Exhalation

by Ted Chiang

Literacy encourages a culture to place more value on documentation and less on subjective experience, and overall I think the positives outweigh the negatives. Written records are vulnerable to every kind of error, and their interpretation is subject to change, but at least the words on the page remain fixed, and there is real merit in that.

The universe is so vast that intelligent life must surely have arisen many times. The universe is also so old that even one technological species would have had time to expand and fill the galaxy. Yet there is no sign of life anywhere except on Earth. Humans call this the Fermi Paradox.

One proposed solution to the Fermi Paradox is that intelligent species actively try to conceal their presence, to avoid being targeted by hostile invaders. Speaking as a member of a species that has been driven nearly to extinction by humans, I can attest that this is a wise strategy. It makes sense to remain quiet and avoid attracting attention.

The Fermi Paradox is sometimes known as the Great Silence. The universe ought to be a cacophony of voices, but instead it is disconcertingly quiet. Some humans theorize that intelligent species go extinct before they can expand into outer space. If they’re correct, then the hush of the night sky is the silence of a graveyard.

Every parrot has a unique call that it uses to identify itself; biologists refer to this as the parrot’s “contact call.” In 1974, astronomers used Arecibo to broadcast a message into outer space intended to demonstrate human intelligence. That was humanity’s contact call.

Pythagorean mystics believed that vowels represented the music of the spheres, and chanted to draw power from them. Pentecostal Christians believe that when they speak in tongues, they’re speaking the language used by angels in heaven. Brahman Hindus believe that by reciting mantras, they are strengthening the building blocks of reality.

So the extinction of my species doesn’t just mean the loss of a group of birds. It’s also the disappearance of our language, our rituals, our traditions. It’s the silencing of our voice.

Reading, I saw that Lawson offered three hypotheses for the presence of humanity. The first was that humanity was the result of a separate act of creation, an experiment or test performed as rehearsal for the main undertaking. The second was that the creation of humanity was an unintended side effect, a kind of “sympathetic vibration” induced because of our solar system’s similarity to 58 Eridani. The third was that humanity on Earth was in fact the main undertaking, and life on 58 Eridani was the rehearsal or side effect. He rejected this last one as unlikely, because if we assume that miracles are signs of your attention, Lord, then a continuous miracle like a star orbiting a planet must be a clear indicator of what you consider most important.

I told him he was correct and said that now I realized why this discovery must be especially difficult for the two of them. “Do you really?” he asked. I told him what I surmised: that the only thing that had made his son’s death bearable was the knowledge that it was part of a greater plan. But if humanity is not in fact the focus of your attention, Lord, then there is no such plan, and his son’s death was meaningless.

I told him that science can be a salve to our wounds, but that shouldn’t be the only reason we pursue it. I said we have a duty to search for the truth. “Science is not just the search for the truth,” he said. “It’s the search for purpose.”

Free will is a kind of miracle; when we make a genuine choice, we bring about a result that cannot be reduced to the workings of physical law. Every act of volition is, like the creation of the universe, a first cause.

I’ve devoted my life to studying the wondrous mechanism that is the universe, and doing so has given me a sense of fulfillment. I’ve always assumed that this meant that I was acting in accordance with your will, Lord, and your reason for making me. But if it’s in fact true that you have no purpose in mind for me, then that sense of fulfillment has arisen solely from within myself. What that demonstrates to me is that we as humans are capable of creating meaning for our own lives.

But our lives have often been difficult even when we believed there was a divine plan, and we’ve persevered. If we have only ever been on our own, then our successes in spite of that are proof of our capabilities.

Every prism—the name was a near acronym of the original designation, “Plaga interworld signaling mechanism”—had two LEDs, one red and one blue. When a prism was activated, a quantum measurement was performed inside the device, with two possible outcomes of equal probability: one outcome was indicated by the red LED lighting up, while the other was indicated by the blue one. From that moment forward, the prism allowed information transfer between two branches of the universal wave function. In colloquial terms, the prism created two newly divergent timelines, one in which the red LED lit up and one in which the blue one did, and it allowed communication between the two.

“But the mistake that all of us keep making is that, when we see our paraselves experiencing good fortune, we think we’re entitled to the same good fortune.”

“I don’t think I’m an envious person by nature, and I don’t think you are, either. We’re not always wanting what other people have. But with a prism, it’s not other people, it’s you. So how can you not feel like you deserve what they have? It’s natural. The problem isn’t with you, it’s with the prism.”

Silitonga had shown that the smallest change imaginable would eventually have global repercussions. For a hypothetical time traveler who wanted to prevent Hitler’s rise to power, the minimal intervention wasn’t smothering the baby Adolf in his crib; all that was needed was to travel back to a month before his conception and disturb an oxygen molecule. Not only would this replace Adolf with a sibling, it would replace everyone his age or younger. By 1920 that would have composed half of the world’s population.

In the private sector, entrepreneurs realized that while the information obtained from prisms had limited instrumental value, it was something that could be sold as content to consumers. A new kind of data broker emerged: a company would exchange news about current events with its parallel versions and sell the information to subscribers. Sports news and celebrity gossip were the easiest to sell; people were often just as interested in what their favorite stars did in other branches as in what they did in their own. Hard-core sports fans collected information from multiple branches and argued about which team had the best overall performance and whether that was more important than their performance in any individual branch. Readers compared different versions of novels published in different branches, with the result that authors faced competition from pirated copies of books they might have written. As prisms with larger pads were developed, the same thing began happening with music, and then film.

“We like the idea that there’s always someone responsible for any given event, because that helps us make sense of the world. We like that so much that sometimes we blame ourselves, just so that there’s someone to blame. But not everything is under our control, or even anyone’s control.”

A popular use of a prism was to enable collaboration with yourself, increasing your productivity by dividing the tasks on a project between your two versions; each of you did one half the job, and then you shared the results. Some individuals tried to buy multiple prisms so that they’d be part of a team consisting solely of versions of themselves, but not all the parallel selves were in direct contact with each other, which meant that information needed to be relayed from one to another, consuming the prisms’ pads faster. A number of projects came to an abrupt end because someone had underestimated their data usage, exhausting the prism before the work done in one branch could be transmitted, leaving it forever inaccessible.

If the same thing happens in branches where you acted differently, then you aren’t the cause.

The behaviorist psychologist B. F. Skinner designed a special crib for his daughter, and there’s a persistent myth that she grew up psychologically damaged and eventually committed suicide. It’s completely false; she grew up healthy and happy.

On the other hand, consider the psychologist John B. Watson, known as the founder of behaviorism. He advised parents, “When you are tempted to pet your child, remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument,” and he shaped views on child-rearing for the first half of the twentieth century. He believed that his approach was in the best interests of the child, but all of his own children suffered from depression as adults, with more than one attempting suicide and one succeeding.

I’m pretty confident that even if the many-worlds interpretation is correct, it doesn’t mean that all of our decisions are canceled out. If we say that an individual’s character is revealed by the choices they make over time, then, in a similar fashion, an individual’s character would also be revealed by the choices they make across many worlds. If you could somehow examine a multitude of Martin Luthers across many worlds, I think you’d have to go far afield to find one that didn’t defy the church, and that would say something about the kind of person he was.