Let's Find Out - The 9 Billion Names of God (Reading and Analyzing) by Arthur C Clarke

Episode Date: March 29, 2020

Arthur C Clarke was a prolific and brilliant sci-fi author. Best known for 2001: A Space Odyssey, he was known to write many short stories as well. This one is a favorite of mine. Thanks for watching. Get the novel mentioned "Terribilita" here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B085B8KWM4 #ASMR #Sciencefiction #arthurcclarke Music: Aphex Twin "blue calx"

This is a slightly unusual request, said Dr. Wagner, with what he hoped was commendable restraint. As far as I know, it's the first time anyone's been asked to supply a Tibetan monastery with an automatic sequence computer. I don't wish to be inquisitive, but I should hardly have thought your establishment had much use for such a machine. Could you explain just what you intend to do with it? Gladly, replied the Lama, readjusting his silk rose and carefully putting away the same. slide rule he'd been using for currency conversions. Your Mark 5 computer can carry out any routine and any mathematical routine, especially involving up to 10 digits. As we wish you to modify the output circuits, the machine will then be printing words, not columns of figures. I don't quite

understand. This is a project on which we've been working for the last three centuries, since the The Llamissary was founded, in fact. It's somewhat alien to your way of thoughts, so I hope you will listen with an open mind while I explain it. Naturally. It's really quite simple. We've been compiling a list which shall contain all the possible names of God. I beg your pardon.

We have reason to believe, continue the Lama and perturbably, that all such names can be written With not more than nine letters in an alphabet we have devised. And you've been doing this for three centuries. Yes, we expected it would take us about 15,000 years to complete the task. Oh, Dr. Wagner looked a little dazed. Now I see why you wanted to hire one of our machines. But exactly what is the purpose of this project? The llama hesitated for a fraction of a second, and Wagner wondered if he had offended him.

If so, there was no trace of annoyance in the reply. Call it ritual, if you like, but it's a fundamental part of our belief. All the many names of the supreme being, God, Jehovah, Allah, and so on, they are only man-made labels. There is a philosophical problem of some difficulty here, which I do not propose to discuss, but somewhere along, somewhere among all the possible combinations of letters that can occur, are what one may call the real names of God.

By systematic permutation of the letters, we've been trying to list them all. By C, so you've been starting at A, A, A, and working up to Z, Z, Z, Z. Exactly, though we use a special alphabet of our own, modifying the electromagnetic typewriters to deal with this is, of course, trivial. A rather more interesting problem is that of devising suitable circuits to eliminate ridiculous combinations. For example, no letter must occur more than three times in succession.

Three, surely you mean two. Three is correct. I'm afraid it would take too long to explain why, even if you did understand our language. I'm sure it would, said Wagner hastily. Go on. Luckily, it will be a simple matter to adapt your automatic sequence computer for this work, since once it has been programmed properly,

it'll permutate each letter in turn and print the result. What would have taken us 15,000 years, it will be able to do in a few hundred days? Dr. Wagner was scarcely conscious of the faint sounds from the Manhattan streets far below. He was in a different world, a world of natural, not man-made mountains. High up in the remote areas,

these monks had been patiently at work, generations after generation. compiling the lists of meaningless words. Was there any limit to the follies of mankind? Still, he must give no hint of his inner thoughts. The customer is always right. There's no doubt, replied the doctor, that we can modify Mark V to print lists of this nature.

I'm much more worried about the problem of installation and maintenance. Getting out to Tibet and in these days isn't going to be easy. We can arrange that. The components are small enough to travel by air, That is one reason why we chose your machine. If you can get them to India, we will provide transport from there. And you want to hire two of our engineers? Yes, for the three months that the project should occupy.

I have no doubt that personnel can manage that, Dr. Wagner scribble a note on his desk pad. There are just two other points. Before he could finish the sentence, the Lama had produced a small slip of paper. This is my certified credit balance at the Asia. geatic bank. Thank you. It appears to be adequate. The second matter is so trivial that I hesitate to mention it. It's surprising how often the obvious gets overlooked. What source of electrical energy have you? A diesel generator providing 50 kilowatts at 110 volts. It was installed about five years ago and is quite reliable. It's made life at the Lama Cary much more comfortable. But of course it

was really installed to provide power for the motors driving the prayer wheels. Of course, echoed Dr. Wagner, I should have thought of that. The view from the peripatet was vertiginous, but in time one gets used to anything. After three months, George Hanley was not impressed by the 2,000-foot swoop into the abyss or the remote checkerboard of fields in the valley below. He was leaning against the wind-smooth stones and staring morosely at the distant mountains, whose name he had never bothered to discover. This thought George was the craziest thing that had ever happened to him.

