Learning the World

“And how long would it take to implement this expected advice?”

“We don’t know.”

“It could be decades,” said Horrocks. “Frankly, even asking them to wait eight years would be like — well, as your friend said, like telling a seedpod not to pop.”

“It has to be done.”

Living half a mille

“All right,” he said, “but even if I did try to do that, I have no way of using my influence. Except talking to people I know. I’m no public writer or speaker.”

“You can start by talking to someone who is,” said Synchronic. “Atomic Discourse Gale.”

He stared at her, feeling he was either being teased, or had been caught in a wile. “She detests me!”

Synchronic’s gaze was unfathomable. “I know. It’s only to be expected… at her age.”

Now what did she mean by that? He chose not to inquire.

“She’s very likely to argue against anything I say, take the opposite position just because it’s me who’s—”

“Yes, yes,” said Synchronic. “Let us worry about that. You do your bit, make your case, and let the law of unintended consequences take care of the rest.”

“All right,” said Horrocks. He rose to his feet. Synchronic remained seated.

“Don’t go yet,” she said. She smiled, looked down, and looked up. “All this talk about seeds popping.”

14 365:05:14 20:10

“Your thinking is metaphysical.”

Thus Grant, this morning. I stared at him. That’s the first thing he’s said that I couldn’t understand. We had met, as usual, by the newsline hotspot on the corner of Fourth and Curved, and were walking, as usual, to the Yellow Wall Cafe, reading our grabs as we went. I blinked away columns. “What?”

“Abstract, not rooted in experience.”

“Oh, you mean about the contact clause?”

I’d concede that: my query, though published in several significant outlets, hadn’t drawn so much as a comment.

“No,” he said. He shoved his hands in his shorts pockets and walked on along Fourth. “In ‘Learning the World.’ ”

“You’ve read it?” I said, with what I hoped was the right mix of appreciation and sarcasm.

“All of it,” he said. “Last night.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, thank you. So what’s metaphysical about it?”

“Your arguments about what the existence of aliens tells us about the universe. You start with the principle of mediocrity — that we are in no unusual situation, not privileged observers — and conclude from that that if there are aliens with an origin and level of development so close to ours, the galaxy is about to light up with alien transmitters.”

“Nothing metaphysical about that. Two close together is unlikely unless there are lots all over the place.”

I held the cafe door open for him.

“Oh, but it is,” he said, breezing through and barging for the counter. “Metaphysical.”

“I still don’t understand what you mean by that.”

“You start from some point of logic and try to deduce something about the nature of the world.”

“As in, one plus one makes two?” I put the corresponding pieces of berrybread on my plate, one by one, under his nose.

“One and a half, now,” he said, chomping.

We got our coffees and sat down.

“Let me give you an example I trawled up,” he said, half a cup and several rounds of argument later. “ ‘From the principle of plenitude, we conclude that God would have created aliens. From the Fermi Paradox, we conclude that if there are aliens, they would be here. But there are no aliens. Therefore God does not exist. Discuss.’ ”

I nearly choked on a mouthful. “That isn’t a metaphysical argument! It isn’t any kind of argument! It’s a rocking string of non sequiturs!”

“So it is,” he said. “And so’s yours.”

“Where did you drag that up from anyway?”

“Prehistory,” he said. “Early decades AG, anyway. And it was, I suspect, a parody of arguments even older than that. Or perhaps contemporary. Consider this one. If humanity is to fill the galaxy, the human population at that time in the future will be many orders of magnitude greater than the present human population. Agreed?”

“OK.”

“Therefore the probability of being alive in a future galactic human community is billions or trillions to one greater than being born now, when humanity only fills a tiny fraction of the galaxy. But we are alive now, which is very unlikely unless there is no vastly greater future human population. Therefore humanity will soon become extinct.”

I pounced on a too obvious flaw. “It might just stop expanding.”

Grant shook his head. “You still get far more future humans than present humans, even if we stay with same population for say the ten million years it would take to fill the galaxy. And thus, the same desperate improbability of our existence among the first, unless we’re also among the last.” He looked around, shoulders hunched. “Doom lurks unseen.”

“That’s even more stupid than the last one!” I said. “Somebody has to be among the first. It’s just a brute fact.”

Grant leaned back, patted his belly, and smiled. “Exactly.”

If he’d made a point I didn’t see it.

“I mean, somebody could have made that argument when they were in the caves.”

“It was made before the caves, actually,” said Grant. “But don’t you see? Your argument is of the same type.”

“No, it is not,” I said. “That argument starts with a completely arbitrary notion, the ‘probability of being born,’ which is probably meaningless in the first place, and tries to deduce without any additional facts…”

At that point I ran out of road. I could see where I was going. “All right,” I said, with ill grace. “Point taken. So how do you explain it?”

A serving machine beeped. Grant took the coffee pot from its top and refilled our cups. He finger-tipped the machine and it wheeled on.

“Maybe it doesn’t have an explanation,” he said. “It doesn’t have to. We can in principle explain how life arose and developed and so on on both planets of origin. What else do we need to do? Do we need a separate explanation of why it arose on two so close together? Why? It’s just a brute fact. It happened. Things do. Events.”

“It’s still a big coincidence.”

“Yes,” he said. He gazed at me with a serious expression, unlike his habitual flippancy. “It’s a big coincidence. It’s something we can’t explain. But as far as we know that’s all it is. And if it isn’t, we’ll only find out by discovering more facts, not speculating, no matter how logical that speculation might seem. The way to learn the world is to look at the world.”

I could hear some criticism there, some tone of disappointment and reproof. And (sorry, Grant, if you’re reading this) I did not take it well, and I had no intention of letting him take it further. So I resorted to saying: “You’re a bit intense this morning, Grant Cornforth.”

“Yes,” he said. He sipped his coffee. “Sorry.”

I took this undeserved apology with a gracious wave of the hand. “That’s all right. Well, I have work to get on with. Same time tomorrow?”

“Of course,” he said. As I stood up he added: “Nice dress, by the way.”

I looked down at the rippling emerald satin shift. “Thank you,” I said, stepping away.

“Good choice,” he called after me.

“Yes, but the choice wasn’t mine,” honesty made me admit, over my shoulder. “My caremother sent it to me.”