"Tom Purdom - Fossil Games" - читать интересную книгу автора (Purdom Tom)

The situation on the ship was almost the mirror image of the situation in
the Solar System. On the ship, forty-eight percent of the population belonged
to Ari's communion. Only nineteen percent had adopted the EruLabi creeds. But
how long could that last? Morgan had been watching the trends. Every few
years, someone abandoned the Doctrine of the Cosmic Enterprise and joined the
EruLabi. No one ever left the EruLabi and became a devoted believer in the
Cosmic Enterprise.
The discovery that 82 Eridani was surrounded by lifeless planets had
added almost a dozen people to the defectors. The search for life-bearing
planets was obviously a matter of great significance. If consciousness really
was the purpose of the universe, then life should be a common phenomenon.
In 2315, just four years after the final dissolution of the Eight, the
Island of Adventure had received its first messages from Tau Ceti and Morgan
had watched a few more personalities float away from Ari's communion. The ship
that had reached Tau Ceti had made planetfall after a mere one hundred and
forty years and it had indeed found life on the second planet of the system.
Unfortunately, the planet was locked in a permanent ice age. Life had evolved
in the oceans under the ice but it had never developed beyond the level of the
more mundane marine life forms found on Earth.
Morgan had found it impossible to follow the reasons the planet was iced
over. He hadn't really been interested, to tell the truth. But he had pored
over the reports on the undersea biota as if he had been following the
dispatches from a major war.
One of the great issues in terrestrial evolutionary theory had been the
relationship between chance and necessity. To Ari and his disciples, there was
nothing random about the process. Natural selection inevitably favored
qualities such as strength, speed, and intelligence.
To others, the history of life looked more haphazard. Many traits, it was
argued, had developed for reasons as whimsical as the fact that the ancestor
who carried Gene A had been standing two steps to the right when the rocks
slid off the mountain.
The probes that had penetrated the oceans of Tau Ceti IV had sent back
images that could be used to support either viewpoint. The undersea biota was
populated by several hundred species of finned snakes, several thousand
species that could be considered roughly comparable to terrestrial insects,
and clouds of microscopic dimlight photosynthesizers.
Yes, evolution favored the strong and the swift. Yes, creatures who lived
in the sea tended to be streamlined. On the other hand, fish were not
inevitable. Neither were oysters. Or clams.
If the Universe really did have a purpose, it didn't seem to be very good
at it. In the Solar System, theorists had produced scenarios that proved life
could have evolved in exotic, unlikely environments such as the atmosphere of
Jupiter. Instead, the only life that had developed outside Earth had been the
handful of not-very-interesting microorganisms that had managed to maintain a
toehold on Mars.
The purpose of the universe isn't the development of consciousness, one
of the EruLabi on board the Island of Adventure suggested. It's the creation
of iceballs and deserts. And sea snakes.