Project Shangri-La. Some wit back at the labs had christened it. For weeks now, the Mark V had been churning out acres of sheets covered with gibberish. Patiently, inexorably, the computer had been rearranging letters in all their possible combinations, exhausting each class before going on to the next. As the sheets emerged from the electromagnetic typewriters, the monks had carefully cut them up and pasted them into enormous books. Weak, heaven be praised, they would be finished. Just what obscure calculations had convinced the monks that they needn't bother to go on to words of 10, 20, or 100 letters, George didn't know.

One of his recurring nightmares was that there would be some change of plan and that the high lama, who they naturally called San, damn Jaff, though he didn't look a bit like him, would suddenly announce that the project would be extended to approximately AD 2060. They were capable of it. George heard the heavy wooden door slamming the wind as Chuck came out onto the parapetet beside him. As usual, Chuck was smoking one of his cigars that made him so popular with the monks, who it seemed were quite willing to embrace all the minor and most of the major pleasures in life. That was one of the one thing in their favor. They might be crazy, but they weren't blue noses. Those frequent trips they took down to the village, for instance. Listen, George, said Chuck urgently. I've learned something

that means trouble. What's wrong? Isn't the machine behaving? That was the worst contingency George could imagine. It might delay his return. Nothing could be more horrible. The way he felt now, even the site of a TV commercial would seem like mana from heaven. At least it would be some link with home. No, it's nothing like that. Chuck seated himself on the parapetet, which was unusual because normally he was scared at the drop. I've just found what all this is about.

What do you mean? I thought we knew. Sure, we know that the monks are what they're trying to do, what they're up to, but we didn't know why. It's the craziest thing. Tell me something new, growled George. But old Sam's just come clean with me. You know the way he drops in every afternoon and watches the sheets roll out? Well, this time he seemed rather excited or at least as near as he'll ever get to it.

When I told him we were on the last cycle, he asked me in that cute English accent of his if I'd ever wondered what they were trying to do. I said, sure, and he told me. Go on, I'll buy it. Well, they believe that when they've listed all his names and they recognize that there are about 9 billion of them, God's purpose will be achieved. The human race will have finished what it was created to do.

And there won't be any point in carrying on. Indeed, the very idea is something like blasphemy. Then what do they expect us to do? Commit suicide? There's no need for that. When the list is complete and God steps in and simply winds things up. Bingo. Oh, I get it. When we finish our job, it'll be the end of the world.

Chuck gave a nervous little laugh. That was what I said to Sam. And you know what happened? He looked at me in a very queer way. Like I'd been stupid in class and said, It's nothing as trivial as that. George thought this over for a moment. That's what I call taking the wide view.

he said presently. But what do you suppose we do about it? I don't see that it makes the slightest difference to us. After all, we already knew that they were crazy. Yeah, but don't you see what may happen? When the list's complete and the last Trump doesn't blow, or whatever it is they expect, we may get the blame. It's our machine they've been using.

I don't like the situation one little bit. I see, said George slowly. you've got a point there. But this sort of things happened before, you know. When I was a kid down in Louisiana, we had a crack-pop preacher who once said the world was going to end next Sunday. Hundreds of people believed them even sold their homes. Yet nothing happened.

