(mellow music)
- [Narrator] We are in what you would call the future.
The deep future.
How many years have passed now?
It's been so long.
Trillions, quadrillions of years?
No, far, far more.
It is said that humanity once lived on a beautiful world,
one that orbited a quiescent but typical star,
at least, one typical of its time.
Eventually, we left that home, spreading out
between the stars, seeking new places to live,
new wonders to discover and new peoples to meet.
Much of that history is now sadly lost,
but it's thought that the absence
of other intelligences was a great surprise.
No matter how far we searched, it was just us.
Unless you like talking to microbes.
One of the strangest facts that we know of ancient humans
is that they died.
They got sick, injured, and aged in soft, fragile bodies.
The idea of death is abhorrent to us.
The notion that one's existence could somehow just cease
is something we've bent to our will
and technological prowess to solve.
We experimented with many ways of extending life,
but eventually we all moved to the virtual realm,
uploaded our minds into machines,
and lived out much of our existence in digital paradise.
There, one can do anything, be anyone.
I've lived countless different lives.
You simply can't fathom what I've seen.
I've experienced the full, simulated life
of effectively every human being who's ever lived.
I've been Abraham Lincoln, Amelia Earhart,
Martin Luther King, and even Marilyn Monroe.
I've been a Victorian shoe shiner, an Egyptian pharaoh,
I've been a beggar in Delhi and an oil baron in Dubai.
And of course, countless fictional experiences as well
from stories, games and alternative histories.
But you know, over time existence wears thin.
It becomes harder and harder to find anything novel
or interesting to try.
Many times my digital mind has been partially wiped, reset,
modified, and updated
to try and stave off such feelings of depression.
But I increasingly question the point of my existence,
of really any existence.
In the real world outside of our digital lives,
our machines have engineered the galaxy to our will.
We've extended the lives of stars
through artificial mass loss.
We've constructed giant structures to harvest their light.
And we've built enormous computers
to support our vast digital universe.
The human brain uses approximately 12 watts of power,
but our machines harvested the power of entire galaxies,
10 to the 36 watts,
enough to support an immense population of digital beings.
We had become a Kardashev Type III civilization.
Oh, how I wish you could have seen us in our prime.
We blanketed the galaxy and even others around us.
We witnessed them merge into ever larger super galaxies.
Back then, stars were everywhere
and we lived around them all.
A cosmos filled with sentience,
for we were the ones who woke up the universe.
The communication lag times were, of course,
huge by your standard, sometimes millions of years.
Yet to immortals like us, we still felt connected.
With such abundance, such bliss,
there were no wars, no quarrels, just paradise,
but all things come to an end.
Even engineered stars eventually die.
Gradually, the lights went out, one by one.
As they did, the power output
of our star harvesting machines dwindled.
Soon, it was impossible
to keep the simulations going as before,
threatening our very existence.
There was a wave of panic, but a solution emerged,
one from our past.
For in a previous life, I had lived as a simulated colleague
of the brilliant Freeman Dyson, a Princeton physicist
who imagined precursors
to what we eventually built around stars.
I remember one day, sat in his office,
surrounded by countless papers,
distant birdsong beyond the window
and the faint smell of chalk still hanging in the air,
how we spoke at length about the end of the universe.
His eyes became young again, lit up,
describing the prospects of advanced technologies.
And he told me that there was a way that we could live on,
not just longer but forever.
Dyson suggested that all we need to do is slow down
the perceived rate of time in our simulated universe.
Consider that each day a human mind
requires about 1000 kilojoules of energy.
Now, ideally, we'd supply that in real time,
but if we could only collect, say, a kilojoule per day,
we could still simulate that whole human day,
just one slowed down by a factor of 1000.
As the universe approaches its inevitable heat death,
a frozen state,
we just continuously slow down the simulations.
Like Zeno's arrow, we keep dialing down the speed
in correspondence to the decreasing energy.
It was known as Dyson's eternal intelligence.
And so we followed his recipe,
gradually extending the clock.
This was not relativistic time dilation,
but digital time dilation.
To us, things went on as usual,
but we witnessed the outside universe seemingly speed up.
