Shape of the Monolith

I can barely swallow my spit this morning. At noon, when I rolled out of bed, I did it with a sense of accomplishment. The shag carpet in my bedroom could have been moon dust scattering as I planted my foot into the new day. There was a distance radio static carrying voices. "Houston," I heard one say.

When the full weight of my body pushed down on my left foot I felt pain and weakness, as if it were sprained. Flashbacks from the mother ship. Aliens traveling across vast distances of space to perform operations on my feet makes me feel loved.

Humanity is still very primitive. We have instruments that measure huge things like gravity fields around impossibly distant stars, or tiny things like quantum tunneling. But how do we measure middle stuff like ourselves?

There is a day in humanities future that will be the greatest ah-ha moment in the universe. This day is fated. It will happen because all great stories have a beginning and an end. And what a great story the universe is. Yes, this day is in our future--the prophets said so.

One of three things will happen on that day (nothing precludes all three from happening on the same day) to change man drastically, so drastically that his story, a very old one now, will finally come to an end and a new one will begin.

1. Extraterrestrials will finally visit our planet. Hear: for thousands of years humans have only had each other to talk to. There have been some great conversations in human history but inevitably they end up like the conversations my brother and I had as children in the back seat of the station wagon, in arguments and finally close fisted attacks. Humans love each other but desperately want to talk to someone else for a change. People talk to their cats and their ferrets but those creatures don’t talk back. Adam was bored with the beasts almost immediately. But to communicate with another race of men from far far away would be like falling in love; the rush of a new love. What we could learn! There’s also the possibility that they’d eat us. Either way man would be forever changed.

2. Artificial intelligence will advance towards self awareness: sentience. Man will finally build something that can talk back. A Pinocchio. Man just seems to be made so that he can make. Man as an artist, like God, aches to create something that will love him back. When computers start talking to us we will fall madly in love. Then again, they might eat us. One thing they will do either way is tell us what we are like. An outside perspective. That alone will change man forever.

3. The ultimate poop pang--discovering that God is real. When the clouds part and the Holy one shows himself, humans will tremble and probably feel some guilt over how we've been acting towards each other in the backseat of God's Station wagon but that will give way to love for our father. There won't be an athiest on that day and we will all have our paths illuminated before us. We'll fall in love, or be eaten.

Now that I’m thinking about it, there might be something else that changes man forever, not from this world or the next but from the realm of ideas and numbers: the mathematical universe...

4. Man finds the end all equation of truth. One little elegant equation that explains all. We will fall in love or eat ourselves.

It is well into the afternoon and I’m almost able to swallow again as I’ve melted most of the mucus away with strong hot coffee. It’s raining outside again and I hear a far away static. Getting out of bed: One small step for man. One Giant leap for Mankind.