They didn't turn nasty as you'd expect. They just decided that he'd made a mistake in his calculations and went right on believing. I guess some of them still. do. Well, this isn't Louisiana in case you hadn't noticed. There are just two of us and a hundred of these monks. I like them. I'll be sorry for old Sam when his life work backfires on him, but all the same I wish I was somewhere else. I've been wishing that for weeks. There's nothing we can do until the contract's finished and the transport arrives to flies out. Of course,

said Chuck thoughtfully, we could always try a bit of sabotage. Like hell we could. That would make things worse. Not the way I meant. Look at it like this. The machine will finish four days from now on the present 20 hours a day basis. The transport calls in a week. Okay? And then all we need to do is find something that needs replacing during one of the overall periods. Something that will hold up the work for a couple of days. We'll fix it, of course, but not too quickly. If we time matters properly, we can find out. be down at the airfield when the last name pops out of the register. They won't be able to catch us then. I don't like it, said George. It will be the first time I ever walked out on a job. Besides, it would make them suspicious, no? Nah, I'll sit tight and take what comes.

I still don't like it, he said seven days later as the tough little mountain ponies carried them down the winding road. And don't you think I'm running away because I'm afraid? I'm just sorry for those poor old guys up there. and I don't want to be around when they find what suckers they've been. I wonder how Sam will take it. It's funny, replied Chuck. But when I said goodbye, I got the idea he knew we were walking out on him.

And that he didn't care because he knew the machine was running smoothly and the job would soon be finished. After that, well, of course for him, there just isn't any after that. George turned in his saddle and stared back up the mountain road. This was the last place from which he would get a clear view of the Lama Sterey. The squat and angular buildings were silhouetted against the afterglow of the sunset. Here and there lights gleamed like portholes in the side of an ocean liner. Electric lights, of course, sharing the same circuit as the Mark V. How much longer would they share it? wondered George.

Would the monks smash up the computer in their rage and disappointment? Or would they just sit down quietly and begin their calculations all over again? He knew exactly what was happening up on the mountain at this very moment. The high llama and his assistants would be sitting in their silk robes, inspecting the sheets as the junior monks carried them away from the typewriters and passed them into the great volumes. No one would be saying anything. The only sound that would be heard is the incessant patter,

the never-ending rainstorm of the keys hitting the paper, for the Mark V itself was utterly... silent as it flashed through its thousands of calculations a second. There she is, called Chuck, pointing down into the valley. Ain't she beautiful? She certainly was, thou George. The batter old DC-3 lay at the end of the runway like a tiny silver cross. In two hours she would be bearing them away to freedom, insanity.

It was a thought worth savoring like a fine cure. George let it roll around in his mind and the pony continued to trudge patiently down the slope. The swift night of the high Himalayas was now almost upon them. Fortunately the road was very good as the roads went in that region and they were both carrying torches. There was not the slightest danger, only a certain discomfort from the bitter cold.

The sky overhead was perfectly clear and a blaze with the familiar friendly stars. At least there would be no risk, George thought, of the pilot being unable to take off because of weather conditions. That had been his only remaining worry. He began to sing, but gave up after a while. This vast arena of mountains, gleaming like whitely hooded ghosts on every side, didn't exactly encourage such abulence. Presently George glanced at his watch. Should be there in an hour, he called back over.

his shoulder to Chuck. Then he added in an afterthought. I wonder if the computer's finished its run. It was due about now. Chuck didn't reply. So George swung around in his saddle. He could just see Chuck's face, a white oval turn towards the sky.

Look, whispered Chuck. And George lifted his eyes to heaven. There is always a last time for everything. overhead without any fuss the stars by Arthur C. Clarke. While it might not even seem very deep or significant, profound, at first read for sight, the actual ending of that story, the fact that the monks' patience, the monk's extreme virtue of three centuries of patience and the subsequent certainty that arose out of that.

And of course, everything that, knowing what lamas, equating monks with lamas, like a patient monk that says about their personality and worldview, and it's very informative as to what he might have meant by the ending of that, that abrupt ending of the story where once you consider the, mysteriousness of the human mind, the complexity of which hasn't been matched by any other scientific discovery yet known to humankind. Spending entire lives and

entire generations series, generation after generation, entire lineages for like they said 300 years of course well beyond that. It's probably one of the most productive insightful things regarding the nature of the universe and ultimately the universe being going hand in hand with God because once we get self Revelation that tells us being as we are beings of the universe our own nature gives us insight into the nature of the universe as a whole. I mean when you get down to our mental units of our brain and

you go to cells and we reach atoms and then we recognize that all matter is frozen energy it's it's and so if you take that that view of you know our material bodies and in the emerging property of consciousness coming out of our you know bodies that are composed of nothing unique in the universe I mean we are an accumulation a it's really just the order the order in the organization of the atoms that make our DNA informs what our cells and the rest of our organs are going to evolve into in other words who's to say you know Arthur C. Clark was actually a very clean scientifically educated man himself and it says a lot I know he

lived in I think Sri Lanka So he was very interested in touch with Asian, or we'll just say non-European, African Asian cultures. And he recognized there is a lot of wisdom. There's a lot of self-knowledge to be gained through introspection. Of course, aspects of that story is he's able to show the symbiosis of the enlightened monks in the rational scientists. The monks needed the lamas needed their machine to speed up their calculations.

