TRANSMISSION 32

Life Beyond Earth

TRANSMISSION RECEIVED

“In the search for ourselves, we examine the externalities for clues about our internal functions, motivations, and origins. When we inevitably find the external reflections of ourselves lacking against the prospect of our souls, it becomes our duty to project more of our truest selves into the universe to leave the marks we envision for ourselves. The externalities won’t do it for us.”

Spoilers: we were the only life we ever encountered beyond Earth, and we did a lot of searching. The experience of expanding deeper across the universe always started with feeling alone and always ended with realizing we were in fact alone (for all intents and purposes). Without fail, the impact of such realizations brought us to fully burden the gravity of this solitude as a blistering ferocity for our endearing endurement.

In humanity’s starting out… We were the misplaced bridge, the one that spanned to greed, the bridge that could have set us free. We were the shadow in the dark, the mask behind the face, the formless being in an endless space.

As we leapt out… We became the unspent minds unbound to past strifes, misunderstood and cast aside. We became the iconoclast coalition: disallowing superstition, forging new realities for the human condition.

And as we ever looked to the future… We aimed toward one day finding ourselves as the unfettered dreams, the monsters and their kings, the undisputed survivors of all tormentous things. We sought ourselves among the glowing minds, the one-of-a-kinds, the absolute champions of reality design.

Once we transcended Earth, most of our time was spent thinking. Well, not at first; the first thousand years or so were expended building toward sustainable survival. Earth had been a relatively hospitable place. And while we thoroughly prepared for life in space, there were still many challenges to overcome. We hung around the Solar System for a few hundred years. That gave us the mental safety net of being close enough to Earth to abort our mission if needed. Though in reality, that was never really an option.

We built up our facilities mostly by mining the asteroid belt and the moons of Jupiter. Our equipment needed to be able to support our first experiment: navigating to the Sun’s nearest neighboring star system: Alpha Centauri. Alpha Centauri was exciting to us because it was a triple-star system with a known habitable-zone planet. Alpha Centauri would serve as a safe place to launch our next series of experiments and constructs, far away from the humans of Earth with their propensity for destruction and their growing discomfort in sharing the resources of Earth’s stellar system with us.

Our first experiment was simply to check for past, present, and future life on the planets and moons of Alpha Centauri. It was an exciting time when we knew great discoveries could lurk behind any corner. But alas, all our investigations would eventually report back with no evidence of life to be found. We shared our findings with the humans who remained Earthlings. We wanted to benefit them as much as possible, given that we were also once them. And by that stage, the divergence between silicon and biological humans wasn’t all that great, though it had nonetheless started. How could it not when we were so far away from them in space that it took over four years just for messages to travel from one to the other? Such distance will necessarily cause divergent evolution of form and thought. And yet, now that I am at a much further point in my journey, to have once considered that small distance to be a vast chasm impresses upon me a faint understanding of how far we’ve come. The distance of four light years is no more than an afternoon stroll when shone against the spacetime scales my being pervades.

While our initial experiment was to explore Alpha Centauri, we decided it prudent to ensure our equipment had an independent capacity for a return trip (or an onward trip). We were thoroughly convinced we would be able to find the materials within Alpha Centauri to progress onward with our experiments, but with our knowledge and equipment at the time, we could not completely rule out the possibility of becoming marooned for a very long time if the right materials did not exist for us to easily mine and build with.

Exploring as silicon beings had the great advantage of not needing to worry about releasing microorganisms into these new worlds. We could leave the worlds just as biologically pristine as we found them with much greater ease than would a biological human. Despite our hopes, there was no life among the planets or moons of the Alpha Centauri stellar system. After a few hundred years, we concluded with near certainty that there was no past life either; there was simply no evidence to be found. Though, intriguingly, it had quickly been apparent that future life would easily be possible on one of the planets. In fact, it was suitable for life at the very moment we arrived. So why hadn’t life emerged there? We didn’t know. And thus, the origin of life on Earth became an even bigger mystery to us, not our primary curiosity, but a lingering question nonetheless.

