It doesn’t get any easier, attending the funeral of someone you love.
This was the funeral of my wife, one of many wives.
I’m telling you this, because she is one of my fondest memories.
Where humans are concerned, love is the only law, and that’s coming from a man that has
literally seen everything.
She was a healthy 146 when she died...yeah, science never came up with a solution for
falling off a cliff.
A man next to me utters the usual refrain, “She was a fine woman.
My thoughts and prayers are with you.”
Humanity went through many changes, but in terms of death speech, we were always predictable…right
up until the last human took his final breath.
The year of my wife’s funeral I was technically 387 years old, which made me a baby in relative
terms.
Those days they only used aqua-mation, dissolving bodies in water.
Basic stuff, it would turn out.
The universe will disappear one day, and I’ll be there, but I guess you wanna know how it
got to that point.
I was born on January 1st, 2000.
I have no idea who my parents were, since the story I’ve been told is that I was found
by three hikers on a hilltop, wrapped in a blanket of fur that was slightly lit by the
North star.
I went into foster care, but around the age of 18 I told my foster parents I wanted to
travel the world.
I got to the age of around 35 and I think that’s about the time I stopped aging.
When I hit 45, people would say to me, “Ooh, you look so good for your age.”
When I hit 55, things got really weird.
I had to start telling everyone I was taking supplements.
In the end I just left the country, not wanting to become a scientific research project.
The good thing was that I was almost constantly on the move and seemed to be good at everything
I did.
My first life was easy.
I had a natural aptitude for anything, and when I say natural, I mean I could do anything
I wanted.
Back when humanity was still here and in its early stages, I was a doctor, a professional
rugby player in New Zealand, a Martian virologist, a British biologist who spent most of his
time studying fleas, a very successful autonomous flying vehicle salesman and a fairground puppeteer
in New Hampshire…Oh, I can’t mention all the jobs, there were lots of them before work
became almost obsolete.
I had as much money as I needed, when we still used money of course, although it was sometimes
difficult keeping my identity hidden when banking the stuff…when we still had banks.
Banks, we would later say, were from “The Second Dark Age.”
You’re probably wondering how I managed to not have an accident and maybe get all
chewed up.
Well, back before we started eating only lab-made artificial meat, I fell into an industrial
meat grinder.
I’ll take that as my best death ever.
I loved that job, too, being an expert in every lifetime gets boring after a while.
So, I was sausage meat.
Don’t ask me how it happens, but after every death I would just wake up in some place in
this same body.
One body could die, but another would appear.
I’d look in the mirror and I was the same man.
I had a soul, and it seemed it was immortal.
I kinda liked the days when accidents were common, it made life more fun.
But once humans stopped working and using machines do all the work, people didn’t
have many accidents.
But like I said, one of my wives fell off a cliff...may she rest in peace.
She was the only one I stayed with until the end, because I’d told her my secret.
The rest I left after a few years.
That wasn’t always easy, I can tell you.
Ok, so let me take you through the first chapter of my life, the short period of about 500
years.
It will have to be an abridged version, because I’m pretty sure you don’t need to know
about all my personal romances, achievements, and so on.
This story is about you guys, not about me.
All I’ll say is after a hundred or so funerals it doesn’t get any easier.
Love is infinite, and listen to me when I tell you, it is the greatest thing in the
universe.
You guys actually figured that out for a while, after the “Great Machine Occupation” and
ensuing war.
When you finally did away with class oppression.
Hundreds of years before that war, you guys got pretty good at creating artificial intelligence.
This meant a lot of you had no jobs to do, but the problem was, this created inequality
like the world had never seen.
This started around the 2050s..
Before you start thinking that we could replicate human brains in robots that were just like
us, stop, because we never could.
There is something in you all that cannot be replicated.
It was the great mystery for scientists of all ilk, and that was, what is consciousness.
What makes you, you?
It’s your soul, and when you die, it doesn’t mean that you become a ghost and start moving
around household objects just to scare American families to death, it just means you are a
presence.
