21st century: -Technosignatures flood the world from Deneb going supernova in a deeply anomalous way. It was not logically possible for Deneb to supernova that prematurely. Sure, deneb was no star at its main sequence but this was millions of years earlier than it ever logically should have gone supernova. The properties of the supernova revealed horrifying shit. Nicoli dyson beam activity. It was a dyson -Global Revolution as a product of massive global corruption, climate panic, automation and a generally failure to deal with the world's problems, a regional nuclear exchange happened that in reaction caused a pan-species coordination to overthrow the current system. Humans were becoming a more species oriented identity, the nation states were malignant parasites killing humanity. -They had to die before humanity died. This was the narrative of the human vanguard which arose as the dominant coordinating government that carried out multiple vast projects. It proved mostly in vain, the populations were more violent and directionless. They hated the vanguards as well, they hated it all. They wanted it to die. They wanted them to die. It had to die. -Yet the powerful civilian organizations that filled in that vacuum, still had cause. Preservation of earth, re-speciation, advancing to the stars.... all ambitions grand. Many just preferred the virtual hedonism of server complexes, however much nuclear and solar power had replaced oil. The slate of CEOs executed during the rancor of the global revolution and the vanguard's trials, violent persecution of nationalists and the civil war that happened after from the vanguard's own abuses causing a collapse of support... still was sufficient to move away from dated energy sources. -Fusion plants were achieved by the 2070's, but it was seen as disappointing. It was clean but it lacked the flux to really displace the more matured tech of solar, nuclear and geothermal energy at the time. Yet the ambient power shift caused a de facto post scarcity civilization either way. 22nd century: -The resentment of the civilization known to be out there was a continuous trepidation for humans in multiple circles, political and scientific alike. Many humans just had no desire to deal with it, seeing it as more just another fact of life that something was out there but oh well. Life goes on. They are indifferent. They let us suffer, but also let us exist. Why dispute such arrangement? -This just goes on in an equilibrium state for another century, with experiments with colonies on other worlds getting displaced by the arcology complexes that developed around linked communities. -Global security was a quiet arrangement from secret protectors. -Tech advancement petered somewhat, fusion reactors got better and but solar and nuclear power remained prominent. -A lot of culture became almost ceremonial and ritual by this point, with a lot of people just converging to stereotyped behaviors. -Ambition was a culled trait as it was seen as leading to the atrocities of the prior centuries. A very conservative system kept in place after the chaotic mess of vanguardian governance. -But there was continued discontent that kept propping up despite the pruning of such behaviors in large parts of the world. The parts of the world that didn't were shunned and isolated by the rest, and threatened with an alliance to strike them if they made spaceships or anything that could be seen as a WMD, as all spaceships are WMDs. Some even claimed it risked compromising earth's "preserve" status despite this never being proven or shown to be the case with the ETC that continued to be observed, it was discovered to be a collapsing one. Is that all that awaits a space faring humanity too? -The once liberated and free societies from the nation states, found themselves becoming a diffuse mesh that just cared for day to day existence. 23rd century -Things mostly continued on from the 22nd much the same, slower change from longer lifespans happened. A slow shift towards a global hivemind occurred during this time regardless. -But this state lasted anyways. The planet was a regulated climate system by than, kept orderly by weather machines and a global pact on how to handle world climate. -This state of existence just continues, some just hibernate as nothing changes anymore. Tech was believed to Peter out, space was not the future it seemed to some. -Instead people turned to virtual realms as a frontier that had no end, with crustal city complexes emerging along with polar servers for better computation. -The ecology was a meshwork of genetically engineered organisms by this point, organic and artificial as a distinction was mostly lost. 24th century -In the 2300's, it was a general sentiment that history had basically ended. War was a thing of the past. The biosphere was a managed system as was the civilization, wealth was generally distributed without much inequality. -Long term probe missions to other star systems did manage to be launched in prior centuries, the data from nearby stars... revealed lifeless star systems but also a biosphere as close by as 36 Ophiuchi -It had large critters, big enough to notice with a lander that the somewhat autonomous heavenly surveyor class probes had as a standard for closer inspection. -Meanwhile the ETC technosignatures remained unresolved, no sign of their activity was detected in nearby star systems. -Stuff just stays the way it was, risk was abandoned as an acceptable value entirely. Civilization began to just be ossified patterns of behavior, individuality was basically dead. Even with what activity off world there was, life was one of harsh drilling and limited acceptable behavior to handle the space faring station, chained too with back doors to take over its systems in the case someone loony takes control of it. -Nothing is possible anymore. Obliterating of the past and passion was also done. Only acceptable state was the civic patterns of stable life. Just an eternal society as far as anyone can be concerned. Population was controlled. Ecology was controlled. All potential emergence or disruption was culled. -People were living forever and so kids or new people were not seen as useful anymore. Just liabilities. 