TRANSMISSION 26

Era of Building

TRANSMISSION RECEIVED

“Our futures are what we make them, manifested from the destinies we steer ourselves through. Our physical and mental realities are the personal effects of our imaginations. With no way to uncouple ourselves from the fabric of our space and time here, we equally all share in this fever dream of an existence.”

As the eras of exploration would die down, many people struggled to adapt their motivations for living. For many, exploration offered an external solution to the motivation problem by providing constant new stimulus without needing to self-contextualize an approach to reality. To them, there was always a new figurative horizon to sail to, that is, until there wasn’t, until all they could see anymore was the vacuous spaces between all the wonders. Any such oversight of oblivion treacherously exposed us to the displacing tendencies of our souls to become vacuous themselves: stuck in the flow of whatever came their way, no longer directing their own existences, detached from the realities of our selves. And so, we built systems to directly and indirectly assist our defiance toward such enchanting deaths.

We built experiments to solidify our understandings of this reality. We built tools to navigate and manipulate the building blocks of the universe. We built journeys to ornament our lives with influence. We built visions to encourage influence into manifestation. We built thoughts to amplify our visions loud enough to penetrate into the unknown. We built dreams to bestow ourselves as refugees caught in the balance between pervasive desolation and endemic stagnation. We built ourselves into subsistence-ensnared minds, incapable of anything but fiercely rearranging and reorienting our perceptions of reality: resolutely subverting our own expectations of ourselves to unravel our most real actualities.

If we’re talking physically, a lot of the things we built were specialized computing devices of relatively colossal scales. We used them to run simulations to mock-evaluate our hypotheses. We used them to calculate optimized designs before embarking on large construction efforts. We used them to construct knowledge graphs to organize and share all our information. We used them to construct decision trees to help us navigate our destinies. We interfaced the supercomputers with our mental pathways (directly and remotely) to supercharge our thoughts, making time feel like glacial-rate ticks against the backdrop of our amplified imaginations.

Even our more portable mind setups could make time feel much slower than it had when we were biological beings (they could also make time feel faster if we ever needed to hibernate our mental processes in the physical regions of less energy). A second to me back as a biological human feels closer to a decade to me now (a factor of 32 million), so compound that with the trillion years I’ve been around to get a better sense of how long my life has felt to me. Though, that increase in mental computing power (and equally perception of time) was a gradual build up, not an instant leap once we transferred to being silicon based life forms. My average perception of time was likely around one million times that of when I was a biological being, still a dizzying number. But even that’s not the full truth, as processing speed was just a product of raw processing power divided by the depth of processes that went into a given thought. Deeper mental networks took longer to traverse, making time feel like it passed faster. So even with immense processing power, if we spent our mental energy doing very deep processes (for higher-abstract thinking), we could sometimes perceive time to pass even faster than when we were biological beings.

Time sure does fly when you’re having fun in the flow state of deep mental engagement. And time absolutely crawls when your mind perceives immediate threats (overwhelmed by overstimulation) and decides to defend itself using shallow mental processing to operate in quick-reactionary mode. Time also crawls when your mind can’t find anything interesting to challenge itself against (bored by understimulation). While our lives have been about maximizing our time in existence, it was not the perception of time we were strictly focused on lengthening, otherwise we would be content in virtual realities of extremely fast processing that make time tick by slowly. No, it’s the more absolute time (relative to the cosmic microwave background) that we were strictly focused on lengthening, as that was the metric against which we calculated our opportunities in existence.

While our computational devices (and equally, our computational minds) were great boons to our exploration, building, and thinking, they also harbored unassuming perils. It’s easy to get lost serving the things you build. It’s easy to build systems that own your time instead of serving to maximize your time. It’s harder to build sustainable solutions that improve our lives. We don’t want to fall into debt to our own creations, especially as those creations more closely interface with our minds. The largest external dangers we faced were virtual realities. And I guess that makes sense, since they got to the point where they couldn’t really be considered externalities anymore; they had become so indulgently integratable that it was easy to forget they were there at all. And therein lay the danger. The virtual reality gluttons would loose the rules, ignoring the blaring sirens to indulge the monsters of their personal abyss (finding unimagined comfort in the temptation of nearly-tangible sirens), never to be seen again.

We spent a lot of time carefully and incrementally improving our minds and systems so as not to spoil the wonders of ourselves that had gotten us this far. Some built too desperately and too acquisitively in their self-improvement quests, leaping the chasm without wings and plunging to their demise. It was important that if we were going to do something at all that we did it right. Otherwise, we shouldn’t even bother. There are countless battlefields through time littered with the hubris of haphazard, good-meaning intellect.