Perhaps in a way, hyper-efficiency of the machine, even though this story was, I think, written in the 50s, so they were saying thousands of calculations a second, which is laughable nowadays, because now we have machines that literally do trillions of calculations per second. billions per second is the norm. Perhaps if the monks wouldn't have jumped at the impulse to capitalize on the machine's efficiency,

they might have, in the due course of the 15,000, was it, years or days, to otherwise do the calculations by hand, maybe they would have gained the wisdom to know not to complete that if the universe, the stars extinguishing themselves, manifestation of all nine billion names of god uh you know would have happened so they i thought it was a very would have taken us 15 000 years it will be able to do in a few hundred days that's uh so it is years so that's that's actually a very plausible scenario i feel like because if you extrapolate just the immense technological growth in the last century that's a hundred years multiply that by 150

you know we have 150 of those to be 15,000 years and that would be hard to even unfathomable really unfathed progress so we can only hope that we truly as much as we're evolving and innovating technologically as well so I don't know I used to be really skeptical about um the spirituality and hyper spirituality and I think the human mind and in all matters of you know the mind and spirit and religion is so complex that it's for a lot of I think it's more easy in a lot of ways for charlatans snake oil salesman and just generally bad actors dishonest self-interested people to capitalize on the thirst the desire for more information more knowledge about the human mind and spirit and

the cosmological significance of the human beings and the complexity voluted you know terminology and and you're bound to run into when when you're diving consciousness and the nature of consciousness what gives it a bad rap in other words i think there's a lot of um great honest uh genuine candid sincere devotees and followers and seekers of truth in the religious and spiritual domains and that might be why he actually used the example of a llama because the Dalai Lama is almost the epitome of what we view as an actually net pure

a spiritually pure individual I don't think I've ever really heard Yeah, actually, I don't think I've ever heard anyone smear the Dalai Lama's name. I can't imagine, I can't remember any instance where I've ever heard him doing anything dishonest. I know if I can say the same about the Pope, definitely not in the history of popes. There's a lot of dirt. Any recent popes, though I don't follow that closely enough. But the, I don't know, I like this story because it really, makes you think it's of course quick but it the ending is it's deep it's the imagery of looking up

at something timeless constant mountains move oceans drop this um climates change temperatures fluctuate we have seasons uh nothing on earth is really nearly as static as the stars i mean even the sun you know it gets it gets blocked out by the moon occasionally but the stars every single night if there's no clouds from the earth you know those are that's a blockage from the earth the stars themselves never seem to change accepting the occasional supernova that we might see so the stars are a symbol of constancy and from which we reference all other motion, you know, brightness even in the universe. And to the imagery of looking up on a, especially being in a,

such a spiritually saturated and overwhelmingly natural environment like the Tibetan mountains. And looking up on a crisp, clear night. When they said it was really cold, it referenced being cold, especially in the story, which I think was a nice little detail, you know, foreshadowing, that's the word I was looking for. What was about to happen, it's very cold. And they look up and all of a sudden the one thing we can rely on and we've relied on for millions, billions of years.

