Episode Seventeen

http://www.ndbag.com/story/comic/17.html

Where does lint come from? Long dismissed an unanswerable question, in recent decades it has come to the fore again as scientists struggle to meet with mankind's burgeoning energy demands. The quest for an answer, though, is not without peril, and we may find that the answer is not to our liking.



Ultimately, of course, the answer is simple; it comes from the sun. Fossil fuels are the once-living remnants of life that relied on sunlight to survive. Even nuclear power can trace its origins to the creation of heavy elements in the furnaces that are stellar cores. As an answer, though, this is meaningless; it tells us nothing.

And so it is with our interloping friend. He arrives at the mention of lint, and assures us that he has real star qualities. But does he? Stars have several qualities that spring immediately to mind, plasma, light and heat being the most obvious. To which does he allude? The answer, of course, is none of these; when we see the furry beastie arrive, he does so by pushing Ndbag out of the way. Pushing is, naturally, the opposite of stars' other main, ahem, attraction; gravity. Straight away, then, we learn that if there are some star qualities to be found in this beastie, there are others that are distinctly lacking. A star deprived of gravity would immediately explode, destroying ever vestige of known life in the universe.

But what, you may ask yourself, has this to do with the search for lint? Ah, gentle naif, it has everything to do with it. Everything, and nothing.

Imagine a world in which the supply of lint was unlimited. A utopia, you say? If only that were so. Paradoxical though it may seem, unlimited lint would mean the death of us all.

To be sure, all would at first seem utopian; for the first time in humanity's 200,000-year story, everyone on the planet would have enough to eat. Energy, too, would become essentially free as lint is easily convertible into fuel. But as history has shown us time and time again, evolution works in no one's favour in the long term, and absolute contentment would lead to stasis. We would sit around in our lint houses, eating lint and talking to each other about, well, lint. Scientific progress would end and, when the huge meteor that's heading our way eventually arrives, humanity will end too.

In this, lint is very much like zero-point energy, long touted as the answer to all our woes. In truth, it is no such thing. Prevailing theories link zero-point energy to dark energy, a mysterious force that is using its antigravitational effect to push the universe apart at an ever-increasing rate. It is surely only a matter of trillions of years before the entire universe is cold and dead, infinitesimal fractions of a degree above absolute zero.

When Ndbag last addressed this topic, he sounded an optimistic note and gave us hope for the future. But if we harness dark energy, will we truly be saving ourselves? Will Zero Kelvin in the form of our unknown beastie be our future? Our future is in the stars, but the furry interloper is not one of those stars. We must tread with caution, but tread we must.