Quantum Travel (A Science Fiction Story)

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--by Robert Arvay

 

We finally did it!  We managed to achieve instantaneous space-travel across vast cosmic distances.  We got from our planet, Earth, to a galaxy so far away that its light can never reach us.  Now, we’re back, and do we ever have a story to tell.

 

Don’t worry, we are not going to get deep into the physics, but only into the fun part of science (I promise you’ll like it).  Instead of hard physics, there is a different field of science that we explored on our trip, but let’s not even get into that, just yet.  By the end of the story, you will have figured it out for yourself.

 

There we were, in our space ship, which was named, Queen Elizabeth.  At first, it had been named, Quantum Entanglement, and this had been abbreviated to QE, and then some people mistakenly thought—well, you get the idea.  So, we just changed the name, and everyone was happy.

In all the vastness of the universe, our telescopes had never detected an earth-duplicate planet, what is called a twin earth.  This was very disappointing.  All the fans of Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Captain Kirk and Luke Skywalker, had hoped that great adventures lay before us.  That hope seemed to have been dashed.

 

Wait.  There was still a chance.  Telescopes can see only so much, and it takes light millions of years to reach us from deep space.  Billions of planets remained to be detected.  What if there were a better way to find a Twin Earth (TE)?

 

There is.  It goes by the fancy name of Quantum Entanglement, which simply put, means that everything is connected to everything else, tangled up, in such a way, that under some conditions, two things can just change places with each other, instantaneously, without travelling through the intervening distance.  This means that we can, as we already said, travel across vast cosmic distances in an instant.

 

At first, the idea was just speculation, but science has a strange way of turning speculation into technology.  That’s what happened with Dick Tracy’s fictional two-way, wrist-radio, which became the cell phone of today.  It’s what happened with Robbie the Robot, from Forbidden Planet, which became—well, Robbie the Robot.

 

At first, only unmanned drones, powered by quantum entanglement, were sent into our galaxy, in search of Earth-like planets.  They found plenty of them, but none of them was a Twin Earth (TE).  That was a huge disappointment.  There were thousands of planets very similar to earth, but none of them were similar enough.  It seems that the planet Earth has millions upon millions of things that make it hospitable enough for us to live on.  Scientists had hoped that, just by chance alone, at least one of the billions of planets in the galaxy would be earth-like enough for us to inhabit and prosper.

 

When that did not turn out to be the case, scientists were incredulous.  How could this be?  It turns out that, mathematically, the chances of getting a hundred coin flips to come out all heads (on the first try) is as close to zero as any gambler ever gets—unimaginably close to zero.  To get millions of dice rolls to come out all sevens (on the first try) is even less likely, and—well, you get the idea.  Try finding the two proverbial snowflakes that look exactly the same.  That was what it was like trying to find a planet that, just by chance, happened to be a twin of Earth.  It was not happening.

 

We did not give up.  If we could not find an Earth twin in our own galaxy, well, there are plenty of other galaxies, a hundred billion of them, each with hundreds of billions of planets in them.  Surely, our quantum space drones would find what we were looking for.  We looked forward to finding many thousands of twin Earths.  The odds seemed to favor it.

 

The nice thing about quantum entanglement is that distance is no obstacle.  We were quickly able to send drones to galaxy after galaxy, and report back on what they found.  And yes, they did find planets that were remarkably like earth.  Remarkably.  But remarkably close is not close enough.  It’s like finding the almost perfect spouse for yourself, a spouse who has only one flaw, only one—that of being a serial axe-murderer.

 

Every planet we found had at least one flaw, but it was always a fatal one, one which made it impossible for that planet to sustain a prosperous colony that humans would wish to live on.

 

Just as things seemed too dismal to continue, someone came up with a brilliant idea.  Why not quantum travel to a planet beyond the light horizon—to a planet so far away, that the light from its galaxy can never reach us?  The very thought seemed scary, like crossing a vast ocean in a raft with no knowledge of what might be on the other side.

 

We decided to try it, and sure enough, after an exhausting search, one of the drones reported back a finding that seemed too good to be true.  It reported finding a planet so similar to present-day earth that it was all but an exact copy.  And the news got even better.  Further analysis showed that the planet showed signs of being inhabited—by human-like people.  One photograph showed what was unmistakably a modern city. 

 

After that, however, there were no further signs of life.  There were no radio transmissions, no television signals, and nothing that seemed to be artificial communications of any kind.

 

Speculation abounded.  How could we explain a planet that seemed to have cities, but no people?  Some said that a catastrophe had killed the population, perhaps a plague, or radiation from a nearby star that had exploded.  Others said that maybe everyone had just left for another galaxy.  Others said that maybe they had invented a technology that allowed them to take spiritual form, and abandon the need for physical bodies.  There was no end to the speculation.  We needed facts.

 

To get those facts, we sent more drones, but for technical reasons, they could not provide any additional, helpful information.  Nothing.  The planet seemed to be a twin earth, a place to which we could send humans and establish a thriving colony, but there was one overriding worry:  was it an axe-murderer?  What had removed the population, and would it strike again?

 

Was it a forbidden planet?  Dared we go there?

 

We decided to risk it.  It was just too good to pass up.  A number of us volunteered to get aboard an experimental quantum-travelling space ship.  It was an amazing technological advance, something straight out of a science fiction story. 

We named it the QE, and others named it the Queen Elizabeth, and the name stuck.

