God Loses Dice

Salt Lake City, August 22, 2033 -- According to messages posted simultaneously on all Lost and Found bulletin boards in the world, God, considered by many to be an important force in the creation and ongoing maintenance of the universe, has lost his dice and urgently needs them back.

God's dice

The messages, which appeared in over 6,300 different languages and alphabets, request that any person who happens to spot the two dice cubes, described as "white, 446 light-years in length along each face, and fuzzy" please contact God at his or her earliest possible convenience.

God's message was signed with all nine billion of His names (see attached list).

Until God's dice are found and returned to Him, scientists fear their continued absence may have serious implications on fundamental structures of the universe ranging from the process of evolution through the principles of quantum mechanics.

"If God has misplaced his dice, then right away we can strike the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle," Dr. Murphy Chladni, a physicist with UC Davis, said. "Einstein will at last be right, at least for awhile, and we will finally be able to determine both the position and speed of elementary particles at the same time. This will let us revert to Newtonian mechanics, in which, thank God, the calculations are a whole lot simpler, until the dice are recovered."

Dr. Chladni was referring to Albert Einstein's infamous rejection of the uncertainty that underlies quantum theory, summarized by his phrase, "God does not play dice." While the rejection had been disproved repeatedly over the past century, God's public request for assistance in finding the purportedly non-existent dice is now seen as the final nail in the coffin of Einstein's uncharacteristic invocation of hidden theories to temper the clash between scientific inquiry and religious beliefs.

The loss of God's dice, which are also viewed by biologists as essential to the continuing processes of genetic mutation and adaptation through natural selection, may have profound long-term implications on the process of evolution.

"If God can't toss his dice, thereby commanding the occasional DNA and RNA strand to break or suffer a copying error, then the gene pool as we know it will become essentially static," Dr. Murphy "Murph" Muller, a molecular biologist at Harvard University, said. "We'll continue to see natural selection working on populations in which small alterations have already taken place, but those can be expected to fizzle out after a few generations if the dice aren't recovered, allowing new variations to be introduced."

According to Dr. Muller, a temporary halt to the process of evolution could have both positive and negative long and short-term implications.

"On the one hand, disease control will become a snap," Dr. Muller said. "If all viruses in the world stay exactly the way they are, rather than going through the familiar process of rapid mutation and adaptation that we're accustomed to, vaccine manufacture and application will become a good deal easier. You'll finally be able to get a reliable flu shot, for example. A lot of cancers will likely become significantly less common as well. Agricultural pest control will be a no-brainer."

"However, without the mechanism of natural selection following mutation, we'll start seeing large-scale extinctions within a few decades as environmental conditions inevitably alter and with no mechanism for adaptation available to affected bird, animal, insect, and even human populations. There's really no way to judge just how serious the impact of that will be on our ecosystem over the long term."

Drs. Muller and Chladni together urged world leaders to join in a universe-wide search for God's dice as quickly as possible.

"If God doesn't get his dice back, sure, calculating the trajectory of satellite transmissions will get a little easier, and maybe some medicine will be simplified, but I don't even want to imagine what a static world would like look after a hundred years," Dr. Chladni said. "I say, point every telescope we have at every point in the heavens where God may have last been playing with those dice and find the damn things before all hell breaks loose."

By Ion Zwitter, Avant News Editor