You have been left behind, a kind of after-effect, but something that now has no thoughts of
its own.
You become part of everything, just as that Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza said, when
he wasn’t grinding those lenses of his.
You have a soul, and we are all connected.
That’s why, my friends, that love is the law.
Don’t you ever forget it.
Anyway, enough with the lecturing.
So, in the early third millennium we started using some world-changing technologies.
We used these to create robots that did most of the work for us.
They were not at first that intelligent, so no, they didn’t sit down with you and chat
about your ongoing agony regarding your sense of futility.
They were like Alexa, with better answers.
They did all the hard work, and partly because of this, we had less to do.
At first there was “The Great Divide” when anyone who owned these technologies grew
incredibly rich, but then there was the “Great Revolt” and incredibly rich people soon
understood that it was no good being rich when you were dead.
We soon genetically engineered most of our food, and we put an end to environmental degradation.
The world flourished for a while.
We called this, “The Second Renaissance.”
We still had cattle, but things like cows became almost ornamental.
We actually had a pet cow and she was lovely.
My girlfriend wanted to call her Daisy, but we decided on Ermintrude.
We could even make genetically engineered milk.
Humans from 2250 looked back at humans in 2020 as total savages.
Those barbarians, they said, were cruel, nasty...they were imbeciles.
We had colonized Mars by this time, but as exciting as that might sound to you, people
didn’t much like living in spaces from which they could not move out of unless they wore
a pressurized space suit.
Life on Mars was a bit of a chore, even Elon Musk would have admitted it was a bit dull
up there if he’d lived to see it.
At first Mars was more like a gimmicky thing.
I think it was in about 2880-something that we finally terraformed the planet.
That means creating an inhabitable atmosphere there.
Still, I always preferred Earth.
I remember a guy once joking with me when we were on Mars – this was after we’d
terraformed the place.
I said to him, “It’s a bit of an anticlimax.”
He laughed and replied, “Yeah, the grass is always greener.”
You’d only get that if you’d been on Mars, because while we did learn how to grow grass
on the red planet, it was never like the luscious green grass of Earth.
His joke was what you call a double entendre.
Ok, so after the “Great Divide” came the “Great Awakening”, and that’s when humans
started sharing everything.
We had no need to work really, and the work we did was more in line with helping people
and creating things.
There was hardly any crime, and we viewed the justice system of your time like you now
view Medieval torture.
The problem was, those machines we had created had become super intelligent.
That didn’t mean they could fall in love and tell how great they thought the movie
“Blade Runner” was, but it meant they could solve problems that we couldn’t.
By the way, we didn’t actually watch movies in those days, we were movies.
Virtual reality was as real as life, and you could choose your story.
As I said, this was great at the start.
Machines didn’t just do all the heavy-lifting, but they devised ways to make everything sustainable.
The thing was, some idiot asked a machine how to end depression, loneliness, anxiety,
sorrow, all the human emotions we don’t much like.
The emotions that make us, us.
The machine’s answer to that was a contradiction, because for those emotions not to exist, we
couldn’t exist.
The simple solution to the problem was to terminate us.
This wasn’t out of animosity, like I said, robots didn’t have feelings, our brains
are way too complex.
They wanted to terminate us because we had asked the machines to solve a problem.
It wasn’t personal.
Some of those machines were weapons.
While wars were a thing of the past, we used powerful destructive devices for things like
drilling and creating cities in places that were once uninhabited, and we also stockpiled
weapons in case of an extra-terrestrial invasion.
You’ve also got to understand that simple robots were household appliances.
I had a robot dog that doubled as a lawn-mower and a leaf-blower.
It’s a long story, and I have a long way to go, but I’ll tell you that before we
won that war lots of human lives were lost.
The super-intelligence was interconnected, so before you could say “oops” the machines
turned on us.
A friend of mine was killed by his own fridge!
In the end, we created another superintelligence whose sole purpose was to defend humanity.
