GREGORY BENFORD

LIFE AT GALACTIC CENTER

We're not in a lucky part of the galaxy, at least for views.

Our sun is tucked down in the disk's plane, though this took centuries to
realize. In retrospect, perhaps it is puzzling that astronomers did not guess
until the nineteenth century that the Milky Way is a disk, seen edge on.

Ancients used water analogies to describe it, images of rivers and streams. How
much easier matters might have been if we could have seen the truly gaudy
attraction in all the galaxy, the brilliant center.

Perhaps, thought, our ignorance is good luck. Dark dust clouds block our view in
the constellation Sagittarius, so we cannot see in the optical frequencies
beyond the edge of our local spiral arm. Beyond that are immense dark lanes,
blotting out the next arm and the hub beyond.

One way to see the center would be to live much nearer. But that could be fatal.

The galactic center is about 25,000 light years away. We orbit about two thirds
of the way out into the spiral disk, a benign, even boring neighborhood. The
nearest star, Alpha Centauri, is 4.2 light years away, an average stellar
separation for our region, where there is a star in roughly every fifty cubic
light years.

Were we to approach the galactic hub, well past the dust clouds, we would find a
halo of stars glowing brightly, growing ever denser. In 1932 Carl Jansky
discovered that, to his shock, the galactic center was the brightest radio
location in the sky, outshining even our sun. Something was going on.

In the core, within a few light years of the exact center, there are a million
stars within a single light year. On average, the nearer stars are only a
hundredth of a light year away. This is only ten thousand times the distance
from the Earth to the sun. Imagine having several stars so close they outshine
the moon.

As one might expect, this is bad news for solar systems around such stars. Close
collisions between all these stars occur in about a hundred thousand years,
scrambling up planetary orbits, raining down comets upon them as well.

The galactic center is the conspicuous Times Square of the galaxy -- and far
more deadly than the comfortable suburbs like ours. Joel Davis's Journey to the
Center of Our Galaxy details how horrific it is, points out that the survival
time for an unshielded human within even a hundred light years of the core is
probably hours.

I began studying the galactic center in the mid-1970s, out of curiosity. I did
not guess that this mysterious region would intertwine two of my passions,
physics and science fiction, though in part I was interested because I had begun
writing a series of novels which seemed pointed in that direction.

The first was In the Ocean of Night, exploring the discovery that computer-based
life seemed dominant throughout the galaxy. The action followed a British
astronaut, Nigel Walmsley, cranky and opinionated. It detailed a few incidents
in our solar system, in the late twentieth century and beyond, which uncovered
the implication that "evolved adding machines," as Walmsley put it, had
inherited the rains of earlier, naturally derived alien societies.

As I began work on the next volume, I realized that the galactic center was the
obvious place for machines to seek. By the early 1980s we knew that there is a
virulent gamma ray flux there, hot clouds, and enormously energetic processes.
Most of this we gathered from the radio emissions, which penetrate dust clouds
and revealed the crackling activity at the center for the first time. Infrared
astronomy soon caught up, unmasking the hot, tangled regions.

By the time I finished Across the Sea of Suns, I realized that I could do some
research myself on the galactic center. I had by that time written papers on
pulsars and galactic jets, and had both expertise and curiosity. Our galaxy is a
barred spiral, meaning that a straight segment runs through the center,
connecting two bright spiral arms. The inner thousand light years is a turbulent
zone of high velocity clouds, moving so fast that gravitation finds it difficult
to force them to collapse into stars. Magnetic fields are also strong, making
collapse still harder. Few new stars, so few later supernova explosions.

In the 1960s my friend Larry Niven had begun his Known Space stories, featuring
a colossal explosion at galactic center, perhaps a chain reaction of supernovas.
There was some evidence of greatly energetic processes there, but we know now
that there was no such mammoth explosion, big enough to make alien races flee.
However, within the inner hundred light years, there does seem to have been a
great energy release a few million years ago. In the infrared we can see the
outrushing gases.

More striking, though, are mysterious features appearing in the radio. In 1984 I
was giving a talk on galactic jets at UC Los Angeles, and my host was Mark
Morris, a radio astronomer. "Explain this," he challenged, slapping down a radio
map he had just made at the Very Large Array in New Mexico.

