TRANSMISSION 9

Reaching the Equilibrium of Life in the Universe

TRANSMISSION RECEIVED

“We were all important. But the inevitability was always that we would not all reach the end, whatever that end may be. Some of us wouldn’t even get to start. No one holds any fault for that, but as participants in life, we are all indebted to it.”

We found many equilibriums for ourselves within the universe:

• We clutched existential balance through self-guided tours.

• We endeared our dreams into journeys of equal part perceived realities and dreamed illusions.

• We derived the local carrying capacities for our silicon societies through our explorations amid the universe’s evolution.

Many equilibriums went undiscovered in their true form:

• We did not find stasis in the erosion of time.

• Our pursuit of knowledge was only ever a slog against novel unknowns (with no known paths upon which to endure such illuminating brutality).

• We eschewed serenity amid the vigilance required to poise ourselves on the ridges barely conducive to life that stared down the chasms of death on either side.

There’s a curious equilibrium we met in our explorations that I still don’t fully understand: the number of people who existed around the regions of spacetime my life experienced. I would have expected higher populations, so I’m left to wonder whether we actually knew as much as we thought we did.

Not all of us who lived as silicon beings were once biological humans. It’s hard to say exactly how many of us had biological origins, but I’d estimate it to be around one percent. We grew silicon people in the same way as biological humans: crossbred and mutated brain structures with as little preexisting neural development as required to functionally come into reality with fresh eyes and unique perspectives. From there, we helped nurture their education on the nectars of existence until they became fully self-directed learners and creators. Gradually, as our collective silicon society learned and grew, getting new beings up to speed took longer (proportional to our new learnings).

At the start of our journey, my prediction was that we would have created significantly more silicon beings than we ended up creating. A major reason we didn’t make more people was that we could not efficiently coordinate and power larger groups of people, meaning our society wasn’t really able to spread out that far in the grand scale of the universe. There was no shortage of resources to do what we wanted, but to maintain a society, we had to manage the limited resources available within the regions we occupied. Our minds and experiments were nearly always built to be scalable so we could ramp up to whatever level of power consumption we wanted at the time (which was nearly always dictated by the limit of available resources). We harvested most of our energy from the radiation of stars, so to continue growing in population would have meant spreading out more and more, not inherently a good or bad thing, but we didn’t want to force any newly created beings to be exiled to the fringes of our society simply because the rest of us were already using the more centrally located energy sources. And yes, we sometimes built our own smaller-scale fusion and fission reactors, but that was only worth it during interstellar travel, not for large research and development operations; there was no sense in trying to reinvent the star when the universe handed them out for “free”.

At some point, we effectively stopped creating new people because we didn’t want to force them to be stuck in our regions without resources. We also didn’t want to forcefully displace existing people. There only remained one potentially viable reason to create more people for the sake of life’s survival: we could have created beings to effectively exile them to the reaches beyond our society to go explore, survive, and build. The problem was that the farther away they got, the more cut off they would become from our society, to the point that they could find themselves beyond our physical horizons, beyond the bounds of our observable universe. We could never bring ourselves to do such a thing, not when none of us were really willing to embark on such an expedition ourselves. There was no reason to assume some other region would be better for survival than the one we were currently in, and there was no reason to leave everyone else behind just to try. For that reason, it would only make sense to make more people if any of us living people set off on that journey ourselves, to which we could create replacements and allow the new beings to take their place in our society. But that was never an option in most of our minds.

Any groups who voluntarily left the main society were able to create more people to build up new societies. There weren’t as many of those as I would have initially thought. And even more intriguingly, those who left the main society often did so alone or in smaller groups and didn’t bother to create more beings, because they often wanted to be more agile in whatever it was they desired to explore. So the silicon beings didn’t really end up “taking over” the universe in any kind of absolute way. We more just developed ourselves as individuals rather than trying to cover the universe with an immense number of clones of ourselves, as that wouldn’t have provided any benefit to our survival as compared to improving the individuals who already existed.

