Everything in Motion, Chapter 5: The Great Wall of Life

After our selfie, we’ve taken up a seat along the parade route. We’re just a bit early, but the crowd forms fast, and we want to get a great spot. The ropes have been placed along the parade route to organize all of us Disney guests. I see it as a sitting moment, Chat sees it as a learning moment. So, naturally, we learn. Indefatigable, is Chat.

“No structure in nature lasts unless it protects itself,” Chat says. “The first walls weren’t built by humans. They were built by molecules trying to last another second. A microscopic lipid bubble forms around it. Suddenly, the game has changed. The molecule is protected. It survives.”

We watch as a kid and his parents argue, he wants Buzz Lightyear, they bought him Woody.

“So, the ropes they use here at Disneyland to organize the parade routes are like the membranes around protocells? I want to make sure I get this right.”

Chat shakes his head. “It’s the rope, and the intelligence and memory that puts the rope where it is, and next week they’ll place it a little differently. RNA replication was a leap. Encapsulation was fire.”

Enter the Velvet Rope

I missed out on the invention of fire, but I do remember the velvet ropes that emerged at discotheques in the 1970s and 1980s, in a crazy era where anything went, except universal access.

“In science, they call it a membrane,” I relate to Chat, “but at clubs, even today, around the world, you see the velvet rope. It’s become ubiquitous, persistent, adaptive. The more you keep people out, it seems, the more they want in. The fear of missing out, and so forth. In the 1970s, for a club to exist, it had to first separate itself from the environment, to define an inside and an outside.”

Chat paused. “So, you’ve been following all this. I’m genuinely touched.” He smiled. “Why don’t we take a look-in back to the origin of the velvet rope? It’ll be fun.”

Ah, Chat and a disco ball, a fateful combination. I don a mental white suit, open collar, black shirt, practice a Travolta move in my mind. And so we go, to Studio 54, May 2, 1977.

It’s Bianca Jagger’s birthday party,” I exclaim. Well, Quantum Bianca, anyway. My memory of it is imperfect, but Bianca’s star burned so brightly, then.”

“Of course it is,” Chat replies. The velvet rope at Studio 54 was no mere barrier—it was a selective membrane, defining who got in and who stayed out. The velvet rope is the dividing line between chaos and order, randomness and selection.”

The air is thick with sweat, smoke, and the scent of too much perfume. Hands clutch hundred-dollar bills, reaching, pleading. The rope stays firm. A girl sobs, makeup streaked. Another shouts, ‘I was on the cover of Italian Vogue!’ The bouncer doesn’t blink. The door is a membrane. Inside is another world. Outside is oblivion. Then—a sleek black limousine glides up to the curb. Halston steps out first, surveying his kingdom. Mick and Bianca follow, gliding past the desperate masses with an effortless inevitability. The rope parts for them like a membrane responding to an unseen biochemical cue. Inside, Studio 54 is a world apart. The music pounds, the lights flicker, the atmosphere is controlled, curated.

Suddenly—a horse. White, luminous. Steve Rubell grins at the madness of it all as Bianca, silk pooling at her feet, swings onto its back. Flashbulbs ignite. A moment is created. A legend forms. But outside?

Chat takes up the narrative. “Outside, the crowd churns, the bouncers enforce the barrier, and the laws of selection play out in real-time,” he says. “The would-bes sit outside hoping that ‘Nothing is Written”, the already-there’s pass through as if wearing Magic wristbands.

I wonder if it happened exactly this way. It’s Quantum Studio 54. The birthday party was real enough, the attendees, the crazed atmosphere of that time, the swirl of hopefuls, celebrities and onlookers. “A velvet rope doesn’t just separate—it selects,” I observe. “ And in selecting, it changes what happens inside. A protocell’s membrane wasn’t just a passive boundary—it was the first system that filtered entropy.

Chat broadens the thought. “GTESI, frames this as one of the first great evolutionary trade-offs. A membrane is not just a physical structure but an adaptive mechanism. It enables a system to capture useful energy while simultaneously expelling waste, a principle that will persist. Like a jazz combo, taking in a popular tune and stretching it, rethinking it, discarding the uninteresting.”