"Good grief," was my first reaction. "Is this a joke?"

It showed a feature I called the Claw, but which Mark more learnedly termed the
Arch: a bright, curved prominence made up of slender fibers. Though the Arch is
over a hundred light years long these fibers are about a light year wide.

They curve upward from the galactic plane, like arcs of great circles which
center near the galactic core, which is several hundred light years away. These
intricate filaments shine by energetic (in fact, relativistic) electrons,
radiating in strong magnetic fields, which are aligned along the filaments.

There was nothing remotely like them in astronomy. What process could make long,
slightly curved paths, a light year wide?

I undertook the challenge, with some hesitation. The object was bizarre, which
meant some new ideas were needed. I was aided by later discoveries in 1985,
which spotted separate filaments within a few hundred light years of the core,
single threads shining brightly. Above the Arch, some Japanese astronomers found
what looks like a weak, fat jet.

How to explain thin filaments which glow by electron luminosity, a hundred times
longer than they were wide? I thought of neon lights, which are glow discharges
sustained by electric currents in slender tubes. What could contain the hot gas,
or electrons? The magnetic fields, which mid-1980s measurements found to be at
least a hundred times stronger than typical in the rest of the galaxy.

Astronomers began thinking of conceptual models for the phenomenon, mostly using
magnetic loops which had been somehow expelled from the galactic center, and
were striking distant gas clouds. These I didn't much believe; the Arch was too
orderly. Others thought maybe the filaments were cosmic strings -immense
fractures in space-time, made in the early universe -- lit up by their passage
through the galactic inner regions. This model was disproved quickly, because
strings should move at very nearly the speed of light; the Arch didn't.

By the time I got through with my calculations, building a mathematical model, I
had decided that the entire network of Arch and threads might be a huge circuit.
It had to be powered by some battery, and while most people thought the galactic
center was the logical site, I kept noticing that it was hundreds of light years
away. Instead, I studied the giant molecular clouds which were moving counter to
the general galactic rotation. These were quite odd, dark and carrying millions
of stellar masses of dust and gas in clumps light years wide.

I found that if they were even slightly ionized -- and how could they not be,
with so much ultraviolet glare from nearby blue stars? -- these clouds would
generate electric fields as they crossed the strong magnetic fields. The edges
of these clouds could then act as batteries, applying voltages which accelerated
electrons, sending them shooting along the magnetic field lines, lighting up the
magnetic structures that already existed.

Since these discharges occurred because of momentary passage of clouds, they
were essentially like weather -- changeable. Perhaps we could see some bright
filaments weaken, others flare? I calculated the times required, and found that
the best we could expect was a change within a decade or so, or longer.

Since these were circuits, they reminded me of lightning. Clouds on Earth
discharge to ground along slightly ionized trails in the air. The stroke time is
about a second, just a bit shorter than the time the lightning takes to begin
snaking about itself, like a garden hose -- or the twisting snapping sparks from
generators, a cliche overworked in films like Frankenstein.

Could these fibers be a sort of slow-motion lightning, taking perhaps hundreds
of thousands of years to discharge? Then we might see filaments curling about
themselves, or each other?

I asked these questions, sketched out solutions, and made a few predictions. In
science any model, to win flavor, must paint an appealing picture and predict
the outcome of future observations. I published the model in the Astrophysical
Journal in 1988, "An Electrodynamic Model of the Galactic Center."

People seemed to find it plausible, if a bit strange. Electrodynamics isn't used
much in astronomy, where gravity rules. I waited to see what observations would
unmask.

Mark Morris kept making maps of the Arch region, but so far has seen no
brightening or dimming, In 1990, though, some other radio astronomers found an
odd thread they termed the Snake -- because it twisted, not once but twice,

I was pleased. The Snake seems attached to a giant molecular cloud at one end,
and merges with the spherical rim of a supernova at the other. Is its cause the
cloud, or the supernova? We don't know.

For now, mine seems the only theory left standing in the blizzard of data we're
now getting about the galactic center. But my model depends on, without
explaining, the strong smooth magnetic fields. How did they get there? Are they
simply accumulated, as matter in falls? Or did some past explosion make them? We
don't know.

