Origin

“I am a religious person,” England said, “and yet my faith, like my science, has always been a work in progress. I consider this theory agnostic on questions of spirituality. I am simply trying to describe the way things ‘are’ in the universe; I will leave the spiritual implications to the clerics and philosophers.”

Wise young man, Langdon thought. If ever his theory could be proven, it would have a bombshell effect on the world.

“For the moment,” England said, “everyone can relax. For obvious reasons, this is an extremely difficult theory to prove. My team and I have a few ideas for modeling dissipation-driven systems in the future, but at the moment, we’re still years away.”

England’s image faded, and Edmond reappeared on the screen, standing beside his quantum computer. “I, however, am not years away. This type of modeling is precisely what I’ve been working on.”

He walked toward his workstation. “If Professor England’s theory is correct, then the entire operating system of the cosmos could be summed up by a single overriding command: spread energy!”

Edmond sat down at his desk and began typing furiously on his oversized keyboard. The displays before him filled with alien-looking computer code. “I took several weeks and reprogrammed the entire experiment that had previously failed. I embedded into the system a fundamental goal—a raison d’être; I told the system to dissipate energy at all costs. I urged the computer to be as creative as it could possibly be in its quest to increase entropy in the primordial soup. And I gave it permission to build whatever tools it thought it might need to accomplish that.”

Edmond stopped typing and spun around in his chair, facing his audience. “Then I ran the model, and something incredible happened. It turned out that I had successfully identified the ‘missing ingredient’ in my virtual primordial soup.”

Langdon and Ambra both stared intently at the display wall as the animated graphic of Edmond’s computer model began to play. Again, the visual plunged deep into the churning primordial soup, magnifying down to the subatomic realm, seeing the chemicals bouncing around, binding and rebinding with one another.

“As I fast-forwarded the process and simulated the passage of hundreds of years,” Edmond said, “I saw Miller-Urey’s amino acids taking shape.”

Langdon was not knowledgeable about chemistry, but he certainly recognized the on-screen image as a basic protein chain. As the process continued, he watched as increasingly complex molecules took shape, bonding into a kind of honeycombed chain of hexagons.

“Nucleotides!” Edmond shouted as the hexagons continued to fuse. “We’re watching the passage of thousands of years! And speeding ahead, we see the first faint hints of structure!”

As he spoke, one of the nucleotide chains began wrapping around itself and curling into a spiral. “See that?!” Edmond shouted. “Millions of years have passed, and the system is trying to build a structure! The system is trying to build a structure to dissipate its energy, just like England predicted!”

As the model progressed, Langdon was stunned to see the little spiral become a twin spiral, expanding its structure into the famous double-helix shape of the most famous chemical compound on earth.

“My God, Robert …,” Ambra whispered, wide-eyed. “Is that …”

“DNA,” Edmond announced, freezing the model midframe. “There it is. DNA—the basis for all life. The living code of biology. And why, you ask, would a system build DNA in an effort to dissipate energy? Well, because many hands make light work! A forest of trees diffuses more sunlight than a single tree. If you’re an entropy tool, the easiest way to do more work is to make copies of yourself.”

Edmond’s face appeared on-screen now. “As I ran this model forward, from this point on, I witnessed something absolutely magical … Darwinian evolution took off!”

He paused for several seconds. “And why wouldn’t it?” he continued. “Evolution is the way the universe continually tests and refines its tools. The most efficient tools survive and replicate themselves, improving constantly, becoming more and more complex and efficient. Eventually, some tools look like trees, and some look like, well … us.”

Edmond now appeared floating in the darkness of space with the blue orb of earth hovering behind him. “Where do we come from?” he asked. “The truth is—we come from nowhere … and from everywhere. We come from the same laws of physics that create life across the cosmos. We are not special. We exist with or without God. We are the inevitable result of entropy. Life is not the point of the universe. Life is simply what the universe creates and reproduces in order to dissipate energy.”