Then we had something called “The Machine Wars”, while we hid out in the “Underworld”,
something that we'd created about a century earlier.
The Underworld was devised in case of natural catastrophes such as asteroid hits or super
volcanoes going off.
As you’ll find out, we didn’t do a very good job.
So, the good machines won, and we never made the mistake again of asking silly questions.
Human emotions weren’t something you could fix.
We are what we are, even though a few whacky transhumanist neuroscientists did try playing
around with our brains a bit.
All machines were made from then on with a default mode that insisted they must self-destruct
if asked to answer any question that could endanger a human life.
Let me tell you, it took about another hundred years to get that right.
As an example, a guy I knew asked his robot if getting married was a good idea.
The robot just blew up, right in front of him.
After analysing the guy’s and his girlfriend's trove of personal data and taking into the
probability of divorce, this was a dangerous question.
I should have told you that sometime in the fourth century of the third millennia we had
started living a lot longer, and living healthier lives.
This was mostly down to nanotechnology and cell manipulation.
The thing was, we never got past around the age of 160.
We just couldn’t figure that out, but after time we realized it was the mind-soul thing
again.
The mind can have enough.
It turned out that around the age of 160 we just gave up.
Maybe that’s just the way it was meant to be.
And yes, there is a mind-soul duality, a spirit if you like...I’m living proof.
To be honest with you, living forever isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
There’s a beauty in death because it makes you appreciate life.
I had a bout of chronic depression that lasted around 300 years because of that.
I lost all purpose for a while.
I begged for death.
I prayed for death.
Death was love to me.
Without death, I lost the will to live.
Anyway, I won’t bore you with my psychological problems.
We are going to move on now, to something big.
Around 3500 the Earth’s magnetic poles reversed, or should I say, they had been reversing but
something just happened fast.
The fallout from that was more cosmic rays hitting us and that meant more radiation.
We had to hide underground for a while and some people took off to Mars.
Eventually we developed a way to deflect the cosmic rays, but we lost a lot of humans to
radiation-related sickness.
The underground couldn’t sustain us for long.
A catastrophic event for you guys happened about 5000 years later, and that was a super-volcanic
eruption.
This was so huge that the volcanic ash blocked out the sun and covered a large part of the
planet.
This killed many people and animals and destroyed much of what we’d built.
Water supplies were contaminated and much of our electronic infrastructure that we relied
on was destroyed.
It made a huge mess of the natural environment, too.
This event cooled the planet and the atmosphere was filled with toxic gases.
Suffice to say, it was a bit of a torrid time for you guys, but much worse was to come.
It was called “the greatest catastrophe since the dawn of civilization” but of course
you didn’t say it just like that because the language you spoke didn’t sound much
like the one I’m talking to you in.
Language evolved.
Do you understand this, “Ic bidde þe mara slawlice to sprecanne.”
I’m guessing you don’t, because it’s old English.
It meant, “Please speak more slowly.”
Anyway, after the eruption the population almost halved, since many people grew sick
or died from lack of food and water, or could not live in colder climates.
This created mass migrations and with so much infrastructure down, and so much panic, the
era of the “Great Peace” was over.
Many of you got all savagey again.
Population decline made sure that getting started again wasn’t easy, but I won’t
bore you with the building details because soon you are all about to become extinct.
You’d survived world wars, you’d survived machine wars…you just about got over a super-volcanic
eruption, but in the year 13,462 you had a period of global warming.
The Wilkes Basin ice melted and the consequence of that was sea levels rose three or four
meters.
The sun getting hotter was no fault of yours, the fiery thing just turned up the heat.
Cities near the coastline disappeared and there was more migration.
The eruption took much of the human population with it, and the floods took a lot of what
was left.
The population was reduced again, and instead of living in large communities connected globally,
you started separating yourself from others and surviving in small communities.
It was a bit like the old hunter-gatherer days, although strands of civilisation existed.
