Complex Inorganic Substrate

I finished Stephen Baxter's Transcendent today. Then I went to T.G.I. Friday's for dinner, to ruminate partly on the future of humanity as expressed by Baxter and mostly to fill me stomach, which had only enjoyed a Pepsi up until that moment.

Briefly, Coalescent scared me, Exultant left me joyous, and Transcendant depressed me.

Taken all three together, Baxter implies there is no obvious purpose for humanity except to spread out and kill things, across galaxies if must be. During the short span, the span of one human's life, for instance, there is the possiblity for endless joy, progress, growth, depression, insanity and anything else you can think of. But in the full scope of things, there is only one constant: The universe will end, and there's no way out.

I hope that despite the implication that these three books are a trilogy (and they are, if loosely, sort of like his Manifold series), I hope that Baxter will write a fourth book, about the Michael Poole of Exultant, the Michael Poole that in Transcendant is eluded to. I don't know if his story is worth reading in its entirety, without more ambitious looks at what humanity will be or accomplish.

I also would wish for a more promising future for humanity, but even I, a non-physicist, non-philosphy-major, was able to reach the conclusion that if you look at the full timeline, the universe ends.

One of Baxter's most exciting concepts in Transcendent is the closed universe idea. If the universe is closed spatially, it must be closed in time as well (as basic as Einstein and other theoretical physicists spacetime). So if you go far enough ahead, you will wrap all the way around to the beginning. I'm glad he didn't bring up what that seam must be like, or how one went far enough ahead in time (or how, in Exultant, one goes backward in time using light speed, etc.), because it must be unimaginable.

Anyway, I wish he'd quit writing about the Coalescents (purposeless, hive-like, mindless human colonies), because they frighten the pants off me. It's one thing to say, humanity has no purpose because the universe is gonna end; it's another to say, yeah, and this group doesn't realize it, but they're already there. It's like giving in to the inevitable, instead of being human and fighting it.

Finally, I saw V for Vendetta. Go see it. I think you'll leave thinking, the world ain't so bad after all.