Sometimes ideas come from talking to people. The following is more a thought than a story, but it illustrates what sometimes happens. It resulted from a conversation over breakfast one morning with a computer wizard called Charles Curley, during a convention in Sacramento at which I was guest of honor.
It also cost me twenty dollars. I didn't know how thick a postcard was for the example that I use in the opening sentence, and nobody I called on the phone could tell me. So I went into the hardware store next door to my office and bought a micrometer to measure one (it's 0.013 inch to save anyone who's insatiably curious twenty dollars). Perhaps this also says something about how science-fiction writers think. Ideas come from asking questions, and to ask questions you have to be curious.
One year is to 4.5 billion years as a cent is to 45 million dollars, or as the thickness of a postcard is to the distance between New York and the Mississippi.
That long ago, the earth formed as one of several accumulations of matter falling together in a spinning pancake of dust and gas that had condensed from the exploding debris of an earlier generation of stars. As the final meteorite bombardment died away and the planetary smelter processed and separated its rocky slags into mantle and crust, rain fell from the hot outgassings to become the first oceans.
There, in shallows and pools invigorated by young radionuclides and a raw, unshielded sun, a new chemistry began of molecules too elaborate to have come together in the rarified depths of space, and impossible in the plasma maelstroms of stars. Colliding, fragmenting, and recombining at quantum-mechanical speeds, billions of different combinations came and went during every second of hundreds of millions of years. Some of them proved stable and remained intact, and were able to grow into progressively more elaborate structures by further additions from the molecular constructor-kit soup. Eventually a few, or possibly only one, hit upon a configuration that would act as a template for parts to come together in the right way to form a copy of itself. Self-replication had appeared.
In their resource-rich primeval surroundings, the replicating molecules proliferated at an exponential rate and soon extinguished the feeble competition put up by their crude predecessors. The copies were not always accuratemutations occurred, each yielding its own line of offspring, and the competition came to be between different designs of replicators, all experimenting with different survival strategies. A potent strategy came with the invention of chemical warfare, which some varieties used to physically dismantle their rivalsit reduced the competition and increased available resources at the same time. In reply to this, the replicators that survived learned to build themselves protective molecular coatings. Defense stimulated new methods of attack, which resulted in improved defenses. . . .
In the billions of years that followed, the primitive molecular coats evolved into huge, elaborate survival machines which the replicators continue to control by remote programming from secure command bunkers deep inside. When a particular survival-machine begins wearing out and slowing down, the replicatorsvirtually immortal experts at survivalcopy themselves through into a new one. On their way down through the ages, acting through their progressively improving sequence of robot proxies, they have continued to invent new technologies that have opened up new realms of survival-enhancing resources. Early on, the blue-green algae freed themselves from dependency on food produced through slow, abiotic processes, by patenting the chlorophyll molecule and photosynthesis, which opened up the entire ocean surface as a resource. Even greater ingenuity turned the ensuing planetwide catastropheits inundation with the toxic, corrosive waste, oxygeninto an opportunity by evolving metabolisms which not only tolerated it, but thrived on it and harnessed it as fuel for better engines. Double-stranded instruction tapes enabled error-correction for accurate copying of the vast amounts of information necessary to build multicellular organisms; the sexual mixing of instructions from the growing information pool produced new combinations much faster than coincidences of mutations ever could; and the invention of the spacesuit in the form of the amphibian egg led to the colonization and exploitation by animals of a completely new, initially hostile, alien environment.
The progression led on through warm-blooded metabolisms, mammalian reproduction, and upright posture to binocular vision, opposable thumbs, and bigger brains. Eventually the species that represented the culmination of the process became self-aware, and learned to make tools and build artificial, inorganic survival-facilitating environments around the organic survival machines. That same self-awareness caused him to wonder where he had come from and why. He used his intelligence to construct enormous instruments, with which he scanned the remote reaches of the cosmos in search of a sign from his creator.
Eventually he found his creator in the opposite directionat the other end of a proton microscope. And at last he decoded the sign he had been seeking, which had been written into the creation: HELP! I'M A PRISONER IN A DNA FACTORY!
Afterword, 1996
The thing that strikes me most on rereading the above years later is its tone of blithe certainty about things that happened billions of years ago, shrouded in mists of time so deep as to defy comprehension. I wasn't around to know what went on, neither was anyone else, and the evidence to reconstruct it could fairly be called nonexistent. Speculation and conjecture abounds, of course (where else was what I wrote drawn from?), and there's nothing wrong with thatas long as we remain mindful of what it is, and don't begin confusing plausibility and pleasing self-consistency with proof of reality. Much of what I read in science these days comes across with the same oversure ring to it of expecting Nature to be somehow obliged to imitate the model, instead of the other way around. Maybe it reflects a necessity today of developing phony sales pitches to impress bureaucrats who allocate funding. This trend didn't trouble me very much ten years ago, but it's starting to now.