It sounds like
something out of a B-grade science fiction novel I once read. I have always
considered Stephen Hawking’s argument against time travel to be the most
down-to-earth answer ever to come out of the mouth of a cosmologist. He argued
that backwards time travel will never be invented because if it ever will be,
we’d be seeing time tourists right now. Whenever you saw a gaggle of pasty
white legs tucked into holographic Bermuda shorts, you’d know something big was
about to happen…
Actually, backwards
time travel is theoretically
permitted in certain mathematical solutions of Einstein’s theory of general
relativity, but it’s hard to see how that wouldn’t create paradoxes.
What would happen, for example, if you traveled backwards in time and murdered
your own mother when she was a small child? After all, if you were never born,
how would you travel back in time to kill your mother in the first place?
Under one solution to
the time paradox problem, the Novikov Self-Consistency Principle, you could
never create a time paradox because time travel is a part of history too. In
other words, if you tried to shoot your mother you would miss, and if you
wouldn’t have missed you wouldn’t have been able to travel backwards in time in
the first place. The question of why you missed, since there would be no
invisible force deflecting your bullet, could be explained only by resorting to
a form of cosmic Darwinism: only self-consistent time loops are fit to survive.
Paradoxical time loops, due to the very nature of time loops, are “destroyed”
by virtue of never being created to begin with.
Certain scientists,
mathematicians and philosophers have speculated that the universe would split
in two if you tried to do that – one universe in which your mother died and you
were never born, and another universe in which she lived. In this scenario,
when you returned to your own present with bloody hands, you would find your
mother alive and well with no memory of any assault. In the next universe over
– the same place and time separated by an invisible wall of causality: you were
never born and your mother is long dead.
Indeed, my own
universe had been split in two all afternoon: Thailand was to my right and Laos
was to my left. Since we were right near the center of the river, I wasn’t sure
which side of the border we were on. This jurisdictional limbo must have been
why the backpackers all seemed to be lighting up their hash pipes at the same
moment. Cannabis makes me paranoid, but there was a small bar on board that was
“manned” by some Laotian kid who couldn’t be more than eight years old. I
pointed at a warm can of Beer Lao and gave him 8,000 Lao Kip, worth about a
dollar. He dutifully handed over the beer, then poured an amber liquid out of a
metal thermos into a couple of dingy wine glasses. He offered one of them to me
with an impish grin and the explanation “Lao-Lao wheeezkii”.
I took the glass with
gusto and raised it to the canopy. Five seconds and two digital photos later I
had learned two important lessons about Laotian whiskey – (i) it tastes like
kerosene, and (ii) it packs a wallop. The hippie with the camera was staring at
his mobile giggling at the photographs he had just taken. I can only hope he
didn’t get the bright idea of forwarding them to the Vatican. It just wouldn’t
do for a Catholic priest to be seen chugging whiskey with an eight-year-old
Laotian boy.
Four hours ahead on
the Laotian side of the river, a village of a few hundred fishermen called Pakbeng
is carved out of the jungle with machetes. I’ll be spending a few hours there
debunking yet another alleged miracle, the so-called Pakbeng Fountain of Youth.
Admittedly, miracle debunkery is a rather ironic occupation for a priest,
especially since my employer is none other than the Vatican itself. But as a
physicist I am certainly qualified, and the Holy See seems to feel that
debunking false claims of miracles, especially by non-Catholics, will lend
credibility to the rare occasions when real miracles can actually be confirmed.
I guess that’s why our investigation team (we called ourselves the DeBunkeroos
in private) includes a token atheist, my militant ex-friend Dr. Bogans – his
inability to explain away a given phenomenon can only add weight to the case
for the miraculous.
A quote attributed to
science fiction author Arthur C. Clark floated across my tipsy mind, something
about how any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
I wondered how the Vatican classified what we found on the Shroud of Turin.
With any luck they’ll be able to keep that one a secret indefinitely. Our
investigation revealed that the parts of the Shroud that contained original
fabric were infested with literally trillions of nanobots: microscopic self-replicating
robots, some not much larger than individual molecules. We weren’t sure where
the Shroud bots came from, but they were based on technology that was hundreds
of years in advance of anything any of us was familiar with.
The bots were dormant
when we discovered them, sort of like a virus that can go inactive for
thousands of years and then come back to life. Bogans brought them back to life
using a magnetic field. After an attempt at reverse engineering and some animal
testing, we speculated that the bots might have the ability to cure certain
diseases by entering the body, replicating themselves by the trillions and
repairing any infirmity one cell at a time. We still weren’t really sure of
their capabilities due to limits on our ability to reverse engineer – hell, if
you could reverse engineer anything I would have obtained the formula for
Coca-Cola long ago. Of course the Vatican kept the Shroudbots a secret from the
public, fearing the effect that such a revelation would have on the faith.
The bots’ ability
to self-replicate can make them act like bio-toxins. A runaway replication
reaction might result in unpredictable consequences, especially if they are
able to evolve into something else, and we don’t yet know whether they have
evolutionary capacity. The whole situation reminds me of another book I once
read, Lost in a Good Book by Jasper
Fforde, in which a runaway nanotechnology reaction at a food processing plant
nearly turns the entire planet into nothing but a giant glob of pink custard
dessert topping. Crazy as it sounds, something like that is actually
theoretically possible.
The hippie with the
camera told me that northern Laos has mushrooms that will make you see pink
elephants if you eat them (the mushrooms, not the elephants). It made me wonder
if there were any mushrooms in the whiskey, because I saw an elephant on the
Laotian side of the river this morning. It wasn’t pink, but I absolutely could
not imagine how it got there. A couple of elderly Laotian fisherman were
standing on either side of it on a tiny sandbar jutting out of jungle
vegetation so dense that it was hard to believe even a human could squeeze
through it, much less a full-grown elephant. Anchored nearby was their home: a
slender Thai-style long-tailed boat about 40 feet long, identical to ours
except that the side windows were boarded up. Through the rear opening I could
see pots and pans hanging from the walls. The mystery only deepened: there was no
way an elephant could fit on that boat.
Another swig of
Lao-Lao down the hatch. I was getting drowsy even as I felt the whiskey eating
its way down my upper digestive tract like Drano through a clogged sink pipe.
The rhythmic roar of the boat’s primitive lawnmower-style engine was sending me
straight to la-la land as I slumped deeper into my wooden seat. My last memory
is the ridiculous spectacle of the backpackers trying to play craps with the
Laotian boys on the vibrating floor of the boat. One of the roosters kept
pecking at the dice…
