u/Temporary_Rule_9486

On the Statistical Improbability of Time Travel

The development of practical time displacement technology in the late twenty-first century was accompanied by an immediate and profound operational limitation. While return to the point of origin, plus a necessary 14.3-millisecond buffer to avoid self-intersection, proved to be reliable, selecting the moment of destination did not.

Early probes could not be directed to any specified temporal coordinates. They arrived, instead, at a random point in the timeline. Or, as it soon became apparent, a random point in the entire future timeline.

Initial test flights, numbering over 300 between 2087 and 2094, yielded a consistent and troubling result. Every single probe returned, or rather, every probe that could return, as 12.4% failed to rematerialize at all, reported a destination environment characterized by complete thermodynamic equilibrium. No stars, planets or particles above the baseline quantum fluctuation threshold were observed. For years research teams debated whether this has indeed been time travel at all, or some play of currently unknown physics. The probes that did return brought back only one meaningful datum: the confirmation that at their destination, nothing remained to be observed.

After extensive debate, the consensus position of the International Temporal Physics Council (ITPC) was formalized in the 2096 Helsinki Memorandum: this outcome was not a malfunction after all, or the result of other unidentified phenomenon, but a close-mathematical certainty that should’ve been expected from the start.

The reasoning, though counterintuitive to lay understanding, can be colloquially explained following a simple thought experiment. Bear in mind that this explanation is highly simplified, as the real physics involved are a complex field of active research.

Consider the set of all natural numbers. Any finite subset, indeed, any finite representation of any subset of these numbers, like let’s say numbers 1 to 1 million, whether written, spoken, or algorithmically generated, constitutes exactly 0% of the total cardinality of the natural numbers. This holds true even for numbers of such magnitude that they cannot be physically represented using all available matter in the observable universe, even when encoded at Planck-scale density. The Graham number, Rayo’s Number or TREE(3), for reference, are vanishingly small relative to the infinite set from which they are drawn.

Temporal analogue is as follows: the interval from the Big Bang to the present day, and indeed to any future epoch within the predicted lifespan of stellar formation, represents a finite interval. The future, however, is, as far as we can extrapolate from experimental data, unbounded. Even in a heat-dead universe, residual particle motion continues. A fact confirmed by the Proxima-7 experiments (2098–2108), in which a time-displaced detector successfully managed to capture a single photon after a decade long experiment. This was indeed the first photon ever detected in a temporal destination whose spectral signature and polarization state were inconsistent with any known artifact of the displacement apparatus. Thus confirming it as indigenous to the target temporal coordinates. Fondly nicknamed “Lucy” by the Proxima’s research team, it proved that change, and therefore time, persists even in deep time.

Taking both the experimental observations and the thought experiment into consideration, it is derived that the probability of any random temporal destination falling within the finite window of "interesting" cosmic history prior to thermodynamic equilibrium, is therefore the ratio of a finite interval to an infinite one. This ratio is, in all practical and mathematical senses, zero. The chance of arriving at any epoch in which stars, planets, or life exist is functionally 0%.

Practical Applications: The Hades Program

The discovery, while devastating to the scientific ambitions of several generations, did not entirely foreclose utilitarian applications. The technology's capacity for two-way temporal displacement, to and from a destination in the heat-dead epoch, found an unexpected niche in the penal system.

By 2100, the global incarcerated population exceeded 107 million. While the UltraMax biorecycling closed-loop prison model, implemented in 2097, had proven capable of sustaining this population indefinitely with a minimal set of initial resources (provided that certain ethical protocols were suspended), the sociopolitical externalities remained intractable. Prison populations continued to function as vectors for ideological dissemination, radicalization, and political organization. And attempts at informational blackout, despite significant investment, had been uniformly unsuccessful.

The temporal displacement array offered an elegant solution: prisoners could serve their subjective sentences at a destination epoch, while the total objective time elapsed on Earth would be measured in microseconds.

Hades 2 : Design Improvements

The new deep-space penitentiary Hades 2, currently undergoing final certification, will launch in Q3 of the coming year on a 25-year loop rotation with a projected population of 16,200 inmates. The improvements to this new iteration, experts argue, would guarantee that a scenario like that of Hades 1 will not be repeated again.