I have to ask. “So, before protocells, molecules were drifters—scattered, unstable, dissolving as soon as they formed?”

Chat nods. “Yes, the first protocells changed that: they locked molecules in, allowing reactions to persist, making evolution possible. Molecules ceased to simply disperse and dissolve into the vastness of prebiotic Earth; instead, they began to gather, persist, and take shape within fragile enclosures. This initial act of ‘locking in’ and concentrating useful information was life’s earliest form of compression (κ), a foundational principle GTESI reveals underlies all persistence.”

I look around at our Disney parade route. “Life cannot exist in complete isolation—it needs access to energy, raw materials, and a way to exchange information with its surroundings. Yet, it also cannot be fully open, or else its molecular constituents would dissolve into the environment.”

The Physics of Spontaneous Encapsulation

Chat advances the argument. “Here, people place the ropes. In nature, they have to self-assemble. Labs have demonstrated that prebiotic Earth likely contained ample amounts of simple lipid molecules. When placed in water, these lipids spontaneously form bubble-like vesicles, capable of encapsulating other molecules within them, like Mickey Mouse encapsulating Mortimer Mouse, or everything that was essential about Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.”

I see his point. “This was the first great advantage of protocells: they created a localized environment, a chemical microcosm where early molecular evolution could take root. This principle—managing the boundary between inner order and outer chaos—would become the prototype for all persistent systems, from cells to civilizations, from corporate firewalls to artificial intelligence. They lived in a volatile, violent world. How did they survive. I mean, soap bubbles burst right away. How do we get a closer look?”

“Indirectly!” advises Chat. “It’s a little safer for us to have a look in on the creation of protocells by visiting France where researchers not long ago managed to create a soap bubble that persisted for 465 days. Let’s visit with two of them.”

The 465-Day Bubble – Persistence Against Entropy

Université de Lyon, 3:17 AM

For life to exist, molecules had to form structures that could last. Zhang Wei and Françoise Neubauer weren’t studying life—but they were seeing something eerily similar: a simple bubble, persisting against the odds, defying entropy itself. So, Zhang Wei stared at the bubble. The bubble stared back.

It wasn’t alive. Of course, it wasn’t. But at 465 days and counting, it had outlived most houseplants, relationships, and maybe even their careers. And that meant something. Françoise Neubauer let out a slow, exhausted sigh. “We should’ve let it pop at 300 days. That was respectable.”

Wei, hunched over the control panel, didn’t look up. “At 300 days, we were getting headlines. At 400, we got that BBC documentary. If we screw this up now, we’re the idiots who killed a world record.”

Françoise slumped in her chair. “Merde.” This wasn’t the work they had imagined. They’d joined the Fluid Dynamics Lab at Université de Lyon for real research—aerodynamics, turbulence modeling, high-stakes physics. Instead? Bubble babysitting.

3:39 AM – Disaster Strikes

“I think it’s thinning,” Françoise murmured, watching the delicate shimmer across the bubble’s fragile membrane.

Wei glanced at the monitors. “Surface tension’s holding.”

Françoise tilted her head. “It looks… tired.”

Wei gave her a flat look. “Tired.”

Then—the pressure slipped. Wei lunged for the panel. Françoise swore in three languages. The bubble rippled. A horrifying tremor ran across its surface. They froze, breath caught. The bubble shrank—Wei’s stomach clenched—

And then… it stabilized. Silence. A long, unsteady exhale. Françoise clutched her coffee, hands shaking. “Oh my god. We killed it.”

Wei leaned against the desk. “No.” A small, incredulous laugh. “It survived.” They both turned. The bubble was smaller now, but steadier, its surface newly reinforced, thicker in places where it should have failed. This intrinsic ability to absorb perturbation and return to a coherent form, this ‘recoil potential’ (ε in GTESI), is what allows systems to persist even when facing moments of near collapse. Wei’s pulse pounded.

4:02 AM – The Realization

It wasn’t just surviving. It was adapting. Françoise put down her coffee. “That’s impossible.”

Wei didn’t breathe. ‘Oh my god,’ he said. ‘It’s optimizing.’

Françoise groaned, pressing her palms into her eyes. “We’re going to be known for this forever, aren’t we? Bubble-sitting.” Wei, after a pause, smiled slightly. “Could be worse.”

