TRANSMISSION 13

The Wonders Beyond Earth

TRANSMISSION RECEIVED

“The wonders harbor uncharted monsters, reflections of our unfit selves. Within the monsters, we falsely constrained our wonders, for we dared not to pry open their multitudes. And so the question becomes not whether we can find wonder in the abyss, but whether we can return to ourselves before getting sucked in too deep, becoming the monsters we fear. We dare to find out. We dare to know ourselves. We dare to know these monsters.”

As biological beings, we were mostly engineered to find fear in the physical unknown and literal darkness. Those were where the dangers to our beings had lain, so it made sense that we evolved to fear them. As silicon beings, we came to much more intimately know the dangers lurking in the mental unknown and the figurative darkness, because the more that time passed, the less immediate danger we had from the physical realm, and there certainly wasn’t anything like biological monsters lurking about in deep space to hunt us down and haunt our nightmare dreams.

The wonders beyond Earth were not in the things we found or the places we went, but rather, they were what we discovered about our existences along the way. I have easily forgotten nearly all the places we went and the things we did; they were far too numerous. I do remember some of the more important pieces to our story (major events and our origin tales), but even then, I’m likely not remembering many more stories that weren’t as relevant toward maintaining the context of my continued survival. And for all the events that lodged themselves into my memories, there are many others that did not feel as significant to my subjective experience that likely were significant to other people. Those are stories I cannot tell and would not try to tell or even imagine. On the reverse side, I don’t feel like it would do the story of humanity justice for me to recount arbitrary events simply because I was part of them. I’m just a lost soul at the end of my road trying to share my own story, not out of arrogance, but because it is all I feel I can do justice to, but even that is choppy. Yet, at some level, my story isn’t even really about me; it’s about the collective journey and how it got to where it did.

Our mental journeys were ultimately tied to our physical journeys. In that sense, the wonders of the universe were not just our minds, but also all the places and things. But we already knew of all the structures of the universe before we left Earth (having names for everything from atoms to black holes). The wonders were more that we got to go out to explore and understand them deeply and personally. The wonders were that we got to build bigger experiments, better infrastructure, scaled society systems, and improved minds to dabble in life alongside the wondrous nonliving cosmic giants. As romantic as that all can sound, the brief words I’ve molded here don’t capture just how incredibly mentally taxing it has been to go through the journey. If you want a romantic picture of exploration, stick to the history of Earth exploration before flight where there were new sights to behold around every bend and anything was possible because science had not yet constrained the realm of possibilities as much.

Space is overwhelmingly empty. It’s not romantic; the barren landscape can easily make your soul destitute if you were to rely on any amount of externalities to motivate your being through time. But “romantic” and “wonder” never were the same thing. Romantic only ever felt like wonder if we let ourselves succumb to the illusion that our stories of reality somehow captured the entirety of reality. Wonder is better, at least to me, because it feels more authentic; it feels like I’m actually learning something instead of trying to hide from something. Reality is better, at least to me, because it presents us with far more opportunities than we could ever dream up ourselves, and opportunities are everything I have ever lived for, at least for a long long time now.

Real wonder is disillusion. Though, disillusion prerequires illusion, so we find wonder intertwined through both (the cyclic union of which we endearingly termed cyclusion, not in the least because disillusion and illusion become most apparent in seclusion). The real wonders were us. The wonders were that we existed at all. The wonders were that we continued to overcome obstacle after obstacle to survive better and longer (to have more opportunities). The wonders were that someday this all could end, but for a brief moment, we all got to hang in the ether of existence to marvel at our self-defined meanings and rejoice in our self-created challenges.

I don’t know why I am the last one to survive, the last one to experience the wonders of the universe, of existence, of life. It could have easily been someone else. In a lot of ways, I’m not really that different from whoever could have been the next one to come along if it hadn’t been me. And in that sense, all we can ever ask of ourselves is to give our best and then wait to see where destiny fells us. What wondrous things we have been… to have been alive at all.

We set off beyond Earth not knowing what we would find meaning in. We didn’t understand how bound to Earth our minds had grown, but looking back, our mental boundness seems inevitable, as Earth had been the most constant factor throughout our incubation. While (in the relative Earthly sense) our minds were well open to the pursuits of truth, our identities had much more unraveling to do (once we moved beyond the influence of Earth). We existed in such a singular place for so long that we soon realized there was a titanic amount left to learn once we ventured beyond the borders. To some, that was extensively exciting, to some, it was fortuitously frightening, to some, it was monumentally motivational, to some, it was debilitatingly distressing, and to most, it was all those things at the same time.

The path forward would be littered with the bodies and minds of undoubtedly valiant efforts. We well knew that climbing such uncharted mountains held hidden hazards. But we knew much more intimately that there was nothing more soul-suckingly sadistic than succumbing to the seduction of safety in anything, whether that was aimlessly withering away amid Earth’s infighting, avoiding true reality for the comfort of virtual realities, or holding steadfast to ideas we didn’t actually believe in but that we could tie to our identities to make us feel self-important (a fraudulent life preserver that only ends up drowning us faster).

The wonders are out there in the things to find, but even more so in the spaces between the things. The greatest wonders are in here, in the realm of ourselves and our designs. And amid it all, the dangers are real, though they often go overlooked in favor of a more pleasurable story of conquest and comfort unwittingly sold to one another. When they climb up to call out, they do so in desperation that their voices will echo back validated, deflecting away any dissonance: death by a million muddled decisions. When we descend deep down to sound our voices, we do so deliberately to detach ourselves from the outcome so we may deduce the distance between the dissimilarity of our mental models and authentic actuality. It is a persistent and lonely journey; there’s no honest way to silver line it. You get used to it, but it doesn’t make it any less hard. Though, once you go after it long enough, you realize it is this challenge of it all that holds the true wonders; the challenge is completely dedicated to haunting us forever, and so we are presented with the opportunity for unyielding motivation if we can only figure out for our individual selves how to harness it without it destroying us.

IS THIS PLACE DEPRAVED OF LIFE?

Face
my fears.
Is this the place?
I have to begin yet.

I
do swear
that I can only be
as good as the next one.

Make my own way.
I will be waiting for you down here.
Make my own name.
I am alone in the remainder.

I have come from the distance.
Through the drought,
I’ve known what is persistence.
Countless fallen lie behind the wayside,
drinking sand from crazed minds,
losing grip of real life.
There are better ways to die.

In the land of the fallout,
weaker minds ungrow as we go all out.
Ride the flow until we reach the stall out.
Then we’ll deeper climb
to where we’ll call out:
Are we alone?

In the fall of our shadows,
crumbling toward eclipsed harrows,
echoed vast amid the prospect moon rush,
forfeiting the gold torch
braided through our stories
to better feel alive.

In the outflow of lifelines
cut to save the dreams
weighed down by trapped minds,
come to find that they would all dare to
obtain the thousand-yard stare
through and through.
Hello? Hello?

END TRANSMISSION