The chronicle of a daring species

Victoria Mortis, by Owe Zerge

Once upon a time, there was a daring species that emerged on a rocky, geologically active planet with plenty of water. This planet, like its neighbors, formed from the accretion disk that revolved around its young, small yellow star in the early stages of creation. All that swirling gaseous material coalesced thanks to gravity and formed eight planets, as well as planetoids, moons, and various rocks. This solar system was located in one of the arms of a galactic spiral. The galaxy that housed it was not one of the largest, but it was not small either. It was of medium to large size, let's say, with a diameter of about 100,000 light-years. This means the fastest possible thing, which is confused with the very idea of ​​causality; a particle of light, a photon, took about 100,000 years to cross from one side of the galaxy to the other. The photon, however, did not experience this time. From the photon's perspective, the journey was instantaneous; the time between its emission and its arrival on the other side was zero.

The photon is one of the few elementary particles devoid of mass. They can only travel at the speed of light, approximately 300,000 kilometers per second, roughly. However, light speed is constant for all observers. I'm not necessarily talking about conscious observers here. From the perspective of a rock on one planet and a cloud on another, light will always travel at the same speed. Since it is constant from all points of view, what changes is time. This is relative. That's why a photon doesn't experience the passage of time, and that's why the faster an object travels, the less it experiences the passage of time—and this effect will be greater the closer an object moves to the speed of light. This is why a photon emitted from that solar system didn't see time pass until it reached something on the other side of the galaxy, while in the solar system, 100,000 years would pass.

Some intergalactic rocks are hurled by cosmic events at fractions of the speed of light.

One of them was detected by the daring species and named 3I/ATLAS. That rock was a comet and was traveling at 0.02% of the speed of light. Although that was a fantastic speed for a macroscopic object, a speed far beyond what the daring species was ever been able to achieve with their rockets and alternative propulsion methods, the rock would still take 500 million years to cross the 100,000 light-years that separate one side of the galaxy from the other, from the perspective of its starting point. That rock would also not suffer as much from the effects of time dilation; therefore, from its own perspective, far from the journey being instantaneous or extremely fast as it was for photons and elementary particles traveling close to the speed of light, it would last about 499,999,990 years. That's a very long time. The daring species emerged in a universe where the distances between the stars made the distances between the continents of its planet seem like walking from the bedroom to the kitchen of their own house.

Much less, in fact.

The planet of the daring species took about 365 days to complete an orbit around its sun, while its solar system circled the galaxy approximately every 230 million years. From its emergence until it was able to detect comet 3I/ATLAS using precise technoscientific instruments, several hundred thousand years passed. Before that, the daring species was not yet ready, nor could it be called, anatomically speaking, a daring species. And even after emerging, it spent most of its time as hunter-gatherers. Here and there, some of its members painted cave walls, and that was all. It was only about 10,000 years before the detection of 3I/ATLAS that it discovered agriculture. Only later did it create cultures, diverse writing systems, and civilizations. We can even say that the daring species only ceased being timid and became truly daring from that period onward. Before, it had the biological equipment, but it didn't use it to its full potential.

The discovery of comet 3I/ATLAS wasn't even its greatest achievement up to that point. Many decades earlier, the daring species, competing with itself for nothing, managed to land some of its individuals on the moon of its planet. A few decades before that, it managed to split the atom to generate energy and also to destroy the world with what it called a nuclear bomb, again competing with itself for nothing. Shortly before that, it managed to fly for the first time. This means that, in less than a century, it went from the first rudimentary flight to the moon. The audacity was becoming increasingly blatant, but it hadn't emerged there. As I said, it emerged earlier, when the daring species definitively broke with the dictates of nature, growing its own food through agriculture and animal domestication. It was there that the universe witnessed the birth of a being who was not merely confused by possessing something more than the other beings around itself—a mind—but a being determined to assert itself at any cost.

This beginning was timid, yes. It still feared the thunder and the surrounding nature. To ward off its fears, it began to fantasize. It forged gods and knelt before them in apparent submission, all in exchange for a good hunt and, later, a good harvest. Over time, however, the gods created by the daring species reflected its own audacity. It no longer saw itself merely as part of the world, but as something beyond, and therefore it came to believe that the world was created by the gods so it could dominate and use as it saw fit. This was the reason why, even millennia later, when it was able to discover comet 3I/ATLAS, there were still individuals of the species who were proud of their stupidity, believing they could do whatever they pleased with their planet, because their god had given it to them as a gift to abuse without consequence. They could hunt and fish until other species became extinct, they could destroy the soil, pollute the water, the land, and the air, because they believed that God had determined they could. Nothing bad could come of it, they thought, because their minds worked believing in magic.