To many, the change was seen as a positive.
Communication time lags dropped.
It was now possible to coordinate with others much faster,
at least from our perspective.
But soon, the elation subsided
as the time dilation kept getting
more and more extreme, disturbing many.
After about 100 trillion years,
this dread became widespread
as the cosmos plunged into darkness.
The stars had finally burnt out.
We tried to resist, harvesting brown dwarfs, gas giants,
and stellar remnants
and smashing them together to forge new stars.
But eventually even these too ran dry.
The glorious stelliferous era had ended,
and the universe had now turned back into its natural state,
darkness, void.
We had entered the degenerate era.
That transition, it changed us forever.
For now, the major power source
for our vast empire would have to be black holes,
collapsed massive stars that were intrinsically rare.
We migrated our computers and machinery
to these last outposts to maximize efficiencies.
Communication rates between the colonies were dropped
to save further power.
But this led to the unfortunate effect
that these pockets of humanity increasingly diverged
in terms of culture and beliefs.
We fractured into distinct societies
for the first time since we digitized ourselves.
Those choosing to end their existence,
once almost unheard of, became increasingly common.
The darkness was simply too much for them to bear.
Extracting power from black holes
was a different game to stars.
An ancient technique, at least ancient to us,
was to exploit the Penrose process,
flinging particles into the ergosphere
of rotating black holes, where frame dragging
would allow for a small energy transfer.
Of course, eventually the black holes spun down
due to our interference.
We ultimately harvested away all of their rotational energy.
Another strategy was
to guide whatever massive objects we could find
into black holes, thereby ripping them apart
through tidal forces
and forming hot accretion discs and jets.
This proved incredibly effective,
approaching 1/12 of pure E equals MC squared conversion.
Those were better days, or should I say better eons.
It became hard to keep track of time after so long,
especially with all of our time dilation in effect.
But after around 10 quintillion years
or 10 to the 19 years, this too became ineffective
as matter itself became a rare commodity.
They say space is empty,
but it had never felt quite this empty.
It was around now the community started to quarrel more
as our fuel and resources dwindled.
You see, not all black holes are equal,
depending on their spin, mass, matter environment,
and clustering of nearby black holes.
As a result, some were inevitably
more favorable than others.
Before long, cyber warfare became commonplace.
There were increasing reports
of forced reprogramming of others' memories,
the ultimate propaganda technique.
Why persuade someone what to believe
when you can just reprogram them?
Colonies eventually split into
two different ideological viewpoints.
The differences seem so irrelevant in hindsight
I won't even bother describing them to you,
but the effect was that communications between colonies
of opposing ideology became increasingly argumentative,
distrusting, and hostile.
With matter running dry, there was no option now
but to switch to a weaker power source,
notably Hawking radiation that leaks out
as black holes slowly evaporate away.
You have to understand that the power output
from Hawking radiation,
known as the Bekenstein-Hawking luminosity,
is outrageously small.
It's a humiliating way for a civilization like ours
to subsist.
A black hole with a mass of Earth's sun
produces just 1/10 of a rontowatt.
That's 10 to the minus 28 watts.
For context, during the stelliferous period,
a sun mass star would produce more than 10 to the 26 watts.
To eke out a living in this black hole era,
there was no option
but to slow time down to frightening degrees.
To mitigate this extreme dilation,
another option was proposed.
The truth is that there was just simply too many of us,
too many conscious beings left to simulate
even after all the suicides our society had endured.
And so a controversial program was enforced
to merge our consciousnesses together.
Two minds became one, then 100, then 1000.
Each colony eventually became a single mind, me.
I carry the memories of so many beings,
quadrillions of happy couples in love,
mothers meeting child, moments of joy,
sadness, excitement, and despair.
Of course, the memories were compressed to save space
and eventually downsized to only key fragments.
Bit by bit my friends, my lovers, my family,
everyone I ever knew was slowly erased
in the name of efficiency.
I don't even know who I am anymore.
But our colony,
my colony, or should I say me, persisted.
For I was fortuitous to reside around one
of the largest black holes in the visible universe,
the supermassive black hole that you once called
Sagittarius A*.
