The participants in this conversation at Castel Gandolfo were the Pope, Solomon, the Honor Guard Hammurabi Badia, and Father Moru, head of the Vatican's secret and military departments. Hammurabi followed at a distance, and since Father Moru had to keep an eye on the Honor Guard, he could only remain by Hammurabi's side and couldn't hear what the Pope and Solomon discussed—Francis had long since learned Solomon's identity from Father Moru, with a ritual conducted by a group of cardinals as corroboration, so he had few doubts.
However, their conversation was not as solemn as Father Moru imagined. The early part focused mostly on soccer, music, and the children of the slums, and the light, pleasant mood didn't vanish even when Solomon showed the Pope the Undying City's supercomputer results simulating the Miller–Urey experiment.
This is a very famous experiment—the so-called primordial soup experiment.
Although Darwin demonstrated that life evolves, he did not solve the riddle of how that evolutionary process began. So in the 1950s, two chemists, Miller and Urey, undertook a bold experiment to probe how life began—trying to create life from nonliving chemical substances.
On March 8, 1953, the New York Times ran an article titled "A Look Back Two Billion Years," which caused a sensation, especially in religious circles. If life miraculously arose in Miller and Urey's flasks, one could draw a conclusion: we would no longer need a supernatural being to descend and grant humanity the fire of creation; it would prove that life is an inevitable product of natural law. Likewise, it would follow that since life could arise spontaneously on Earth, it should also exist elsewhere in the universe.
But the Miller–Urey experiment failed.
Although a few amino acids were produced in the flasks, that was still far from the birth of life. No matter how Miller and Urey tried, life did not arise in the flasks. As early as 2007—before the Chitauri descended and proved life existed beyond Earth—Miller's vials were rediscovered in a closet at UC San Diego. Students reanalyzed the samples using more advanced methods, including liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry, and the results were astonishing. The reanalysis identified several important nucleobases.
In other words, the amino acids in the flasks had formed bases.
This finding was exciting. Life has evolved over billions of years, whereas those flasks had only sat in a closet for fifty years and still changed. In the grand arc of life's evolution, fifty human years are no more than a blink. After that, interest in creating life in the laboratory was rekindled. The Pope remembered it; at the time he was still the Archbishop of Buenos Aires in Argentina, a Jesuit. "Evolution does not contradict God's creation. As early as 1950, Pius XII stated that evolution and doctrine are not incompatible. In 1996, John Paul II affirmed that view," the Pope said with a smile. "But you still haven't proved where life comes from."
"That's why I bring up the supercomputer," Solomon said, brushing a finger across the leaves in a flowerbed. "Humans cannot leap two billion years into the future to see what would be in a flask, but mathematics can. We can encode every parameter we need into a model. We need to simulate every parameter of the primordial ocean; the computer must 'understand' motion, thermodynamics, gravity, and so on—only then can it accurately simulate and reconstruct the combinatorial relationships among every atom in the primordial sea. As it happens, I have such computers, more than one, and I couldn't wait to start computing and simulating."
"And the result?"
"After fifty years, the flask produced the precursors of RNA, consistent with the Miller–Urey experiment. The simulation continued; when the computer's cooling pool was boiling and the timeline was stretched by tens of millions of years, the flask still held only compounds and a jumble of mixtures."
The Pope raised his eyebrows in surprise. "No life?"
"No." Solomon admitted his failure candidly, seemingly indifferent.
"That is surprising." There was no schadenfreude in the Pope's tone—only regret.
"It's not hard to understand. The second law of thermodynamics states that heat cannot pass from a colder body to a hotter one without other changes occurring. In a closed system, all energy ultimately becomes entropy."
"Enlighten me."
"Entropy dismantles structure—hot water cools, sandcastles collapse into loose sand under waves. That's entropy, an irreversible transfer of energy. How nonliving chemical substances self-organize into complex living forms is the great riddle of life. Natural law drives randomness rather than organization—no doubt about it—but that is not why we go looking for a creator," Solomon said, showing the Pope examples of orderly phenomena in nature on a tablet: gravity, snowflakes, vortices, quartz crystals, and so on. "The universe organizes matter, moving from disorder to order; this seems contrary to entropy. Most physicists conclude the universe is disordered—the universe promotes entropy and disorder."
The Pope spread his hands, signaling Solomon to continue.
"Yet other facts show the universe operates under a single directive with a single goal: dissipating energy. Returning to cases of self-organization in nature—tornadoes, snowflakes, ripples—these are dissipative structures, in which molecules self-organize to help the system disperse energy more effectively. Put simply, matter self-organizes to dissipate energy better. While the universe drives disorder, it also generates pockets of order. As a system's disordered state escalates in structure, those pockets of order enhance entropy. To create disorder efficiently, you need a certain degree of order."
Solomon drew a mathematical symbol representing the Big Bang and entropy—a central point with arrows radiating in eight directions. "Order arises within disorder, self-organization driving entropy increase. This process doesn't need God to give it the first kick. So I added one instruction to the model: maximize energy dissipation."
"And the result?"
Solomon pulled up an animation with a timeline. At the fifty-year mark, the Miller–Urey result appeared. In the closed system, compounds continued to move and combine; from basic protein chains they evolved into a honeycomb of hexagons. These were nucleotides. Next, the nucleotide chains began to wind on themselves, coiling into a helix. Then the helix evolved further into a double-helix structure—DNA, the code of life.
"It's quite straightforward. If you want to dissipate more energy, the simplest method is self-replication. Life is merely the inevitable outcome of entropy, a mechanism for driving entropy increase. The Battle of New York proved life exists beyond Earth—that proves life can take root anywhere. Life is something the universe generates and propagates to dissipate energy—it is inevitability born of chance, a product that emerges spontaneously from physical law."
"Then why not continue?" The Pope shrugged. "Keep going and the life in that flask might end up as a rock musician!"
"You're the most humorous Pope I've ever met, Your Holiness," Solomon said with a laugh. "That work is ongoing. In extraterrestrial civilizations, some have created gods of their own species by similar means. On Hala in the Large Magellanic Cloud, there's a supercomputer called the Supreme Intelligence—a life existing within a machine, built by a process analogous to the simulation I've shown you. If we continue, the life in the flask might do much more than play rock. I altered the algorithm, accelerating the evolution of compounds with a logic-deduction-like approach. We created virtual life—mathematically defined virtual prokaryotes. But that's where we stalled. To push evolution further we had to scale up capacity, introduce more matter, and compute the transformations of all compounds; simulating even a brain demands enormous resources."
Here, a hint of regret crossed Solomon's face. "Whether DNA mutates is Schrödinger's cat—it's a quantum-state compound. Even computing directly with qubits isn't enough. No quantum computer could run such a vast intelligent lifeform; all the computers on Earth combined couldn't do it, and my research teams are still seeking ways to go further. We have the technology and the theory, but we're busy converting them into practical use. Like life's beginning, it's a 0-to-1 leap—every step is."
"Father Moru is a devout man. He pushed hard to make this conversation happen," the Pope said, hands clasped behind his back. "I know who you are, and I know the meaning of your existence—and the outcome of the Mass in the Alps. Each era has its theme, and the revelations you bring differ with each age. In the past, people believed in a creator; now, they believe in science. They're different, but both are what humanity needed at the time. I know you came to see me to ease an old man's mind."
Before Solomon could continue, the Pope patted his arm with a chuckle. "If I am the last Pope, so be it. Whether nailed to the cross or slaying dragons, faith will always exist in this world—even your 'Unified Truth' is no exception. No matter where humanity goes from here, compared to the past, at least now you walk among us, don't you?"
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