It is some time in the distant future. Your consciousness has been digitally linked and
integrated into a brain machine interface located inside an orb-like spacecraft that
was launched from the dying planet of your origins. Like all things, your planet reached
its final moments as its lonely star began to run out of fuel, ceasing all thermonuclear
reactions and growing into a red giant on the way to its final ember, slowly engulfing
your planet in the process. In an act of desperation, you and many others launched your self into
deep space in an unlikely search for another planet that can sustain life on its own.
Like a school of minnows, you swim through the sea of space, each in individual spacecrafts,
all coordinated together as well as you can. Inside your spacecraft, your body is held
in a cryogenic stasis tube. It will last indefinitely throughout the journey. Your spacecraft, however,
will not. Sustained by a circulatory process of dark matter collection, your fuel source
is essentially endless, but your spacecraft will face its inevitable demise through erosion
and/or malfunction. It cannot sustain the chaos that is the universe nor the entropy
that inhabits everything inside it forever. If you do not find a planet in time that is,
at a minimum, tolerable to life, you will never be able to exist as a body with a home,
and the timeline of your life will end with the spacecraft’s.
Even with no guarantee of a future – even with being presented such a horrible circumstance
- at this moment, one could argue that you are unfathomably lucky. There were billions
of others left behind who died with the planet, all for horrible reasons that no one deserved
any more or less than you deserved to be one of the ones that was launched. And beyond
that, amongst the billions that were, you are of the small percentage who made it past
the initial launch. Hundreds of millions of others combusted in the process of the launch
or met their demise early on in the journey thereafter as a result of collisions with
space debris or spacecraft malfunctions or by falling off course and whatever else. By
the luck of luck itself, in total, the odds of you making it even this far were something
around one in four hundred trillion. And now, you continue onward into the unknown.
Your spacecraft hurtles through the galaxy equipped with a plethora of technologies that
assist you in the mission of locating a new planet that needs only one thing: just the
right mix of everything. In between intermittent periods of extended
sleep and autopilot modes, using your thoughts alone, you monitor your journey through the
spacecraft’s navigation system. You and it do your best looking for galactic habitable
zones. In the entire galaxy, at best, only about
10% make up what could be considered these zones. And areas within these zones that contain
stars suitable for livable planetary conditions, could be closer to less than just 1% of the
entire galaxy. At the most optimistic of estimations, odds are less than one in a million of finding
a planet that is tolerable to life, let alone cordial. And that’s not even accounting
for any other factors that might happen to you along the way. For this whole thing to
be successful, in total from start to finish, your odds would likely end up being somewhere
between one in four hundred quadrillion and impossible.
To even have any odds at all at this point though is a miracle of odds itself.
As you continue to pass cold, dry, barren planets, all uninhabitable to you, you lose
more and more hope. Without giving up entirely, you return to a long, group-coordinated, auto-piloted
slumber. After some unimaginable length of time, suddenly,
the interface awakes you. It has, for the first time since being launched, detected
a planet that seems to show signs of potential inhabitability.
You and the lonely remaining survivors move forth towards the planet in elated awe over
this impossible discovery. As you approach, the interface retrieves imagery
and data, revealing a planet that seems to have just the right mass for just the right
force of gravity to keep you on it, while allowing you to still move. Just the right
mix of atmospheric conditions for just the right mix of molecules to form and sustain
themselves as water and oxygen. Just the right mix of warm and cold temperatures, never being
too much of either. Just the right proximity to the nearest star for light and energy to
fuel just the right rhythmic order of continued motion. All just right to allow nutrients
to grow from the planet’s surface and for life to live.
As you approach even closer, the interface is able to scan and interpret more imagery
and data, revealing what look to be species of beings that look just like you - mostly
as if they are fundamentally no different from you at all.
In this moment, you realize that not only are you going to be able to live a life in
your body, but against almost all conceivable odds, you happened across what seems like
a planet that is almost perfect for it. A planet with sunsets and ponds and oceans and
trees and food and life; all shared with others like you. The luck is beyond absurd. Beyond
the mere concept of absurd. And yet, here you are.
You continue closer and closer, overjoyed and antipating your land. Before you get too
close, you probe the entire planet one more time, and all of the sudden, the interface
reveals footage of a previously unseen horror that awaits you. It shows a misery that exists
on the planet that you will almost certainly have to assume. It shows you disease and bacteria
and germs that cover the planet, mostly all of which you will be at risk of becoming infected
by. It shows that in many of those beings that look just like you, that you will inexorably
be a part of, exists a malevolence. A greed. A violence. A potential hatred. It shows you
the horrible storms and tragedies and disasters that the planet experiences with no real warning
and nothing much to do about it. The planet is at least equally terrifying and horrible
as it is perfect and beautiful. But by the same token, it is equally perfect and beautiful
as it terrifying and horrible. In this moment, you are confronted with a
choice: “To land or not to land?” You consider how, with as far as certainty
can be certain, this is your only hope at life. And against all possible odds, you are
here - at this distant, solitary planet amidst the cold, dark of a seemingly unending lifeless
universe. And with every incoming ship, including your
own, there is the potential to bring to the planet a compassion and love and the same
unbelievably favorable odds of hope that you got you here in the first place.
You make what you believe
is the obvious choice.