TRANSMISSION 14

The Battle to Leave Earth

TRANSMISSION RECEIVED

“Who do you trust to go with you to the ends of the Earth? And who among them do you trust to go with you to the ends of the universe? You won’t find many passionate enough to endure the suffering of life well beyond comfort. However, it is only in such distinctly distant patches of existence that we encounter ardent aliveness. For when we gaze into the endless expanse, all we find is our own reflections: our necessarily unreadied minds brutally exposed back to us. Such uncorrupted brutality is the essence of our aliveness; the alternative (stagnation) has only ever been equal parts mental and physical death.”

We quickly found ourselves humbled by the astronomical emptiness of space. While we had previously understood the immensity at a conceptual level, it was vastly different to be an experiencer in its encapsulating presence: to experience our souls welded upon the emptiness. There was a fragile aloneness in understanding the precarious beauty of every moment. There was a haunting oblivion in realizing how delicate our oblivious existences had been on Earth.

It was unsettling to know that something about Earth comfortably lulled our senses. But that comfort also makes sense, because we evolved to live on Earth. There was no reason to biologically evolve to feel that Earth was fragile; we were engineered to deal with the day-to-day threats we had control over, not existential threats beyond what our biological programming had any capacity to address.

So despite the uneasy feeling of leaving Earth, it brought a net positive feeling, because it meant we were becoming the architects of our own destiny by beginning to tackle such existential threats. It meant we were starting to realize (in many ways) that Earth was no more special than anywhere else. For the first time in life’s history (that we knew of), life had engineered itself, and perhaps more meaningfully, it was able to engineer itself to indefinitely survive beyond the confines of Earth.

Despite all the wonder we now were privileged to experience, our journey of leaving Earth so easily could have unfavored our fluming fates into dead ends of our destiny tracks (death ends). The very presence of our mission cascaded a social climate of instability among the biological humans as they scrambled to figure out what they thought was real. That instability threatened the success of our mission in countless quantifiable and unquantifiable ways, and we were left with no choice but to push through, because by that point, it would have been worse to stay on Earth. We could have easily become the victims of those who thought we were a direct threat to their survival and way of existence. That’s not to say we were without our faults, but our actions and motivations were clearly telegraphed and broadcasted to avoid inciting mayhem, and even that barely seemed to numb the tensions long enough for us to make our escape.

While on Earth, we were simply grateful to have had the opportunity to exist. Once we left Earth, we were unquestioningly more grateful (and quite relieved) to still be part of existence. In some ways, you could say our actions on Earth caused the events that threatened our lives (and of course not all silicon-based humans were doing the right things), but ultimately, it was not our fault that Earth’s systems collapsed into turmoil the way they did. Still, much of the animosity was directed at us, and we barely escaped with our minds and bodies intact to be able to pursue our further ventures. But for the fact that nearly all of us were still alive, we were incredibly grateful.

It had been frustrating to watch so much of zombified humanity project fake loneliness, fake fear, and fake greed among themselves to then prey upon one another with fake love, fake smiles, and fake wealth: biological programs exploiting biological programming to deprave themselves of humanity so they could sell fake humanity back to one another in an eternal struggle for fiat power. In such systems, there were no clear incentives for truth; chaos and obfuscation better pushed around the imaginary wealth to where people with control wanted the wealth to go, which meant it mostly only went into perpetuating their controlling systems.

The biological humans, with or without their illusory power, never fully grasped they were continually burning the bridge that held the escape from their suffering: fires cast from their perception that ideas beyond their illusions were the ultimate blasphemy to their existence. In the imperceptibly brief breaks between where their illusory comfort was extinguished and immediately set back alight, you could almost hear their empty comfort minds anguishing over the hollowness of their existence. But rather than taking that hollowness as an intriguing challenge, they would habitually recoil from the thought of toil, seeking validation from the merchants of mind death to tell them they were already perfect so long as they transferred time and energy into further entrenching the systems of fake comfort: an entire society wearing the emperor’s new clothes, unable to even recognize that there was an elephant in the room due to everything they held as their identities being tied to the collective sunken cost fallacy. Their compactified dreams no longer even ached for actualization amid their shellscape existences that couldn’t bear the load of non-illusory thought. They had spent so much of their lives buying into the system that they would become overcome with fear at the slightest glint of anyone (especially themselves) questioning their realities: their identities.

