Chapter 6

The planet found itself in a bit of a quandary. It had by now drawn on its long time memories, and was slowly assimilating even older, those buried into the deepest sturdiest rock formation existing on the planet.

It found itself placing the new organisms at several bubbles, at several times, but without a way to define which one. Time as such didn’t mean much to the planet, of course it grew old as macroscopic time passed by, but as it was as much anchored at a quantum mechanical mode in where time as such lost its arrow it at times found it hard to differ those bubbles. And of course it was, even though no bubble was the other like. And even as time itself might flow differently in one, depending on what constants it was shaped in, it still, on a quantum mechanical level wasn’t that different although constants might be.

Most of the bubbles did do have one constant in common, namely ‘c’, the speed of light in a vacuum. Those that didn’t you might want to call ‘exotic’. They were so very different.

There was also the problem of adapting, it was not prepared to adapt itself just because some new life forms had arrived, not unlike a cranky old man, not sure at all whether it welcomed the change. The planets population had been in a stable mode for millenniums, and who knew what new ideas those might bring with them? In the end it decided to wait and see, to give them some more rope as the expression goes.

Now you might think that the arrow of time exist everywhere. That’s where you go wrong, and if you happen to know a little about physics you probably already can see where that arrow stops to make sense. That’s right, quantum physics. Where you make the experimental setup, and where your local clock is the one defining a time for it. It might be easier if you think of time in terms of scales. The one way arrow of time, as it is called, only have one way on our macroscopic plane but as you scale down to the quantum level you will find most of the properties associated with ‘reality’ and ‘action and reaction’ questioned.

In one way you can consider both dimension and ‘time’ as an ‘illusion’, although that isn’t as simple as it sound. Scaling is what builds both those dimensions you define yourself in, as well as your arrow of time. It sounds as a cat chasing its tail doesn’t it? A ‘carousel’ of sorts as scaling indeed needs dimensions to be defined. But you see, even scales breaks down quantum mechanically. Not that we notice, and the same can of course be said of the arrow.

Of course Earthly science still had to realize it, but the planet knew and so took every advantage it could from this fact. You my friend, can’t ‘coexist’ consciously at all scales, even though your body does. The planet on the other tentacle? Well, it could, and did. So in one way the storage of its memories didn’t matter, it could place it where ever it liked, link it to spins or other esoteric quantum properties, but to retrieve the same it had to stay ‘on’ a certain scale, and there macroscopic properties indeed made a difference, just the same way as it did for Earthly science, be it blue ray, magnetic tapes, or crystals.

Janelle’s and Jeff s world was indeed advanced, but the right physical questions hadn’t been asked yet. And as always, your question will be what decides the answer. It wasn’t knowledge missing here, just the right questions.