Sorry for the wait!
Best enjoyed with the music: /FhneYcAD34Q
Chapter 4 - 平安のパンスペルミア説 ~ Memento Alien
"I was thinking about biological entanglement again."
"That again?" Okazaki chuckled. "You sure you're in the right field Kitashirakawa? Maybe I ought to send you over to the bio department."
My younger self laughed.
"No, I think they'd send me right back. In any case, I was thinking since we have few examples on Earth, maybe we'd have better luck if it were an alien species we were talking about."
"Aliens? Really?"
"What's the matter with it?"
"Maybe it's my age, but aliens are one of those things I try to steer clear of. On one hand you have over two hundred years of total speculation mixed with another two hundred years of propaganda campaigns involving them."
"What does that have to do with anything?"
"I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't see the difference between speculating on life here on Earth and out in space. We'll only know when we actually see them right? I think people are just impatient. And moreso, could you imagine the ramifications that would have if, say, the idea of panspermia were true? The moment anyone brings up aliens the conversation just goes off the tracks, and no actual progress in anything gets made…
"... Anyway, I don't want to leave you empty handed, so I'll tell you about something you won't learn anywhere else."
"And what would that be?"
"My work from my earlier years, and not the things that are published."
"Why didn't it get published?"
"Let me tell you what it was first, and then I think you'll catch on as to why. It was when I started work on my post-grad that I was inspired by a friend of mine to pursue a new concept in the realm of physics. That idea was 'Boundaries.'"
"Boundaries? What do you mean, like event horizons or something?"
"It's not so specific. I was really out there to distinguish how many boundaries were what we'd truly call physical.
"For example, walls are definitely physical, but even they can be passed through by various means. In fact, the boundary of the wall is more psychological than anything. You could imply a wall with frames, and people will still treat it as a wall.
"So my question is what are the boundaries created solely by the universe, as opposed to ones we project onto things. As it turned out, most boundaries are actually a product of the mind, and there are few what I truly call physical boundaries. The speed of light is one, defined as the boundary of moving through space faster than time. Event horizons were also an obvious one, as they denote the point of no return for information entering a black hole and information exiting a white hole. But what else is there beyond that? There are of course mathematical boundaries to the universe, but math itself is a metaphysical abstraction that, much like the wall, is projected onto the world at large.
"But even those two natural boundaries may too be like an implied wall; something we respect because we've developed over thousands of years to discriminate certain objects as such. And so the conclusion I came to was such: there is no matter or quantum for the thing we call boundaries, they are a psychological phenomenon."