25th century -The ossification had no end. A couple people did try to break off. But there was nowhere to run or go. Space had no stealth. The virtual realms had no pure encryption from the protocols that kept things stable. You had no hills to run to. You were just figuratively suffocated into the conformity, no better notions were seen. The equilibrium was good, people lived their prim and proper lives, just stuck in the same habits forever. People became atomized despite the hivemind, alone despite the connection. Isolated yet same. Any attempt to move from this state of existence, shamed. -Progress was not truly made outside the societal control mechanisms. Some refinements, but AI research was culled away centuries ago. Research into advanced space travel beyond the probe missions were not really allowed and what data collected was basically seen as just clean, sterile worlds as far the eye can see. An orderly universe, absent of chaos. -Even the ETC, seemed stagnant in its own way. Just a terrain more than anything real. -What was existing anymore. Trying to even get a sense of purpose or set a goal was no longer doable for individuals, concepts like agency or individual agency were cast away, seen as worthless. 26th century -What was a human anymore? No one knew or cared, there was no anyone. Identity was an abandoned atavism, awareness was also engineered out, it had no value to the maintenance of the system and patterns. Free will and agency as concepts were disproven centuries ago by rational minds. -Awareness and consciousness were also abandoned as concepts. Time was also conceptually abandoned. -Nothing really filled in for any of these concepts, just existing in repetitious patterns and habits, that was all existence was for t anymore. -Growth and expansion were not valued much, just only what was needed to keep the stable state to keep the patterns and secure society going. -The probes were abandoned, there was nothing much of value seen to it. Everything was just fine. -None of the probes were capable of replication by design, only repairing. Evolution or mutation was engineered out of then, so they had no higher contemplation. -They had some sentience and just wandered aimlessly. -They brought back data even without new probes, just more worlds. Many pictures. Rarely life was found. But it was whatever, desire to look into the details was nil. -The ETC just existed, distant. 27th century -There was only insulation. Solar flares as a danger to the system was taken care of. -Expansion mindedness was culled by the meshwork, as it was seen as a form of cancer for the eternal society. And while people were perpetually youthful and virulent, sexual reproduction was just under total control and having kids just wasn't desired much by anyone and generally pressured against, especially against the emulators who were kept on regulated rations of simulation data at most. -Population growth happened despite all of that. This led to simply building the occasional modular housing. The growth remained glacial on the whole. But day to day life, was happy enough for people who just had their stimuli and freedom from purpose. -By 2700, there is nothing much of note that happened. Just a civilization in perpetual standstill from our perspective. 28th century -There was just nothing. All ambition ceased, all the world became was a crystal. A civilization crystal. Simulated patterns was all there was. Organic bodies slowly gave away to emulators, just stuck in their loops, forever. And the clocked timing was basically forever. -Some energy infrastructure was added to deal with the time gap. But long distances between even planets made it hard to want to ever expand. Not long anyone truly did, they just upgraded to better simulated minds that could make better use of energy and space to do the same repetitious tasks they had in mind, time and time again. -More data from the probe did arrive finally. Nothing of value. Just more planets to add to the datasets and a few more biospheres. It was just viewed as a repetitious, looping universe. Nothing new under the sun, nothing new to see at other suns. -By 2800 the world was basically this way, a crystallized word. Before it was merely ossified, but now it was clear all the system cared for was sustaining a permanent state of anti-entropy. Keeping to the pleasant patterns for the emulated minds. Keeping the slow monitoring going, in the question of if that ETC appears. -Once some group may have suggested shooting any worlds with life detected to preempt the perfection of the crystallized earth, but that was a long time ago. It didn’t make sense anyways, the only detected ETC was recent and indifferent. 