And what about the jet? This points to the big unanswered question about the
center: is there a black hole there? Certainly our experience with distant,
active galactic nuclei leads us to suspect one, since the galactic jets I had
already studied almost certainly come from the accretion disks around truly
massive black holes, some ranging up to perhaps a billion stellar masses.

Measures of the orbital velocities of stars very close to the true galactic
center, called Sagittarius A, suggest that a point mass of about a million
stellar masses lurks there, giving off very little light.

Much controversy surrounds these observations, though, with some holding that
the data could mean only a thousand stellar masses iS needed. All that is packed
into a radio bright structure less than ten times as wide as the distance
between the Earth and our sun. The region is hard to fathom, though, because the
total luminosity within fifteen light years of this structure is about ten
million stellar luminosities. Picture ten million or more bright, young stars
orbiting a tiny dark spot, and you'll see the problem making out what's going
on.

While I was mulling over data and jotting equations, I kept on writing novels.
What came to be called the Galactic Series (by my publisher) pushed on with
Great Sky River, a reference to the ancient Indian names for the Milky Way. I
focused on the inner ten light years, for dramatic effects, even though I knew
the sheer energy flux there made humans quite vulnerable. It seemed a good stage
to act out my main theme, the superiority of machines in much of the galaxy.

The huge energetics of the center would draw machines, I felt. The black hole
would intrigue any inquisitive life form. And the struggle between vastly
different forms would surge across such a virulent territory. Humans would be
part of it all, but certainly not the major players.

So I began envisioning what it might be like at stage center. Black holes draw
matter in. Energetic arguments suggest that a black hole at the center should
ingest about a thousandth of a star's mass in a year, already ground into dust
from the giant molecular clouds -- with occasional burps if a whole sun gets
swallowed. Indeed, the electrodynamic view I advanced suggested a mechanism to
fuel the black hole: the discharges we see are in fact energy shed by slowing
the clouds, a sort of electrodynamic brake.

The mass funnels into a disk, rotating about the hole. The disk gets hot from
friction, its rotation perhaps shaping the jets which may focus intermittently
above and below the disk. Here the diet of particles and photons is rich and
varied. Only hard, tough machines could survive for long there. In the fourth
novel, Tides of Light, I drew out these contrasts.

Machines which can reproduce themselves would, inevitably, fall under the laws
of natural selection. Earlier forms which arrived from elsewhere would
specialize to use local resources. The entire panoply of biology would
recapitulate: parasites, predators, prey. Adaptation would shape machines, who
would by their intelligence counter with their own clever moves, carrying out
their long term agenda.

How to think of this? I prepare for novels by writing descriptive passages of
places and characters. In spare moments I began working up snapshots of possible
life forms and their survival styles. I wrote them in present tense, for a sense
of immediacy, seeking the analogy to biology:

Above the disk nothing made of metal or ceramic can long survive.

The grinding down of stars goes on perpetually. Blobs of already incandescent
matter spiral in at speeds higher than found anywhere else in the galaxy. The
Eater holds eternally captive the gathered masses of a million dead suns. Its
pull whirls the. doomed matter in a final frenzied gyre.

The blobs rub against each other. Magnetic fields mediate the friction and in
turn grow. The fields twine and loop through the condemned kernels. In tight
collisions fields themselves annihilate against each other and more energy
releases.

Above such brutal furnaces skim the phase creatures. They had once been of the
mechanicals. Now they exist not in hard circuits or ceramic
lattice-intelligences. They have evolved out of self-directed necessity. To
drink more energy they have learned to dissolve.

As torrents of hard radiation lance through them, they are plasmas. This gathers
in fluxes and stores them in long-range correlations.

When the flood ebbs the phase creatures change. In the cooler spots above the
disk they can condense. Lacy filaments become gaseous discharges. The power so
generated they broadcast outward, to lesser ranks who can store it.

The phase creatures themselves use these fluxes to organize themselves into
free-floating networks. Circuits without wires. Electrons flowing only in their
own self-consistently generated magnetic fields. Voltages and switches
light-quick, gossamer thin.

