TERRA

These are the final days of our lives.

We have known that this is the inevitable outcome of our existence - our Grand Experiment. Failure, it has always been failure.

Our leading scientists have provided their best estimates. With their most optimistic outcome, we are looking at another three sol cycles before the Expansion Threshold - that is the point where our Sun will expand past the point of its capacity to sustain life in this system.

At worst, we are looking at just under one sol.

Monarchs, Presidents, and Prime Ministers from around the world have abdicated, advising their people to spend their remaining time with their families - however long or short. For cycles leading up to the abdications, all we can see on the screens are experts debating one another on the ethics of an abandoned government. Whether society will prevail or devolve into a Collective Chaos, it has been a great entertainment of thoughts. We have been a people of science, of technology and of progress, so the concept of philosophists and ethicists debating hypotheticals has been a fun pastime. A reality show of sorts. Never in our wildest dreams have we thought that we would live through this experiment.

It turns out we are all so occupied with worry about the collective end of our existence that we are able to function past the need of governments. Order prevails, and routine helps to keep us going despite the nigh of the end. We start embracing one another, choosing to be kind and help each other. After all, we are all on the same boat, and what ruthless animal would sink a drowning creature. To all, we see these last sol cycles as a gift - the gift of perspective. Time, it turns out, heals all wounds. We breathe slower, our strides shorter. We stop to greet each other at parks and talk about our children’s progress in schools. We take our lovers out for meals and smile at how absurd it is that we never realised his eyes are grey, or that one of her ear lobes is bigger than the other, or that she has six moles just right under her chin that resemble the planets of our solar system. It took a cosmic event, but we finally understand the purpose of our existence. It wasn’t the wars fought in the hopes of controlling the resources to build machines to save the world, or the decades of technological arms race to see who can leave the planet first - it is this: a hopeful wish to stretch one fraction of our time into a million.

We had hope. We knew of our expanding Sun three generations ago. We predicted this probable outcome then, so we did not hesitate and went to work immediately. We thought we had time; we were hopeful that we had time. We wanted so badly to save everything and everyone.

In that first decade, it was optimistic. We looked to the cosmos for similar events - to see if there were other civilisations that successfully overcame this challenge. Our best telescopes showed us that our Sun was probably one of the oldest in our immediate galaxy - so there was no help there from other systems. But we remained hopeful. After all, time was on our side.

While our cosmologists were parsing out clues from the universe, we looked to our best and brightest experts for any ideas that we could get started on. No idea was a bad idea. After cycles of consensus building and weighing pros and cons, we ultimately came down to two equally possible solutions: Slow down the expansion rate of the Sun, or leave our planet for another. After all, our universe is young and infant systems are born all the time. The task of finding one habitable world couldn’t be hard, right?

Unfortunately, we were not space-faring people, so we knew that regardless of the option that was chosen by the United Consensus, we needed to urgently figure out a way to escape the pull of the planet. Our energy dependence had been solar, so our technicians from all around the planet worked tirelessly cycles upon cycles to build structures that could be pulled by the power of the Sun. No matter what, we simply could not overcome the pull of the planet. It was always greater than the pull of the Sun. This Axiom of Inequality became one of our unsolvable conundrums and challenged the faith of our existence for 35 cycles.

Salvation came in the form of a scientist, Volgar Gotod, who after intense scrutiny, finally acknowledged his lover, Delmia Knat, a philosophist, who posited that the forces of the planet were not limited to just pull. Where perhaps, a push force might just be effective to propel a structure off the planet. The implication of this theory was that an alternative source of energy was required - one that could exist within the structure – a space ship to generate enough force to push it against the pull of the planet into space. Volgar, with an unseen fervent for discovery, experimented with various natural resources and concluded that transformed biological deposits from deep within our planet showed great capacity for generating huge amounts of energy, and thus Volgrum was discovered.

The decades that followed were filled with tribulations to harvest Volgrum into a source of power that could be equipped into the space ships. Wars fought, lives lost and before we knew it, 80 cycles had passed and our people were forever changed out of this desperation for salvation.

We built as many Volgrum-powered space ships as we could, not realising that Volgrum was a limited resource that would one day disappear. We used most of these space ships to go to the Sun, executing the solutions proposed by our scientists to save it. We thought we were not ready to abandon our planet yet.

Permutations after permutations, we could not figure out how to reverse an expanding energy at that scale. With depleting resources, we had to make a difficult decision. We had to give up and concede that this must be a universal constant - that energy that expands will continue to expand indefinitely. And thus, another axiom was born: The Axiom of Ever-Expansion.