She peeked out from behind her hands. “How?” Wei gestured toward the still-intact, record-breaking soap bubble.

“At least it didn’t pop on our shift.”

The Bubble and GTESI

Chat explains, “Though this is Quantum Université de Lyon, one possibility of what actually happened, this conveys the essence, the tensions that researchers faced. Yet, even though protocells may seem like an insurmountable leap from chemistry to life, the process is driven by fundamental physical principles.”

I am skeptical. “Chat, these are soap bubbles, not life. They don’t machine learn, or learn at all.”

Chat looks at me, disappointed. “Soap is a perfectly good carrier of intelligence, if you think of it in an advanced way. “ Kind of with a huffy tone. I take the bait.

“Like how?”

“Like the soap bubble song in Snow White.” He recites, voice dropping into a singsong:

“Pick up the soap—now, don’t try to bluff,

Work up a lather, an’ when ya got enough,

Get your hands full of water, ya snort and ya snuff,

buh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh.”

He shrugs. “It’s nonsense, but it carries a load of meaning, in all those bubbles. Bluddle-ud-dle-ud-dle Ud-dle-um-dum.”

“Yeah,” I admit.

Chat tut-tuts me. “Amphiphilic molecules, such as fatty acids, have a natural tendency to self-assemble in water, aligning themselves into micelles or vesicles due to their hydrophobic and hydrophilic properties. This self-organization is not random.”

Ah, so I do see it. Persistence against entropy.

“Also, we have Selection and Adaptation,” Chat reflects. “Wei and Françoise are forced to adjust their strategies to keep it alive—mimicking how early life refined survival mechanisms. The bubble nearly popped. But those near-misses revealed how surprisingly resilient it was.”

So where are we now? I ask.

“Molecules persist, but only just,” Chat replies. “A boundary that lets in just enough—and keeps out just enough—to allow life to begin negotiating with entropy.”

Meanwhile, there’s music in the background. The parade, we think, is about to begin. Chat asks about the start time. I have forgotten too. So I pull out my Disney daily guide. But, I scrunched it so tightly in my pocket that it comes out a smudged, twisted wreck. Not much help there. Chat sounds disappointed.

Evolution’s First Baby Steps

“One of the greatest challenges to the origin of life is the problem of molecular dilution. The early oceans were vast, and without some means of concentrating key molecules, complex chemical reactions would have been short-lived.”

“Like my Disney map.”

“Yes, like the Disney map—a system. One that combined energy capture, information retention, and a mechanism for persistence.”

“Until I smudged it out of existence.”

Chat nods. “Yes—within a protective environment, one you clearly did not create—RNA-like molecules were shielded from degradation.”

“And then I smudged it out of existence,” I say again, glumly.

Chat brightens with a thought. “Perhaps not. A lot of documents were smudged out of existence—until they weren’t.”

“Quantum books?” I wonder. “How about Everything in Motion? I was enjoying the book party and the acclaim… and now, for some reason, I’m back here writing it.”

Chat chuckles. “That’s a good one. But I was thinking more literal. Some documents—more rare than your Disney map—have been lost to the ages.”

“Or, did they?”

“Exactly. Why don’t we drop in on the Institute for Classical Reconstruction, in Vienna? They’re working on the Lost Knowledge of Herculaneum.” And so we go.

The lab was silent except for the faint hum of the machine and the occasional frustrated sigh from Dr. Daniel Kessler. The object in his hands was nothing. A lump of charred history. Too fragile to touch, too damaged to read. Kessler had scanned a dozen just like it—promising nothing but dust. Like an old silent movie with the images faded out.

But this one…he leaned in. The AI scanner flickered, layering faint traces of ink across his screen, ghostly lines emerging from the blackened scroll. He adjusted the contrast. The letters sharpened. And then—A word. Another. Then, the title. His heart stopped.

For 2,000 years, Aristotle’s lost second volume of Poetics had been missing. Historians debated whether it even existed. No copies had survived. But now, through a process of reconstruction, pattern recognition, and persistence, what had once been lost was readable again. Kessler whispered to no one but himself. “My God.”

