Submission

by Michel Houellebecq

‘Yes, the beauty of the universe is striking, but the sheer size of it is what staggers the mind. You have hundreds of billions of galaxies, each made up of hundreds of billions of stars, some of them billions of light years – hundreds of billions of billions of kilometres – apart. And if you pull back far enough, to a scale of a billion light years, an order begins to emerge. The galaxy clusters are distributed according to a vast cosmic graph. If you go up to a hundred people in the street and lay out these scientific facts, how many will have the nerve to argue that the whole thing was created by chance? Besides, the universe is relatively young – fifteen billion years old at the most. It’s like the famous monkey and the typewriter: How long would it take a chimpanzee, typing at random, to rewrite Shakespeare’s plays? Well, how long would it take blind chance to reconstruct the universe? A lot more than fifteen billion years