Who knows how long we've, you know, at least mammals, I don't know about lizards and dinosaurs, but I'm certain that some monkey, 10 million years in the past, looked up and there was like Arthur C. Clark's 2001 an initial imprint of the majesty and the mystery of the nighttime sky and the stars and what that means and how far away and how large that might be and what that tells us what that says about our place in the universe and just looking up and imagine seeing that after millions of years of that almost being burned into our psyche really think it is and just seeing them start to keep it's a memorable image for sure so and one last thing I think I want to mention is the deep connection between language and mathematics and of course language predates written history

and writing who knows how many tens of thousands of years but old traditions carry on through the spoken word were certainly developed very in a very sophisticated manner before they were written down in around the world you know in many cases in India in particular I want to bring up creators of mathematical and computational sciences here on page 127 it says the Carolus School of Astronomy and Mathematics founded by Madh and they came up with many ideas such as about two centuries before Newton and Leibniz created the calculus which is in a serious way like they're the shoulders upon which Einstein and everybody else who were great innovators and inventors and physicists and scientists that allow the technological era that we exist and today to exist. But these guys independently, and way centuries before those European counterparts,

they developed concepts that were ancient, even to them, in the 1300s around then, such as infinite series expansions, power series, trichinometrics, like sine, cosine, arc tangent, tangent, um approximations of infinite forms differentiation integration which is calculus uh tons of things i mean approximating pi and how to you know get the circumference of a circle and i bring this up because in indian particular which is what uh arthur c clark was very familiar with there's a what i want to say here the relation between language and mathematics is an ancient indian tradition And before there's a proper mathematics and I think even in India is where we get the concept of zero from

We definitely European math would would be would lack a lot if it didn't have it wasn't informed by India and Diaz mathematical concepts and this is becoming an interesting idea I want to further explore in the future We make a very sharp distinction between a logic and mathematics and and as there's language says a lot about the way we think because obviously we our minds evolved the use of language and so clearly language is a insight into how our minds think and the grammar and the syntax that we use gives us insight into the trains of thought and in the processes which go on

in our mind and they're like the externalized vocalizations of our internal monologues and stuff it's interesting to think like what we how humans thought we must have all thought in images before we uh actually had words that we could kind of think to ourselves and speak to ourselves um it must have been very emotional in an integration of emotions and you know images and memories and experiences before we had the proper language but that's all to say that there is a deep connection in Arthur C. Clark's vision that coming up in just naming God's nine billion names of God would complete some kind of maybe circuit or something that would connect in some profound cosmologically significant way because we are a part of the

universe so in essence that's our connection to god i mean god is is the universe or even if it it is beyond the universe it's still in really any definition of god it's it's the causal influence on the universe so whatever our nature is is in a religious spiritual sense very the nature of god so whether we are a part of God or we are the creation, the stuff of the, whatever the analogy of God's thinking would be. We, in our consequent inventions like language and tools and mathematics are ways to kind of follow breadcrumbs as far as learning about the nature of our own minds. spiritual texts might not be as explicit in their mathematical formulations but they are the seeds out of which are math and what we think of as separate rational scientific thought is is has

flourished and so we have to pay proper credence you know i mean it's like uh i know what a good analogy would be but uh there's i think the ultimate theory thesis of last thing I would like to say is just that the there's depths conscious religious very ancient religious texts that we would do well to revere and for continue to further explore before we just threw them out as superstition and irrelevant to our modern lives the thought that we the culture and technologies that we thrive off today and rely upon are built very firmly on top of these spiritual religious foundations out of which you know which we developed over millions if not

at least hundreds of thousands of years in the wild in true raw nature under the stars and to me it's very significant to some of the wisdom that we might be able to gain from these distilled iterations of nature our consciousness and whatever relation that might have with such as a monotheistic god i think this story had a lot more to say than just a surface gloss of saying oh it was just deus ex machinae at the end saying that you know the writing out nine billion names of God is is just a complete fabrication and just a you know a trivial little surprise ending to a short story I think this story could definitely be made into an elaborate novel science fiction novel it has very

fertile seeds of recognizing that they he made a point a very careful point to point and to say that they invented their own alphabet it wasn't just the European alphabet they took centuries to you know carefully develop a an alphabet out of you know who knows how much intense meditation and introspect you know because although we have a very hard you know very solid universe that we live in externally internally I think we have an equally real and vast universe in each of our minds in the connection of which is probably is gonna bring about unknown minds in the universe mutually were much more capable

in together than we are alone. Meditation with insights, spiritual reflection can actually yield. So anyways, I think it was a great short story, full of, like I said, very, very promising, very rich ideas, very engaging ideas that provoke imagery that is quite beautiful, I think. I hope you guys enjoyed it too. Thanks for watching.