Read Online King of the Worlds by M. Thomas Gammarino - Free Book Online

swiped it away. Over her left shoulder, he could see Erin lying in bed. Inexplicably, she appeared to be holding a baby.
    16 _____________
    The discovery that complex life was so similar throughout the galaxy had served as a real buzzkill for those Terrans given to a sense of cosmic exhilaration. Yes, there were now hundreds of new cultures to discover, and no doubt each had its fascinating quirks and eccentricities, but there were no bug-eyed monsters or Wellsian juggernauts, no parasites or dream beasts, angels or telepaths. Tentacles remained a water thing. Eating, drinking, breathing and sleeping were practiced by hominids everywhere. Bicameral eyes appeared to be universal, as were mouths, anuses, and dimorphic sex. No civilization had yet been found that did not rely to a large degree on spoken language. In fact, most of these newly discovered life forms were more than 99.4 percent identical to Earth humans at the genetic level. Virtually no one had expected this, and there was a whole new cottage industry devoted to finding out how indeed it had happened. Some scientists adopted a determinist view, arguing in essence that the real surprise would have been if things had turned out otherwise — if, for instance, there were natural life forms out there on Earth-like planets that were not carbon-based. They created simulation after simulation on their omnis, inputting all the variables — chemical elements born of the big bang and the furnaces of sun-like stars; mass, gravity, rotation, orbital period, composition, magnetism, atmosphere, geology, topography, and climate of each respective planet — and time and again they showed remarkably little deviation. As long as life had at least 3.8 billion years to evolve on one of these planets, it invariably produced something an awful lot like a human being — ”convergent evolution,” they called this — and once a certain threshold of intelligence was reached, selection pressures eased and adaptation leveled off. New Taiwanese scientists, for instance, claimed that life had existed on their planet for upwards of 6 billion years, and carbon dating conducted by Terran scientists so far supported that hypothesis. The bone of contention between the Determinists and the (unfortunately named) Panspermists was that the former believed it plausible that life had come about independently on each of these planets and then evolved, whereas the Panspermists, despite the Determinists’ simulations — which they dismissed as being reverse-engineered in some way or other — held that chance, if it were truly chance, could not possibly have behaved so uniformly. In the face of the demonstrable fact that intelligent life on Super Earths throughout the Milky Way was indeed so humanlike that some races could not even be usefully classed as other species, they were left to conclude that life had originated in one place and one place only and then made its colonial voyage around the galaxy inside of comets, thereby seeding hospitable planets where they would then take their own slightly divergent evolutionary paths until meeting up again some billions of years in the future. For the Panspermists, the race was on to see who could identify the one and only place in the galaxy, or indeed in the wider universe, where a host of elements first pooled their resources, developed membranes and learned to reproduce. In addition to these two camps inside the scientific community, there was of course one further possibility — namely, the religious hypothesis. God had made intelligent life in his own image and therefore, unless he was a shape-shifter, the standard deviation could not be large by definition. One Catholic bishop had even undertaken the project of compiling photos of every humanoid face in the galaxy inside his omni and “averaging” them out into a single image, which he believed would reveal the face of God at last. As it turned out, God