand. The more distant ones form the glowing background we call the Milky Way.

"And how many stars, how many suns, would you guess that the whole Galaxy contains? If you said a few million, you would be hopelessly in error. A few billion would be better; there are, in fact, about a hundred billion stars in the Galaxy. Every one of those a sun-thirty of them to every man, woman, and child now alive.

"We will return to our own Galaxy again-after we have seen the still greater background of which it is a tiny part. So once more we multiply our scale a thousand times....

"Yes, it looks like a field of stars. But it is not: each of those tiny smudges of light is a whole galaxy-this one might be ours. Our splendid star-city of a hundred billion suns, now reduced to a faint star itself. It would take light a hundred and fifty million years to cross this picture; this is how far we have gone in eight jumps, each of a thousand times, from the man we started with....

"But now-at last!-we are coming to the end of the line. For if we make one more jump, we run out of space itself...."

In the center of the screen, filling only a small fraction of the square frame that had surrounded each of the earlier pictures, was a globe of light. Its edges were slightly diffuse, fading away into the nothingness around it.

"This may be all of Creation-the Universe of Galaxies. Beyond this region, our most powerful telescopes cannot penetrate; indeed, there may be no beyond. For out at the cosmic horizon, at the ultimate limits of our vision, the galaxies themselves are disappearing from our sight, as if falling over the edge of space. What happens here we do not know; it may well be something which our minds can never grasp.

"So let us return from these far reaches, back to our Home Galaxy, with its hundred billion suns...."

The shining globe of the Cosmic All expanded at a dizzying speed. Presently its uniform glow broke up into tiny grains of light; these too expanded and drove apart. The screen was once more full of little whirlpools and spirals-some tangled in clusters, some alone. One of them grew and grew until it spanned the sky, and its raveled edges condensed into knots of stars.

"Our home galaxy, again, with its hundred billion suns," repeated the commentator, "most of them are little suns like our own-too small to be visible on this scale. All those you see here are giants; ours is only a dwarf, despite its overwhelming importance to us.

"And of those hundred billion suns, large and small- how many shine upon worlds that carry life? Perhaps most of them, for matter has the same properties throughout the universe. We know that life arose independently on Earth and Mars. we believe that it arises automatically on all worlds that are not too hot or cold, that have the common elements of oxygen and carbon and hydrogen, and that are bathed by sunlight for a few billion years.

"Yet even if life is common, intelligence may be rare; in the long story of Earth, it has evolved only once. Nevertheless, there may be millions of advanced cultures scattered throughout the Galaxy-but they will be separated by gulfs that light itself takes years to span."

Two arrows appeared, aimed at stars so close together in the sparsely populated outer arms of the Galaxy that they seemed to be neighbors.

"If this was our Sun, and we sent a radio signal to a planet circling this nearby one, it would take a thousand years for the reply.... Or, to put it in another way, we might expect an answer now, if the message left our world around the birth of Christ.... And this would be a conversation with one of the closest of our galactic neighbors.

"Yet even if it takes thousands of years to travel from star to star, a really advanced race might attempt the feat. It could send robot ships exploring for it-as Man has already sent his robots ahead of him to explore the Moon and planets."

There were shots of ungainly space probes-some familiar, others obviously imaginary-drifting across the stars, peering down at passing worlds with their television eyes.

"Or they might build huge space arks-mobile planetoids which could travel between the stars for centuries, while generation after generation lived and died upon them....

"Or they might hibernate, or be frozen in the changeless sleep of suspended animation, to be awakened by robots when their age-long journey neared its end....

"Even these are not the only possibilities. A very advanced race might be able to build ships that could attain almost the speed of light. According to Einstein, no material object can travel faster than this; it is the natural built-in speed limit of our universe. However, as we approach this speed, time itself appears to slow down. A space traveler might fly to a distant star in what, to him, appeared to be only a few months-or even a few hours.

"But only to him. When he returned from his destination, he would find that years or centuries had passed, that all his friends were dead, and, perhaps, that his very civilization had vanished. That would be the price of stellar exploration-trading Time for Space, with no possibility of refund. Yet the price might be attractive, to creatures whose lives are much longer than ours.

"Finally-perhaps Einstein's theory, like so many theories in the past, does not tell the whole truth. There may be subtle ways of circumventing it, and so exceeding the speed of light. Perhaps there are roads through the universe which we have not yet discovered-shortcuts through higher dimensions. 'Wormholes in Space,' some mathematicians have called them; one might step through such a hole-and reappear instantaneously, a thousand light-years away.

"But even if this is true-and most scientists think it pure fantasy-the exploration of the universe will still require unimaginable ages. There are more suns in the whole of space than there are grains of sand on all the shores of Earth; and on any one of those grains, there may be civilizations that will make us look like primitive, ignorant savages.

"What will we say to the peoples of such worlds, when at last we meet? And what will they say to us?"

"Thank you, Victor," said Manning when the screen blanked out and the red light in the dubbing room went off. "I knew you'd do it. Don't worry about the fluffs- we'll fix them. Anyway-what did you think of it?"

"Not bad-not bad. But I wish you hadn't put in that nonsense at the end."

"Eh? What nonsense?"

"Higher dimensions, wormholes in space, and all that rubbish. That's not science; it's not even good science fiction. It's pure fantasy."

"Well, that's exactly what the script said "

"Then why bring it in? Whose bright idea was it?"

"One Dr. Heywood Floyd's, if you want to know. I suggest you take it up with him."

Kaminski really meant it, but somehow the matter slipped his mind. There was so much work to do, so much to learn, that it was months before he thought of it again.

And then it was far, far too late.