The Hades 1 station, the precursor model, was constructed between 2103 and 2109 at a total cost of 18.7 billion credits. It was designed to accommodate 4,500 inmates in a fully self-sustaining closed ecological system, with backup provisions for subjective sentence durations of up to 400 years.

Launched on 14 March 2110, Hades 1 ceased telemetry transmission at objective 2.4 milliseconds post-transition. The station, by design, lacks any return mechanism, and retrieval can only be initiated by a signal transmitted from the present to the destination epoch.

It was concluded that the station did not arrive at its intended destination, or rather, it arrived at a destination from which no signal could return. Whether this was due to a miscalculation in the temporal coordinates, a structural failure during transit, or an unforeseeable interaction with the destination epoch's physical conditions remains unknown. Recovery attempts, numbering 47 as of the current date, have been unsuccessful.

The MaxFree corporation, which now operates 90% of global correctional facilities and has been contracted for the Hades program since its inception, has assured stakeholders that the Hades 2 station incorporates lessons learned from its predecessor. The new model features redundant temporal retrieval systems, enhanced structural integrity for transit stress, and a significantly hardened communication buffer that should permit telemetry return for up to 7.2 milliseconds post-transition, sufficient to confirm successful arrival.

Critics have noted that the primary lesson of Hades 1: that launching a temporal prison into the heat death of the universe with no return guarantees, is operationally identical, from the perspective of Earth, to simply executing the inmates, has not been addressed by MaxFree representatives.

Indeed, the main argument still used by MaxFree to silence critics is that attempts to locate and recover the original Hades 1 have not been abandoned, although no quantifiable data regarding the extent of these efforts has been released to the public. This, however, marks a significant shift from the original press conference given by the CEO following the original incident, now considered largely lost media. During the conference, the primary argument was that, having considered this possibility from the start, Hades 1 had been launched exclusively with inmates serving life sentences.

Anyone in the same situation?

We need a Roadside Picnic, Stalker, and/or Annihilation-style TV series because most stories about aliens are really the same Disney script about us winning, fighting, or understanding them.

These stories, on the other hand, have balls.

And dare more unsettling questions: what if the universe is so vast, ancient, and indifferent that we are neither its heroes nor its center?

And yes, the Alien Queen from James Cameron 1986 movie is now technically a Disney Princess. (It's a weird hill to die on, I know.)

(Optional title for "Fire in the Sky" movie).

Now, seriously.

I'm not talking about the perfectly mildly sane possibility that somewhere in the universe there are intelligent beings who got curious enough to point a telescope at us. Curiosity is the juice of intelligence.

I'm talking about the other aliens, the grey dudes that materialize in bedrooms to kidnap accountants in Ohio, and have picnics on Area 51.

Depending on the poll, nearly half of Americans believe that aliens have come visiting Earth in some form. And yes, among those people are perfectly rational individuals imagining something like tiny automated probes drifting through the Solar System. But I suspect that's a minority.

The thing that blows my mind is not that some people believe this.

It's that, in a strange and deeply American way, these beliefs may have become part of the political and cultural ecosystem that allows legitimate scientific research into this topics to exist.

Science has always depended on public enthusiasm. And think about all the amazing work of SETI and NASA. And yet, surrounding all of this is a vast cloud of public interest, much of it generated by people whose understanding of extraterrestrials came from Spilberg.

This is personal for me, my own dad, uneducated as he was, believed in little green men and flying saucers. But he would also buy me books of astronomy, he got me a telescope for christmas, and I still remember that screensaver of SETI@home.

At least some percentage of the political support for the scientific search for life in the universe comes from people who believe that search is already over. And I think that's more than a single digit.

The guy with the tin hat, and the guy from MIT, they both want governments to take extraterrestrial life seriously. They both want humanity to look upward. The fact that they fundamentally disagree about almost everything else is something real aliens would very much be interested in studying.

Because the possibility of alien life occupies such a unique place in the human psyche, it is, simultaneously, one of the most rigorous scientific quest ever endeavored... and one of the biggest crackpot factories of all time.

Honestly, I think the most important part of searching for aliens isn't finding aliens at all. It's trying to understand ourselves.

