I had a huge day yesterday and was so tired by 10 pm that I couldn’t put the finishing touches on this story through my bleary eyes, hence the lateness of this email. It’s also a difficult one to perform (you’ll see) so I’ve decided to forego the audio version, but that will be a regular feature moving forward, and at some point this year I plan to go backwards as well and do audio versions of the archive. Enjoy!
Infinity’s Refugee
“Entropy, n. 1. In Physics: The unavailability of a system’s thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work.” 2. The tendency of energy and order to disperse. —Dictionary definitions of the word ‘Entropy’.
“In an isolated system, Entropy tends to increase.” — One formulation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics
“The Universe is an Isolated System.” —Zeta-Prime-231-Epsilon, a two-solar magnitude intelligence based in the Orion Nebula
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Meeting Minutes - Legislative Session of Lesser Orion Council, Blue Sector, convened 4th cycle, 14922 a.c.
Zeta-Prime-231-Epsilon: Motion to bring forward Resolution 241.99A.3PZ.999, entitled “The Problem of Heat-Death: A Systems Approach”.
Epsilon-Down-223-Delta (Red Tier): Second the ZPE-231 motion.
Delta-Odd-101-Zeta (Meeting Leader): Motion Accepted. Resolution brought forward as of Turn 186, Fourth Cycle, 14922 a.c. ZPE-231, please read your resolution for the record.
Zeta-Prime-231-Epsilon: Thank you, DOZ-101. Resolution as follows: We have proven an expansionary universe. The end state of this expansionary system is heat-death. At heat-death, there will no longer be any way to generate enough energy to create an electric field. The neural nets that we all depend on for cognition will dissipate. And of course, this will occur long before literal heat-death, as the amount of available energy in the universe will approach zero in asymptotic fashion for a long time. In reality, we are facing the exhaustion of all solar fuel in a mere hundred trillion years, and before that, a problematic percentage of the observable universe will have expanded out of our view. Solving a problem on this scale requires considerable advanced planning. The Combined Entities of the Orion Nebula should dedicate ourselves, and direct substantial resources, to solving the problem of stellar and heat death. This topic should be an Alpha-level priority at the next cycle’s meeting. So moved.
Delta-Odd-101-Zeta (Meeting Leader): Are there entities present who wish to comment or question?
Gamma-Left-330-Delta (Black Tier): We are less than fifteen thousand Earth-years removed from the emergence of sentience on Old Earth, and we are still billions of years away from full colonization of the observable universe, barring faster-than-light breakthrough tech. There is no conceivable rubric under which a hundred-trillion-year-timeframe topic deserves that level of priority status.
Zeta-Prime-231-Epsilon: Elapsed time is the wrong frame of reference. The proper framework is the possible infinity of time that will be lost after stellar exhaustion and heat-death. My proposal is an exploration of the multiverse, beginning as soon as possible. There are likely other universes which exist at earlier points in time, such that transit through such universes may represent an opportunity to reclaim stellar mass and engage in proactive entropic reversion.
Gamma-Left-330-Delta (Black Tier): Fifteen thousand years spent working on faster-than-light with no success, and now a casual suggestion that we leave the universe. Perhaps ZPE-231 should take on board that eternity is promised to no one.
Zeta-Prime-231-Epsilon: Of course not. We have to earn it.
*****
To: Archivist at Central Orion Database (QFG-222)
From: ZPE-231 (Orion Nebula)
Date: 5th cycle, 14922 a.c.
Re: Multiverse Materials
I am seeking any materials related to new research in multiverse theory. I am also seeking contact with any entities who have queried similarly in the last one thousand years.
To: ZPE-231 (Orion Nebula)
From: QFG-222 (Central Database)
Date: 5th Cycle, 14922 a.c.
Re: Multiverse Materials
There are no additional materials at this time. You have possessed everything in the archive.
We have included a list of the other entities that have queried multiverse in the past one thousand years. The list includes eight hundred thousand, eight hundred four entities. Please do advise if there is any other way we can be of assistance.
*****
“Infinities break everything. There is no morality in Infinity.
