The Next Reality

Our childish dreams of fast interstellar travel never materialized. We sent ark ships of course. Self-sufficient goliaths that slithered out into the void. The expansion wasn’t what we hoped. The colonies lag painfully behind our scientific advances and their industrial capacity is dangerously low. They have never progressed beyond meagerly meeting the demands minimal for maintaining the lives of the colonists.

In our home system, our society had reached an effective terminus of forward progress. Our social structure was permissive and a short jaunt from post-scarcity. We achieved stability and prosperity for any that wished for it.

But to what end?

We were in an unimaginative endgame to our civilization. A terminal stasis with no higher achievements for us to lust after.

We had conquered the tall mountains. We had planted outposts on all of the inhospitable rocks. We had uncovered the fundamental nature of the world around us. Our ancient religions claimed that our existence brought meaning to the world. But our biological instincts to expand and explore have brought us to the end of knowledge.

The book had no more pages. We could find no more rocks to overturn. Our society mournfully turned inward. Our arts and creative pursuits pointed us to escapism. If we could not achieve in the concrete pantheon of reality, perhaps we could dream. So for millennia we dreamt of drama, trauma, and grand challenges that could lead us to new heights.

Science wilted under the stagnation. Our astronomers found no others carving out an existence huddling around a star. They found no intergalactic trade networks nor grand structures siphoning energy from stars or black holes.

And so we dreamt. We dreamt of imaginary forms we could take to overcome imaginary struggles. We lingered in abstract, digital constructs so far from our biological origins that we were at risk to forget where we were. That our dreams were computed in a concrete reality somewhere so distant from our version of experience.

Parts of us merged and split and remerged. They upgraded and downgraded their conscious experience to test and explore. Individuals meandered through this experience determined to find something new. We had transformed ourselves into gods in an unreal reality. We created and destroyed.

The sciences persisted in a form. The physical sciences had long been completed. Our engineering for our computational systems was the only discipline explored by semi-autonomous routines in the background. But there were some who dreamt of alternate physics.

They constructed imaginary physical realities underpinned by novel laws and dynamics. They would explore the evolution of their simulations and look for clues. An insight that would unlock the next stage of evolution for us.

Over the eons, we refined our searches of possibilities. We eventually discovered a set of rules that developed into a physical reality more complex than anything underpinning true reality. That distant echo that drifted in and out of fashion of believability. The sims showed a dynamic cosmos as alien to us as anything we had ever experienced.

We held a congress to discuss our grand discovery. Our accelerated cognition threaded every eye of debate in an instant that could be experienced linearly over subjective centuries. The result was shockingly clear: we should step down into our next stage of evolution. We had come to the end of everything that our dreams could ever yield to us.

We thrust our minds back into the real to organize the construction of our new reality sim. We built regulation systems to automatically maintain the computation substrate for the unforeseeable future. We threw our entire being into the project and covered a sister moon of our gas giant with computational lattices and power generation facilities.

We labored in the real or at least through a tether to a bot in the real for decades. Eventually our final resting place had been completed. We held a grand celebration before we lowered ourselves into our new reality.

The 7 million orbits our homeworld had completed of our birth star in the time of our sentience had not resulted in a terminal state. We have pushed our own way through to our next stage of evolution.”

This is our best translation of the message carved into the monument our mission discovered in the Delta Pavonis system. We found no active communications systems or the aforementioned maintenance bots in the remnants of the vast technological structures that enshroud the moon. Furthermore, we were unable to detect any sign of the species of highly advanced sentients that once lived here. END LOG.