Page 23 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

Invasion of the Silicates

Rutger Schlager’s turn was next. He waited until his tablemates
had settled into attitudes of respectful, if not rapt, attention.
“Total war!” he intoned in a gruff monotone. “It may well be
that threats to the planet from its big-brained bipeds has eclipsed
concern about alien invaders intent on world conquest, but I think
fear of the unknown gets more attention than garden-variety self-
destruction via resource mismanagement. Oh, I know: this has been
done so many times it’s a joke. The insignificant astronomy lab
assistant tugging at his boss’s sleeve for attention to a tiny anomaly
that soon becomes a cataclysmic menace, and only they have got
the answer—if only they could get a hearing in the corridors of
power. Owing to writers’ projective propensity, those invaders
display enough greed, stupidity and ruthlessness to make them
instantly comprehensible to readers looking for a thrill.”
“People looking to the sky for bug-eyed monsters in flying
saucers heading for Washington, D.C.: that was big in the Cold War
era. Then it was strands of exoplanet DNA hitching a ride on
meteorites during the early biotech disruption years. Now, in the era
of the microchip, it’s time for a new type of fatal intruder, one that
settles insidiously upon the face of the planet night and day, trillions
of tons of it since the earth was cooling. I speak of space dust,
ladies and gentlemen, the minerals surviving interstellar journeys to
descend unnoticed among us, slowly accumulating on the land and
the bottom of the sea. It is beneath our gaze, to be trod upon,
pushed aside in construction projects or scooped up for use in
building materials. Ninety percent of the earth’s crust consists of a
large group of silicates, compounds of silicon, oxygen and other
metallic elements.”
“Scientists have told us of the possibility of organisms based on
silicon instead of carbon. Let us take this one this one step further:
were such entities—or their embryonic silicate stage—to be
dispersed among the galaxies, either by intent or the destruction of
their home world, they might, after eons of aimless buffeting by
gravitational and electromagnetic forces linking the star systems,
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