Goldilocks Zone

By Nick Webb

‘Of course,’,Father Christmas waved grandly with his glass of twelve-year-old Ardbeg, ‘sometimes I miss being at the sharp end, but it’s a blessing for Rudolph – he’s getting a bit arthritic, you know, and is much happier put out to stud.’

 ‘No need for it really – what with biotech cloning – but the reindeer deserve some fun after all that zapping back and forth. It’s been getting vexed. All that bloody central heating with pathetic little vents and no chimneys – you can’t believe the trouble – to say nothing of the ah-hem patchier distribution of good kiddies. As for me, rediscovering my chin has been an adventure. And that damn red uniform; I won’t miss it. I was always too hot.’

‘I imagine that your worm-hole technology is orders of magnitude more efficient than sleigh-based logistics.’ Brian, a man with a tenacious grasp of the relevant, is an investment analyst with KPMG. His suit is Italian – and grey. His eyes are grey, his hair is grey, his radio-controlled watch is grey. There is an icy spread sheet where his heart ought to be.

‘Absolutely’, said Father Christmas. ‘We’ve achieved massive back-end savings getting shot of those elves, bolshie little bastards. What’s more, I feel a lot better in myself. The weight, the weight…’ He sighed. ‘I lost four stone just by being out of mince pie range. Now my diabetes is just a matter of watching my diet. I’m looking forward to the next challenge.’

Brian has the charisma of a kipper, yet he is not daunted by Father Christmas’s significant look. ‘I will have to assure my colleagues that the worm hole method is not only viable but one of your core competencies. Can it be rolled out onto other systems? Is it, for instance, scalable?’ Father Christmas snorted with suppressed irritation. ‘Not only is it scalable, but it is the only approach that has the remotest chance of working…’

Brian steepled his thin fingers and peered quizzically. ‘Look’, said Father Christmas, the universe is big, really big, inconceivably, brain-bruisingly big. Douglas Adams said that you may think it is a long way down to the chemist, but that is nothing compared to the universe. With the light-speed barrier in place, everything we do – art, wheelbarrows, Shanghai, war, love, flu, Madonna, orchids, Prince Philip…everything – will always be a footnote, something infinitely trivial cosmically speaking.’

‘Mr Einstein’s rules are known to every schoolboy.’ Brian’s manner said: get on with it – I’m expensive.   ‘How does this affect our investment decision?’ ‘Well’, said Father Christmas, ‘now – with the right funding – we are within a flea’s whisker of controlling worm holes and reaching across the universe. Think of the potential. Imagine our sun is the size of this full stop.’ From inside his cashmere jacket he pulled out Brian’s draft contract, opened it at random and found a tiny full stop. The font was very small. ‘On this scale, where is our nearest stellar neighbour, eh?’

Brian could calculate the annualised write-off on a sub-prime loan without breaking a sweat, but at astronomy he wasn’t so hot. He gave a tiny shrug so Father Christmas barrelled on. ‘Next door? Fifty meters away? Actually it’s six miles. Between one full stop and another there’s lots of interesting objects, the Oort Cloud for instance. But averaged out there’s nothing. I mean, really, really nothing, the square root of absolutely nada, nothing to a standard our best industrial vacuum pumps cannot attain.’

‘I fail to see the up-side to this unproductive void.’

‘The point is’, said Father Christmas, ‘that there are squillions of currently hard-to-reach opportunities – maybe two hundred billion suns in the local system and perhaps a trillion planets. And the Milky Way is just one of billions of galaxies – too many to count. We estimate the number statistically. With a sample that size we only need find, say, one in fifty million planets to be fall into the Goldilocks Zone…’

‘And that is?’ Brian interrupted.

You tosser, thought Father Christmas, you’ve done no homework at all, but he reminded himself that he was looking for a serious wad. ‘You know; Goldilocks and the porridge – not too hot, not too cold. Stable orbit, liquid water, tidal pools, benign seismology, magnetosphere to protect against the excesses of the local solar central heating unit – just right, in other words, for the evolution of life.’

He took a good swig of his single malt, his eyes glowing with messianic zeal. ‘Even with the odds against us, we’d still have thousands of life-bearing planets just poised for exploitation. With biotech we can grow whatever the local young crave by way of pressies. And the trading with species with no sense of our values should be fantastic. Buying Manhattan for a few beads will look like a tough deal. Think of the alien technologies, the new patents… God’s teeth, can you imagine?’

This last question was one to which Brian could always answer ‘no’.
‘I will return to my board’, he said, ‘and we will evaluate the potential for a decent return.’