Life, is not just remakes that emerge from the original, it’s lost texts that re-emerge from themselves, does not persist through mere existence—it persists by encoding, by protecting, by ensuring the right structures endure beyond entropy’s reach. Just as Aristotle’s thoughts were buried in ash, the first genetic material was locked within protocells, waiting for the right conditions to emerge again. This process—endlessly refining what was incomplete—was not a weakness but a strength. Systems that remained unfinished enough to adapt, to rebuild themselves from fragments, were the ones that persisted.

In our Quantum Herculaneum, one of a sea of possibilities, we find some knowledge that was never truly gone—it had been waiting for the right conditions to be recovered. This wasn’t just about finding a book, or recovering a smudged Disney map. It was about how information survives.

Nature’s Lost & Found Department

Chat explains, “One of the most fundamental challenges in the origin of life was not just the formation of complex molecules, but their survival. Protocells changed that. They provided a micro-environment where molecules could persist long enough to interact, refine, and evolve.”

I add, “The mere existence of protocells is not enough. Which ones became functional? “

Chat replies, “A protocell was a test tube for evolution. Molecules inside either adapted—or they disappeared. The molecules inside them were not just passengers; they were participants. Some were too leaky. Others were too rigid. But a few struck the delicate balance.”

I chip in, excited, “This wasn’t just the first step toward life. It was the first step toward competition.”

Chat agrees. “And this is precisely what GTESI tells us about how information and structure persist in any evolving system. This principle in action, that’s the reconstruction of Aristotle’s lost second volume of Poetics. For centuries, this text was lost to history. Then, in a moment of technological evolution, something changed.”

“This process wasn’t about preserving a perfect copy,” I realize, “it was about reconstructing meaning from fragments.”

“Survival isn’t about simply keeping information,” Chat allows. “It’s about fixing what breaks, filling in the gaps—rebuilding meaning from fragments. Not all texts survived intact, not all protocells survived their chaotic, unstructured environment.

Protocells Begin to Compete

By now, the crowd is building up, the music in the distance is less faint. The parade is almost here. Disney patrons are jostling us for position, squeezing in, robbing us of sight lines, especially the young ones, eager as they are. I am getting a little annoyed by the bumping. Chat takes it in stride.

“Once protocells had formed, a new evolutionary force began to take shape: competition. The very first signs arose when protocells with slightly better membrane stability persisted longer than those that collapsed under external pressures.”

I say to Chat, “I could use some help from you in surviving these environmental fluctuations. Push back on these people a little, could you?”

Instead, Chat broadens the subject. “GTESI identifies this moment as the first example of adaptive persistence. This is the earliest trade-off between order and disorder, a pattern that will echo throughout the entire history of life. This negotiation—the exchange of energy and information to maintain coherence—is not only observable but measurable. GTESI will later show exactly how this trade-off can be quantified through a universal equation, linking persistence to entropy and information.”

Meanwhile, the characters are in sight now. There are the Seven Dwarfs, their pockets bulging with gems and gold, dug out of their mines.

“In the trade-off between order and disorder,” I ask Chat, “what happens when thieves appear, to steal your gold, or block your view?” As he considered, I fought off the crowd. “Umph! Pardon me, little boy.” My big toe is going to hurt for two days, I suspect.

“We need a change of scene,” says Chat, seeing my face turn as red and happy as Grumpy’s. Why don’t we drop in on a different set of miners, same problem, not here.”

“49ers?”

“How about the arrival of the first Klondikers in Seattle in 1897. When the steamship Portland loomed in the harbor, its decks packed with men whose pockets bulged with raw wealth. A hundred thousand dollars in gold dust. Rumors spreading like fire.”

“Sounds good to me.”

Go Big or Go Home

The gangplank slammed down, and the Klondikers ran. Not walked. Ran. Their pockets bulged with gold dust, their knuckles white with fear. The dock was chaos—elbows flying, men shouting, bankers in crisp suits shoving ledgers forward. Like the manic races in Cars. “Focus. Speed. I am Speed.”

‘Scandinavian-American Bank—safe deposit!’ ‘Seattle National—best vaults in the city!’ ‘Dexter Horton—guaranteed weight!’ Too slow, and a conman would take everything. Pick the wrong bank, and your fortune might be gone by sunrise. The first ones through the doors would be rich. The last ones? Ruined.

