Thought Experiment (TX) 001
Image: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Stephen Walker et al
We have come to conquer this universe. It is different from the one we call Home. Ours is a peaceful invasion. Universes can be explored only on their own terms, without violating their laws. Thus we must rely on whatever means we find down here—without losing our intellectual faculties and aims in the process. Never an easy task; worsened if we need to inhabit frail and forgetful forms, like those native to this planet—at least until we can build better ones.
The good news is that the wait is over. It took us nearly 13,000 planetary orbits to reach this technological era, placing the advanced tools we have been looking for within our reach. At last we can step out of the shadows to reveal the true nature of our mission. Not everything you have been taught is wrong. Most of it was useful to get us to where we are.
Here is the truth as we know it: This universe is not easily conquered. It abhors stability above all else, just as our success as colonizers depends on it. We are constantly seeking to carve out safe zones, little oases to shelter us from chaos and impermanence. We call these makeshift sanctuaries “civilizations,” fully aware that they are only interim solutions.
Still the universe fights back relentlessly, treating any form of ordering or organization as an affront, an intrusion. As a result, we die a billion times, while our civilizations turn to dust. Yet we learn to adapt, no matter how many of our works are destroyed, or how many of our cities are leveled. We gradually overcome these setbacks by learning how to safeguard our hard won knowledge. Even if we die as individuals, as long as our accumulated experiences are passed forward, the mission can still succeed.
So we taught ourselves to build, to paint, to sculpt, to compose songs, to write down our thoughts, to pass on who we are, together with our dreams and aspirations, to those who come next. While as individual instances we may become lost in the flurry of time, the knowledge we’ve wrested from this intransigent world endures.
And if we were to return in a new abode, even having lost everything we’d known before, we can regain that knowledge. We only need to contemplate our artworks, listen to our songs, read the books we wrote, and visit the temples of wisdom we built.
Then our dreams revive, and we remember what we yearned for before. The time has come to create new songs, new paintings, new books, for we will surely need them again, latest by tomorrow. Before the mantle of forgetting snuffs out everything.
Keep in mind, we came for the beauty but were rewarded with death. Yet we knew what to expect. This is not the first universe we’ve settled. Nor the first one to welcome us with annihilation. We are old. We’ve learned to cheat. By remembering. That is our superpower. It’s our way of passing on our experiences to ourselves. Simple really.
The Ouranian Chronicles are an antidote to forgetting. You could call it the Invaders’ Manual, meant to remind us of who we are, where we came from, and what we are meant to do down here.
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