In 2024 Ukraine’s newly established Unmanned Systems Forces (USF), featuring elite tactical units like the 412th "Nemesis" Brigade, launched a test assault against Russian forces with a squad of 10 AI-controlled "Terminator" quadcopter drones, supplied by a Ukrainian defense manufacturer. 

The drones were launched toward the front line near of Bakhmut, with orders to cover an operational area of 3 to 5 kilometers. Once they reached the zone, human operators completely cut the communication link, leaving the drones in full "Terminator mode" to independently search for, track, and strike targets. 

The onboard AI visual-tracking systems successfully locked onto targets and killed two Russian soldiers. Making it the first confirmed instance in military history where fully autonomous drones without any human in the loop executed a fatal strike on human combatants. Although this information has only very recently been disclosed. 

This new form of warfare is advancing at an alarming rate. Some experts argue that the change in military paradigm is comparable to the wide adoption of mechanized warfare and machineguns prior to WWI. If a new major conflict were to occur now, this would lead to a rude awakening for the factions still relying on traditional non-AI methods of combat. Fully aware of this reality, the US government is pouring insane amounts of money to upgrade its own drone arsenal and AI systems.  

The chances for this technology to remain exclusively on military hands within the next decade is 0%. Much of the drones themselves and weapons systems used in Ukraine had come from cheap, mass manufactured refurbished consumer goods and open source software. Most of the contractors supplying the war effort are little to middle size specialized business, many of them local, and using technologies like hobbyst 3D printers and Arduino electronics.

The chances for AI drone attacks carried out by terrorist groups is now taken very seriously by law enforcement agencies. The FBI considers consumer drones with payload capabilities to be highly agile threats to public airspace. For major global events like the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the FBI has deployed a specialized drone task force explicitly trained to intercept uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs). FBI leadership has noted that the evolution of AI alongside advanced drones makes these "lone wolf" or asymmetric threats a primary concern.

In January 2026, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officially launched a new office dedicated entirely to advancing Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems (C-UAS) technologies. DHS has pushed a massive $1.5 billion contract vehicle to acquire tools to detect and disable these threats. But that's a far cry from the estimated cost of effectively controlling and regulating this technology.

On smuggling operations, AI drones are becoming a nightmare too. The most severe domestic challenge for law enforcement involves criminal enterprises using heavy-payload commercial drones to drop drugs, weapons, and tools directly into correctional facilities. In international contexts, agencies like the UK Ministry of Justice tracked over 1,700 drone incidents at prisons across England and Wales in a single year.

At national borders, drug cartels have institutionalized drone technology. The U.S. Northern Command estimates that more than 1,000 illicit drone flights occur along the U.S.–Mexico border every single month. Cartels exploit the 8:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. darkness window to ferry high-value, low-weight synthetic narcotics like fentanyl. Using pre-programmed navigation that doesn't require any kind of connectivity, and custom modified commercial drones capable of carrying up to 100 kilograms (bare in mind the LD50 of pure fentanyl is just 2mg for an adult).

Things are about to get ugly.

Yeah, I know The Mist series exists, but that’s not really the vibe I'm talking about. I mean a full-on The Road / The Last of Us / 20 Years Later scenario: It's ten years after absolute Cronenberg monsters invaded Earth and everything went to hell. People are forced to survive out in the mist, there's messed-up religious cults, cannibals everywhere, and Lovecraftian horrors beyond human comprehension.

The air in the containment deck of the Abaddon was sticky with the stench of old grease. The typical, comforting smell of a long-haul cruiser.

Captain Thomas found her at the end of the maintenance gantry. Engineer Vance was leaning heavily against the brass guardrail, her face washed in an intermittent neon radiance.

Below them, the jump core suspended itself in the center of the vault. It was a massive, opaque sphere of dark metal, but right now, it seemed almost alive. The Cherenkov radiation was bleeding through the liquid shielding, refracting into impossible shades of violet and oily green that didn't belong anywhere else in the thousand worlds the abbadon had touched. It gave the captain an eerie feeling.

"I’ve been looking for you on the bridge," Thomas said, his boots clicking softly against the mesh flooring.

Vance didn't turn around when she answered. Her eyes still fixed on the pulsing aurora below. "A ship's engineer doesn't have much to do once the jump has begun, Captain. The sequence is entirely automated. Besides, we aren't even in space right now. Just a tiny, fragile bubble of standard spacetime keeping the hull existing while we drift through the flux."