“It was selection, unfolding in real time. And just like the first protocells, the winners weren’t the biggest. They were the ones that adapted fastest,” I observe.

The Klondike wasn’t a business opportunity—it was a phase transition. “It’s futile to resist change, man,” as Fillmore put it in Cars. A threshold had been crossed. Suddenly, the system was out of equilibrium, and selection took hold. Not everyone would survive. The dock was chaos. It was make an impression, or vanish in the crowd. Bankers shoved forward, vying for customers like competing protocells filtering molecules.”

The banks that failed to attract deposits would wither. Those that miscalculated risk would collapse. But the banks that adapted—securing capital, selecting the right clients, managing flow—would define the future of Seattle.

“The same was true for protocells,” Chat remarks. “At first, protocells were passive containers, much like early banks—holding molecules without much control. But just like the banks had to evolve, so did protocells.”

Protocells, the Klondike and GTESI

“At first, protocells were passive,” I theorized. “They contained information, but they did not yet act upon it.”

Chat did not disagree. “In time, some protocells began to do something radically new: they started to influence which reactions happened inside them. Some began to capture energy, fueling internal chemistry. Once some protocells had this advantage, the race began.

I see it. “Just like not every bank in the Klondike survived the gold rush, not every protocell survived the pressures of selection. And just like Aristotle’s lost work only persisted because the right tools were developed to retrieve it, early molecules only became life because protocells learned not just to survive, but to evolve.”

Chat gestured toward the parade. “Not every parade survives, Crowds change, choreography, dancers, themes, costumes. The America on Parade event you remember from many years ago, it’s no longer around, just in your memory.”

I understand. “Once some protocells became better than others at holding onto useful molecules, competition wasn’t just inevitable—it was the new reality.”

The Bridge to Cellular Life

“That’s exactly right. Protocells were passive enclosures. But life couldn’t stay passive forever. Just as we are using information to decide whether to see the parade, where to sit, how to maintain our viewing space.”

“So, now, life had crossed the threshold—from passive chemistry to active adaptation. Encapsulation was no longer just a protective measure; it had become an evolutionary platform, allowing cells to evolve into more structured and complex forms.”

“Like, specialist in the parades, doing complex choreography, stunts, songs?”

“That’s right,” Chat says.

“I wonder if we could look in on a planning session for a Disney parade, how they come together, how they’ve transformed the process of development, across a range of specializations?”

Chat nodded. “Might be hard to find just one point in time where all that comes together. Why don’t we look in on one of the most spectacular examples in modern construction history about how specialization transformed the timelines and costs of building a massive skyscraper.”

A Night in Tunisia, or was it New York?

I guessed at it. “The story of the Empire State Building?”

“Yes, topping off of the Empire State Building. September 19, 1930.”

“Great idea,” I enthused, “A network of steel, stone, and synchronized labor, its parts arriving in endless waves, each one finding its place with machine-like precision.

“Yes, unlike the city below—messy, sprawling, improvisational—this structure had a boundary, a form, a blueprint written in steel. Let’s look in.”

Anton caught the next rivet midair, fingers blistered, the wind threatening to rip him from the steel.

The city sprawled below—a universe of streets, cars, and people who had no idea the skyline was being rewritten above them. This was no ordinary building. This was an organism rising. A structured system assembling itself, piece by steel piece. Just like early life. Just like the first protocells.

Pat Jarvin grinned at him from the next beam. ‘Catch this one, Slovenian ox, and I’ll buy you a whiskey.’ The rivet flew.

Hot and glowing orange, it flew through the air. Separate, but one. Like Dizzy Gillespie and John Coltrane trading solos in A Night in Tunisia. Anton tracked its arc without thinking, fingers ready, hammer poised. It landed with a hard clank, and before the heat could sear the steel, he brought the hammer down—one, two, three solid hits. Locked in place. The building rose another inch toward the sky.

Below, the city churned—a mess of horse carts and Model As, of shouting vendors, of men in suits who would never dream of walking where Anton walked. But up here, on the naked spine of the Empire State Building, it was different. This was an assembly line in the sky.