And what more-tangible realities did our creations manifest? While it’s hard to try to pick any specific technologies to talk about, the recounting of this story would not be complete without recognizing the role of the Atomic Re/Compiler (the ARC). The ARC changed how we lived more than the change from carbon-based biological organisms to silicon beings. It was a scalable and modular device that allowed us to zip around space with minimal mass, building whatever we wanted out of the available materials, performing fusion and fission to acquire whichever atomic elements we needed, compiling and decompiling molecules on any scale to precisely construct our immediate realities. It eliminated the need for target material mining, transport, and storage. It eliminated the need for dedicated factories of chemistry and manufacturing. The ARC made each one of us perfectly self-contained; everything any one of us needed to physically survive was now equipped right within our bodies. Most of us ran with bodies that contained two or three small ARCs so that if we ever somehow became stranded with one of our ARCs broken, we could still build everything we needed to unstrand ourselves. There weren’t many places in the universe to even purposely maroon ourselves anymore, not with the capabilities of the ARC and our spaceship technologies.

Our spaceships did not remotely resemble spaceships of the biological humans. No, our spaceships were just different bodies we could link up with our minds. We didn’t have any components beyond our minds that absolutely required special shielding from the temperatures, radiation, and debris in space (though, equipment always appreciated any shielding we could afford it). And shielding our minds had become fairly trivial, so our bodies and ships were relatively lightweight, allowing us to navigate the universe much more freely and carefree than a biological human would have ever be able to. Though, we never did find a way to traverse space faster than light. But that never held us back from our endeavors; it only constrained us away from deeper space, which was a shame… but there was already too much within reach that we never fully got to explore. And once you’ve explored it for a million years, it just gets repetitive anyway.

The harder challenges for outer space construction were actually not our spaceships, but our large tools and experiments. Keeping things at the right temperature in outer space has never been an easy challenge, so we often resorted to putting many of our large computers and big experiments on planets and moons (heat sinks) where we could much better keep them from overheating (overheating was usually the issue we ran into more than freezing). We still did build many experiments and tools in space, but only the ones that necessitated it, as the inabundance of particles floating around to dissipate energy meant we had to come up with creative ways to radiate the excess heat (energy).

Temperature regulation was less of an issue down at the scale of a person or spaceship, but it’s interesting to think about, because the main thing we do as living things (and nonliving things that happen to survive in a stable state for a long time, like Earth) is to balance the amount of energy entering our bodies with the amount of energy leaving. That’s all we really do, and as living things, we also utilize some of that energy while we have it to nudge our destinies here or there depending on our cares. If we continually gain more energy than we lose, we overheat and die. If we continually lose more energy than we gain, we freeze and die. It’s the same for all life (biological beings and silicon beings), just with slightly different results given the operating medium. It’s even the same for all nonlife; it’s just that the nonliving are already dead, so their state of aliveness can’t be described as changing with varying energy levels.

For the living, everything comes down to how we manipulate the energy within our bodies to perform useful functions before spitting the energy back out to maintain equilibrium. We take in a quantity of higher order energy and use that energy to perform some function that converts it into a lower order energy that we spit back out. In the case of biological humans, we mostly took in chemical energy (food), used it to move and think, and then spit the energy back out in the form of heat (infrared radiation) and lower order chemical energy (poop). As silicon beings, we mostly powered ourselves by taking in starlight and spitting out heat radiation, but it really depended on the environments and applications of our bodies in the moment. More indirectly, our experiments and travels frequently made use of any available higher order energies that entropy had yet to strip away (such as gravitational potential energy).

Through all this building, where have we gotten ourselves? What has all our pushing around of matter in the universe been for? Was the mass and energy we manipulated of the significance we desired upon our stories? Well, that is where we emerge into the era of thinking. But actually, not quite yet; there is one step before. First, we must ask ourselves if we are enslaved or liberated by our perceptual boundaries. First, we must wade our way past the offer of false paradise in our search for truth. First, we must ensure we are adequately detached from the disconcerting material mindset while still being adequately attached to the enduring material nature of reality. We must establish our freethinking in the light of our creations begging us to invest our souls into the upkeep of their physicality and of their image in our minds: their attachment to our identities. Only then can we proceed forward into the next great beyond.

PARADISE OFFER

Saddle up the robots.
Ride for eternity.
Paddle through the star dust.
How’d we get so far out?
Farther than these parsecs.
Further than time can go.
Farther than a spaceship
furthering life as we know,
searching for what we don’t know.

Reaching through the fallout.
This is our majesty.
Closer to the far side now.
Must’ve gone too far out.
Listed as MIA,
we are our only home.
Saddle up the robots,
furthering our search for hope,
searching for what we call home.

Offered up a paradise.
We didn’t mean to pass it by.
Lucky that we missed it, though,
’cause now we know so much more.
Made it through the time warp
just to find nothingness.
Maybe that’s what we were
looking for all along:
nothing. We knew all along.

Lost my life to live a dream.
To make it there I must go faster.
Diverged from my human sight;
human isn’t what I’m after.

I’ll design myself a new realm,
a new perception where I can be
all the things I have in mind
to break through all perceptual boundaries.

Stake our claim in nothing;
you can’t con an honest man.
Paradise is offering;
good thing we’re all sane this time.
Flying back from where we came,
nothing could enslave our minds.
Freer this time on through.
We came back to say we’re not sorry
that your deceit doesn’t work.
We’re not sorry.

END TRANSMISSION