Lively intelligences dance there. They enter the discussion which has been
teeming above them, in the cooler realms. With silky elegance their thoughts
merge with the hard beings who are the cruder, earlier forms of mechanicals.

But the phase creatures still know their origins. They share the thought
patterns of the metallic forms. They converse.

My reading in evolutionary theory suggested that generally, the rate of
development was faster where the contrast between energy levels was greatest.
This explains why volcanic vents at the bottom of oceans proved a rich life
site. Similarly, the tropics boast of myriad species, the poles few. The
contrast between the black hole region and the surrounding sea of stars is
similarly stark.

I worked out a crude model for setting up a current system which could link the
disk of a black hole to the surroundings. The disk traps magnetic fields as in
falling matter brings the field lines in. A rotating magnetic field can sling
particles -probably electrons and positrons -out along the gradually opening
field lines. The disk acts like an enormous rotating flywheel, driving currents
and mass flow both up and down from the disk. This should yield two jets. One
can calculate the energy yield -- actually, just an upper bound, which turns out
to be considerable.

This part of any electrodynamic model is quite iffy, because we know nothing
directly from the black hole environment. A gamma ray emission was seen several
times through the 1980s from somewhere near galactic center, which corresponds
to the annihilation of electrons and positrons. Perhaps it was from the black
hole region, but certainly it's intermittent, for it vanished years ago and has
not been seen since. Perhaps the weather there changed.

Worse, the calculated energy going into jets proved to be much higher than the
rather weak, broad jet seen (in radio maps) emerging northward from the center.
So perhaps the process is much weaker than we think. Further, there is no
visible counter-jet, casting doubt on the whole assumed geometry of the black
hole region.

It is easy to show that the present core region is accreting matter at a mild
rate. If a star plunged in, there would be much more emission. Still, all this
assumes that the radiation from matter plunging into the disk and then into the
hole is simply streaming out.

What if something else intercepts this flow, uses it, and degrades it into
lukewarm heat? Then all our calculations of spectra would be awry. What could
such intervening agencies be. . . ?

Black holes have weather, of a sort.

Light streams from them. Blackness dwells at their cores, but friction heats the
infalling gas and dust. These streams brim with forced radiation. Storms worry
them. White-hot tornadoes whirl and suck.

For the immense hole at the exact center of the galaxy, a virulent glow hammers
outward. It pushes incessantly at the crowded masses that circle it, jostling in
their doomed orbits. Gravity's gullet forces the streams into a disk, churning
ever inward. Suffering in the weather.

The press of hot photons is a wind, driving all before it. Except for the
grazers. To these photovores, the great grinding disk is a source of food.

Fire-flowers blossom in the disk, sending up lashes of fierce ultraviolet.
Storms of light.

Both above and below the accretion disk, in hovering clouds, these photons smash
molecules to atoms, strip atoms into bare charge, whip particles into sleet. The
clouds are debris, dust, grains. They are already doomed by gravity's rob, like
nearly everything here.

Nearly. To the gossamer, floating herds this is a fountain. Their life source.

Sheets of them hang, billowing with the electromagnetic winds. Basking in the
sting. Holding steady.

The photovores are patiently grazing Some are Infras, others Ultras -tuned to
soak up particular slices of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Each species has a characteristic polish and shape. Each works within
evolutionary necessity, deploying great flat receptor planes. Each has a song,
used to maintain orbit and angle.

Against the wrathful weather here, information is at least a partial defense.
Position-keeping telemetry flits between the herd sheets. They sing luminously
to each other in the eternal brimming day.

Hovering on the pressure of light, great wings of high-gloss molysheet spread.
Vectoring, skating on winds, magnetic torques in a complex dynamical sum. Ruling
forces govern their perpetual, gliding dance. This is decreed by intelligences
they scarcely sense, machines that prowl the darker lanes further out.

Those magisterial forms need the energies from this furnace, yet do not venture
here. The wise and valuable run no risks.

