The Compleat McAndrews

There is a throwaway comment in the ninth chronicle, that McAndrew was going off to hear a lecture entitled “Higher-dimensional complex manifolds and a new proof of the Riema

Conjecture.” This is a joke intended for mathematicians. In the nineteenth century, the great German mathematician Bernhard Riema

conjectured, but did not prove, that all the zeroes of a function known as the zeta function lay in a certain region of the complex plane. Riema

could not prove the result, and since then no one has managed to do so. It remains the most important unproven conjecture in mathematics, far more central to the field than the long-unproved but finally disposed-of Fermat Last Theorem.

People will keep chipping away at the Riema

conjecture, precisely because it is unproven. Just as we will keep pushing for better observing instruments, more rapid and sophisticated interplanetary or interstellar probes, quantum computers, artificial intelligence, higher temperature superconductors, faster-than-light travel, treatment for all known diseases, and human life extension.

The future in which McAndrew lives is fiction, but I believe that the science and technology of the real future will be far more surprising. There will indeed be ships, built by humans and their intellectual companions, computers, headed for the stars. They will not be powered by Kerr-Newman black holes, nor employ the McAndrew balanced drive, nor will they tap the resonance modes of the vacuum zero-point energy. They will not be multi-generation arks, nor will they find life-bearing planetoids in the Oort cloud, or rogue planets in the interstellar void. What they will be, and what they will find, will be far stranger and more interesting than that. And they will make today’s boldest science fiction conjectures appear timid, near-sighted, small-scale, and lacking in imagination.

Writing of this I wish, like Benjamin Franklin, that I could be pickled in a barrel for a couple of hundred years, to experience the surprising future that I’m sure lies ahead. If I can’t do that and don’t last that long, here is a message to my descendants two centuries from now: On my behalf, make the most of it.