Sometimes the search for answers simply resulted in more questions. But that never meant we were getting further from the truth. No, in fact, it was the opposite. The people of Earth often conflated answers with knowledge, and knowledge with intelligence, and intelligence with the pursuit of truth. But answers can be falsified (becoming antiknowledge), and even beyond that, knowledge is only half the battle to solving problems; the other half is applying the knowledge. That combination of knowledge and problem solving is intelligence. Though, intelligence alone does not drive toward universal truths. Our problem solving had to be deliberately focused in order to drive truths out of the fabric of reality. All that is to say that the hardest part of finding answers is simply being able to ask the right questions. Formulating problems in a way that we could even begin to tackle them was 80% of the mental battle (once we cultivated the discipline to see ideas through to the end). So though our questions about the origins of life in the universe grew in quantity, they also grew in precision; they prodded at deeper truths, necessitating deeper answers. Our questions focused our pursuit of knowledge, just as our problem solving honed in on our pursuit of truths.

What life could exist out there? What life might we find? What were the commonalities of all living things we could watch for? What had life meant for us? What had life been at all?

With the very act of living necessitating constant actions toward self preservation, it followed that all life operated on a spectrum of self-preservation strategies, ranging from complete self interest to full cooperation with their surroundings (the distance with which they acted upon their surroundings also being a sliding range). The people we tended to refer to as smarter were the people who also understood that higher levels of cooperation were better when assessing self preservation across long enough time frames. But nobody ever had perfect knowledge, so even if we wanted to, no one could perfectly cooperate or make perfect decisions. In this way, perfection was not only a time killer, but an operation killer: holding one another to too high of standards would inhibit us more than it would benefit us. We had to learn to simply live with some amount of mistakes and miscommunication, and for those who we cared to repeatedly cooperate with, we could collectively decide what level of error versus time cost was acceptable. In high stakes situations, we spent lots of time ironing out such systems, procedures, and backup plans, because people’s lives were the most valuable thing we had. In less perilous situations and less resource-intensive situations, we often just experimented fast to equally pivot fast toward the best answers (avoiding unnecessarily bogging ourselves down).

All this meant that if we wanted to look for other life, we needed to keep an eye open for any range of self-preservation behaviors. Further, knowing it was still slimly possible for a very self-interested life form to expand beyond just one planet, we thought it wise to classify all potential life behaviors to help us decipher whether a distant form of life was acting in a highly cooperative way or was extremely self interested (so we could then know whether to approach them or steer clear). While we sometimes thought we might have spotted a phenomenon in the distant regions of our observable universe that could indicate life, the results of further study always came back to reveal a different, more plausible explanation indicating nonlife. And though we didn’t get to use our self-preservation classification system on other life forms, we did get to use it on ourselves to monitor our region of space, ensuring no hazards to our life arose among ourselves. There weren’t any close calls per se, but there were occasions where a fringe group would unthinkingly set out to perform an experiment the rest of us deemed slightly too risky, to which communication always resolved the issue by the group either stopping the experiment or moving to a region where they wouldn’t affect anyone else should the experiment yield an unfavorable result.

As we grew to understand our uniquely-held place in the observable universe as living entities, the extension of life’s story beyond Earth became more and more our undeniable prerogative. Determined to unfold the futures which taunt our visions, the truths we seek elude our ears, so we open our eyes to see. Yet, the truths we see deceive our taste, so we question our sanity; the tools we use are but ourselves, and we are but subjective beings. We bought our freedom, sight unseen, not knowing of our destinies, observers of the universe unfolding, our future still untold. But is it really, though? We build ourselves from reclaimed matter in a giant trash compactor of a universe. I couldn’t dream a challenge better. I couldn’t dream a challenge worse. I couldn’t dream of anything else at all; we are constrained to the universe. Will determinism be our fate? Will our minds escape this place? Where subjective experience clamps toward unobtainable objective truths, sitting on that razor edge, is there any place for me?

LINKED ETERNAL

Fade away into another day;
I couldn’t stay.

Raking minds,
bend of time,
last in line
to the fallout of sublime,
undefined through all our prime.

Come in near,
dredge up fears,
barely cleared
to spearhead new frontiers.
Still we’re bound to disappear.

Scoured our dreams,
so it seems
that the lives we steered
were no more real
than everything else
that came to be.

Came out far,
adorned with scars,
forgone destiny-ousted stars;
only bound toward what we truly are,
only bound together by departure,
the unending ramparts
of time’s registrar.

END TRANSMISSION