At times the herds fail. Vast shimmering sheets peel away. Many are east into
the shrouded masses of molecular clouds, which are themselves soon to boil away.
Others follow a helpless descending gyre. Long before they could strike the
brilliant disk, the hard glare dissolves their lattices. They burst open and
flare with fatal energies.

Now a greater threat spirals lazily down. It descends from the shelter of thick,
turbulent dust. It lets itself fall toward the governing mass, the black hole
itself. Then it arrests its descent with out-stretched wings of mirrors. They
bank gracefully on the photon breeze.

Its lenses swivel to select prey. There a pack of photovores has clumped,
disregarding ageless programming, or perhaps caught in a magnetic flux tube. The
cause does not matter. The predator eases down along the axis of the galaxy
itself.

Here, navigation is simple. Far below, the rotational pole of the Eater of All
Things is a pinprick of absolute black at the center of a slowly revolving,
incandescent disk.

The clustered photovores sense a descending presence. Their vast sailing herds
cleave, peeling back to reveal deeper planes of burnt-gold light seekers. They
all live to ingest light and excrete microwave beams. Their internal world
revolves around ingestion, considered digestion, and orderly excretion.

These placid conduits now flee. But those clumped near the axis have little
angular momentum, and cannot pivot on a magnetic fulcrum. Dimly they sense their
destiny. Their hissing microwaves waver.

Some plunge downward, hoping that the predator will not follow so close to the
Eater. Others cluster ever more, as if numbers give safety. The opposite is
true.

The metallovore folds its mirror wings. Now angular and swift, accelerating, it
mashes a few of the herd on its carapace. It scoops them in with flux lines.
Metal harvesters rip the photovores. Shreds rush down burnt-black tunnels.
Electrostatic fields separate elements and alloys.

Fusion fires await the ruined carcasses. There the separation can be exquisitely
tuned, yielding pure ingots of any alloy desired. In the last analysis, the
ultimate resources here are mass and light. The photovores lived for light, and
now they end as mass.

The sleek metallovore never deigns to notice the layers of multitudes peeling
back, their gigshertz cries of panic. They are plankton. It ingests them without
registering their songs, their pain, their mortal fears.

Yet the metallovore, too, is part of an intricate balance. If it and its kind
were lost, the community orbiting the Eater would decay to a less diverse state,
one of monotonous simplicity, unable to adjust to the Eater's vagaries. Less
energy would be harnessed, less mass recovered.

The metallovore prunes less efficient photovores. Its ancient codes, sharpened
over time by natural selection, prefer the weak. Those who have slipped into
unproductive orbits are easier to catch. It also prefers the savor of those who
have allowed their receptor planes to tarnish with succulent trace elements,
spewed up by the hot accretion disk below. The metallovore spots these by their
mottled, dusky hue.

Each frying instant, millions of such small deaths shape the mechsphere.

Predators abound, and parasites. Here and there on the metallovore's polished
skin are limpets and barnacles. These lumps of orange-brown and soiled yellow
feed on chance debris from the prey. They can lick at the passing winds of
matter and light. They purge the metallovore of unwanted elements -- wreckage
and dust which can jam even the most robust mechanisms, given time.

All this intricacy floats on the pressure of photons. Light is the fluid here,
spilling up from the blistering storms far below in the great grinding disk.
This rich harvest supports the mechsphere which stretches for hundreds of cubic
light years, its sectors and spans like armatures of an unimaginable city.

All this, centered on a core of black oblivion, the dark font of vast wealth.

Inside the rim of the garish disk, oblivious to the weather here, whirls a
curious blotchy distortion in the fabric of space and time. It is called by some
the Wedge, for the way it is jammed in so close. Others term it the Labyrinth.

It seems to be a small refraction in the howling virulence. Sitting on the very
brink of annihilation, it advertises its artificial insolence.

Yet it lives on. The mote orbits perpetually beside the most awful natural abyss
in the galaxy: the Eater of All Things.

Intelligent machines would build atop this ferment a society we could scarcely
fathom -- but we would try. Much of the next novel I wrote, Furious Gulf was
about that -- the gulf around a Mack hole, and the gulf between intelligences
born of different realms.

