(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 ma
ny
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. W
e 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. Wi
th 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 b
rilliant 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 foreve
r. 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 Z
eno'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 f
rom 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 i
nto 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 d
iverged 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 ne
arby 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
communi
cations 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 e
ver 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 l
uminosity 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 als
o 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, brief
ly 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 o
ther 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 dig
itally
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
senti
ence 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.
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