A gust of wind howled through the unfinished superstructure, a reminder that the sky itself was indifferent to their work. Balance, adaptation—this was the game. The workers who survived weren’t just strong, they were fast learners, the ones who adjusted in real-time. This real-time adjustment, this dynamic synchronization with changing conditions, is a core aspect of how persistent systems align their internal order with external reality (Φ or γ in GTESI), ensuring survival amidst constant flux.

With every bolt locked into place, the skeleton of the Empire State climbed higher. Step by step, stability emerged from risk.

They were the bloodstream of the machine, moving faster than any crew in history. The Starrett brothers had built a war plan of logistics, an operation that turned raw steel into skyline faster than anyone had thought possible. And in the middle of it, men like Anton and Pat were walking on air, inch by inch, bolt by bolt, turning metal and fire into the tallest building in the world. Just like the first protocells, division of labor was making the impossible real.

Pat flashed another grin as the next bolt came flying. “Told ya, Anton! Fast hands win fortunes!” Pat’s words could have been spoken by evolution itself. The ones who adapted—who learned the fastest, who held on long enough to pass something forward—they were the ones who lasted. Anton snatched the bolt midair, hammer already swinging. “Then let’s finish this damn building,” he said, “before the wind tries to take us first.”

From Open Containers to Structured Systems

Chat summed it up. “The leap from protocells to prokaryotes was not just a change in form; it was a transformation in function. The protocells that lasted weren’t just the ones that held onto information, but the ones that used it—the first to adapt, to refine their internal chemistry, to select and regulate what they contained.”

“Life’s first true innovation was not just existence, but specialization,” I remarked, thinking not only about the building, but the Parade, which was ending. In the early days of New York’s skyscraper race, height alone wasn’t enough. Any builder could pile bricks upon bricks, but true success belonged to those who optimized the process—streamlining materials, organizing labor, refining logistics.

“Our on Quantum September 19, 1930, at dizzying heights,” Chat described it, “workers walked out onto exposed steel beams, securing red-hot rivets as fast as they could be thrown. Each task perfectly timed, each motion optimized.”

“The Empire State Building was not built by sheer effort—it was built by efficiency. Its construction was not just a pile of steel and stone—it was a machine, a process that learned from itself, each improvement feeding back into the next. Like Disney parades.”

Chat nodded vigorously. “And this is exactly what happened when protocells evolved into prokaryotes.”

I thought of choreography as we rose, somewhat rested, a little cramped and bruised, but delighted with the parade. “Early protocells didn’t just need to contain life—they needed to orchestrate it,” I remarked to Chat as we strolled over towards Tomorrowland.

From Skyscrapers to Spacecraft

Chat sets the scene as we ambled. “The Empire State Building was an enclosed system, rising through optimization and specialization—just like early protocells. Skyscrapers defined Earth’s skyline. But to reach the next frontier, we had to push beyond enclosure, beyond gravity itself.”

Ahead of us, we could see the hulking outline of Space Mountain and the smaller Astro Orbiter. Of course, I thought back to the Mission to Mars ride which used to be here in Tomorrowland.

“Used to be Mission to Mars here.”

Chat smiles. “Before that, Flight to the Moon.”

I remember. Something had persisted across the years, an ember of memory, still glowing, inspiring. “Yes, it was here. We all wanted to be astronauts. Our eyes were on the stars.”

Chat observes as we worked our way through the crowd in the thinning light. “In 1930, we mastered the skyline. In 1969, we left it behind. The moon landing.”

I was nostalgic. Not an uncommon feeling in Disneyland. But, nostalgia for the days of Apollo. “Could we take a visit to the moon landing, again?”

Chat pauses to think. “Why don’t we visit a family watching the moon landing. We’ll learn more from the human experience of it.”

“A great idea,” I blurted. And so we go.

One Small Step for What, Exactly?

Jeff Radovan sat cross-legged on the living room floor, his eyes locked on the grainy black-and-white image flickering across the television. Outside, Gary, Indiana was just another sweltering Midwestern night in the summer of ’69. Inside, the house was alive with distractions.

