8 Epilogue
Los Alamos Laboratories, New Mexico, 2145. It is lunchtime.
Our gaze is directed towards a quiet corner of the otherwise busy
refectory hall. “The Time Traveler” (for so it will be convenient
to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us.1
“I have seen the desolation that will be wrought upon Earth
by the aging Sun.” The response at the table was immediate. A
multitude of crop-haired heads turned in unison. Conversations
stopped in mid-sentence. The Time Traveler had our attention.
“As you all no doubt know,” he continued, “The Osgiliath2
Project unlocked the fundamental secrets of time travel two years
back. But just four days ago, by Earth time, I took the very first
human journey down a deep-future timeline.”
We sat in stunned silence. This was news indeed. Certainly
we all knew of the Osgiliath Project, and two Nobel Prizes had
come to the laboratory as a result of it. But to actually send a
human into the future—that was incredible. The official line was
that only inanimate matter could be sent through time, and then
only atomic-sized objects at that. A number of nanobots3 had been
sent through the time portal to verify that the process actually
worked, but to think that the future had been revealed to human
eyes, that was truly food for thought.
“Come on, that’s impossible,” one of the younger researchers
taunted. “We all know that only non-sentient objects can be sent
through the time funnel.4 You’re joking – right?"
“I traveled into the future. It is the truth,” the Time
Traveler replied, making no further effort to justify his fantastic
announcement. His haunted expression, however, left us all a
little uneasy. Indeed, upon reflection, it was clear that the trauma
of seeing the deep future, and what lay in store for Earth, sat
raw and indelibly stamped upon his face. “I initially traveled 4
209
210 Rejuvenating the Sun and Avoiding Other Global Catastrophes
billion years into the future,” he eventually continued after a
long, reflective silence. “I cannot convey the sense of abominable
desolation that hung over the world. The red eastern sky, the
northward blackness, the salt Dead Sea ... the uniform poisonouslooking
green of the lichenous planets, the thin air that hurts one’s
lungs; all contributed to an appalling effect.“1
Not one of us at the table moved. It was as if time stood still.
We could hardly breathe. All eyes were directed towards the Time
Traveler. Could his story really be true? Certainly, we all appreciated
from basic astrophysics that the Sun must eventually go
through a giant phase, but the consequences of that evolution were
something that had never truly registered in any of our thoughts.
“I pushed deeper down the timeline,” he eventually offered.
“The Sun grew ever brighter; Earth became ever hotter.” Then,
with a look of anguish showing across his brow, he added, “The
huge red-hot dome of the Sun had come to obscure nearly a tenth
part of the darkling heavens. I looked about me to see if any traces
of animal life remained, but I saw nothing moving in Earth or sky
or sea. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of
birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of
our lives—all was over.” 1
And so the narrative of the Time Traveler continued. We,
his audience, sat dumbstruck, listening to his every word and
revelation about the distant future and the eventual destruction of
Earth, our home, by a bloated, red giant Sun.
“But is all this inevitable?” someone eventually asked. “Must
this Sun-driven ruin be Earth’s inevitable future?"
“No, it is not inevitable,” the Time Traveler responded.
“What I have seen need not come to pass. It is just the present
future that I have witnessed.” With these words the Time Traveler
appeared to be done with his story. We all began to breathe
again, none of us quite realizing how deeply absorbed we had
become involved in the details being recounted. Bodies shuffled
and stretched. A few people left the table, shaking their heads as
they walked away; others sat in contemplative silence.
A few days after his lunchtime revelations, the Time Traveler
disappeared. We never saw him again. Questions were asked, of
course, and the police even investigated, but absolutely no trace
of his whereabouts could be found. The Osgiliath Project was also
closed down a few weeks after the Time Traveler disappeared, the
Epilogue 211
accountants apparently finding the project to be too expensive,
and of affording too few prospects for practical development and
near-term investment expenditure recovery. Rumors abounded, as
they always do in a place like this, that the project had gone
underground and that the military boys were running the research
now. Who knows? But one thing is for certain. After hearing what
the Time Traveler had to say, a few of us that were seated around
that lunch-time table have started to investigate ways in which
the long-term husbandry of our Solar System might be achieved
through the rejuvenation and engineering of the life-giving Sun.
Notes and References
1. Extracted from H. G. Wells, The Time Machine. Random House, New
York edition (1931).
2. A name shamelessly taken from J. R. R. Tolkien. Osgiliath is Sindarin
Elvish for ‘citadel of the stars.’ It was at Osgiliath that the chief palantir
was kept, before being lost during the great civil war of Gondor.
A palantir was a crystal globe that could show events from far away
in both space and time. The history of Osgiliath is given in Tokein’s
The Silmarillian [Allan and Unwin, London (1977)].
3. Nanotechnology or technology on the nanometer (10−9-m) scale will
presumably be well developed by 2145, the imagined time at which
the Epilog is set. Indeed, even today scientists at Columbia University
have announced the development of a molecular spider that uses
four, 10-nanometer long DNA ‘legs’ (the researchers conveniently
appear to have forgotten that spiders actually have eight legs, but
no matter) to clear a sterile path along a substrate. The specific
research paper Behavior of polycatalytic assemblies in a substratedisplaying
matrix is by Renjun Pei and co-workers, is published in
the Journal of the American Chemical Society , 128 (39), 12693-12699
(2006). Neural computer networks incorporating biological ‘brains’
composed of cultured rat neurons have also been described recently by
Thomas DeMarse and co-workers in, The Neurally controlled Animat:
Biological brains acting with simulated bodies. Autonomous Robots,
11, 305–310, (2001).
4. I have no real idea what to call the time ‘funnel,’ but I have always
liked Kurt Vonnegut’s expression “chrono-synclasic infundibulum,”
as used in his 1972 play Between Time and Timbuktu, or Prometheus
Five. An infundibulum (of course) is something that is funnel-shaped.
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