The World in Which I Dream

A group of four or five of us moved slowly along the dusty trail towards the low rhythmic singing. The red light of the setting sun moved quickly in the tropics, our shadows reaching out ever farther ahead of us into the African scrub, and over the cliff above the oxbow.

 We came upon the singers suddenly, surprising ourselves because they were standing on a ledge several feet below the rim of the cliff. Four grey figures sang on, oblivious to our appearance. Covered in mud and dusty rags, their bodies vibrated with the sound from the lowest registers. Two of the singers had no heads. Their windpipes took up most of their raggedly cut necks, and it was from these that the hypnotically low sound came. The two on the ends were half as tall, and their mud-caked dreadlocks were full of cracks. Their torsos were covered with designs in red, orange and grey clay; some with simple triangles and circles, others with complex saz-like patterns. The sound held us immobile in front of the frightening quartet until the song suddenly ended, and the singer nearest me quickly reached out and clamped down firmly on my privates, dragging me down the cliff and out onto the muddy shore of the river. At this point I was overcome with extreme terror, knowing that we were waiting for something large to appear from the river. My captor began a keening, and I heard his companions back up on the ledge take up the same song. Panicked, I strained over my shoulder to see if my companions were still there, but there was no one besides the immobile singers. I had been left alone with these creatures, and I could only guess that my colleagues and our guide were still running breathlessly into the sunset.

A light splash brought my attention back to the river, and I whipped my shoulders around, the pain telling me that I had been twisted for some time, desperately hoping to see any threads of help. The quiet moving in the water brought my heart to a stop. A long dark shape had approached our shore, and I began to shake as an enormous crocodile's head became slowly more defined in the fading light. The glassy eyes fixed on us, and I knew we had been spotted. My captor seemed unperturbed, and did not loosen his grip or cease his wail as the reptile's head came out of the water onto the silty slope. As the neck and forelegs emerged, I noticed that the rest of the crocodile was strangely light colored, matching the river's tans, rather than the dark greenish brown of the head. Even more strange was that the forelegs had no scales and the feet had no claws. Confused, I gazed down, and noticed that my own feet had disappeared into the mud, and small bubbles were rising out of the imprint they had left on the surface. A deep rumble made me look back up, and I could not breathe. I had to look above me to see the crocodile's head, which I realized was now about ten feet above the ground, as the monster was standing up to his full height. I was about even with the crocodile's belly button—-which I immediately realized no reptile could have—and nothing made sense any more.

The crocodile's head was on an enormous man's body, and I could just make out small drops of water running down his stomach and arms in the last light of the fast tropical twilight. My captor had stopped keening, and I realized he had also released me. However, between the depth of the mud around my feet and the confusion I felt at being in front of this thing, I was immobilized. The crocodile's head dipped towards us, and I heard a voice that gave me gooseflesh: full of sibilants and guttural notes, I knew that a question was being asked of me that I had no hope of answering, let alone understanding. My chest hurt with anguish and loneliness, but my captor began a high piping chant within which I caught some very old Somali words that I struggled to follow, piecing together a litany of crimes.

  "Sobek wishes to know why you are here, where you do not belong. He wants you to realize that he has come far, far from his home in the land of his lake to this place, to reunite what you have torn apart." ...

  "Sobek says that he has judged you, and your soul is found wanting. You are full of lies that you call truths. You have brought thousands of strangers here, and they have moved things that were not to be moved. You have moved the Nile. You have moved Sais and Philae. You have moved the dead. You are a thief and a plunderer." ...

  "Sobek says you have moved His Mother and Father, His Brother and His children. He says you have hidden your wives from Him, and He is full for them, having not lain with them for millennia. Your soldiers have slain His priests, pulled down His temples, and hacked His name from countless walls." ...

  "You have made images of his Mother that are untrue, and built temples to this lie. You have brought pestilence to both the dark waters. He says he can taste it in them, along with the blood of women and small children, killed by centuries of your brothers for false beliefs." ...

  "Sobek sentences your soul to the Devourer, and He shall cause you to be shat out into the Lake of Fire."

  The rumbling voice had stopped, and the last notes of my captor's chant floated out over the dark ripples. I slowly moved, and could see the figure ahead dimly against the dark sky. I began to croak, my voice sounding weak and childish as I shook uncontrollably. I spoke of my years of work trying to bring help to this region, to build schools, to build networks that could reliably distribute food, and the drilling and digging of so many wells. I tried to explain that many of these things I was accused of were not of my making, and were far beyond my control, were not of my people, nor even of my time. I spoke of my wife who was waiting for me, and expecting a child we had hoped could replace the one recently lost. I cried openly, and began to heave with sobs. The singer became agitated, and began to slap me, but I only stopped when a deafening roar came from Sobek, which made me stumble as I struggled in the stotches I had made. I fell forwards, and put my forehead on the cool mud, my arms stretched out in front of me, my weight on my knees and elbows. I heard a rustle and felt Sobek move, and then felt the air hurriedly rush out as His jaws closed around my head.

  I could see my decapitated body slowly get up, and my companion took me by the hand, and led me back to the group. I could hear my notes joining the others as we resumed the low rhythmic chant I had first heard on the wind a few hours before.

  Sobek slipped back into the water and headed back down river to the Fayyum and into his own insanity, caused by ten thousand years of watching Man change his land, and not understanding any of it.