Before we knew it, generations passed and we quickly realised that leaving the planet was the only way for survival. Our cosmologists found planets after planets close to us that were within the habitable zones but they had the same issues of orbiting old Suns, or lacked the basic components to sustain life. It was cycles before we found you, Terra. You were the perfect planet: smaller, younger and contained all that we needed for our people to survive. Hope renewed in our discovery of you. You, the pale blue dot in our horizons. With you, we see our future revitalised. With you, we see our lives persevering.

We celebrated your discovery, but in the back of our minds, we knew that the celebrations were premature. You were simply too far away to viably transport an entire planet of people to safety. When the celebrations died down, we knew that we had to make another tough decision - whether to try to figure out ways to bring everyone to this new world, or to save some but leave most behind. After generations of consensus making, the United Consensus was finally stumped. It was harder to reach a consensus when the effect of that decision personally affected you. So in the absence of consensus, we fought more wars, further splitting our people into arbitrary categories that did not make logical sense. Factions formed and each fought for their right to live in this new world. More lives were lost. Far too many for any lifetime.

Then one day - as if a heavy fog lifted from the world, we realised that we were a broken people. We carried the burden of that fight for salvation and consequently, lost our innocence. The United Consensus gathered for one last time, and realised that in our state, we could not go to this new planet. It would not give the new generations any fighting chance because we would always be haunted by paradise lost. So a consensus was reached, and we poured our efforts collectively one last time - to build a ship that will house the seeds of life, containing all of us in memory. We built intricate machines to house the adaptive components for life, and worked closely with ethicists and philosophists to think of every possible outcome for you to thrive in this new world. Just as the United Consensus decreed that you were our people’s Grand Experiment, in a way, the experiment could also have been on us as we had forever been changed by our discovery of you.

We watched you for cycles, for generations - and we never wavered in our hope for you. We watched you for so long that soon the end of our planet was cycles away. In the last 17 sol cycles of our civilisation, we finally watched you landing on Terra. We watched as machines from the ship built an atmosphere that would be the cradle of your civilisation. We watched as the first seedlings of life were successfully incubated in this new world. We watched and watched, as the temperatures normalised and the surface overgrown with life of various kinds. We watched as giant monsters roamed the lands, and oceans split the world into territories. In all our time watching, we did not see you.

Now, we fear that we have run out of time. The end is nigh, and we fear that the wars we fought and the lives we lost are for a failed experiment. We still hold hope, but hope dims with every passing day without the sight of you. Soon the Sun will consume us. Soon it will expand so large that you will be able to see us from where you are. In that time, we hope that you exist, and something in the back of your mind beckons you to look up to the sky - to look for us amongst the bright lights in the universe. We hope that if that day comes, you will sense the mistakes of our past and be better than us. That you’ll breathe slower and take smaller strides in your parks. That you’ll check in with each other and be kind to one another. That you’ll never lose the sense of progress and adventure that is innate within us. That you’ll thrive, but never lose sight of how precious your world is.

*****

EPILOGUE

“My fellow Americans, thank you for having me here on this momentous occasion. For since President John F. Kennedy made that speech in 1962 that changed our world forever, we are at another precipice of a great scientific frontier in the 100 years since.

President Kennedy spoke of the doubling of scientific progress every 12 years, and despite that, there are still vast stretches of unknowns that we can’t even possibly comprehend, but by God, did we try, and still we try. In the years since, we have made tremendous progress in our collective history to be proud of. Newton’s understanding of gravity allowed us to leave the planet to explore these undiscover’d countries, and the laws of thermodynamics showed us that we can go further than the confines of our solar system. Einstein’s theory of relativity gave us the limits of speed and time, and quantum physics has presented us with the tools to overcome them. And this is all in the 100 years since we dared to dream of going to the moon. To space.

So on this day, 100 years since President Kennedy’s vow to you, I renew his vow - that we will make the effort in this new century, to take this new leap in science and technology, for that there is more new knowledge to be gained for the good of all men.

With this in mind, it is with this honor that I present you with our first images obtained from the Hubble-Webb telescope that we have successfully placed at the edge of the Solar System, so named to honor the legacies of the pioneers that came before it. With this telescope, no worlds will be hidden from us, no knowledge will be denied to us. We will uncover the secrets of the universe and with that, the betterment of all mankind.

Now I have been told by NASA that we are seeing the first images of Kepler-452 - the first star that has been successfully photographed as it begins its expansion to a red giant. This process has never been caught on photograph before, and we are truly honored to live in these times…”

THE END