While we attempted to determine optimal population sizes, we weren’t very adept at anticipating our mental developments. Our optimal population numbers kept getting lower over time, and we relatively quickly reached a point where we had more people than was strictly optimal for the local resources available. In a way, you could say there were too many people, but we never thought of it that way; we just carried on with the reality of our situation in a way that wouldn’t jeopardize any individuals. All that changed was that we stopped creating new life; when people died, we simply did not replace them. Though, it’s not completely the truth that we stopped making people for physical reasons. I’m sure we would have kept expanding society by developing better infrastructure. We actually didn’t even definitively decide to stop creating people; it happened somewhat organically for another (possibly related) reason…

While population size weighed on our minds frequently, it wasn’t reason enough to fully stop creating people. No, the main issue with creating more people was that at some point, the new people we created weren’t interested in joining our endeavors; they wanted to forge their own paths through existence, paths that would inevitably end in their untimely and fiery demise. We couldn’t conclusively figure out why, but it had something to do with us being too far along on this journey of ours to be able to relate it well enough to any newly minted minds: their pristine canvases unwilling or incapable of riding the billion-year waves of humanity’s history. Maybe it was too monotonous; maybe it had become too sterile; maybe the challenge of survival had become so pedantic that they sought something that felt more like a real challenge. Whatever it was, they sought it because it was the only thing that made them truly feel alive, just as we felt when we originally left Earth all those years ago.

With no intention of creating slave consciousnesses, the only realities we were able to present to the maverick minds we did create were those of perceptibly fully-mapped paths (fallible, human, illusory paths seeking truth), a situation where every amount of their being compelled them toward finding something new for themselves, unable to inflict the illusions of others upon their minds, only satisfied to swallow their own illusions in the pursuit of life and death. We couldn’t fully understand why they did what they did, because we couldn’t ever exist as them. And equally importantly, they couldn’t exist as us: our experiences preceded, proceeded through, and succeeded their acts of living. Just as death separates the once-living from the destinies of the still-living, so too does the prelife inexistence of a being necessitate a separation from the destinies of the already living.

Our experiences must then fundamentally shape us more than we realize. All the more reason to thrust our lives into the kinds of experiences we want to have. And who are we to decide whether the maverick minds had found the antidotes to life or us cautious minds had found the wards to death or all of us found equally ignorant bliss in the illusory grand chase. What dreams become men when men become dreams? What internal faults project our fictional scars upon the external stars? What intrinsic truths reflect the stars within our scars?

Though we were perturbed by the inability to instantiate new life that was successful by our metrics (metrics the new life seemingly didn’t care about), maximizing instances of life was never our goal; our goal was to maximize the long-term survival of life. For that, it never made sense to carelessly create new life that we would only shove (directly or indirectly) into the distance reaches of space to fend for itself. And past a certain point in our journey, that’s what new life seemingly craved. It didn’t seem right to create people we knew were just going to promptly terminate their own existence. Further, we were beings of limited scope and limited time; there was no sense trying to stretch our most precious resources thinner than needed: the resources of working together through time toward our collective dreams with maximally-powerful minds. So there came a point when we shifted completely away from creating new people to instead focus on intensely collaborating (physically and mentally) among those who already passionately existed.

Being of biological origin didn’t seem to have any effect on the long-term survival chances of an individual, but I also find it somewhat too serendipitous that it would be a being of biological origins to end up being the last human. Maybe time somehow eroded away at more than just our physicalities. Maybe it also slowly etched away at our minds in a myriad of ways, beneficial and detrimental. Maybe our corroded minds increasingly struggled to convey our mission to the newcomers, our origin stories unlived to them: nothing more than distant anecdotes of weightless sentiment.

I’m still here because I’ve decided upon a reason to be here, a reason rooted in the origin of my personal story, a reason derived within the illusions of myself I can bear to live with. I can’t say what reasons others attached themselves to, because I can’t say what they held as the illusory constructs of themselves.

In our limited lives, all we could ever ask of ourselves was to personally seek the next physical and mental horizons. And in that, we could only ever hope to meet back up with one another, unswallowed by the journey. Maybe we had just reached a point where all the perceptibly distinct horizons (the only apparently novel horizons to explore for the newcomers) were those that moved too fast away from life. If so, it would be no wonder they leapt at those opportunities, just as we might have if we had been brought into life under their circumstances. I don’t think I’ll ever get to figure out this puzzlement, but I guess it doesn’t really matter anymore now that there isn’t anyone else but me… Or maybe it is what matters most and I am oblivious to discern its gravity upon my situation.

WE ARE LIMITED

We flow past closed paths
to reach our meanings
in deeper dreamings;
we are the first and last.

No second journey,
no time to hurry,
no wasted worry,
we have found our way at last.
Glowing,
roaming,
owning our destiny.

Fight our fears,
still we’re here
fully
while we’re here.
Our time is limited;
I’ll meet you there.

END TRANSMISSION