Posthuman Blues

Look at the galactic spiral below. It's not the Milky Way, although it's a close relative. Forget for the moment that you're looking at an alien galaxy. Pretend it's home.





Each mote of light is a star, as transient in its own magnificent way as the blinking of fireflies. Nothing is permanent, yet billions of the stars embedded in this cosmic swirl have lasted long enough to accrete planets: ponderous, striped gas giants to which Jupiter is but a comma; hot, rocky worlds that mirror Mars, Venus and -- quite probably -- our own Earth.

A "billion" can be a difficult number to truly appreciate, except maybe as an abstract sum of money. Our minds never evolved to deal with such celestial arithmetic. Our rational left-brains, good enough for drafting spreadsheets and tallying the month's bills, are left in embarrassed stupor. I don't know how many stars this galaxy has, but let's say 100 billion. Again: a challenging number. No wonder people made fun of Carl Sagan -- speaking of such immensity in merely human language is discomfitingly comical.

The known universe has over 100 billion galaxies, each hosting its own retinue of stars. Most of these stars have planets; it's statistically inevitable that some of these cradle life. And of these, a fraction almost certainly harbor intelligent life: thinking beings following unguessable agendas. As much as we pretend otherwise, the Earth is not central or even significant in this dizzying sprawl of suns and planets. No anthropocentric deities watch over us or offer assistance.

Sagan encapsulated our predicament by comparing our planet to a pale blue dot, a speck of dust adrift in a sunbeam. But we're not the only speck of dust, and the sunbeams are so numerous that they interpenetrate until all is a rich, uniform white.

The human species, unique and vulberable, has perhaps a few hundred years left unless radical measures are taken. If we fall silent, our broadcasts will outlive us, phantom emissaries slicing through the interstellar dark, growing steadily weaker as they're pummelled by clouds of dust and drowned by the electromagnetic wailing of rival stars. Eventually our presence will be reduced to the abstruse realm of quantum fluctuation.

The maddening stammer of "current events": a trite and forgettable dream.

The sky is alive with light.