Page 135 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

Adjournment

alive—are in fact designed to receive and transmit radio-wave
signals. So, whether or not the murderer imagines hearing that dead
pump at work, a suspicious detective might just find a way to detect
those ongoing pulses. Maybe he’s also a cardiologist. I don’t know
what angle to pursue. More thought is needed.”
“We are clearly coming to the end of the evening,” said Fred
Feghootsky. “Anyone else with an embryonic tale to relate?”
“I may have one,” piped up Brad Razeberry. “The problem is I
don’t know where to situate it: on this planet or elsewhere. I’ve
read, as have most of you, that mankind is liable to leave a trace, a
mere residue, of its existence on Earth in a very thin stratigraphic
layer in the geological record. That period has been dubbed the
Anthropocene Era. Okay, so we came and went, and a few million
years later some extragalactic visitors may attempt to reconstruct
our culture from that planet-wide smudge of synthetics. As you
know, the chances are almost nil of one spacefaring species arriving
at the planet of another that is still extant. Mother Nature and
Father Time will not be kind to our memory—that is why I might
call this thing ‘Gaia Furioso’ or ‘The Pyrrhic Victory Lap’. That
depends on how badly it needs a punning title to be viable. But
what if we are the aliens finally making it across vast distances of
time and space to find an inhabitable planet with just such a
minimal trace of long-gone civilization? What would our
conclusions be? Some of this isn’t very original. Sorry: I’ll either
cure it or kill it by our next meeting.”
“Well, it would have been my turn next,” said Fred. “My latest
brainchild is a sort of espionage thriller. An infamous experiment
was carried out at a university in the 1960s to demonstrate that
people could be coaxed into administering physical pain
anonymously to others under certain conditions. That finding
related to accepting direction from authority figures. It was a
dismaying exposure of character weakness, a moral failing in the
average person—the banality of evil, perhaps. But here we are, and
demagogues remain undeterred. The point is, among the subjects
recruited for that fake torture research, there might have been some
real sociopaths who had, as a result of that experience, a

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