Week Nine: Space Opera

For this week I decided to read the short story 9 billion names of God. Where a group of monks believes that when they can figure out the 9 billion names of God that humanity as a whole has served its purpose for existence. They believe that God will then end the world, as we know it. They devise an alphabet where after all their calculations would turn out to be about 9 billion names, and even through their research it would take an additional 15,000 years to come to the conclusion. Instead they want to finish this task by a quicker means and decide to use a machine of modern technology called the mark V computer. They end up hiring two men that will know how to operate and maintain the computer to make their results appear with in 3 months. During this process one of the men becomes worried that the monks will blame the computer and them because they believe the task will fail. Although one of the men tells the other of a story where when he was a kid there was a preacher who said the world would end and it didn’t, his followers ended up selling their homes and believed the preacher was correct in his prophecy. And even after finding out the world didn’t end they didn’t revolt against him they just believed he had made a mistake in his calculations and continued believing him. The other man how ever didn’t think that would happen in their case so he decided to postpone the computers results until their scheduled departure just in case. Only to realize that on their way to their departure destination the machine would be finishing up its results, and noticed that the stars began to disappear reinforcing that fact the monks were right all along. The Story brings an interesting aspect of a belief in God and how some people may find others beliefs bizarre, it shows us that we can believe what we want but it doesn’t mean we are correct and that others are wrong if they don’t believe in the same things.