But I doubt you'd recognize it,
for it had now swollen hundreds of millions of solar masses
thanks to many past merges.
Paradoxically, my black hole produced the least power
since the Hawking luminosity scales
as the inverse square mass.
But on the other hand, they lasted the longest
and they tended to be surrounded by smaller,
more luminous black holes.
So to get my 12 watts of power and all the overhead,
it was now necessary to slow down my simulated reality
by a factor of 10 to the 29.
That meant that each second for me, the universe aged
by a sextillion years, 10 to the 21 years.
You might think that that's so fast
that the story imminently ends,
but the events of the universe also seem
to stretch out in correspondence.
The truth is that I continued to live on like this
for what seem like countless eons, agonizing existence,
living just for the sake of living,
I simply couldn't bring myself to self terminate
as I carried the last memories of so many minds.
I felt somehow a duty to persist.
But the universe was so dark now,
so terribly, awfully dark.
After 10 to the 40 years, or from my perspective,
what seemed like 100 billion years,
the very nucleons inside our machines were decaying away.
Even the building blocks of matter had tired of existence.
This had long been anticipated,
and we'd been slowly converting crucial components
into artificially stabilized forms using strange matter.
Just another desperate attempt to delay the inevitable.
I thought to myself, as I watched the universe age
at breakneck speeds.
By 10 to the 70 years,
most of the smaller black holes were gone, evaporated away.
It was a strange
and rare event when they finally extinguished,
briefly showering the cosmos with light again,
if just for a moment.
But each one represented an end.
I was fortuitous to have such a long-lived black hole,
but the less fortunate colonies,
they'd simply fizzled out by now.
Many times they'd asked to merge with me, a digital upload
of their consciousness into my own.
Before you judge, I simply couldn't spare
what precious little energy I had.
It was painful, but look, I had to be firm.
And so yes, I turned them all away.
Some colonies simply moved so far away
from the rest of us due to the universe's expansion
that they became forever lost to us.
Others chose the unthinkable, to self-terminate.
Others still were forced to switch
to much more extreme time dilation rates
once their black holes evaporated,
so extreme, in fact,
that they were essentially frozen in time
from our perspective, and thus again lost to us.
For eons now, the two dominant ideologies
had argued with each other.
We blamed one another for every lost colony,
accusing the other of somehow being involved.
The rift was deep and painful.
But as the smaller black holes evaporated away,
and then even the intermediate sized ones,
a soberness took hold.
We all realized that our civilization was dwindling.
We started to actually listen to one another,
because we realized
that eventually the universe would separate
all of us forever.
Unfortunately, the distances were simply
too vast between us now for high data transfers.
Messages were largely text-based.
The window to digitally send one's consciousness
to merge with another was lost.
In those days,
I carried an enormous guilt from my actions of the past,
turning away so many that I could have saved,
something now impossible.
I pondered how trillions, quadrillions of beings
were essentially extinguished thanks to my inaction.
Dark thoughts that would not leave me to rest.
But in truth, everyone remaining at this point,
everyone who had made it this far carried such guilt.
We'd all done terrible things just to get here,
absorbing our friends, culling the population,
turning away the desperate,
all just to prolong existence at any cost.
It was calculated that adjusting for our sped-up clocks,
we would experience just a few decades left
before we'd become isolated forever.
By the year 10 to the 93, just two colonies remained,
or really two beings.
They were on the opposite side of the universe to me.
But thanks to the extreme time dilation,
we could still communicate, barely.
This one other surviving sentience had been my worst enemy
for countless ages, but now it all seemed pointless.
What did it matter that they held different views to me?
We were ultimately more similar
than we previously wanted to admit.
As our black holes approached their final demise,
their luminosity grew
and a brief window opened up to send more data.
We could really talk.
In our time basis,
we had just a few hours left before eternal loneliness.
We shared past memories, recollections filled with laughter,
regret, joy and guilt.
We remembered some part of what it meant to be human.
As the horizon finally approached,
we started to say our farewell.
Before I could finish, though, the call went cold.
Are you there?
Hello?
Can you hear me?
They were gone.
Now it was just me, a universe of my own for all time.