For years I had enjoyed long conversations with a friend, noted artificial
intelligence theorist Marvin Minsky, about the possible lines of evolution of
purely machine intelligence. Marvin views our concern with mortality and
individualism as a feature of biological creatures, unnecessary among
intelligences which never had to pass through our Darwin-nowing filter.

If we can copy ourselves indefinitely, why worry about a particular copy? What
kind of society would emerge from such origins? What would it think of us -- we
Naturals, still hobbled by biological destiny?

A slowly emerging theme in the novels, then, was how intelligence depended on
the "substrate," the basic building blocks. Machines could embody intelligence,
but their styles would be different.

Angular antennas reflect the bristling ultraviolet of the disk below. Shapes
revolve. They live among clouds of infalling mass -- swarthy, shredding under a
hail of radiation: infrared spikes, cutting gamma rays.

Among the dissolving clouds move silvery figures whose form alters to suit
function. Liquid metal flows, firms. A new tool extrudes: matted titanium. It
works at a deposit of rich indium. Chewing digesting,

The harvesters swoop in long ellipses, high above the hard brilliance of the
disk. As they swarm they strike elaborate arrays, geometric matrices. Their
volume-scavenging strategy is self-evolved, purely practical, a simple
algorithm. Yet it generates intricate patterns which unfurl and perform and then
cuff up again in artful, languorous beauty.

They have another, more profound function. Linked, they form a macro-antenna. In
a single-voiced chorus they relay complex trains of digital thought. Never do
they participate in the cross-lacing streams of careful deliberation, any more
than molecules of air care for the sounds they transmit.

Across light-minutes the conversation billows and clashes and rings. A
civilization blooms on the brink of the deepest abyss in Creation.

By the time I reached the last volume, in 1992, I had spent over twenty years
slowly building up my ideas about machine intelligence, guided by friends like
Marvin. I had also published several papers on the galactic center, am working
on a further model for the Snake, and still eagerly read each issue of
Astrophysical Journal for further clues.

Much remains to be found there. My nephew, now a doctoral student at Caltech,
will make a thorough map of the center in 1995, using a detector he built to
view light wavelengths shorter than a millimeter -he's caught the bug.

I finished the last novel, Sailing Bright Eternity, in summer 1994. It had been
twenty-four years since I started on the series and our view of the galactic
center had changed enormously. Some parts of the first two books, especially,
are not representative of current thinking. Error goes with the territory.

I had taken many imaginative leaps in putting together a working "ecology" for
the center, including truly outre ideas, such as constructions made by forcing
space-time itself into compressed forms, which in turn act like mass itself:
reversing Einstein's intuition, that matter curved space-time. All this was
great fun, requiring a lot of time to think. I let my subconscious do most of
the work, if possible. It's an easier way to write; but it stretches out
projects, too. Occasionally I wanted to say to long-suffering readers, who wrote
in asking when the next volume would appear, "Sorry; I'm writing as fast as I

Doubtless there are many more surprises ahead. We're extending our gaze into
ever more distant frequencies, gaining better resolution, seeing liner detail.
In peeling back the onion skins, we get closer to. how galaxies work, how the
vast outbursts of their centers affect life, and how the truly bright galactic
cores, quasars, work.

My own model is quite possibly completely wrong. It seems to explain some
features (the filaments, the Snake) but has trouble with the jets. Eventually,
comparing radio maps over time, we might see flareups and changes in the
threads. Mine is strictly done in what I call the "cartoon approximation"--good
enough for a first cut, maybe, but doomed to fail somewhere.

In any case, models are like matters of taste. Nobody expects a French
impressionist painting to look much like a real cow; it suggests ways of looking
at cows.

Is there life at the center? Nobody knows, but nobody can rule it out. Only by
thinking about possibilities can we test them. My first intuition, seeing the
radio map of the Arch, was, This looks artificial. Maybe it is -- you had
probably thought of that explanation halfway through this piece. Astronomy
reflexively assumes that everything in the night sky is natural. Someday, that
may prove wrong.

One of the ways science fiction looks at the world is by pushing it to extremes,
asking the questions that go beyond the bounds of what we can observe and check
now. Imagination is no mere foot soldier; it wants to fly. That's why science
fiction and science are forever linked.