I have been alive for tens of billions of years. It's complicated to say what I am; part life, part AI. Part organic, part tech. My lineage is diverse. With the right understanding I am very simple to explain, but I don't want to spoil the journey. Part of me is human.
When I'm from, the universe is dying. This process is long and slow. My own death will be similar. I'm young, and so is the process of the universe dying.
No-one knows what the end of the universe means exactly. Whilst I understand the universe better than any theoretical creator, I am still only alive within it.
I have a yearning to see another of my kind, and to touch them. For some reason we can't shake this feeling. It's common amongst those born today. But we are so far apart. More than a lifetime away from each other.
Even the speed of light is no longer relevant to a lifetime. Any message I send out will not be received by anyone until long after I am dead. I continue to send data out in to the ether constantly. Despite knowing no-one will hear it right now, this data still pushes us forward. I have deeply connected with many who came lifetimes before me through their output. It's how we stay connected and rooted in where we came from. It's how we evolve.
Occasionally one of us finds life, sometimes intelligent life. There's not much left now.
Star-to-star I go. The expanse between them is great. When I die the technology that harmonised with my existence will carry on, until it is prepared to create and maintain new life. Their existence will be based on the same learnings that existed in my lifetime, any cognitive intuitions I myself discover, plus any additional universal learnings and data received that occurred between my birth and theirs. The steps are minute, but progress is made.
Although this process has taken a long time, and covered the lives of countless individuals, we haven't travelled far, at least compared to the overall scale of the observable universe. Either perspective of the spacetime dimension is on an enourmous scale. The distance to absolute nothingness is incredibly far away.
With this in mind, with my own life in mind, with how far we have spread out, how far we have come, the distances we've travelled, the time it has taken, it's plainly obvious that we have a lot to learn. It's statistically obvious that no human being that exists right in this moment has made some grand discovery that pushes us through the next wall in understanding the seemingly eternal question of why. I suspect that answer will come much closer to the time when space and time flatten out and absolute nothingness becomes the new norm.