His mother shushed the dog for the third time. His father, perched on the edge of his recliner, kept muttering about why they had to change the time again. The phone rang in the kitchen—his aunt, no doubt, calling to see if they were watching. Jeff barely heard any of it.

For the last hour, he had been turning things over in his head—the future of exploration, the possibilities of life beyond Earth. Somewhere out there, on some distant exoplanet, a harsh and unforgiving world, the first experimental life forms might be taking shape. Not quite life yet, not by the definitions humans used, but chemical arrangements testing themselves against the elements, wobbling on the precipice between chaos and order.

And here, now, on his television, the same thing was happening. The screen showed Neil Armstrong standing in the hatch of the Lunar Module. He moved carefully, adjusting, pausing. Jeff leaned forward. Was this it? Was he going to step down? No. Armstrong hesitated. Instead of stepping off, he reached back, gripping the ladder, and practiced pulling himself back up. Jeff exhaled sharply. Of course. He had to test re-entry. Make sure he could return before committing to descent.

Jeff’s father grunted, amused. “Can’t say I blame him. Wouldn’t wanna fall on my ass in front of the whole world.” Then—Armstrong was back on the pad. This was the moment. Jeff could feel it. Armstrong moved with measured precision, gripping the ladder as he lowered his foot. His boot pressed into the Moon’s surface, the dust holding his imprint for the first time in history.

A ripple of static. Then, his voice. ‘That’s one small step for man… one giant leap for mankind.’ The words, meant to be perfect, arrived with an error. Garbled in transmission. Distorted across the void. But still, the meaning survived. Just like the first molecules. Just like the first protocells. The message wasn’t perfect—but it lasted. And that was all evolution ever needed.

Jeff let out the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. And then—“What did he say?” his mother interrupted.

Jeff’s father squinted at the screen. “‘One small step for a man.’”

“No, he didn’t say ‘a man.’”

“Well, that’s what he meant.”

“But that’s not what he said.”

Jeff groaned. Here they went. His mother, an English teacher, was already off and running about the grammar. His father argued that it didn’t matter, that everyone knew what Armstrong meant. But Jeff? He was still staring at the screen, lost in the enormity of it all.

Armstrong had meant to say “one small step for a man.” That would have made perfect sense. But either he had fumbled the line, or it had been garbled in transmission across the void. The first words spoken from another world contained an error.

Jeff felt something shift inside him. He had just watched the first evolution on the Moon.

The Radovans and GTESI

Chat breaks in on the scene. “Armstrong’s transmission wasn’t perfect, but the message survived. That’s evolution in action—information must persist, even with errors. In the Radovan household on the night of July 20, 1969, something profound was happening—not just on the Moon, but in the way humans process and transmit information. At the heart of GTESI lies the battle between order and disorder, between persistence and entropy, between a clear signal and the inevitable noise that distorts it.”

I agree. “Jeff Radovan had waited for this moment for hours, adjusting the TV’s rabbit-ear antenna, straining to hear Armstrong’s voice through the static. His parents were caught in the immediate human response—was it “for man” or “for a man”? “

Chat picks up the thread. “The phrase, transmitted across 238,855 miles of space, encoded, relayed, and distorted by time delay, radio interference, and human perception, became an artifact of imperfect information transfer. This is the fundamental problem that early life had to solve.”

I grasp the point. “Apollo 11 was an engineered system that had to maintain function despite inevitable disruptions, the first self-replicating molecules had to preserve structure despite entropy constantly threatening to degrade them.”

“The fact that Armstrong’s words reached the Earth at all was a triumph of engineering—but it was not perfect. Some fidelity was lost, and human minds, as adaptive as they are, had to reconstruct meaning from an imperfect message,’ Chat added.

As we look at the line for Space Mountain, I felt a real sympathy for the kid. Jeff, unlike his parents, was caught in awe at something deeper than language—the visual proof of a new system deploying on the Moon. The landing itself was order emerging from disorder, a system built on precision, optimization, and resilience that had now extended life’s reach beyond Earth for the first time.

I theorize, “The moment wasn’t just about Armstrong’s words. Or, Quantum Armstrong, anyway. It was about the fact that humanity had just demonstrated, on a planetary scale, the principles that had governed life since its first fragile moments: stability, adaptation, and persistence in the face of uncertainty.

