Literature | Science
Three Cosmic Whoppers Our Favorite Science-Fiction Stories Taught Us
Stranger than the Strangest Fiction…
My first literary loves were science fiction and fantasy. For someone growing up in a small town, novels like O. R. Melling’s The Hunter’s Moon and Larry Niven’s The Integral Trees transformed the deep forest all around and night sky overhead into the edges of a vast and unimaginable universe. That’s still true, and science fiction in particular offers an invaluable bridge between what we know (or at least believe) right now and what might turn out to be true tomorrow, and what we might become as a result.
Stories tend to follow each other’s leads, though, and build on each other over time until the genre develops a very recognizable setting and rules, rules that have more to do with what makes for a good story than with trying to be realistic. From warp drives and wormholes to epic space battles between rival empires, science fiction often speaks with a shared language of tropes that, since almost none of us have gone to space, we end up relying on when we imagine what might be out there.
Here are three of the most common cosmic whoppers in science fiction, cases where what we’ve grown up seeing and reading doesn’t necessarily line up with what we’ve really learned about the universe so far…
It’s a Small, Small Universe
“Space is big,” goes the famous quote from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. “Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space. Listen…”
But then our heroes go on to visit more than a dozen inhabited worlds over the next several books, so maybe it isn’t quite so big after all.
The problem with the universe, when it comes to telling stories, is that not only is it really big, it comes with a speed limit. So far as we’ve observed, nothing has ever moved faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, and so far as the math works out, nothing ever can: it’d take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate anything with mass to light-speed. Without delving into very speculative solutions like traversable wormholes, space warping or some other exotic travel method, reaching the nearest stars will take centuries. We’ll have to use either a generational ship that can sustain a population long enough for the crew’s descendants to arrive (the only method that’s feasible with existing technology) or develop suspended animation (still very theoretical) so the crew can sleep through the trip. Either way, no one they know will be waiting back home.
“Space is big,” goes the famous quote from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. “Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space. Listen…”
There’s a lot of classic science-fiction literature out there about such generational voyages and the impact they’d have on both the crew and the people back home. But if you’re writing a weekly space adventure that involves characters making regular trips between star systems, that sort of thing doesn’t work so well — and those speculative solutions involving teleporters and hyperdrives start to sound awfully tempting.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In the long run, such shortcuts around the speed of light may end up working, and starships might really jump to a nearby star system in the same time it’d take us to fly across the Atlantic. But after fifty years of sci-fi movies and shows taking those shortcuts for granted, to the point that more recent series often don’t make any effort to explain how they work anymore, it can be easy to forget that the speed of light is even an obstacle. Optimism that we’ll someday overcome our limitations is admirable, but becoming blind to those limits has just the opposite effect: without understanding why they exist and what it might take for us to work around them, we risk becoming complacent.
It’s possible we’ll never be able to circumvent the speed of light and that, if we make it there, our interstellar colonies won’t resemble different cities here on Earth so much as bubble universes, each one with its own history and culture, each separated from the rest by many trillions of miles of void. With transmissions taking years to cross the gap, communication would be less about holding a conversation than about sending a constant stream of our history while it happens, a beacon to affirm we still exist.
It’d be a different future than the one we’re used to seeing portrayed, but a meaningful one all on its own. And, for right now, it’s the safest bet.
Life, uh, Finds a Way
Still, whether it takes a few hours in hyperspace or a few lifetimes with traditional propulsion, there’s little doubt we could eventually reach those neighboring stars and planets. What might we find when we get there? Science and science fiction have a great deal of interest in that question, and it’s another area where pop culture has helped shaped our expectations in a way that, at least for now, doesn’t have much basis in fact.
What are the odds that we’re alone in the universe? Are you tempted to say “virtually zero?” That’s the answer we hear quite often in documentaries, and it’s the answer most stories set in a spacefaring future take for granted. Humanity is typically portrayed as a fledgling species newly emerged in a galaxy that harbors truly ancient civilizations, whether it’s the Vulcans from Star Trek or the Asari from Mass Effect. Perhaps we make up for our youth by being more innovative, a reckless wunderkind seen as a threat to older, wiser aliens like Klaatu from The Day the Earth Stood Still.
At any rate, this planet is teeming with life, from bacteria that live in the stratosphere to extremophiles around deep-sea vents, and it’s been that way almost since the Earth cooled. And there are over a hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone. So the odds must be low for humans to be the only intelligent life. We must be a young upstart planet, right?
We don’t know. And after decades of searching, we still don’t know.
What we do know is that the Drake equation, a formula that begins with the starbirth rate of our galaxy and then can be filled in with educated guesses about their planets, seems to suggest that there should be a multitude of galactic civilizations. We also know that there doesn’t seem to be any sign of them, leading to the so-called Fermi paradox: as he put it, “where is everybody?” While we can excuse the apparent lack of life in our solar system as bad luck, Enrico Fermi noted that the galaxy is old enough that we should see signs of civilization all around us, from industrialized planets giving off infrared emissions to alien probes.
What we do know is that the Drake equation seems to suggest that, however conservative our estimates are, there should be a multitude of galactic civilizations.
