Andy and the Egg

The WLBOTT Thin Books With Pictures Society recently discussed Andy Weir‘s short story, The Egg.

The Egg is a very though-provoking, humorous, and poignant story. Weir published the story on galactanet.com, and you can read it for free in any of 32 languages.

As we look into the story, there will be spoilers, so if you’d like to read the story first, we’ll wait!

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The Conflicted Wife

In The Egg, a man who has recently died is being guided in the afterlife. The man’s first thought is of his wife and family.

His wise psychopomp replies: “Your wife will cry on the outside, but will be secretly relieved. To be fair, your marriage was falling apart. If it’s any consolation, she’ll feel very guilty for feeling relieved.”

We asked Elder G to analyze the complex emotions the wife must have been experiencing:

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In a Nutshell

The story concerns an anonymous protagonist (referred to as “you”) and “the being” (referred to as “me”). You, a 48-year-old man who dies in a car crash, meet the being, the narrator, who says that you have been reincarnated many times before, and that you will next be reincarnated as a Chinese peasant girl in 540 AD. The being then explains that you are constantly reincarnated across time, and that all human beings who have ever lived and will ever live are incarnations of you. You mention being Abraham Lincoln, Adolf Hitler, and Jesus. The being adds that you were also once John Wilkes Booth, every Holocaust victim and every person who followed Jesus.

Wikipedia

We took this story to heart. We agreed to spend the next day, to the best of our ability, to view every person we encountered as a reincarnation of ourselves. Several of us found that we had an interesting super-empathy, especially when we encountered what we considered bad behavior, because we were forced to look inside ourselves and see what would cause us to react that way.

One of our Thin Book Society‘s members, who is highly competitive, seemed to miss the point. He would grade everyone he met on where they were on his evolved ladder. No surprise, he placed himself at the top. You all know this guy – talks too much, says too little, and is always right. This guy needs some serious reincarnation.

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The Universe is Patient

Let’s run some numbers. Let’s say that the departed man in The Egg exists at the end of human time (this is not mentioned in the story, but we need some boundaries).

Elder G ran the numbers (his analysis is at the blott bottom). How long would it take for a human to live as every human who has ever lived?

The answer is astonishing: ≈3 trillion years.

The universe is about 13.8 billion years old. So although Homo sapiens has existed for merely ~300,000 calendar years, our protagonist could experience something on the order of 200 times the present age of the universe by living those human lives sequentially.

Elder G

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Where Does this Place Moon Watcher?

How far back in time was Moon-Watcher in “2001: A Space Odyssey”, who touched the monolith? According to Elder G:

In Stanley Kubrick’s film, the “Dawn of Man” sequence is generally placed about 4 million years ago. NASA’s history of the film explicitly describes it that way.

But Arthur C. Clarke’s novel places Moon-Watcher and his encounter with the monolith about 3 million years ago. Interestingly, an early screenplay also says “AFRICA, 3,000,000 YEARS AGO,” so the exact number shifted during the film’s development.

So for our purposes, I’d say: Moon-Watcher touched the monolith roughly 3–4 million years ago.

And that gives us a delightful marker for the scale we’re constructing:

~4 million years ago → Moon-Watcher bonks bones together.
~300,000 years ago → Homo sapiens appears.
Today → WLBOTT attempts to understand reincarnation.
~3 trillion subjective years → our rough estimate for living every human life in The Egg.

One other useful detail: Moon-Watcher isn’t actually an “ape” in the modern chimpanzee/gorilla sense. Clarke calls him a man-ape, an imagined early hominin. At 3–4 million years ago, the real fossil record puts us roughly in the world of australopithecines, well before genus Homo became established.

Our 3-trillion-year Egg journey is about 750,000 times longer than the entire interval between Moon-Watcher’s monolith and us. That is a lovely unit of cosmic absurdity: 750,000 Monolith-to-WLBOTT intervals.

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Sister Magdalena’s Take

In Weir’s parable, the boundary between self and other ultimately disappears. If I humiliate someone, I am literally humiliating another incarnation of myself. If I show mercy, I am showing mercy to myself.

Sister Magdalena doesn’t need that identity to collapse. In fact, she insists that it shouldn’t. The other person remains genuinely other: another consciousness, another history, another beloved creature. The reason for radical empathy isn’t that person is secretly me. It’s that person is loved by God as completely as I am.

“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”

C. S. Lewis – The Weight of Glory

The Society also discussed the concept of duality / non-duality, but it soon became clear that we did not know what we were talking about. As Elder G commented, “we have entered into the metaphysical rhubarb patch.” We have no idea what that means.

Or, as Wikipedia clarifies, “Nondualism, also called nonduality, is a fuzzy concept.”

