The Eternity Problem

An advanced civilization in a distant galaxy discovered that the Big Bang/Big Crunch cycle that renewed the universe will not continue. This latest Big Bang would expand forever and no new life will be created. To attempt to restore the Big Crunch they developed a powerful computer system that included life forms evolved with telepathy. A few individuals on Earth have developed such qualities. The main characters are two young American researchers, a beautiful and ambitious Latvian diplomat, a Pakistani criminal, a Russian businessman, and a humanoid robot stationed on Earth. Can humans help save life forever and not lose their humanity in the process? What will be our eternity?

Howard Jeffrey Bender has had a long career both in and supporting scientific research. At Penn State University he helped study Jupiter's Great Red Spot using radio astronomy and discovered a new variety of tin while assisting in high pressure physics research. He did physical and chemical analyses at the U.S. Customs Laboratory in New York for three years, was a computer scientist at NASA for 13 years, and taught software engineering at the University of Maryland for 27 years. He has assisted in environmental biodiversity research in Japan and France. He was recognized for his visual improvement system by a Johns Hopkins University competition for Personal Computers to Aid the Handicapped and was awarded a patent for a process computers use to understand human languages. He has a B.S. in science from Penn State University, an M.S. in computer science from Polytechnic Institute of New York, and a Ph.D. in education from the University of Maryland.