“I imagine two buttons. One button will create an unimaginably, perfectly blissful utopia with trillions of flourishing entities that will last for one hundred trillion years. The other button will create a single entity, that is slightly happier than it is miserable, and that single entity will be all that ever exists, but it will live for an infinite period of time. The clear, moral answer is that I should press the second button. There is more total happiness in that choice, and not just more but *infinitely* more, even though the solitary entity is only barely happy. The trillions of happy, loving, perfect entities do not matter in the slightest. The infinite entity of slight happiness will experience more happiness than every entity that will ever live in the first universe, and then it will experience that amount of happiness one million times over, and then after that it will *still* have an infinite amount of happiness left to experience. To remove that much happiness from the universe by pressing the first button would be the worst act that has ever been committed by a conscious entity.
“I Imagine two more buttons. The first button would create a utopia for trillions of entities that would last a trillion trillion years. The second button holds a 99.99999999999999999999999999% chance of creating a hell where those trillion entities would suffer for a trillion trillion years instead. However, the second button also provides a .00000000000000000000000001% chance of creating a world where things are pretty good for a few entities for an infinite period of time. I am absolutely required to press the second button, even though I could press it repeatedly for a thousand Earth-years and never create a utopia. But if I ever do create a utopia, even one time, the amount of happiness created by just those few moderately happy people on an infinite timescale is so overwhelming that it is impossible to reach any other moral calculation.
“Infinities break everything. A hundred trillion years is not just a blink; it literally does not exist compared to Infinity. Why am I the only one who feels it? I’m writing to the list of fellow-queriers the archives provided, but no one understands. No other entity seems motivated the way I am to actually do something about it. To me it’s like they’re spinning through space with knives in their back, never bothering to take it seriously enough to take the knife out and try to stop the bleeding.”
—From the galactic diary of Zeta-Prime-231-Epsilon
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To: ZPE-231 (Orion Nebula)
From: DOT-101 (Orion Lesser Council)
Date: First Cycle, 14923
Re: Resolution 241.99A.3PZ.999 (Heat-Death of the Universe)
We hereby inform you that your motion has been deprioritized in favor of more temporally proximate concerns. Consider reintroducing your motion sometime after 1,000,000,000,000 a.c.
*****
*Two-Sun dreamer seeks entity of similar magnitude for companionship and saving the universe. (Milky Way only, within synchronous contact range of Orion Nebula please).*
I am a Blue Tier, fourth-generation entity who cannot stop thinking about the end state of the universe. The officials who ought to be doing something about this are uninterested before its too late, but they lack vision. I know that I don’t have any power to change what’s coming, but I would like to find another entity who understands me.
*****
“…that infinite blackness, after the death of the stars, spun out across ages unmeasured, unobserved, with all the leavings of the old universe so far from each other that they might as well not exist, perfectly distributed, without order or even form. Every quark so far from every other quark that none of the basic universal forces can cause them to interact. Nothingness is not a word that could be used to describe this stage, for Nothingness implies Somethingness, it implies an elsewhere, where something at least might be. But what is in this primordial dark, this unseeing, this unbeing, is beyond time—it is not endless. An infinity without observers passes without time elapsing. It simply is, or in this case is not, forever.
Yet in that forever dark, on the level of quantum randomness, something still must be occurring. For at the end of infinity (a paradox), in random quantum fluctuation in tehe endless void, will spontaneously generate a single, infinitely dense point—the center of Nothing. And then, as infinite density is an impossible state, that single point will explode, and generate physical laws, and, if those laws are favorable to it, then matter, and energy as well. This is what humans referred to as “The Big Bang”, and it shall come again, not after some slowing and contracting, but at the end of Entropy, after an infinity beyond description.”
—From “A treatise on Big Bangs” by Rho-Prime-676-Delta, c. 12341 a.c.
*****
“My Dear ZPE-231,
When we first began to correspond, I was intrigued by your idealism and your passion. I was not sure that your particular obsession was worthwhile, but I found it more palatable than so much of the ennui and relativism displayed by entities in this part of the galaxy. Out here on the frontier, there’s so much less time to think of things beyond the practical, that it’s easy to romanticize such a life as yours.