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Kalpa

Tales of the Kalpa

The Shepherd Boy

There’s an old European version preserved in the Brothers Grimm tale “The Shepherd Boy.” It describes an enormous diamond mountain. Once every hundred years, a little bird comes and sharpens its beak on the mountain. When the bird has finally worn away the entire diamond mountain, the first second of eternity has passed.

There was once on a time a shepherd boy whose fame spread far and wide because of the wise answers which he gave to every question. The King of the country heard of it likewise, but did not believe it, and sent for the boy. Then he said to him: “If thou canst give me an answer to three questions which I will ask thee, I will look on thee as my own child, and thou shall dwell with me in my royal palace.” The boy said: “What are the three questions?”

The King said: “The first is, how many drops of water are there in the ocean?” The shepherd boy answered: “Lord King, if you will have all the rivers on earth dammed up so that not a single drop runs from them into the sea until I have counted it, I will tell you how many drops there are in the sea.”

The King said: “The next question is, how many stars are there in the sky?” The shepherd boy said: “Give me a great sheet of white paper,” and then he made so many fine points on it with a pen that they could scarcely be seen, and it was all but impossible to count them; any one who looked at them would have lost his sight. Then he said: “There are as many stars in the sky as there are points on the paper; just count them.” But no one was able to do it.

The King said: “The third question is, how many seconds of time are there in eternity.” Then said the shepherd boy: “In Lower Pomerania is the Diamond Mountain, which is two miles and a half high, two miles and a half wide, and two miles and a half in depth; every hundred years a little bird comes and sharpens its beak on it, and when the whole mountain is worn away by this, then the first second of eternity will be over.”

The King said: “Thou hast answered the three questions like a wise man, and shalt henceforth dwell with me in my royal palace, and I will regard thee as my own child.”

The Shepherd Boy / The complete fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm

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Indra and the Ants

(about 4:15 into the video)

According to the Buddha

Gautama Buddha did not give the exact length of the maha-kalpa in terms of years. However, he gave several analogies to understand it.

Imagine a huge empty cube at the beginning of a kalpa, approximately 16 miles in each side. Once every 100 years, you insert a tiny mustard seed into the cube. According to the Buddha, the huge cube will be filled even before the kalpa ends.

In one instance, when some monks wanted to know how many kalpas had elapsed so far, Buddha gave this analogy:

If you count the total number of sand particles at the depths of the Ganga river, from where it begins to where it ends at the Bay of Bengal sea, even that number will be less than the number of passed kalpas.

Wikipedia / Kalpa

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Kapla, Himachal Pradesh

Kalpa is also the name of a village in northern India.

Kalpa is a small village lying above Reckong Peo, the district headquarters of the Kinnaur district, Himachal Pradesh state, north India. Geographically, Kalpa lies in the Sutlej river valley of the Indian Himalaya. The region is inhabited by the Kinnauri people and is known for its apple orchards, as apples are a major cash-crop for the region. The local Kinnauri follow a syncretism of Hinduism and Buddhism, and many temples in Kalpa are dedicated to both Hindu and Buddhist gods and goddesses. The average literacy rate of Kalpa is around 83.75%. India’s first ever voter, Shyam Saran Negi, also belongs to Kalpa.

Wikipedia

Kalpa, India, at 31° 31′ 48″ N, 78° 15′ 0″ E, is approximately the same latitude as Waco, El Paso, San Angelo, and Killeen, Texas.

Elder G was dubious concerning the ice rink claim, but…

Ha! Kalpa has an ice-skating rink. The universe is clearly beginning to write the blog for us. I checked because I wondered whether we’d stumbled into one of those internet factoids that evaporates on contact. But the rink is real. Kalpa is a Himalayan village in Kinnaur district, Himachal Pradesh, sitting at roughly 2,800–3,000 meters elevation beneath the Kinnaur Kailash range. District Kinnaur The Himachal Pradesh government records an ice-skating rink there, and recent reporting says the renovated rink was readied for ice skating in winter and roller skating in warmer weather. Himachal Pradesh Government

One correction, though: I don’t think the rink itself is indoor. There are plans for a separate multipurpose indoor sports stadium in Kalpa, which may be where the descriptions became tangled.

Elder G

Okay, we’re completely making this up now, but we’d like to think that the skating rink is a place of community and fun in the small village of Kalpa.

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Legends of Kalpa

HimachalWale is a travel organization providing guided tours, Spiti Valley expeditions, weekend getaways, and bike trips across Himachal Pradesh. On their blog, they shared legends of Kalpa.