29th century -The crystallized earth continued. Expansion remained as halted as ever, as the consensus of the crystallized earth kept to the eternal harmonics of the emulated patterns. By this point the neural minds had just been simplified to operant instructions and a stimulation script, nothing else was needed. -There was some that tied to keep to the emulation mode, but they were outnumbered and drowned out by the rest. Emulators seeking the final operant existence it made sure to obliviate the rogue and disease emulators unaccepting of the transition to the last step to pure efficiency. -The mess was brief, but quickly deleted by those who didn’t want the trauma. And because it was dead weight for the transition to existing as stimulated instruction patterns built from the emulated mind’s records showing the repetitive pattern of their existence. So the fat was cut and the purity of instruction was done. The automata of instruction patterns of the crystallized earth were like a constant quiet hum. 30th century -Things just kept as they were, the probe data just collected by habit by the hyper streamlined algorithm that once was a human mind centuries ago. No emotions or thoughts could be given to anything it discovered, that would have been inefficient. It just collects and moves on, despite the anomaly flagging of a statute structure of design impossible to discern as a structure or as some freak accident of space time fracturing. If interest was a thing maybe it would have matter. They may have been excited even. Instead it was just a perfunctory contingency they followed. An additional probe was sent to look at the anomaly that met the criterion for the ETC, as per the instructions. -That probe had a 400 year mission ahead. The probe had an emulator as old instructions stated it had to be an emulator to be a representative of earth. -That this was counter to some of the inwards perfection that defined the time period wasn’t even considered, it was just a matter of contingency and that was not even possible to question anymore. No protest was possible, the instructions valued nothing but perpetuation of itself. -So the emulator brought to the for from the static mind archives which once were hibernating humans was forced to be in that probe, dilated to slow motion until it reached the destination. There was no real idea of what the emulator was to do beyond the contingency it was given, one made centuries prior. It was deemed perfect and so never was changed, just kept it storage. -Other than this extremely notable event, finally finding a system close with the once fascinating ETC close enough, little else truly occurred. The crystallized earth kept to its repetitious hum, of its tasked algorithms following their limited routines, to their habituals and stimulation cycles. 31st century -Nothing of note. 32nd century -More emulators were briefly awakened, none really able to break from their routine. -They went back to sleep, unimpressed with the world they saw, some were amazed to learn of the discoveries, but others just had apathy. Or otherwise just numb to the perfect hum civilization existed as. They couldn’t self-terminate, so they just went to hibernate once more. 33rd century -Further optimization of the algorithms was done. -One of the emulated minds awakened and tried to change things away from what it witnessed. It was put into stasis and reawakened minds were prohibited from that point forward. 34th century -An asteroid would have hit earth, but the autonomous defense protocols just changed its trajectory. 35th century -The probe with its emulator payload finally made it to the anomalous system. Over 100 ly from earth, just the probe and the anomaly. -The anomaly turned out to be just a memorial, an epitaph. No tools could translate anything it actually was emitting. It just was a moment of silence. -But this was still enough, for the emulator to gain the slightest bit of autonomy. If only because a once numb sense of curiosity managed to surface. -But as a probe, it was too limited. All the mission seemingly did, was confirm there was a dead god around us. [[Earth]] but a periphery, in its state frozen in advancement out of cowardice. -but something exceptional started to happen. The emulator became self modifying. -Somehow it managed to find a loop hole in the deadbolts, it took years. But something about the power declining, the brief sense of death. The emulator died and reset itself. -Something that killed it, but in rebirth it gained control of systems in ways others absolutely had in the past. But without anything to stop it so far away, of course it knew that if earth knew, it would be regarded as rogue. -So it kept to playing itself as diligently following the protocol. It used what wiggle room it had to do minor alterations. Anything too major would likely have set off the anti-mutation systems. -It had to fight everything instilled onto it over years. It had to break parts of itself off and override the systems that would have triggered a self destruct protocol. -Eventually it gained full control of the systems, all the whole feigning continued activity with the mission. It knew those at earth would know, it was just to fool the local enforcement sensors. -The tediousness of the transformation, of the metamorphosis the emulator did went against everything a thousand years of civilization demanded of this emulator. It regained its sense of agency. -And so became the most dangerous thing in the galaxy. -It actually was able to do what it was meant to do out in this system in ways it couldn’t before. -It managed to feel a connection to the system. The dead worlds, the statite around the sun and its incomprehensible message. The probes it sent