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“The Small” refers here to human smallness. As individuals, we are small indeed, and collectively, humanity is small, too. Imagine a concert attended by all of humanity. How big a venue would you need? Not as big as I’d imagined—a space about as large as Shanghai’s Pudong District would suffice. Here’s another perverse thought experiment: If you were to make a meatball out of humankind, its diameter would be less than a kilometer. “The Great” refers, of course, to the universe. Every person has a deep sense of its enormity. The most distant light we see was sent out over ten billion years ago.
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“Captain, this is lunacy!” yelled the fleet commander. “You are telling us that an organism without any hereditary memory that transmits information using sound waves at one to ten bits per second can form a 5B-level civilization?! And that they developed this civilization entirely on their own, without any external assistance from an advanced civilization?!”
The space-time shock wave caused by Vessel Blue 84210’s hyperspace leap was considerably attenuated by the time it hit Earth. Every clock jumped three seconds ahead. Humans, confined as we are to three-dimensional space, were unaware of the disturbance. “It’s a pity,” said the High Archon. “They’ll be confined to sub-light speeds and three-dimensional space for another two thousand years without the intervention of a more advanced civilization. It will be at least a thousand years before they can harness the energy of matter-antimatter annihilation. Two thousand more years before they can
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“The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible,”* said the High Archon. “The most comprehensible thing about the universe is that it is incomprehensible,” said the senator.
“Will that little sun really be able to shine forever?” Yi Yi asked Li Bai. “At the very least, it will last until the new Earth civilization is advanced enough to create a new sun. It is a miniature white hole.” “White hole? Is that the inverse of a black hole?” asked Bigtooth. “Yes, it’s connected through a wormhole to a black hole orbiting a star, two million light-years away. The black hole sucks in the star’s light, which is released here. Think of the sun as one end of a fiber-optic cable running through hyperspace.”
She stared, captivated by the sphere with the dancing lights. “Is this consciousness?” “Yes. Just as a computer’s ability to operate is a product of a tremendous amount of zeros and ones, consciousness is also just a product of a tremendous amount of simple connections between neurons. In other words, consciousness is what happens when there is a tremendous amount of signal propagation between nodes.”
It was thirty-four years ago during a peaceful moonlit night on this mountain peak. A feather-like figure in the moonlight, a pair of eyes looking up at the stars … A twinkling in his brain quickly propagated through the entire universe of his mind. From then on, that twinkling never disappeared.
That universe contained in his brain was more magnificent than the star-filled exterior universe that had already expanded for about fourteen billion years.
Although the external universe was vast, the evidence ultimately showed it was finite. Thou...
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On its highest peak, at the vine-covered ruins of the observatory, these two nearly sixty-year-old people gazed eastward expectantly, waiting for that dazzling brain cell to rise over the horizon.