In a way, this rebellion was founded on an unconscious revolt against nature, against existence itself. All other animals, their brothers, seemed to be one with the environment. Even other species that were nothing more than food for bloodthirsty predators seemed content with their fate. When they lost some of their relatives devoured in the prairies and rivers, these animals did not suffer excessively, but continued on their natural course, multiplying and generating new potential victims. The daring species was different. Its suffering was greater. For years it remembered the loss of a relative, and it hurt. What kind of place was this? Who had put them there to suffer? It was a cosmic affront. The daring species was right to think that way, it just didn't understand that there was no consciousness or mind like its own behind this affront. It was alone. That's why it created its gods, the vast majority of them cruel. The more affirmative of their own existence, the crueler its deities were. After all, the world was amoral. Blood lubricated everything that moved on its own. Its cruel gods reflected reality.

However, every now and then, gods and mythologies genuinely opposed to all that torture emerged. Instead of promising more life after death, as other fantasies did, these mythologies aimed to teach a path to the total dissolution of being, the end of the ego. But even these mythologies invariably ended up becoming life-affirming, at least for the vast majority of those who followed them. The same happened with rational wisdom, separate from mythology, known to them as philosophy. Ultimately, rejecting existence was always seen as heresy, a disease of the soul, and later as pathology, a disease of the mind, something to be combated with inquisitions and institutionalization. After all, however brutal everything around them was, most of them considered themselves made in the image and likeness of a warrior and tribal god, a god who, in the past, accepted sacrifices of people, including children, for his glory. This god, that species understood, was nourished by pain, blood, tears, and despair. The more desperate, the more suffering, the greater his power.

None of these gods and none of these mythologies were true, in a factual sense, of course. Those things merely represented the different and sometimes contradictory desires of the species. The species, like all others, arose through natural processes that took a long time, and within all species of living beings lived the idea of ​​permanence, of self-affirmation, both individually and collectively. Of all mythologies and philosophies, the only ones that went against the affirmative current were precisely those that completely rejected life, but, as we have seen, they were never accepted by everyone, and even those who accepted or admired them either corrupted them or were mostly incapable of living them to their ultimate consequences. Life, existence, had very strong appeals, it's true. It was difficult to fight against hundreds of millions of years of natural selection that produced a strong sense of preservation, continuity, and self-affirmation.

Some followers of violent and affirmative gods even killed each other in wars against the followers of other gods and other mythologies, but they did not do so because they found life bad. On the contrary, they believed so much in the goodness of life and the god they worshiped that they were certain that what would come after would be more life, an even better life. Deluded and ignorant, they did not understand that the only life they had was not good at all, quite the opposite. But the bolder the daring species became, the less it needed gods and fantasies to justify itself, the more its purely secular collective ideals guided its ambitions and, together with the scientific discoveries it made, propelled it to every corner of the planet and into space. Some dreamers, futurists, and also many grifters, proposed the idea that they could conquer the stars through technoscience. It was impossible, of course. However, this did not prevent them from making hundreds of millions believe for generations that the daring species would not die on that planet along with its forgotten ancient gods and the other animals, its brothers.

The daring species had been overcoming the impositions of nature for thousands of years, so it was easy for people, many of them enlightened, to believe that, in the future, their descendants would live intergalactic adventures and get closer and closer to an explanation for everything. If they could not fully understand the universe and their place in it, their power of understanding would at least transform them into true gods. They believed that one day they would be able to manipulate reality, create new planets to inhabit, and finally, conquer death—not only of the species, but of the individual. With each passing decade, it seemed they were getting closer to immortality and expansion to the stars, two events so promised by their optimistic sages and opportunistic grifters. A day would come when they would no longer need the fantasies of their ancestors, because they would finally have the absolute power to control everything around them. Their audacity would have no limits, they were increasingly certain. Furthermore, they believed they were close to making contact with other minds similar to their own, minds that had emerged on other planets through the same natural processes.

Not only that, they also believed they were capable of creating artificial minds through their technoscience. Some even believed they had created consciousnesses like their own, but in the end, it was a lie. Training computers to answer complex questions did not make them conscious, did not endow them with minds and an inner life. Even animals closely related to the daring species possessed an inner life, though they didn't reflect as it did, nor were they as distressed as it was. But intelligent computers, despite their intelligence, would never be real minds, no matter how much the audacious species tried or believed. To make matters worse, one of the ways it believed it could achieve immortality through technoscience was through the supposed transfer of the mind to the digital realm, leaving behind the limitations of biology. This also proved impossible. The most they were able to do was create digital copies without an inner life, while the original simply died and watched the lights of existence go out completely.

There would be no immortality, although they managed to manipulate their biology to live longer than they were naturally capable of. These were real advances, and no one can deny the merit of that species, it's true, but there would never be a technological apotheosis. It also never managed to discover if there were or had been other consciousnesses in the known universe that, like them, were children of nature. This frustrated them greatly. However, not all would be lost, it thought. It would continue persevering and maintain its spirit of expansion. After all, although some things are not possible, others could still happen, it thought. If there were no intergalactic neighbors, the species would populate the universe, bringing life and consciousness to other planets and solar systems in her galaxy and, who knows, to other galaxies. But none of that happened, however much it wished for it. Its attempts were frustrated by the reality of a universe indifferent to its desires. Those attempts always ended in disaster and a lack of resources to finance projects that, in the end, proved meaningless.

