The First and Last Men

The First and Last Men is the title of an Icelandic movie that I recently started to watch.

Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future is a “future history” science fiction novel written in 1930 by the British author Olaf Stapledon.  Or so Wikipedia dixit. What’s more interesting is its treatment of the Future. Good old Olaf foresees 18 different speciations of humans that evolve from one another.

The book’s premise is that 2,000 million years into Our Future, the 18th speciation is confronted with a dying Sun. And that’s when they decide to send us a Message across the Gulf of Time: A Final Warning from A Dying Future.

The premise is excellent but superficial in that one can see it coming from a Long Distance. Why do I say this?! Because the future is entropic. Or better said, all our Futures are entropic. We are doomed by any measure. Our Species, our Planet, our Sun, our Galaxy, our Cosmos, they are all doomed. Our planet has an expiration date set some 600 million years into the future. By then, the Sun will have engulfed our Pale Blue Dot. So we have until that time to get out of Dodge. That means leaving our system and venturing out into all the directions of the Universe.

But I digress. And not to leave the point hanging, our kind will perhaps be gone by then anyways: both from Earth and anywhere else.

We have come into being 14 billion years ago via a Big Bang and we will surely go out either via a Whimper or another Bang.

And this is where my mind took over the film’s stream of consciousness, and really flew away, soaring crazily into the ether.

What if, my mind told me, what if the Future was seized of some impending plague, environmental or cosmic catastrophe. Think the Andromeda Strain kind of a scenario. What if they found out too late to do anything to postpone their demise, which in a sense was ours too. Only thing is this would be a remote demise to Us, while Theirs Was or IS quite close by. Relativity sucks.

What if the Future attempted to communicate with us through the vast remote gulf of space/time separating our worlds.

And what if they managed to reach out to us and gotten us to listen to their dystopian S.O.S.

And what if their message was “Do something before it’s too late!“. Be that move to another planet or look for a cure at the bottom of the ocean, or in the rarefied atmosphere of our mountain tops, or on another planet in another system.

And then, what if we did not listen. Or we did listen but just said, “Oh well, this crisis is so far out that we might as well enjoy the next 2 billion years, since now we have proof we will make it that long anyway.”

I fear this scenario is more likely to occur should the Future reach out to us. Knowing our complacency, I do not believe we would heed their warning and act even if they handed us the keys to our Future. It is far more likely we would ignore all maydays. In the end, we would squander this opportunity to mold our Future differently. We would not use the time to look for solutions that would alter the time continuum. Given enough time and separation from the issues plaguing the 18th iteration of Humanity or post-Humanity, our Modern Man would cop out on a technicality.

I fear the Future would also know this outcome would prevail, since it is the Future, and time, at least as we know it, is unilinear. But they’d try it perhaps to see if Time was not linear, hoping it wouldn’t be, but finding out that even if Time was not linear, the human condition surely is, at least in our infantile time slot. Come to think of it, given the 18th human speciation’s existence would be proof enough to the unilinear nature of time, and its unchanging nature. Imagine this as a larger representation of the Grandfather Paradox.

For we are all alive now at the very beginning of our cosmic adventure. And regardless of how much or little time we may have, one thing is quite certain. We’ve only just begun to play pretend. We’ve only just begun to take conscience of our own position under a Sun, among a trillion such other sols, shining on many tens of hundreds of trillion of planets scattered throughout the Cosmos.

And our blunt refusal to lend the Future a hand would be very much aligned with our narrow, minute, and shallow knowledge of the stakes for which we play the game of our Survival.

We are in a sense doomed to not only repeat our ancestors’ mistakes. We are bound to go to our Eventual Doom fully conscious and aware of Its Time, Date, and Cycle. Yet if we had to put in a little effort to see if the Cosmic Noose allowed some wiggle, some sort of brief respite we could use to situate ourselves and look for our Salvation, we’d most probably succumb to our innate fatalism.

Procrastination is not only the leading cause of not handing in one’s homework on time. It is also the principal reason wars are lost, peace talks fail, economies go bust, and people would rather commit suicide by overeating themselves instead of putting down the fork and hitting the water bottle and the gym.

Procrastination is the unknown force that has always hampered, and ham strung humans. Since the beginning of time, we have delayed, postponed, or otherwise pushed the moment of reckoning from trivial stuff like not doing the tax returns just yet, to major decisions affecting all of us. All the while hoping and vainly giving our brains a bit more time to adjust as if that would also magically increase our tax refunds or improve our outcome somehow.

In fact, the problem with procrastination is that our indolence is directly proportional with the amount of time we are given before the given data changes the situational paradigm. Thus, if we are given a few hours to respond to an ultimatum, we are sure to stir into action and figure out a way out. If given a few days, we will perhaps lose a bunch of precious hours figuring out if the situation poses real and present danger. But if we are given a few weeks or months or years, boy, we treat the matter at hand with such contempt that we end up acting in the very last hour of the very last day of the last week inside the last month of the final year.

If given decades or centuries or millennia, our species would contrive to forget about the warning altogether most likely, and treat its emergence as a non-immediate problem, with the naivete and innocence of small, dumb and lost children.

And if we were collectively afforded the generational computational space of millions or billions of years, we would just ignore the call to action, disregard its sender(s), and treat it all as a big fat hoax.

That is why I truly believe the Future will not give us too much warning. Because if they did, they’d only reach someone who would put them on hold, indefinitely and irrevocably, and without a moment’s thought too.

That is why the Future would only call us collect, somewhere between “You’re about to be hit by an asteroid!” and “Do this if you want some of you to live!”

The reaction time the Future will give us will depend on our progression as a rational species.

If we get our stuff together and our House in order, we may get more notice. But if we continue our path of hedonistic self-indulgence, we will be lucky to get enough time to get the dog out of the house, and into grandma’s minivan, before the asteroid hits the roof of our Home.

The Future knows best how to avoid the self-defeating Trap of placing too much trust in Us. After all, they are the Future.

In a sense, if one was to look for the Point of a Blunt Blade, they’d only be able to find it, you’ve guessed right, in the Future.

Somehow, this entire stream of consciousness left me completely used and empty as a lobster shell. I wonder now if perhaps we’d be better off living in a non-relativistic universe. A quantum universe inhabited by a multitude of variated multiverses would go a long way to alleviating my angst right now.

Oh well, we will live, and we shall learn. Hopefully, something useful that will deepen our understanding of our position in time and space beyond the dogmatic views held in high regard by academia with the same gusto a starving dog looks at a pork chop. I know, I know. My attempt at levity is quite low-hanging and off-putting after such a serious exposé but I am truly a specimen of our day and age. And my humor is my refuge, my deliverance and my only place of sanity, my Shangri-La, in this mad, mad world of ours.