Michael Crichton - The Andromeda Evolution

Before the Wildfire team could finish their tests, the Andromeda Strain evolved into a novel plastiphage configuration called AS-2. Though harmless to human beings, AS-2 was able to depolymerize the plastic sealing gaskets that isolated the laboratory bulkheads. A nuclear fail-safe was triggered and heroically disarmed moments before detonation.

However, remnants of the AS-2 variety escaped, the particles outgassing into the atmosphere and dispersing globally. Although this new particle was not harmful to humans, it wreaked havoc on nascent international space programs that depended on advanced polymers to reach orbit.

Thus began Project Eternal Vigilance.

Hours after the Andromeda incident, the founding members of Project Wildfire lobbied the president of the United States for emergency resources. The goal was to begin worldwide monitoring for new outbreaks of the Andromeda Strain or its subsequent evolutions. Their proposal was given immediate and generous funding from the Department of Defense black budget, staffed with top analysts, and officially activated three days later.

But that was over fifty years before, and every scientist involved in the first Andromeda incident had since passed away.

Today, Colonel Hopper watched as the rows of computer monitors came on, bathing her analysts’ faces in bluish light. The colonel sighed at the view, ruminating on the huge expense necessary to secure every bit of satellite time, every analyst hour, and the immense amounts of data transfer and storage.

Colonel Hopper was well aware of her unit’s dwindling influence. At every morning shift, she noted the increasing mileage on her equipment, the attrition of her best analysts, and the encroaching needs of the other units at work in Fairchild AFB.

In particular, Air Mobility Command (AMC) had been pushing for more satellite time to ease their daily task of coordinating KC-135 Stratotanker aerial refueling craft in the thin air high above Tibet and the Middle East. The acting commander of AMC had even gone on record with the opinion that Eternal Vigilance was a pointless waste of resources.

And it seemed he was correct.

Eternal Vigilance had been on high alert for over fifty years—with Hopper at the helm for the last fifteen. And before today, it had never found a single thing.

IT IS A WELL-ESTABLISHED Achilles’ heel of human civilization that individuals are more motivated by immediate private reward than by long-term, collective future benefits. This effect is particularly evident when considering payoffs that will take longer than a generation to arrive—a phenomenon called intergenerational discounting.

The concept was formally introduced by the young French economist Florian Pavard during a poorly attended speech at the International Conference on Social Economics on October 23, 1982:

The average span of a human generation is twenty-five years. Any reward occurring beyond this generational horizon creates an imbalance that undermines long-term cooperation. In short, we as a species are motivated to betray our own descendants. In my view, the only possible solution is the institution of harsh and immediate punishments for those who would be unfaithful to the future.

It has been subsequently theorized that our species’ seeming inability to focus on long-term existential threats will inexorably lead to the destruction of our environment, overpopulation, and resource exhaustion. It is therefore not an uncommon belief among economists that this inborn deficit represents a sort of built-in timer for the self-destruction of human civilization.

Sadly, all the evidence of world history supports this theory.

And thus, despite well-known deadly high stakes, Project Eternal Vigilance suffered from endemic human shortsightedness. Over the years, the operational capacity of the program had been deferred, discounted, and diminished. And on this particular rainy morning, the project was on its last legs, barely functioning … but still viable.

At 16:24:32 UTC Colonel Hopper was seen on internal video, sitting at her desk with perfect posture. Her half-empty thermos of coffee rested atop a pile of equipment requisition forms that she must have known would be denied, and yet had forced herself to complete anyway.

A call came through.

Sliding on her headset, Hopper punched a button on her comm line, her monitors erupting into life.

“Vigilance One. Go ahead,” she said, speaking in the clipped tones of a lifelong data analyst.

The voice she heard had a distinct American accent, and she recognized it from her dwindling team of field operatives.

“This is Brasiliero. I’ve got something you’ll want to see.”

“Private channel is open, pending certificates.”

“Pushing through now.”

Tapping keys, Hopper granted the request.

All at once, the bank of four flat-panel monitors lining the front wall flared with data. Each monitor showed a discrete overhead view of the Amazon jungle: a basic unenhanced digital camera image; a light detection and ranging (LIDAR) map; an enhanced-color hyperspectral view of the canopy; and the minutely detailed gray-scale topography of synthetic aperture radar.

The drone footage was live, being generated in real time.

One by one, the eight analysts looked up at the front screens, pushing their chairs away from desks and murmuring to one another. Personalized workstations began to blink with ancillary data, information flowing to specialists according to their domain of control. Colonel Hopper stood.

In the dead center of every image stood something unexplainable.

It appeared to be a featureless block, curved slightly. It rose above the steaming expanse of jungle, laid directly across a river tributary. At its base, sluggish water flowed from underneath. Behind it, the blocked river had pooled into what looked like a giant mud puddle, flooding the surrounding jungle. The nearby trees and vegetation that hadn’t been swamped seemed frail and bent, dying.

“The anomaly is located on the descent trajectory of Heavenly Palace,” said Brasiliero, over the room speakers. “The Tiangong-1 space station was directly above—”

“Roger that, Brasiliero. That will be all for now,” replied Hopper, putting the connection on hold.

With a glance, Hopper checked the latitude and longitude. The anomaly was perfectly equatorial, with a line of zero degrees latitude to seven decimal points—a precision of approximately one yard. She added this observation to the incident notes. It was an odd detail, seemingly important, and yet catastrophically misleading.

Dale Sugarman, the senior signals intelligence analyst, stood up and turned to face Colonel Hopper, his headphones dangling around his neck. In five years, she had never seen the huge man demonstrate excitement about anything other than video games. Now, the senior airman’s shaky voice echoed sharply through the all-room speaker loop: “This data is impossible, ma’am. There are no roads, no airstrip, no way to build anything out there. Sensor error. I advise overhauling the drone. Send in—”

“‘Impossible’ is the wrong word, Airman,” said Hopper crisply, crossing her arms. A conviction crept into her voice as she continued, “What we are seeing is not impossible. It is simply an ultra-low-probability event.”

The room fell silent as the analysts considered her words.

There exists a certain class of event that can technically occur, yet is so incredibly unlikely that most laymen would consider it impossible. This false assumption is based on a rule of thumb called Borel’s fallacy: “Phenomena with extremely low probabilities effectively never happen in real life.”

Of course, the mathematician Émile Borel never said such a thing. Instead, he proposed a law of large numbers, demonstrating that given a universe of infinite size, every event with nonzero probability will eventually occur . Or put another way—with enough chances, anything that can happen will happen.