In 1943, science fiction writer A. E. van Vogt published the last of a quartet of novelettes that would eventually be gathered together to form the book The Voyage of the Space Beagle. In it, van Vogt imagines a being so vast it literally fills the space between the stars of a distant galaxy. It's a creature so exotic that even among a crew of explorers sent out to look for alien life, it's nearly missed. And it's no wonder. The difference in scale and nature between the humans aboard the Space Beagle and the creature through whose tenuous mass they fly is many times greater than that between a bacteria and a blue whale.
This book was one of the first pieces of science fiction that I ever read. I still have the treasured copy from 1950 (delivered to my mother by mistake when the Book of the Month Club misread her order). And I was fortunate enough later in life to meet A. E. van Vogt and collect his signature on that old, many-times-read volume.
None of which has a lot to do with Easter -- except that, as someone who considers himself both a scientist and a Christian, I think van Vogt's story helped me reconcile the beliefs that would define my life.
Imagine a being that's truly big. One that doesn't just just dwarf us, but makes van Vogt's galactic being seem like a minnow. A being so big that it doesn't live in the universe, it contains the universe. A being to whom the spaces between galaxies are no more consequential than the gap between the hairs on our arm. One for whom the Milky Way is less than the dot at the end of the encyclopedia.
Not only is this creature incomprehensibly huge in terms of size, but also in terms of age. It predates -- if such a term can have any meaning -- the Big Bang. The expanse of deep space and the mind-bending span of deep time are it's substance. It's home.
More than that, the very boundaries of the universe are not its boundaries. If there are other universes out there, an infinity in which our clump of space time exists as just one bubble in an endless froth. Space, said Douglas Adams, is big. And so it time. This thing is bigger.
But it's not big and dumb, this enormous thing. It's not some great Star Treky amoeba that ate the universe and is now crawling around blindly looking for desert. It understands the things that it contains. Its understanding is just as big, just as deep, just as jaw-droppingly overwhelming as its size and age. If you imagine that it has a billion eyes looking through a billion telescopes, another billion fixed on microscopes, researchers reading a billion simultaneous reports, supercomputers running climate models, and a seat on the board at Google -- you haven't even come close.
God is an alien. And not just an alien. God is an alien more strange than anything ever conceived by the writers of golden age sci fi. It (and yes, I'm deliberately not saying "he") is a creature far more frightening than any goggle-eyed veiny big headed baddie on the cover of Strange Tales, more different from us than a silicon-based critter that bores through rock. You grok?
To such a thing, we must be... well, insignificant doesn't even cover it. And yet...
Maybe this isn't just one bubble in the big multi-universal bubble bath. Maybe this isn't just experiment #135,412 of an infinite series. Maybe this is bubble is one in which -- after lots of twisting on a variable here, a constant there -- things turned out interesting enough to attract the attention of the Big It.
In this bubble, the values of the strong nuclear force, the charge of the electron, the mass provided by all those unseen Higgs bosons, all of that was just right to provide a universe that didn't remain an undifferentiated dot or blow up into a fog of cold quarks. This is a universe that produced generations of stars. Stars whose size, color, nature, and lifespan are more variable than flowers in a field. That's interesting. It's a universe in which the death throws of those stars generates the raw materials for planets studded with craters, ridged with mountains, cut by canyons, washed by oceans. That's interesting.
It's a universe that accommodates chaos -- which is really interesting. The kind of place where, after a few billion years (a little more some places, a little less in others) leads to the kind of conditions where a few chemicals can bond together into complex activity. The kind of activity It finds really interesting.
Because if you wait a few billion years more (a pleasant afternoon when you're essentially outside time), those interesting chemicals get around to being complex beings. Some of which -- though they're staggeringly small and tragically transient -- share a lot more in common with It than might be expected. They -- we -- can think.
How we think is itself something of a mystery. Yes, it happens in a blob of fat and protein encased in a protective shell. But how that wrinkly thing generates that sense of being -- the sense that you are in the body, but not just the body. Consciousness. That's harder to explain. Is it all just electricity running through a sufficiently complex set of neural switches? Maybe. Or perhaps there's a quantum effect involved, a system for harnesses that universal chaos and dipping into activity at a subatomic level. There are many neuro-scientists -- including a lot of folks pretty inimical to the idea of the Big It -- who don't think even a quantum brain can explain that spot where brain and mind diverge. Some of them think that the mind is generated through an interaction that goes outside the bubble of our universe, and into the froth, where it can encounter the infinite dance of action and consequence.
In any case, in this bubble, It wants to talk to us. In a very real way, we are Its children -- the outcome of all that knob-twisting to generate this universe... and perhaps a lot of tinkering since then. Of course, tsetse flies are also Its children.
Anyway, It could have cracked the sky, rattled the mountains, set the seas to boiling, and bellowed "Hey, you funny little things. Look up here! I made you! Let's talk." That's well within it's (massively unlimited, indefinably huge, etc.) power. And maybe it did exactly that. Only that approach didn't really work out that well. Hey, if it's hard for us to think about how such a all-encompassing thing would think, predicting our reaction might also prove difficult for It.
When a creature has worked through a lot of test runs to get an interesting universe, one populated by things with which It can at last communicate, it's no real surprise that It might need to take a few passes to get the communication channel tuned.
It could have decided to clamp a patented Big It Brain Collar on every one of these thinking things, but that went against Its nature. After all, this was a universe where It was fully aware of every sparrow that fell -- but It didn't make a habit of catching them. It liked the chaos. Liked the fact that these things did weird things, made odd decisions. Loved it when they stood up and lectured It on the way the universe worked. So it tried different ideas at different times, to different groups of thinky things.
One of those passes goes like this: to demonstrate It's affinity for these creatures that think, It decided to make a Grand Gesture. It made Itself subject to the temporal, spatial, physical limits they endure. So It placed a copy of Itself in one of these little jars of flesh, and pushed little It onto the stage right where multiple civilizations of the little creatures met in a boil of ideas and conflict.
Once It go Its wobbly new legs stable, It got around to the message It had been trying to deliver:
- The guys in power? They're not that important.
- We're all connected. Me to you. You to Me. And all of you together.
- Take time to contemplate things bigger than yourself.
- Pay less attention to all the stuff that doesn't think. It's not very important.
- No matter how much stuff someone has, they're not more important.
- No mater what someone has done, forgiving them is your best bet.
It had been around for a long, long time, and it knew a lot about these things. It also knew that some of the thinking things -- the ones that had a lot of stuff, and power over others -- wouldn't like this advice one bit. It pretty much knew what they would do.
That was okay. Yes, It had to do this. It had to suffer, to be tortured, to experience death. But the reason wasn't because there was some kind of rule. Some kind of cosmic "these things only get to experience what it's like to live outside their temporary shells if you follow this check list." It made the rules. If It wanted to, the sky-cracking "Hey, here I am again. There's a lot more to you than you can see." route was still open.
No, It followed the path that had the suffering not because there was a magical formula requiring one part blood, two parts nails. It did it to show that It's not only endlessly big, endlessly old, but endlessly sympathetic to the plight of we little thinking things. It had to go this route, if only to demonstrate that the message It brought extended to all of us -- including the Big It. It did it to say "I'm not just your father/mother/creator. I'm also your sister/brother/fellow sufferer. We're all trying to understand each other. We're all on the same voyage."
If the grand gesture of Easter didn't reach you, don't worry. It didn't stop thinking of other ways to reach out. It didn't stop being interested.
It didn't run out of time. Neither did you. You never will.