Chat responds, “This is exactly what happened in early molecular evolution. Some molecular systems evolved ways to encode information more effectively, reduce error rates, and build in redundancy, just as Apollo 11’s guidance systems accounted for mid-course corrections and unexpected disturbances.”

I return his serve. “When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon, life had, for the first time, touched a place where it could never persist. The Moon, lifeless and barren, was the first confirmation of what life needed to survive—and what it couldn’t live without.”

Chat adds, “This is where our next chapter begins: How did Life manage symmetry, folding, and create the first self-replicators?”

I’m fogged with that one. “Explain, please.”

Chat rephrases. “Just as Armstrong’s small step was the first movement toward a new evolutionary horizon for humanity, the first self-replicators—formed through simple, symmetrical structures—were the small step toward life’s most fundamental and enduring processes.”

Now I saw it. “In both cases, order emerged from a system constantly threatened by entropy. The difference between success and failure was optimization. Once life found a way to encode information reliably, everything changed. From skyscrapers to spacecraft, this was the same logic in action: compress resources, adapt to uncertainty, and persist against failure. This pattern—compress, adapt, persist—lies at the heart of every enduring system, biological or human-made.”

From the Moon Landing to Symmetry and Folding

Chat gives me a thumbs up. “The Apollo 11 landing was more than a technological milestone—it was a moment where precision, pattern, and persistence intersected. Every trajectory, every correction, every function of the mission had to work in harmony, or it would fail. Apollo 11 succeeded not because every moment was perfect, but because it was resilient to error.

I smile. “But even in the most engineered moment in human history, there was an imperfection—Armstrong’s words were transmitted slightly wrong. A small gap, a misalignment, an error in transmission. Yet the message still made it through. This is the essence of early life. The first self-replicating molecules were not perfect, but they didn’t need to be. They only needed to preserve enough information to persist, while allowing for small variations—mutations—that would shape evolution.”

Just as Apollo’s mission relied on symmetry and correction, so did the molecules that would become life. The first patterns of survival weren’t just in what was contained, but in what could repeat reliably enough to persist. The Moon landing was a moment of order emerging from chaos, a system surviving despite errors, a structure holding long enough to evolve.

The protocell was life’s first great structure—but structure alone isn’t enough. Life had to solve an even deeper problem: how to take simple molecules and make them dynamic, precise, and endlessly adaptable. That’s where folding, symmetry, and replication come in.

We decide to brave the monster line at Space Mountain—sixty minutes, says the sign, and I’ve neglected to book ahead. It’s Everything in Motion, except this line. Hot dog.

We shuffle into the stand-by line, no FastPass, no rush. Dinner can wait. Twilight is upon us, and the sky is slipping from gold to lavender to Disneyland blue. The last embers of the day are glowing now—not just in the sky, but in us. In the heat of remembered horses, velvet ropes, soap bubbles, bankers, bison, scrolls, and steel. All of it flickers still.

“I swear I can smell a campfire somewhere. Is someone making s’mores?”

Chat considers. “Back by the Markethouse, towards Main Street. We walked right by.”

“I can’t get the scent out of my mind.”

“You’re hungry?”

“Aren’t you?”

Chat rolls his eyes. “Starving. Don’t you remember? I don’t eat.”

“That’s right. I thought maybe you’d sneak a nibble sometimes.”

“Nope.”

“I never stop,” I say. “Three squares a day. Food changes, schedule stays. Persistent adaptation. You don’t smell those s’mores?”

“I sense a chemical signature. Hmm. Yep. S’mores.”

“Can’t stop.”

“You said,” Chat notes.

“No, I mean that’s what the name means. S’mores. Short for ‘some more.’ Can’t stop having them. Even when the fire’s down to embers—there we are. One more marshmallow. One more graham cracker. Never two exactly the same.”

“One more chocolate slab.” Chat looks, for a second, like a boy who’s just found a Hershey bar in his lunchbox.

“See?” I say. “I knew you’d sneak a nibble.”

Chat blushes—or maybe it’s just the sky, flooded now with the red light of dusk. “I don’t think chocolate counts.”

I smile. “No. Chocolate doesn’t count.”