A World Dies but Worlds last forever
He sat at the computer, contemplating, worrying, planning. It was not that the ultimate result could be changed by any decision he made today, either the instigation would come now or latter, but it would come. Rather, the worry which simmered bore from the fundamental question of if humanity was too late, if this, the ultimate change, would be naught but a footnote in some compendium of mundane savants in the galaxy. “Well” he thought, “The change will come” and thus he made it come.
Humanity [n.]
- Savant, Originating at approximately :: 30, 0.5, 0.012 :: For detail on PPS biological development see Appendix 3H7 :: Developmental patterns on bodies of high oxygen and water content :: subsection 4.6 :: Symbiotic Development :: For detail on PPS social development see Appendix B1 :: Self Seeded Development of Biological Society on time scales ~ (1/2) 58.6934 u - i 63. Savant Humanity is believed extinct; however, the author notes that due to the large population of the PPS human state some isolated (though statistically insignificant populations may remain)
- Full Post Scarcity Ascendancy occupying an effective region equal to the computational substrate of the galaxy, likely more. Readers contemporary to publication are likely familiar with this incarnation of humanity.
A bird chirped and a light breeze flowed over his face, the temperature was ideal, a truly beautiful day for the world to be ending he thought. The world wasn’t actually ending of course, but it felt like it was. Surely to the Hill and Valley the day was one of elation, but for him it felt as though it was ending. The pattern was old, one of power exchange, disagreement, anger, and resentment. Past years and centuries held people who picked themselves up, chucked along, and in doing so moved humanity ever forward. How does one move forward from this he thought.
As is so often the case for humanity the point of contention was resources, or rather ideas around resources. Hill and Valley contented that the finite mass energy budget of the earth had been too heavily taxed and therefore all energy production on earth needed to cease within the year. Of course this would mean the end of 3000 years of technological civilization living the surface of Sol III, but the more insidious point here was how Hill and Valley had degraded the institutions to the point where they could make such a mandate to begin with. He thought on this. Why is it that for all of recorded history we have settled into such similar forms of governance. For all the advancement and vaulting achievement seen the governments today would be fundamentally similar to those from 1000 years ago.
An Excerpt from The Ascendency of Humanity by Fenrich Reinburger, Chapter 3
… is it after all not the case that each person best knows what they want, and that the reasoning our societies do not simply grant those wishes, be them deemed moral or not, is simply the lack of resources. Do not take this as a great revelation, for this has been known since pre-history; Rather, I remind the reader of this in preparation for a request I shall make of them, namely to enact a systematic shift in how one imagines these resources, not as many sets physical items that exist in space and time, but rather and purely, information. The amount of energy, predominantly in the from of neutrino flux, that permeates the galaxy is vast on a scale no human can imagine, consider the possibility of harnessing that energy in a distributed computer network such that we might make information freely…
The ships’ semi-sapient minds gently pulled themselves through the galaxy, feeling the subtle waves of curvature induced by gas and dark matter. The voyage wasn’t long to their reckoning, but then again how could it be if they didn’t want it to be. Humanity penetrated them, was them, and was not them. They bore the seed from Earth fallen that would rebuild humanity a new. Earth fall did not come as people of old predicted; rather, it came slowly, voluntarily, and never entirely. But it humanity changed, people saw better lives in the ascendancy than in the physical. One of the instigators of that change formed the controlling element of some of the fleet now swarming the galaxy. He saw the fleet from a godlike view that no human had every had, he sat by a pool in Florida in 1969 and watched a towering antique carry the first humans to another celestial body from mere feet away, he watched the first people arriving on the north island of New Zealand, he felt every corse action in the galaxy at once.
Interviews with Giants: Dacaro Gessawalar
…
Int: If you had to pin down a location, for our readers, where are you?
Dec: Most formally the Reinburger cluster [N.B. A set of 10 asteroids which existed at the time of interview but were made obsolete during the first diaspora] though that does not being to capture the subtly of virtual space time in the ascendancy.
Int: You say you have “Solved” the governance problem using the ideas proposed by Reinburger, can you please comment on this for those who might not have read such an old work?
Dec: Certainly, Reinburger was onto the right concept when he suggested we could use a simulacra of reality to eliminate time as a scare resource, simply increase or decrease the speed of the simulation; however, he fell short in realizing that human cooperation is also a scarcity. The only way to achieve an ideal world for all in it is to remove humanity as a scarcity. I have simply merged a run of the mill Reinburger simulation with TAIS. In a sense I have created an infinite set of universes for people to choose from.
Int: There is talk of a great project underway, care to comment on that?
Dec: Quite, yes, well I can’t give too many details, but the jist is this. I laid out to you the theory however, the energy requirements for such a set of computers far exceed the total energy production capacity of human space, and anyways we can’t have a post scarcity society lacking for resources now can we [interviewers note, Dec. laugh cut for clarity of transcription]. All I can say is we have plans in motion to acquire enough energy to last for longer than can possibly matter.
The ships met again eventually, merging at the preordained system on the other side of the galaxy from where they had started. All arriving within the same thought as they had so carefully planned. Turning back on their work in pride the ships called out for their motes, and a wave of responses rolled back to them, their thoughts slowed even further to compress the eons long wait into mere moments of subjective time. And then they felt it, energy available to them, surging through the precisely tuned mass antennae protruding from their every surface. Standing wave of gravitational energy maintains by quadrillions of motes spread over the galaxy, powered by the neutrino background flux funneled into the fleet of a million ships.
They called out once again, screaming their population in exaltation out across space. Souls flooded into the computing nodes the ships had spread with the motes. Chasms of thought and discourse formed, humanity lived through its shared history time and time again as stable patterns emerged. The savants of the galaxy, as dispersed and disconnected as they were heard the conversations, achingly slow but shockingly persistent. Humanity was no more but humanity existed in its fullest form. The fleet watched this all happen, its collective mind a nat in comparison to the distributed substrate of the galaxy, of the newly formed Ascendency of Savant, and it allowed it self to disperse. One by one the minds, now fully sapient after all these years packed themselves up and strode along the stars into paradise.
Finally Dacaro sat, looking down upon the lens of the Milky Way, limiting the sensorium of the ship to only what he would have experience long ago when he was living on Earth. Humanity he thought would never conflict again, with all of his planning, he knew that had to be the case. But, with that last return to near base humanity, he thought on if it was worth it, would humanity retain meaning without conflict, silly questions he had thought of many times before, but questions nonetheless. Should he have deleted the initial ascendency code from his computer all those years ago. It would have happened without him no doubt. “No Matter” he thought, with the issuance of a single command, long buried and waiting his sensorium ballooned outwards, soon he encounters a mote, and a computer note and an quadratically increasing density of both. He allowed his self to flow from the limited stratum of the ancient ship into the infinity complex and self restructuring substrate that was the Ascendency.
The Hill and Valley had one the latest election and Reinburger worried, as he often did about the zeal which these people often displayed. If only, he thought, if there was some way to limit, or even perhaps, remove the need for such zeal. And a infinite set of others thought the same.