#throughglass


Posted From Glass

Musings on Deep Time: it's all about the fizz

Musings on Deep Time Many of us have heard how old the Earth is, how old the solar system is, and perhaps even how old the universe itself is. Maybe you have even seen a timescale laid out, showing how if the age of the Earth was compared to one year, man and all his history wouldn't appear until December 31st. In fact, the other night, during the relaunch of the Cosmos television series made famous by Carl Sagan, the new host Neil DeGrasse Tyson did that, comparing the age of the universe to an Earth year. On that scale, everything we have ever done fit into the very last second of December 31st! In this same episode, DeGrasse Tyson gave a very brief description of the far future of the universe, and that got me thinking. I deal a lot with geological time in my job, so I'm used to thinking in tens of thousands of years, in millions of years, and occasionally in billions of years. Because of my past work with NASA and time at Caltech and MIT, I'm also interested in astronomical timescales, so even tens of billions of years are 'comfortable.' I was not prepared for the cosmological timescale. And neither are you. I guarantee it. 1. It's all about the fizz You have probably seen a timeline of the history of the universe that begins with the Big Bang, proceeds with all that star and galaxy formation stuff, and ends up with the large scale structures we see today. It struck me that these timelines always stop at the present. What about the next 20 billion years? What about the next 2,000 billion years? What do we think is going to happen? And so I went looking for papers on the subject. It turns out there aren't very many. Apparently such conjectures aren't good for publication records or tenure. And there's good reason for that - the various scenarios have large error bars, and depend on answers to questions we still haven't answered, like how long does matter last? How large can the universe get? How, exactly, do black holes die? How is mass related to gravity? What the heck is this 'dark matter' and 'dark energy' stuff? It turns out that those questions are much more complicated than we ever expected, and the answers (where we have any) are very weird. Anyhow. I shall sidestep all those complications, and cut to the chase. First: how long will the universe last? An unimaginably long time. Well, possibly even forever. But it's a forever I never want to see: it's very likely a very cold, very dark place. The only things in it are a few flecks of imperceptible light, so dim and weak that nothing could ever detect them. Every few duotrigintillion years (we'll get back to that) you might come across an electron. That's it. That's all. No trace of the Earth, the Sun, or of anything we ever did. No trace of any other civilization on any other star, on any other galaxy. Absolutely nothing. It will all be erased. The ultimate void. Perhaps Genesis had it backwards. Conclusion: very boring. Stultifying. So let's tell this story backwards, and find the very last 'really exciting' thing that happened. It turns out that label belongs to the disappearance of the last black hole. Yes, we think they disappear. They might be fearsome juggernauts in our universe right now, destroying entire stars, spinning whole galaxies, and fueling all kinds of science fiction nonsense, but in the end, they will simply fade out of existence. How the heck does that happen? Aren't they supposed to swallow everything forever? So here's the first little piece of weirdness I promised: black holes actually fizz. Stephen Hawking came up with this startling conclusion. I'll deal with the details somewhere else, but the essence of it is that at a very, very slow rate, black holes give off energy, and each time they do, they shrink a bit. If you wait long enough, even the biggest black hole imaginable will eventually evaporate. How long? A googol years. So there you go: you finally have a use for that word, googol. No, not Google. Googol. One duotrigintillion. A one followed by a hundred zeros: 10,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000 years. How do we wrap our brains around a number like this? Here's a little taste of how hard that is: let's try the DeGrasse Tyson trick, and make January 1 be year 0, and midnight December 31st be a googol years later. Now we've got a scale for the 'exciting' portion of the universe's lifetime laid out before us. Let's find out where man sits! And… you can't find it. Every single day looks the same: fizzy black holes. They get bigger as you go backwards, but even there, on January 1, the very beginning of our universal timescale, the whole day seems to be full of really boring, gassy black holes! What about the first second of January 1? Same. What about the first millisecond? Same. And so on. Microseconds, nanoseconds, femtoseconds, attoseconds, yoctoseconds, and beyond. We keep trying to find Earth, even our Sun, our Galaxy, anything. But on this scale, the scale of black hole lifetimes, of a googol years, even something so unimaginably old as the Earth, the Sun or even the 'TODAY' mark--13.8 billion years from the start--is too close to the beginning to see. So, on our cosmic calendar, before we even had time to look at our watches, everything we have ever known about, even our Sun, and even the very last star ever to shine, is gone before we know it, and we still have 365 days of fizzing to go. Can't we try a different trick? How about laying out that same googol years in a line, from here out to where Voyager 1 is, about three times as far from the Sun as Pluto, or 20 billion kilometers? Now, surely we should be able to see something other than fizz? Nope. Even before you have moved along that line over the width of one atom, everything is all fizz! It turns out that on that incredibly long line marking out the time from the Big Bang to the evaporation of the last black hole, the little mark for 'TODAY' is only 1/60,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000th of the width of an atom from the start. A googol years is a very, very, very long time, and most of it is really, really, really boring. However, remember that even this was not as boring as the 'cold dark forever' I described previously, which might last a googol googol years! Next: we zoom in so we can finally see something, sixty orders of magnitude, to the end of normal matter, at one tredecillion years, or a one followed by forty-two zeros: only 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years! After wrapping our brains almost around a googol, this ought to be easy. Right?