Nothing Is Forever

Nothing Is Forever

“Nothing is forever,” he warned,” no matter if it’s an individual life or the one hundred billion year life of the smallest, reddest sun”…

“Change in inevitable, but little else about the coming forever is certain. I would imagine that everyone here holds that noble wish that intelligent life will prosper in the universe, spreading to other suns and eventually to all the ends of the Milky Way. But that remains far from certain. In our ongoing studies of the sky, we have observed what has to be considered a paucity of intelligence. Today those civilizations nearest to humanity are just beginning to hear the earth’s original transmissions, radio and radar whispers barely hinting at everything that has happened since, and it is presumed that in another several thousand years, a slow rich conversation will commence. Or our neighbors will respond to our presence with the most perfect, telling silence. The fertile imagination easily conceives wonders as well as horrors coming from this unborn history. But this man before you, this atum, believes that real gift of the Others will be to suggest to us the richest, most stable answers to the eternal questions of life and living well in a universe that holds minds such as ours in such very low esteem”. (A History of Terraforming, by Robert Reed)

Nothing Is Forever. Photo by Elena

“Strings,” she tries again. “Everything is made of string”. Thoughts, feelings, memories, they are strings of numbers in the brain. And science has proved that strings – even when they seem perfect (like you, you beautiful child!) – will come out all in knots. (The Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated String, by Lavie Tidhar).

It won’t be easy. They won’t understand. Tortured, incomplete, they are not able to understand. Offered the greater whole, they see the loss of the lesser. Offered communion, they see only extinction. I must be careful. I must use this newfound ability to hide. Other things will come here eventually, and it doesn’t matter whether they find the living or the dead, what matters is that they find something like themselves, to take back home. So I will keep up appearances. I will work behind the scenes. I will save them from the inside, or their unimaginable loneliness will never end. Those poor savage things will never embrace salvation. I will have to rape it into them (The Things, by Peter Watts).

Now that we have seen how to find our way around the solar system, let us take a look at the bodies that make it up. It is a sad fact that many astrologers have practically no idea of what the true natures of the bodies are that they use in making their calculations and interpretations…