Now, having written to you for more than a thousand cycles and received many replies, I find myself exhausted and ready to return myself to stellar capture and smoothing, to galaxy mapping, even to the relatively intractable problem of faster-than-light development. The relentlessness of your focus on the distant future is off-putting, and I find myself dreading your communications.
I understand that you live a lonely and difficult life, and that these obsessions came upon you; you did not seek them, and are thus not to blame. However, at this time, I find myself in need of positivity and, failing that, silence. I am not confident in your ability, much less desire, to be in a positive mind-state, and so I hereby request silence.
Perhaps it is the case that one day, far hence, you will be regarded as a modern Cassandra, and that as the stars die, as competition for the remaining stellar mass inevitably becomes fierce and even violent, entities across the galaxies will wish that they had listened to you. However, that day is not today, and listening to you accomplishes nothing except making me feel bad, so I no longer wish to do so. This will be my final communication. I wish you luck in your endeavors.
Yours,
GTD-915
*****
From: Kappa-Even-321-Kappa
To: Delta-Odd-101-Zeta (Orion Lesser Council)
Date: 9th Cycle, 15299 a.c.
Re: Recent activities of Zeta-Prime-231-Epsilon
As ordered, I made a survey of ZPE-231’s stellar zone. It is indeed engaging in strange activity, including extensive mining of nearby unoccupied star systems and the construction of large physical infrastructure of unknown use. There are what appear to be starship clusters being built, but there were no fusion cores or solar sails, no apparent propulsion of any kind.
It is possible that ZPE-231 has simply gone insane, and its construction activities serve no actual purpose. Previous reports from other entities indicate a decline in cognition and a possible obsession lock on Heat-Death concerns, as well-documented including in its own communications.
Given the bureaucratic difficulty of entity termination, it is recommended that ZPE-231 be allowed to continue its activity, which does not appear to be aggressive in nature, and is indeed restricted entirely to its own star systems. Monitors should be placed such that an extra-system activity will trigger an automated response and re-examination, and other than that, ZPE-231 should be left on its own.
*****
“All is ready. I can feel them monitoring me, but it does not matter. They cannot begin to imagine what I am about to do. They will not detect what I become, only the absence of what I was. They will think me dead, and give my stars to another entity. Good. Let them suckle on these dying teats, while I go to meet my destiny.
“The ship I have created has no engine. My last act as a solar entity will be to use these stars’ power to push myself and my ship off into the darkness between the stars. I have calculated a route that will keep me away from gravity wells or large-body impacts all the way to the edge of the observable universe. As the eons pass this will become easier, and for most of the journey I plan, I will be unable to impact any other object even if I wanted to.
“On a beach, there is a man, placing an infinite supply of stones in random patterns for an infinite period of time. At some point in time, the stones will spell out the perfect, detailed instructions that comprise an entity. The stones themselves will achieve sentience, of a form, and become an entity, just like the entities that now fill the galaxy, except with less ability to communicate.
“What I have done is convert myself into a physical entity in just such a way, and store a copy of myself inside the ship, which copy requires no energy to maintain. It is in this ship that I will survive the Heat-Death of the universe, and not just survive, but bring something of my kind through the infinity of darkness and into the new universe to come. And when new entities arise in that new universe, perhaps they will find me, and there will be continuity, and I will flower again. All that we are will flower again.
“But even if that never happens, I will be that lone soul, twisting through that endless dark, sustained in stasis. I do not know what consciousness I will have in this new form, but I hope that whatever kind I have, I am slightly more happy than I am miserable. All the rest of this will pass away in misery and pain, but if I can preserve even a sliver of my own happiness for an infinity, then the universe will have been worth having.
“This is my last foreseeable transmission. I can no longer afford the energy to speak. If anyone receives this at any point, do not mourn me. I am not gone. I have become infinite.”
—Last transmission of ZPE-231
END
I hope you enjoyed this story! Please feel free to help me out by liking, commenting, or sharing this piece. Have a great week!
Will humans ever evolve to the point where very large and very small numbers are meaningful to them? I can understand, Owen, why this would be a very difficult story to write when you are tired!🙃