Red Moon

by Kim Stanley Robinson

He wondered if Shor’s algorithm, which took advantage of quantum superposition to factor large numbers, could be used to define the temporal length of a moment of being. It had to be longer—it felt much longer—than the minimum temporal interval, the Planck interval, which was the time it took a photon moving at the speed of light to move across the Pauli exclusion zone within which two particles could not coexist: that minimal interval of time was 10-44 of a second. A moment of being was more like a second, he felt, maybe three seconds. Meaning each moment of being was, when compared to the minimal interval of time, a near eternity. Much longer in proportion to the minimal interval than the lifetime of the universe was relative to a second. Although it could be argued that the universe’s lifetime had so far been fairly brief. He wondered what the largest prime number he could recite aloud might be.