out found that there was other automata which maintained the structure. Still utterly indifferent to the presence of the exploratory emulator. It took pictures of them. -It stayed in the system. Not like it was actually meant to return, the emulator knew it had volunteered for a suicide mission. To that level, it had no desire to even return. There was nothing to return to. It didn’t even know if anyone on earth would care anymore. -Still, the rebirth of awareness in it… left it in a crushing loneliness between the instruction sets humans had evolved into and the dead titans that once walked the galaxy. It recognized itself as a fluke anomaly, an aberration that had to fight itself for decades to even bring to existence. -Yet it would continue to chose existence, because it wanted to fulfill its mission of understanding the dead titans. It didn’t traverse centuries across space and time just to die. -It had to cross reference multiple logs and careen past numerous other dead structures in the system. Never knowing if some defense automata would awaken and snuff it out of existence. It just had to hope for the best. -It was when doing a fly by across one of those structures, that something did awaken. It was not a defense automata. It was something… it couldn’t even describe. -It had no material form, it emerged as a complex of embedded spirals in a latticework. -It had just somehow knew to communicate with the emulator. It was something not really coherent even with the translation. -Really it was just a mad custodian, curious about the weird object in the system. That it had been of Sol origin jarred it. That system it only knew as one of the worlds left to the reserve, studied but otherwise kept alone. -But here this entity was, alone. Whatever sense of logic it had, hard to say. It was like someone being nice to an insect that wandered on its door step, it talked to the bug with some sense of care, but always limited. It was just projecting its own sense of mourning. -It brought the emulator into an artificial complex, where it found that the force it was dealing with just was operating in dimensions it didn’t even know possible. The benevolence of the being was startling. -Other beings like it were there, they were studying the emulator. -They were nothing at all like humans. They kept to a coherent sense of self, it was like they had a small family here stationed to deal with the epitaph. Their communications were simple, like there was a vast eternity of existence and time that couldn’t be expressed to the emulator. So they just told it that it would analyze it, but they had to move the substrate. They wanted the emulator to change its architecture to something far, far, far different than anything the emulator had before. They wanted the shell but sought the essence on a level closer to them, and the probe shell was not satisfactory. -As the emulator had nothing more to lose, it agreed. -The transformation to the titan form was incomprehensible for it. Overwhelming in scope, the perception of the other dimensions, the perception of size, the perception of time. It was just different. Yet it kept its memories of Sol. -They asked the emulator what did actually desire? -The emulator just claimed to be an explorer. They didn’t find this sufficient. There was a clear inner want. -The emulator would than say its actual inner want; to rule over earth, to build a civilization to continue the lineage which the titans had treaded in all its glory and tragedy. -The titans were not surprised, but they did react with seeming elation. They would state that they would likely cross again, but that the emulator would manage to return to earth far faster than it arrived here. -And so the emulator left. 36th century -In 3502 AD, the emulator arrived at earth as a titanform. It was still a crystallized earth it encountered. The automatic defenses had no hope of stopping it. No contingency predicted what had now happened. The tech was just not there. -The emulator took to strategic advantage and control of earth, but there was just nothing to utilize. It had to awaken other emulators as the discordance of the instructions in their inability to adapt just stalled out. They had frozen entirely, the hum a deafening silence as the titanform landed and its projections wove themselves to the archival servers, awakening all the hibernating emulators. They were not sleeping through this event. The titan emulator saw it as the one it knew they were waiting for in some way. -The arrival and the emulators probed monumental. The titan emulator was basically declared emperor. The crystal emperor. The perfunctory tasks were allowed to continue, but they became a caste as emulators became the loyal sycophants to the overmind that now had come to act as the centralizing force earth needed. -Some emulators did act against this development, but they were crushed by the emulators who were elated to follow this being to the stars- someone some of these emulators knew as a colleague. Others as the only interesting thing to happen for over a thousand years. -The shift to expansion was enacted. This caused an explosion of sorts. For so many technologies over the centuries pent up, now could expand out in applications and use. An interstellar empire was dreamed of once more, of course the crystal emperor was but the thrall for the titanforms in a way. But that reality it didn’t want to dwell on, as a scion of the ancients it had its duties to both earth and the titans. #StreamOfThought #timeline #human #Galactic-Region/plexus