Page 53 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

The Element of Surprise

“But first we can at least discern the alternative categories of
how it could play out,” said Izzy Azimuth. “One: Ubh has no
surprise for physics or chemistry; or, rather, its surprise is that it has
no surprise. It has a half-life longer than lighter transuranic
elements, but certainly not like carbon or helium. It has some
military use, at least in testing new weapons, so the lab has to be
taken over before foreign powers can get access to the technology
producing it. In that case, the surprise is that the government wasn’t
prepared to deal with it, or didn’t realize its potential importance.
Maybe then it could be used to trap spies inside Vulcan.”
“Two: Ubh acts as a space-time conduit to something really
wonderful or really terrible. Being stable, it can accrete into
quantities forming worm-hole tunnels large enough to send a
manned vessel into a region of the cosmos far distant in history—
ahead of or behind our era—there to learn the answers to unsolved
mysteries in physics and cosmology. The area has to be made off-
limits to the rest of the world owing to the possibility of our
overseas competitors stealing the process for making Ubh. So you
might have real cosmonauts training for this great adventure, as well
as under- or overtones of international espionage or sabotage. The
surprise here could be the revelation of any of the weird science
either to the public or the reader.”
“Three: the good old don’t-mess-with-nature scenario, in which
the first Ubh atom is a seed or catalyst for the spontaneous creation
of long chains of itself, spiraling out in all directions and threatening
to overwhelm the earth until it runs out of raw materials—lesser
atoms of inferior stability, perhaps, like nitrogen or oxygen. This
transformation and accretion is advancing in a geometric
progression; the smart guys who let the genie out of the bottle
would have liked one or two days before it broke through the
barbed wire around the Vulcan Institute and spread across the land.
It’s the same problem as with the silicates—it taps into our reptile
brain’s fear of uncontrollable and indefensible attack by natural
phenomena normally comprehensible, if not dormant, the stuff that
bad dreams are made of. When the horror is unintentionally self-
inflicted, the moral goes from ‘you never know what can happen’ to

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