Saying Goodbye

We evolved from stone-eating microbes aeons ago. We slogged our way up the evolutionary chain until we had the wherewithal to sling capsules into orbit. Generations of bright minds contributed their small brick to the palace of scientific progress. We learned, schemed, and dreamt in quiet rooms and grand laboratories—aiming to peel back the curtain on the fundamental reality of this staggering universe. We constructed monuments to our progress and worshipped experience through the arts.

We thought the age of forward progress would continue unmolested until we outgrow the confines of our happenstance biology. It is clear now that we won’t be granted this pleasure.

Our star is dying. We noticed some anomalies several decades ago. We hoped they were short-lived undulations that we could weather. The newest constellation of probes that we installed in a tight orbit around our home star has confirmed that this is far from reality. We have mere decades before our sun irradiates any trace of live from our planet.

The blind, unwavering hand of an uncaring universe is moving to wipe my species from existence. The young are terrified of what is next for us. The old are lamenting the unfairness of the terrible tragedy of our star’s unblinking indifference.

Our officials are attempting to placate the masses with government sponsored suicide while the resilient scientists are doing all they can to produce another option. An option that prevents the extinction of our species when our home system has stated it no longer cares for us to live here.

The most fully formed plan is to construct self replicating machines with digital images of a few select members of our species to our neighboring stars. These machines would then gather materials and construct compute devices to start instantiating these images as digital copies of their originals. A university group has a prototype, but we are scared because it means that all of us here will die.

Some minds in printed machines may become conscious around a distant star many millennia from now, but they will not be the originals. The simulation substrate of the computers will not match the original, so they will think and act differently. The original scanned organism will have been dead for as many millennia as their information was in transit. A semblance of our species would remain, but we would all be destroyed.

We don’t know if interstellar space is even traversable. It’s likely that there are large bodies of matter that don’t emit light coagulating between the stars, waiting for our descendant machines to smash into them at unthinkable velocities.

If the probes—by some miracle—do manage to arrive at their destination stars, we don’t know if they will even be able to operate. We have never built archival storage that can last for thousands of solar cycles nor have we built computers that can operate so long after they were constructed. Entropy is a cruel, degrading force that is nigh impossible to withstand for any reasonable length of time.

Despite challenges, we must dash forward. Despite the wanton misery of our circumstance, we will not be forgotten. We will not be extinguished. We will not be reduced to ultra-fine particles of smut floating in the void.