TRANSMISSION 17
The Extent of Our Existence
TRANSMISSION RECEIVED
“Where are we going but to glimpse at our deepest dreams? How do we get there but by charting the steadfast course? Why are we journeying but to uncover our dreams in the first place? What next but to repeat ad infinitum¿ lest we lose our minds amid anything less than our authentic selves.”
On this unnamed mass amid the sparse future of humanity, I’m subject to the whims of my constrained destiny. That is to say that there isn’t much left to do here for me; my opportunities are constricting. I haven’t decided what my destiny signifies. And equally, while our collective destinies certainly have conveyed the extent of our existential journey, I am also unable to place a definitive meaning onto it. In a sense, we all lie here at the exonerated end of a patchwork journey projected upon the sunset of our unblemished dreams (the enriched illusions we chased to the unembellished ends of time), only to watch our dreams ebb beyond the horizons we could no longer follow. The only difference between each of us as individuals was that some of us just saw the sunset sooner than others: letting fade the illusion of a permanent existence as we accepted our fates.
Sitting here on this moon for so long has halted the cycles of my existence, the cycles as I’ve known them my whole life. I am no longer a body in motion; my rhythms have been perturbed. And the perturbations have penetrated deep into the heartlands of my soul. How far have I been afflicted? I can’t quite say. My life up until this point was a dance with time as we learned, created, and dreamed. We cycled through the same motions both within our individual lives and along the eras of life’s existence:
Exploration: We sought to understand our immediate reality.
Building: We experimented to solidify our understanding of reality and determine what tools were available to us.
Thinking: We applied our knowledge and tools toward furthering our quality of life and survival rates.
For myself and for those who shared in my journey, the macro view of our path could be roughly expressed into the following phases that bear resemblance to the three eras mentioned above:
Philosophy: A spark was all it took; we ignited our vision for the future with the simplest of questions. But to ask the question in the right way was not so simple; that took the correct set of circumstances (for which we were eternally grateful). We simply pondered what we would do with unlimited time. Our answer was that it was such a tragedy our limited lives wouldn’t get to learn nearly as much as we wanted. The resultant question then became apparent: how could we aid the survival of individuals and the collective? Thus began our quest, a quest espoused through a handbook to chart the course for all our newly chartered minds to the cause.
Research: With our newfound dreams to pursue, we spent the next period learning about our brains and minds to determine whether there was any way we could possibly live indefinitely. We set upon the idea that, in theory, we could transfer our minds to silicon hardware to make it easier for us to engineer our way around death (such as through avoiding biological senescence: death by manufactured obsolescence).
Prototype: Thoroughly convinced our prospective path was potentially possible, we set off to deduce whether we could build silicon-based brains. It took a lot of experimenting to figure out what we were doing and to figure out what we needed to be doing, but we eventually constructed brain hardware capable of facilitating human-level minds.
Development: With silicon brain technology unlocked, we hunted and prodded for ways to transfer our minds from the biological human hardware to the silicon brain hardware. Through incremental testing and validating, in time, we were able to satisfactorily develop a mind transfer procedure.
Deployment: Once developed, we scaled our operations to deploy the mind transfer technology and procedure to all humans who wished to undergo the transformation and join in on the exploration of indefinite life.
Improvement: As more and more humans went silicon, we all contributed to the improvement of our minds and bodies. Our minds now had access to control any compatible hardware directly as if it was our own body. This eruption of possibilities was exciting and liberating for many of us, but it also brought a fear of the unknown and unfamiliar to those who remained as biological humans.
Research: Though we planned to leave Earth anyway, the fear held by the biological humans led to our need to accelerate the process of spaceship and society design beyond Earth. This period was marked with a tumultuous sequence of endeavors and expositions.
Colonization: While many great advancements were made along the way to this era, the tensions were high between the silicon and biological beings, so we couldn’t be happier than to settle into the rest of the Solar System beyond Earth. We had made it out nearly fully intact. In this period, we established ourselves as builders through spaceship design and though the enactment of our societal visions.
Exploration: For various reasons, we once again needed to move beyond our home. This time we would be leaving the Solar System. Our tools and technologies were equipped for self-sufficiency out in the vast and inhospitable galaxy. We turned our eyes to the stars and set off for the nearest ones to mark a new wave of exploration for humanity. There were so many interesting things out there to uncover; the Milky Way Galaxy was our metaphorical Oyster Nebula: opportunities abound for those who endeavored (just as Earth once was for its own era of explorers).
Building and Experimenting: After a considerable amount of time, we settled into our rhythms to begin fully applying the knowledge from our explorations toward furthering our goals. We built immense tools and elaborate experiments to deeply probe the universe for clues that would help confirm or debunk whatever knowledge we thought we had gained. In biological human terms, this roughly equated to the Earthly builders who were alive in the few eras preceding the lives of all us biological-to-silicon beings.
Research: Having come to deeply understand our situation in existence, we used our solidified knowledge to very clearly and deliberately craft the roadmaps we wanted to follow forward in the continued pursuit of indefinite life. This roughly equated to the Earth-human era of people alive during our biological-to-silicon emergence.
Refinement: The path from here to the end was strewn with our continued exertions to innovate and eke out higher survival chances. With our boots firmly on the ground, this epoch became our stomping ground, an unfettered battleground where we would never settle for any semblance of a middle ground. We claimed this era as our high ground in the quest to break new ground for life, where the ground rules were unrestricted and the only limiting factor was our ability to remain grounded in reality and stand our ground in the face of impending entropic nothingness.
I speak of this all with the benefit of being able to look back at our past, but even in the early stages of our movement, we had this trajectory roughly outlined ahead of time. It acted as our indefinite life roadmap as we pursued these ventures in unison: sometimes in parallel, sometimes in sequence, sometimes in vain, sometimes in triumph, always in monumental awe. The affordances of simply existing spawned the luminance of our minds to activation, gliding through the self-aware intrinsicalities: that we were magnificent illusions of our own minds, that we were able to facilitate our fates into multitudes, that we were free from the debt of being meaningful to anything but ourselves.
RACING ’ROUND REALITY
I am reaching into unknown…
alone.
We’ve been reaching into our fears…
for years.
Reaching outward,
farther out away from our spawn:
this place we call our home.
I’m still as much a part
of the world down there,
or anywhere.
Reaching onward,
further into what we don’t know;
this place we walk alone.
We’re still as much the cure
as we are the cause
of all our flaws.
Spawned out of my sleep
to each new day-
light breaks my limboed state.
Gliding onward
(crossing through the places
that we know)
into the true unknown.
I have yet to see life
that is self-aware
while still genuine.
Crossing borders,
all they’ve known is orders
that control
their every waking thought.
They’re still too linked
to all of the world up there,
to anywhere.
Hiding out from Earth
as our quest becomes known.
They want to come along.
But little have they known
dangers similar to these:
life-threatening.
Always dying,
nevertheless trying.
I have had
too many close encounters
trying to save
even just one of their lives.
At least I tried.
END TRANSMISSION