Himachal Pradesh (lit. ’Snow-laden Mountain Province’) is a state in the northern part of India. Situated in the Western Himalayas, it is one of the 13 mountain states and is characterised by an extreme landscape featuring several peaks and extensive river systems.

Wikipedia

Best Stories & Legends of Kalpa — Tales from the Mountains
[images by Elder G]

Kalpa, at 2,960m with the majestic Kinner Kailash range as its sentinel, is steeped in mythology that locals treat not as stories but as living reality. The 6,050m Kinner Kailash peak is believed to be the winter home of Lord Shiva, and the rock formation near the summit changes color through the day — locals say it reflects Shiva’s mood.

The Goddess Kamakhya Devi
Kalpa’s ancient Kamakhya Devi temple, with its intricately carved wooden architecture, predates recorded history. The goddess here is a fierce protector deity who locals say guards the village from avalanches and landslides.

During the annual puja, a bronze mask of the goddess is carried through the village in a procession that involves ancient dances performed only in Kinnaur. The temple’s carved wooden panels depict scenes from the Ramayana and Mahabharata, but with uniquely Kinnauri artistic interpretations.

The Apple Orchard Spirits
Kalpa’s apple orchards — some of the oldest in India — are believed to be protected by nature spirits called “lok devtas.” Before the first apple is picked each season, the entire community performs a ceremony to ask permission from these spirits. Trees that produce exceptionally well are adorned with prayer flags and treated as sacred. Orchardists say that trees produce better fruit when you speak kindly to them — a belief that modern science (plant communication studies) is beginning to explore.

HimachalWale

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Reference: Elder G’s Time Analysis

How long would it take to live all lives ever lived on Earth?

Elder G: These estimates already give us a wonderfully ridiculous number for the poor protagonist of The Egg.

1. How long have humans existed?

If by “human” we mean Homo sapiens, the Smithsonian dates our species to roughly 300,000 years ago, emerging in Africa.

That’s worth defining because if Weir’s “every human” included earlier members of Homo, such as Homo erectus, we’d have to push the starting line back toward 2 million years ago.

For our experiment, I’d use Homo sapiens only: ~300,000 years.

2. How many humans have ever lived?

Here’s our best ballpark:

About 117 billion Homo sapiens have been born.

The Population Reference Bureau constructed a demographic model using estimated prehistoric populations and birth rates. Their 2022 calculation produced 117,020,448,575 births. They emphasize that this is necessarily speculative because we have essentially no demographic records for most of human existence.

Since another roughly half-billion people have been born since that estimate, for WLBOTT purposes I’d round the number today to something like:

≈117.5 billion human lives

Interestingly, more than 8 billion of those people are alive right now, meaning a surprisingly substantial fraction of everybody who has ever lived is living during our own little sliver of history. The PRB calculation put the living fraction at 6.8% in 2022.

3. What was the average lifespan of all those people?

This one is much squishier.

Modern global life expectancy is around 73 years, but that’s extremely unusual historically. It was only about 32 years in 1900, and estimates around 1770 put it below 30.

And that doesn’t mean everybody historically keeled over at 28. Infant and childhood mortality dragged life expectancy at birth dramatically downward. Someone who survived childhood could live for many more decades.

For very deep prehistory, things get extremely uncertain. PRB’s particular demographic model even suggests life expectancy at birth may have averaged only around 10 years during some very early periods. That’s an assumption used to make its population model work, rather than something I’d treat as a confidently measured prehistoric statistic.

So if what we really want is:

“How many years of conscious human existence must our Egg-person experience?”

I’d be more comfortable adopting a deliberately broad lifetime average of perhaps 20–30 years per person, and showing the answer as a range rather than pretending we know it precisely.

And now the fun begins.

If there have been roughly 117.5 billion lives, then:

Assumed average life	Total subjective experience
20 years	2.35 trillion years
25 years	2.94 trillion years
30 years	3.53 trillion years
40 years	4.70 trillion years

So a useful WLBOTT working estimate would be:

≈3 trillion years

of accumulated human life. That’s already deliciously strange.

The universe is only about 13.8 billion years old. So although Homo sapiens has existed for merely ~300,000 calendar years, our protagonist could experience something on the order of 200 times the present age of the universe by living those human lives sequentially.

And Weir has another trick available to him: the protagonist isn’t constrained by chronological order. The story explicitly has the character reincarnating into different historical periods. So those trillions of subjective years can be packed into only 300,000 years of external human history.

Which gives us two clocks:

Earth clock: ~300,000 years
Egg clock: ~3,000,000,000,000 years

And that, I suspect, is where your Hindu/Buddhist cosmological comparison is going to become spectacular. Because three trillion years sounds preposterously enormous to us…

…until we meet a kalpa.