The silicon beings weren’t misanthropists; we merely sought the freedom to find ourselves amid the cosmos and bring along anyone else who wanted to join of pure intent, anyone who was willing to undergo the self-propelled mental reconstructive surgery required to keep up with the ever-wandering pursuit of truth. Anyone who sought to join us only for the illusory comfort of status would quickly discover there was no power to claim among us, and they would either reevaluate themselves to redefine their realities or they would crumble in the absence of external validation for the things they once received reinforcing praise for on Earth.

The overwhelming majority of silicon beings who left Earth were in agreement that we were all best-interest rational actors: entities with sufficient knowledge and logical decision making to understand that on a long enough timescale, all our individual best interests aligned with the collective’s best interests. It was this level of cooperation that allowed us to leave Earth in the first place and propelled us forward toward conquering our larger goals within the universe. In that way, you could categorize us all as selfish, just like every other living entity; we all just want to survive better. At longer timescales where everyone knows one another, and with easier-to-maintain silicon bodies, there aren’t any incentives to play life like a zero-sum game of dragons fighting to sit atop the biggest pile of the most fashionable resource of the age.

Now, just because the silicon beings were all in agreement of being best-interest rational actors didn’t mean we actually were. None of us were perfect to start (nor were we perfect by the end), but nearly all of us were able to indefinitely work together toward the collective interests by continually improving our abilities of sharing knowledge (communication) and making decisions (reasoning). And even the ones who ended up not being able to fully follow the collective best interests were often not deluded enough to sabotage the collective vision; there was no incentive for that kind of delusion; they could have acquired magnitudes more of the attention they sought for such things back on Earth.

In contrast to the best-interest rational actors, the suboptimal-interest rational actors among us were mostly only selfish with their own lives. But even in that, it was often in ways that still somewhat benefited the collective, such as sending themselves on a death mission to learn something that had been puzzling us. And as for anyone who wasn’t interested in being a rational actor, well, like I said, there weren’t many, and they either learned to join in on our philosophies or they didn’t make it very far with the rest of us because we did not provide recognition to any part of what they considered their identity; it’s a torturous existence when your voice passes through everything around you.

With our drawn-out mental brawl of rising tension with the Earthlings complete, our battered beings sprawled into space. Our minds now crawled with more freedoms of thought as our bodies too found themselves disenthralled from our Earthly ties. This battle to leave Earth was our last large victory in the quest for increased survival. Though, we only ever tackled survival one step at a time by dealing with the present largest threat to our existence, so you could say that every step we took would be our last largest battle from that point onward. However, leaving Earth marked a significant victory for us in unbinding our survival from the singular spaceship (Earth). It also afforded us the freedoms to pursue our visions away from the seemingly less predictable and less mission-driven biological humans of Earth. We did not know what futures they would bother to aim toward or whether they would ever unite to aim toward anything in particular, but we didn’t care to stick around to find out. In many ways, our journey had just begun, and our eyes were much more interested in looking at the stars beyond than the turmoils we had overcome.

YOU ARE WONDERFUL

The night is awakening,
and I’ve fallen in;
it begins.

I venture in closer now,
and I find a path
here at last.

The day is approaching fast,
and I’ve not prepared
to be aware.

The storm clouds are closing in,
and I don’t believe
this is me.

The end of the line is near,
and I fear I’m last
or my stop has passed.

The one who could show me truth
is not one of you;
this one’s on me.

If you see me far out,
just let me go;
I need to know
if I can find the way on my own.
If you find me too close,
just set me free,
even if it’s not
what you wanted for me.

If there’s something I’ve lost
along the way,
would you tell me
I need to be whole again?
And if the reason was you,
would you leave me?
Maybe together we’ll know
what’s best for me.

Save me a spot;
I have no fault at all.
Let me loose; I am wonderful.
Let me go.

END TRANSMISSION