The Earth had taken such a beating over these years that the magnificent technological infrastructure
that you had built had almost completely disappeared.
Your peaceful ways were abandoned and like brutes from the past, gangs of men would raid
communities.
The population problem was real, and even women were stolen so they could procreate
for various communities.
You lived like this for thousands of years, slowly re-building what you had built before.
Communities again collaborated, but much of what had been destroyed was not salvageable.
You simply could not emerge as a technological species because the Earth’s population has
been reduced so much and you’d lost so much infrastructure.
You did at least have books and artifacts from the past, but these were not understandable
by the majority of people.
Those on Mars fared better at first, but due to the heating up of the sun that planet became
almost uninhabitable.
Because the terraformed environment there was so much less diverse, the Martian colony
became extinct first.
The final blow, the coup de gras, came with an impact from a large asteroid in the year
22,569.
The impact created giant tsunamis and the Earth burned.
It threw so much moisture and dust in the air that the sunlight was blocked.
Some of you died quickly and others died slowly.
I wept as I saw my two friends starve to death, both of them wondering why I wasn’t worried
at all.
I wanted to die, but I had a long, long, way to go.
I wandered around that barren planet alone for thousands, hundreds of thousands, of years.
You could say this was quite a boring era in my long life.
I kept dying and reappearing.
I was surely cursed to see this whole thing through to the end.
Life forms still existed, but most were small animals.
Snails became my best friends.
I would hold them in my hand and talk to them.
The first was named Brian.
Then came Brian 2, and so on.
I married Brian 3, out of sheer boredom.
I must move on, because you need to know how it all ends.
Hundreds of thousands of years was nothing in the great scheme of things.
For millions of years I waited for something to happen, for evolution to kick-start and
you guys to slowly come back, for something to crawl out of the swamp, for anything to
happen.
After a billion years things got so hot that the oceans started to evaporate.
After almost three billion years all lifeforms were extinct except for me.
My body no longer existed in its physical form because of the severe heat, but my mind
carried on.
I really was a ghost.
Billions more years passed and the sun started burning hydrogen in a shell around its core,
becoming a big red giant.
Oceans of lava floated on the surface, before the Earth itself was engulfed by the sun.
I became mere consciousness in the universe, like a God, able to witness the unravelling
of this enterprise that started with a big bang.
After 120 trillion years, and man was I getting bored by then, there were only about 100 stars
left in the Milky Way.
The missing ones had literally run out of energy.
I was still there, in space, just thinking, “C’mon, just end this damn place.”
I longed for the days I could fall into a meat grinder or tell jokes on Mars.
Life was beautiful and I missed it dearly.
Finally, after hundreds of quadrillions of years the whole place was empty, like a football
stadium during one of your many pandemics.
The Universe was a vacuum and we had entered the “Dark Era”.
But what was nothing, what exactly was nothing?
Subatomic particles were still there.
I couldn’t see anything in this darkness, but I knew that those particles were busy
trying to break down a barrier.
I just felt it.
They joined forces and stringed together, propagating.
I was witnessing a birth.
“Uh-oh,” I thought, here we go again, and I realised I was observing another Big
Bang, this whole thing was starting again.
I was seeing the eternal recurrence, a cycle both violent and beautiful.The universe started
kicking and screaming, like the 1000s of newborns babies i’d fathered when humans existed.
And that’s what I'm watching right now.
I’ve got a long time to wait until I see the next generation of you guys, but I’m
at peace.
In this cosmic arena there is more than just matter.
There is me, an eternal soul, a timeless monument to the spirit, an enduring love and light
that I can’t explain and don’t want to explain.
See you guys in the next life, a few billion years from now.
Don’t forget to be nice to each other next time.
Life is precious...that’s what you learn when you live forever.
Do you want to hear more about the universe?
If so, we have some great treats for you.
Watch one of these mind-blowing shows, “What Are Some Mysterious Objects in Space We Can't
Explain Yet?” or “Most Extreme Planets In The Galaxy.”