This contradiction gives rise to the concept of the Great Filter, an almost insurmountable challenge to becoming a spacefaring civilization that either we’ve been lucky enough to surpass (perhaps it’s the rise of multicellular life or a written language) or something we still have to face (environmental destruction, nuclear war, an extinction event). If the filter is the former, we might find countless other planets with more primitive forms of life, but very few with intelligent life. If it’s the latter, we might instead find the abandoned ruins of countless civilizations.
You wouldn’t necessarily know that from science-fiction, though. Just like a space adventure without a warp drive would be boring (or, at least, a very different kind of story), a space saga with humans as the only characters isn’t something we’re used to seeing. It isn’t quite as unheard of, especially in more recent stories, but the temptation to create a thriving, inhabited universe for our heroes to explore, with alien characters who serve as a foil for human nature, can be irresistible for a writer, and generations of such stories can leave us with a deeply-rooted impression that there must be a galaxy full of life and adventure out there, just waiting to be found.
Was Ian Malcolm right: does life find a way? Maybe, but until we’ve found at least one other world with life on it, there’s no way to know the odds. They might be one in a hundred, a thousand, a million — or one in such an enormous number that the odds of finding anyone else are nil.
Going Out with a Bang
“Some say the world will end in fire,” wrote Robert Frost in his poem “Fire and Ice,” “some say in ice.” “This is the way the world ends,” T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” concludes. “Not with a bang but a whimper.”
It turns out that he was right, as were those who bet on ice in Frost’s poem. But there’s something deep in the human psyche that rebels against such an anticlimactic ending to the universe. Science fiction stories, and even popular science articles, continue to embrace the idea that the universe will have a definite, decisive ending, and that its death will be part of the cosmic circle of life, leading to the birth of another universe.
Almost as soon as the Big Bang was proposed, the idea of a corresponding Big Crunch captured the public imagination. The universe began a fiery explosion and would someday end in an equally fiery collapse. It fit perfectly with our own cyclical existence: sunrise and sunset, summer to winter, ashes to ashes and dust to dust. From there, the idea of a Big Bounce arose, the idea that, after the universe had ended, it would experience another Big Bang, a new universe to replace the old one. Maybe this had already happened many times before our universe began. That mirrored the human condition even better, and offered a sense of hope for the distant future: the next universe would live on after us, just as our universe was born from the ashes of one that came before it.
The trouble is that there’s never been any evidence for those models. For as long as astrophysicists have been doing the math, the results have pointed to an endless expansion and a gradual “heat death” of the universe. The stars and galaxies would grow further and further apart while all the useful energy is gradually consumed, first by the fading stars and then perhaps by evaporating black holes. Finally, when the black holes themselves are gone, the heavens would be left cold and still, and increasingly empty.
That mirrored the human condition even better, and offered a sense of hope for the distant future: the next universe would live on after us, just as our universe was born from the ashes of one that came before it.
Once dark energy was discovered in 1998, the situation became even bleaker. While the expansion was previously thought to be slowing, but never quite coming to a stop, now it was observed to be accelerating due to some unknown form of energy. Not only was Big Crunch off the table, whole new cosmic destinies now replaced it, from the “phantom universe” (a point when the expansion might someday exceed the speed of light, rendering the rest of the cosmos invisible and unreachable) to the “big rip” (the prospect of the acceleration eventually tearing spacetime apart).
Maybe that’s too depressing a thought, or too much at odds with the way we’ve understood life to work ever since our species became intelligent enough to consider it. You’ll find many, many sci-fi stories stubbornly clinging to the Big Crunch. From Star Trek and Red Dwarf to The Three-Body Problem and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the going assumption is often that the universe will nonetheless end in a blaze of glory.
A series of dramatic and very misleading headlines recently claimed that a Big Crunch and Big Bounce could still be possible, and that it might happen “remarkably soon.” What the Princeton study really showed was that, if we assume dark energy is about to reverse itself (something we currently have no reason to think will happen), then the universe may start to contract. This is almost identical to saying that, if gravity were reversed, we’d fall into the sky: it’s technically true, but it’s hardly a prediction.
But the idea of the universe ending in fire is a compelling one for writers and readers alike, and one we won’t be giving up anytime soon.
Beyond Our Imagining
In many ways, the universe as we believe it to be right now is a place of stark beauty and solitude. To look up at the night sky is to look up at an untouched creation, and the price we might pay for reaching out to the stars is to leave the Earth we know behind. I believe it’s still worth the cost, perhaps even more so. If we don’t make the journey, who else will?
But maybe not. Science is always learning from its mistakes, and maybe what we think we know will turn out to be wrong. Perhaps there really are fantastic alien civilizations waiting out there, and new ways of reaching them that we just haven’t come up with yet. And maybe there’s something more meaningful at the end than a slowly fading sky: if nothing else, quantum fluctuations may become large enough over such a vast time scale that they’ll eventually reset the universe. We don’t know yet.
Whether the cosmos are as vast and quiet as they seem or turn out to be filled with life and adventure, they’re beyond anything we might imagine here on the ground. I hope someday we’ll get to see it for ourselves.
Thank you for reading! Each Friday I’ll be posting a new article covering science, philosophy, psychology, pop culture — pretty much everything I think is interesting and worth talking about. If you’d like a sneak preview of this month’s upcoming articles, you can always find them on jeffereymoore.com.
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