Bewilderment

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ONE OF THE SOLUTIONS TO THE FERMI PARADOX was so strange I never dared tell Robin. He would have had bad dreams for months. One quadrillion neural connections lay on the inflatable camping pillow next to me: one synapse for every star in two thousand five hundred Milky Ways. Lots of ways to overheat.

But here’s the solution I never told him: Say life is easy to kick-start from out of nothing. Say it’d been springing up in every crack of the cosmic sidewalk for billions of years before the Earth appeared. After all, it sprang up here the moment this planet stabilized, from the same stuff that exists everywhere in the universe.

And say that over the eons, countless millions of civilizations arose, many of them lasting long enough to venture into space. Spacefaring creatures found each other, linked up, and shared knowledge, their technologies accelerating with each new contact. They built great energy-harvesting spheres that enclosed entire suns and drove computers the size of whole solar systems. They harnessed the energy from quasars and gamma ray bursts. They filled galaxies the way we once spread across continents. They learned to weave the fabric of reality itself.

And when this consortium mastered all the laws of time and space, they fell into the sadness of completion. Absolute Intelligence surrendered to nostalgia for the camping and woodcraft of its own lost origins. They created consoling playthings—countless sealed-off planets where life could evolve again in its pristine state.

And say that life in one of those terrariums evolves into creatures with two thousand five hundred times as many synapses as there were stars in a galaxy. Even with such brains, it would take those creatures millennia to discover that they were trapped forever in a simulated wilderness, looking out onto a virtual firmament, trapped in childhood, alone.

The catalog of solutions to the Fermi paradox calls this the Zoo Hypothesis. Zoos made Robin queasy. He couldn’t stand to see sentient beings confined.

My own parents raised me a Lutheran, but I lost all religion at the age of sixteen. All life long I’ve believed that when a person dies, all the beauty and insight and hope—but also all pain and terror—everything stored in her one thousand trillion synapses disperses into noise. But that night in the Smokies, in our two-person tent, I couldn’t help petitioning the person who knew Robin best in all the world. “Alyssa.” My wife of eleven and a half years. “Aly. Tell me what to do. We’re fine together, in the woods. But I’m afraid to take him home.”