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probability forced us to exist exactly as we are. Only the timing was in question.”

“I have to think about that. It sounds logical but it’s weird,” I said.

“Think about this,” he continued. “As we speak, engineers are building the Internet to link every part of the world in much the same way as a fetus develops a central nervous system. Virtually no one questions the desirability of the Internet. It seems that humans are born with the instinct to create it and embrace it. The instinct of beavers is to build dams; the instinct of humans is to build communication systems.”

“I don’t think instinct is making us build the Internet. I think people are trying to make money off it. It’s just capitalism,” I replied.

“Capitalism is only part of it,” he countered. “In the 1990s investors threw money at any Internet company that asked for it. Economics went out the window. Rationality can’t explain our obsession with the Internet. The need to build the Internet comes from something inside us, something programmed, something we can’t resist.”

He was right about the Internet being somewhat irrational. I wasn’t going to win that debate and this was not a place to jump in. He had a lot more to say.

“Humanity is developing a sort of global eyesight as millions of video cameras on satellites, desktops, and street corners are co

“In the distant future, humans will learn to control the weather, to manipulate DNA, and to build whole new worlds out of raw matter. There is no logical limit to how much our collective power will grow. A billion years from now, if a visitor from another dimension observed humanity, he might perceive it to be one large entity with a consciousness and purpose, and not a collection of relatively uninteresting individuals.”

“Are you saying we’re evolving into God?”

“I’m saying we’re the building blocks of God, in the early stages of reassembling.”

“I think I’d know it if we were part of an omnipotent being,” I said.

“Would you? Your skin cells are not aware that they are part of a human being. Skin cells are not equipped for that knowledge. They are equipped to do what they do and nothing more. Likewise, if we humans—and all the plants and animals and dirt and rocks—were components of God, would we have the capacity to know it?”

“So, you’re saying God blew himself to bits—I guess that was the Big Bang—and now he’s piecing himself back together?” I asked.

“He is discovering the answer to his only question.”

“Does God have consciousness yet? Does he know he’s reassembling himself?”

“He does. Otherwise you could not have asked the question, and I could not have answered.”

Physics of God-Dust

“If the universe is nothing but dust and probability, how does anything happen?” I asked. “How do you explain gravity and motion? Why doesn’t everything stay exactly where it is?”

“I can answer those questions by answering other questions first,” he said.

“Okay. Whatever works.”

“Science is based on assumptions. Scientists assume that electricity will behave the same tomorrow as today. They assume that the laws of physics that apply on Earth will apply on other planets. Usually the assumptions are right, or close enough to be useful.

“But sometimes assumptions lead us down the wrong path. For example, we assume time is continuous—meaning that between any two moments of time, no matter how brief, is more time. But if that’s true, then a minute would last forever because it would contain an infinite number of smaller time slices, and infinity means you never run out.”

“That’s an old mind trick I learned about in school,” I said. “I think it’s called Zeno’s Paradox, after some old Greek guy who thought it up first.”

“And what is the solution?” he asked.