 

The QE space ship was by no means a luxury liner.  Compared to the ocean-going vessel of the same name, our QE was more like an out-rigger canoe, but then hey, the Polynesians did amazing things with their out-rigger canoes, and we felt the pioneer spirit.  We were eager to risk our lives to be the first to personally explore TE (Twin Earth), although I confess, we were more enthusiastic about the explore part than the risk our lives part.  Even so, given the choice, we went.

 

The big day finally came.  Well, actually, it was not so big.  There was no fanfare, no adoring crowds, no speeches or musical bands, no breaking of champagne bottles, none of that.  The people who had approved the mission had a strong suspicion that we were all doomed, and they needed plausible deniability if things went terribly wrong.

 

We boarded the QE, closed the hatches, and well, pushed a button or two, and for the few people who witnessed the launch, we just disappeared for a second, then reappeared.  They thought something had gone wrong, but it hadn’t.  We returned with an amazing report.

 

During that one second of earth time that we had been gone, our mission had actually taken several days.  We first knew that we had succeeded in reaching TE (Twin Earth), when we found ourselves in orbit around the planet.  Not being exactly an out-rigger canoe (okay, I am prone to exaggeration at times), our sensors displayed to us an awesome planet-scape.  It looked just like earth, except for the layout of the continents and oceans—but there were indeed, continents and oceans, and water-vapor clouds, and greenery!  The atmosphere registered as earth-like, with oxygen and carbon-dioxide and nitrogen in earth-like proportions.

 

The next step was to board our landing module, a small space-craft that could safely take us to the surface of the planet—we hoped.  How would we be received, if anyone still inhabited the planet?  All kinds of thoughts ran through our heads, but still, this was the chance of a lifetime, and we threw caution to the winds.  At least that’s what we say now.  At the time—well, never mind.

 

We boarded the landing module, and departed from the QE.

 

When the landing module reached the surface, we felt a small thud, and then the doors opened.  Then, just like in the movie, Galaxy Quest (it’s amazing how similar fiction can be to, okay, fiction), we all screamed, at the guy who opened the door, hey you idiot, what if the atmosphere is poison or something, but it was just like earth’s atmosphere.  Yeah, we already knew that.

 

So, throwing caution to the winds, because we had to, we stepped out of the landing module and onto Twin Earth.  It was a great moment.  We should have said something historic, like one small step for a man, but the first one out was a woman.  So instead, we just said, wow, look at that.

 

We had landed near a city that looked just like any big city on Earth, with tall buildings, and overpasses and stuff.  Instead of being in the city, we were in a suburb, a nice residential neighborhood.  Again, it could have been any nice residential neighborhood on Earth.  It had one and two-story houses, paved roads that ended in cul-de-sacs, trees and shrubs—just like on earth.

 

Nobody had seen us land, and we wondered when we would meet up with the first Twin-Earther alien.  Actually, we were the aliens, and we hoped we wouldn’t get arrested.

 

And so, there ends our story.  We didn’t find anyone, but we knew that whoever had lived in those houses looked a lot like us, because we found vehicles that we could comfortably sit in, although we did not know how to drive them.

 

Oh, there is one more part to the story. 

 

After traveling about in our landing module, touring the planet, we started finding things that looked crazy.  We found houses with no doors or windows.  We found roads that began in a tree trunk, and ended in another tree trunk.  We found an office building that was sitting in the middle of a pond, half submerged.  The farther we got from the city we had seen from orbit, the less sense things made.  We found buildings that were half-completed, it seemed, but they looked more like piles of rubble that had been scooped together by a giant hand, sort of like toy building blocks haphazardly arranged by a child.

 

We put all our observations—photographs, spectrographs and other measurements of every kind—into our onboard computer, trying to understand who or what might have built such a city, and then abandoned it.  Was it some sort of game?  A movie set?  An experiment?  Bait for a trap?

 

Finally, between us and the computer, we came to the most likely conclusion:  it was all chance.

 

What?  What kind of answer is that?

 

But, think about it.  In the vastness of the cosmos, there are millions of chances for nature to accidentally arrange things that look like they were purposely made, but were not.  There used to be a rock formation in New Hampshire, USA, called, the Old Man of the Mountain, because it looked amazingly as if the rocks which composed it had been intentionally arranged to look like, well, an old man of the mountain.

 

In an infinite universe, there will be an infinite variety of regions, each of which is subject to the rules of chance.  The city we found was just that, but even chance has its limits, and so, the planet and its city had been the unlikely outcome of chance—but the farther we got from the city, the more random the buildings became, until finally, there was only wilderness.

 

There remains only one question unanswered.  It involves the science that we promised would be fun.  What is chance? 

 

Chance says that if I roll two dice, there is one chance in six that the total of the dice-roll will be seven.  But whereas dice-rolls are governed by chance, the dice themselves are not random.  Dice are not made by chance.  They do not have random numbers of sides.  They can have as few as four sides, or more than four, many more, but somebody designed them. 

 

Dice are purposefully designed, and only after that can they be used in games of chance.  What is it that purposefully designed the universe?

 

Randomness, then, can operate only within non-random parameters.

 

So, as you have guessed for yourself by now, even if the universe is governed by chance, the laws of chance (call them the dice) are themselves not random.  Things inside the universe may be random, so that even the most unlikely combinations of events can happen.  Entire cities can come together due to random chance.

 

The universe, however, like dice, is not random.  It is intentionally designed.

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