Page 27 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

Invasion of the Silicates

“But you said that after being seeded it took a few millennia to
be noticed.” It was Brad Razeberry. “If a climate crisis, with all its
far-reaching consequences and immediate effects developing in one
or two centuries isn’t sufficiently recognized as a disaster in the
making, how could this difficult-to-grasp geological morphogenesis
be expected to get anyone excited?”
“And another thing,” said Leith Mauker. “You have the thing
branching out into an infinitely-repeating structure like a crystal.
Therefore it has a resonance: find it and maybe it will self-pulverize
without stirring up the deadly silicon storms. Obviously you don’t
want it to win, from our perspective, by pushing us into death and
destruction. But other inorganic oddities have been invoked by
science-fiction writers in ways that allow for no recovery. You
wouldn’t go for that, I’m sure. No, I can see why you don’t have
your own denouement worked out: it would be either impossibly
simple or simply impossible.”
“Wait a minute,” cried Perversity. “You have foreclosed some
very good alternatives with this idea of absolute victory or defeat.
There’s more to life than silicon, you know. And we are adaptable.
The mammoth sand castles are not. Why not use our creative
intelligence to arrive at a modus vivendi with the silicates? I’ve seen
some very determined plants digging into solid rock to establish a
place for themselves. We could find or design such organisms and
cover the deserts with them. Might help the climate, too.”
“Yes,” said Brad. “Isn’t there any living thing that doesn’t
contain silicon? Or create special bacteria: they could be a barrier.”
“Agreed,” said Leith. “And if all else fails, we could get ahead of
its expansion, bulldozing sand in and out of its reach to direct it
into places that would do the least harm—if not become useful to
us, like windbreaks. You didn’t say what would happen if one of
these things hits a natural limit. Presumably it just stops growing.”
“No, I didn’t say.” Rutger was pensive. “If it had any organic
teleology, it would fall apart and blow away in the four winds as a
self-sacrificial gift to its species’ future. But it’s just sand.”
“You did say something about it that resembles metabolism,
however.” Izzy Azimuth was diffident. “If it finds silicon as a

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