The Terminal Beach

"Tonight you dance by the light of ancient mistakes!"

Iain M. Banks, Look to Windward

A few months ago, with absolutely no fanfare at all, NASA found evidence of an unthinkably ancient death: the expiration of a star, over 13 billion years in the past.

NASA's Swift satellite, in the fifth year of its near-Earth orbit, picked up Gamma Ray Burst 090423 on April 23rd. Analysis of additional data gathered by the satellite and Earth-based observatories revealed that the burst was produced by the explosion of a massive star and its subsequent collapse into a black hole or a neutron star, a mere 630 million years after the birth of the universe.

The image at the top of this posting is a lie, by the way, a digital abstraction created by assigning colours to the data. The explosion itself was not visible, light itself having failed and faded long ago as time and distance stripped it away, photon by photon.

Science fiction has always been characterized by a sense of scale, of the enormity of time and space. In H. G. Wells' The Time Machine, the nameless Time Traveller stands beside a barren ocean 30 million years in the future and describes the following nihilistic vision:

The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts from the east, and the showering white flakes in the air increased in number. From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of Man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives--all that was over. As the darkness thickened, the eddying flakes grew more abundant, dancing before my eyes; and the cold of the air more intense. At last, one by one, swiftly, one after the other, the white peaks of the distant hills vanished into blackness. The breeze rose to a moaning wind. I saw the black central shadow of the eclipse sweeping towards me. In another moment the pale stars alone were visible. All else was rayless obscurity. The sky was absolutely black.

A horror of this great darkness came on me. The cold, that smote to my marrow, and the pain I felt in breathing, overcame me. I shivered, and a deadly nausea seized me.

We stand on the edge of a different ocean, an ocean of stars and galaxies, with the ripples from events that are unimagineably distant in time and space lapping at our feet. And yet, someone at work recently expressed their surprise that I've never watched an entire episode of Seinfeld - I almost laughed at them. Nothing personal, but by comparison Jerry, George, Kramer and Elaine don't even start to capture my interest. (Even if their show was about something.)

- Sid