One of the neighboring planets, which it discovered had been similar to its home world millions of years before, even saw failed colonization attempts. The main problem was the limits imposed by physical reality. Although it tried to theorize ways to break reality, they never corresponded to what was truly possible. It sent probes out of its solar system, but despite being very fast, it took them about a decade to pass the orbit of the outermost planets in the system and several decades to actually leave the heliosphere. To communicate with these probes, the daring species used radio signals and, later, lasers, but all traveled at the limit of the speed of light in a vacuum. By the time it discovered comet 3I/ATLAS, some of these space probes were two light-days from its planet after traveling for fifty years. Sending a signal to them and receiving a response took four days, even at the speed of light. Even though the species managed to break these distance records eventually, it never came close to achieving its greatest dream in space: traveling faster than the speed of light.

Although it had developed theoretical ways to reach significant fractions of the speed of light, which would make it possible to traverse long stretches of its galaxy in a person's lifetime, all these methods would subject the traveler to the effects of time dilation. Had such projects been put into practice, but never were due to the exorbitant economic costs, the travelers would have had to say goodbye to everything they knew, because, although they would age a little, hundreds of thousands or even millions of years would pass from the perspective of those they left behind. To make matters worse, as the universe expanded ever faster, faster even than the speed of light, being confined to lower speeds would mean that the species would always live in a bubble outside of which nothing could ever be reached. The economic costs combined with the emotional costs caused all these long-distance projects to be abandoned. The daring species still tried to keep alive the hope of at least colonizing neighboring planets, but even these more modest goals were abandoned. It would watch the universe gradually expand from its single planet. The planet itself would be consumed by its sun as it exhausted its hydrogen and expanded.

Although the species wouldn't admit it, it understood that science fiction, which had so inspired it to explore new horizons since the advent of technoscience a few centuries earlier, no longer corresponded to reality. This type of fiction had predicted submarines, computers, long-distance communication via screens, trips to the moon, but there was a real limit. It was incapable of overcoming insurmountable physical barriers. At a certain point, works of fiction that speculated about future scientific advances became the same as pure fantasy. Believing that it would reach the stars became as childish as believing in dragons, fairies, and elves. But it continued to accumulate knowledge and understand the universe. Its knowledge, moreover, continued to bring both benefits and setbacks: while they cured diseases and invented conveniences, they also invented new ways to kill each other, increasingly effective and increasingly sadistic. Despite this, it continued to believe that the more one knows, the better off one is. This was a mantra it repeated since the birth of the scientific method.

At a certain point in history, however, understanding the universe ceased to be beneficial to its spirit, something that had already been felt by isolated individuals for a long time, even before the birth of technoscience. Gradually, it began to realize that the mantra did not correspond to the facts. The accumulation of knowledge, from a certain point onward, did not improve their existence; on the contrary, it made it heavier, more desperate. What was the point of it all? Not only did gods not exist, but they could not become gods, nor spread life throughout the cosmos. They were alone even naturally, since they never encountered other minds in the vastness of the night sky. More and more, the daring species sought the comfort of a new Dark Age, an era of comforting ignorance in which it could live in cosy stagnation. But the genie was out of the bottle. It was difficult to force them to believe and live in the same way as their ancestors of past generations. Even those who were still fervently religious did not give up the various conveniences brought by atheistic technoscience, the same technoscience that had stripped reality bare and shown nothingness as the foundation of everything.

To its horror, the daring species understood that those who rejected life had been right all along, despite not admitting it to itself. It pretended until the end to have some importance to the universe. It replaced the mythological gods of the past with fantastic notions about its own history, something it had done before. All that saga of suffering had to have been worthwhile, otherwise it would go completely mad, even more mad than it already was. The species spun madly, battling with itself, seeking the end a of history that would only truly conclude when the last individual of the species lost consciousness for the last time and succumbed to death. It is not known for sure what happened in the end. Perhaps it finally used nuclear bombs to kill itself over nothing. Perhaps arrogance and ignorance caused its death in a great epidemic. But some believe that, gradually, over generations, fewer and fewer members of the species saw purpose in continuing and, mostly unconsciously, it chose to shrink until the last daring one was born, and after him, no one else.

Its planet remained noisy, but now only the other animals that remained alive and changing over time made the noise. But they also ceased to exist. The planet of the daring species went through so many geological eras over billions of years that no trace of life ever existing there could be seen. All those millions and millions of years in which life underwent changes, including the emergence and disappearance of the daring ones, served absolutely no purpose and would not be remembered by anyone. The universe would continue its processes for all eternity until nothing remained but photons, protons, and other elementary particles, each so distant from the other that they would never collide, even by traveling at the speed of light. Although the daring species never discovered other minds in the universe, it is true that perhaps somewhere far away there was another species as daring as, or even more daring than, it. But if there was, that species was also forgotten. It was as if they had all never existed.

by Fernando Olszewski