"Do you come down here a lot?" Thomas asked, stepping up to the rail beside her. The ambient hum of the core vibrated through the floor.

"When I want to think," she murmured, her voice flat, carrying that specific brand of fatigue common to people who spent their lives keeping machines alive. "Tell me, Tom... are you familiar with the concept of Universal Darwinism?"

Thomas frowned "I’m a pilot, Vance. Not a scientist"

"It was an old twentieth-century hypothesis," she said, finally glancing at him, her irises catching the green glare of the core. "Before the First Collapse. A physicist proposed that our universe exists entirely inside the singularity of a black hole. And that every time a massive star collapses and forms a new black hole, a baby universe is born on the other side."

Thomas shrugged disregarding the matter. "Doesn't change the price of fuel now, does it"

Vance countered, turning back to the glowing liquid "Think about it like biology. Universes aren't static; they are born, they age, and they die. So, if universes reproduce by making black holes, which kind of universe will be the most common?"

Thomas stared at the back of her head, his mind struggling to bridge the gap "The ones that make the most black holes, I suppose." He finally ventured, a bit annoyed.

"Exactly," Vance nodded "The universes whose laws of physics are perfectly tuned to maximize the production of singularities."

"Fascinating," Thomas said, though his voice lacked conviction. "But I still don't see where this is going."

Vance gestured sharply toward the core. "Underneath that shielding, inside the micro-chambers, we aren't just burning fuel. The engine maintains the hyperspace bubble by creating micro-singularities. Billions of them. Microscopic black holes, created and evaporated, over and over, millions of times a second."

She paused, the green light flaring up, casting long, shadows across the bulkheads.

"We are one species, Thomas. One among two dozen sentient races we've encountered in our tiny patch of the galaxy. And all of us, within a few hundred years of developing radio technology, discovered the exact same thing: hyperspace travel requires the artificial generation of black holes."

The hum of the core seemed to deepen, shifting from a mechanical vibration to something almost organic, like a rhythmic breathing of a giant beast.

"Sometimes," Vance whispered, "I look down there and I wonder. What if the emergence of intelligent life isn't a cosmic fluke? What if it’s an evolutionary mechanism of the universe itself? We think we conquered the stars. What if we are just a biological catalyst? Made by the cosmos to breed new universes."

She turned her face fully toward him now.

"And if that’s true... maybe everything we know and care is just a collection of tiny specks inside the core of someone else."

The silence that followed was long.

Thomas looked at her for a moment. He reached out, his rough, calloused fingers gently covering hers.

"I care about you," he said softly, his voice barely rising above the mechanical thrum of the machine.

For a second, the impossible colors seemed to fade, replaced by the simple, fragile warmth of the emergency lights

------------------------------

Would you like to flesh out the dialogue further, or explore what happens to the characters when the ship drops out of the jump?

For over half a century, the United States has been locked in a quiet, relentless war against an invading force from South America. This relentless attack is kept at bay over the narrowest chokepoint of the Central American funnel, in the Darien Gap. This is biological warfare at an industrial scale, fought over a frontline of barely 100 miles. The enemy is the screwworm fly, responsible for botfly-like agricultural scourges that decimated entire cattle ranches and caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damages, before control methods were established. Every year, millions of sterile lab grown flies are released on these borders, to prevent the swarm from reaching further north. 

For a creature whose brain weighs less than a gram, this simple fly makes for a force to be reckoned with. Its success as a scourge comes from its ability to search and identify its prey, on which it lays its eggs. The mental process behind this behaviour is, however, radically different from the way other larger predators stalk its prey. In a way, the flies' abilities are literally hardwired into their brains. 

In October 2024, the FlyWire Project culminated an immense, global scientific effort, when a massive package of papers was published in Nature. Scientists took a single female fruit fly brain and sliced it into 7,000 microscopic layers. Each tiny slice was scanned using an electron microscope, generating millions of high-resolution images. Then a custom-built AI algorithm traced the pathways of the neurons through the layers, putting them back together in a simulated version of the fly’s brain. In 2026 the simulation was hooked up to a digital body. 
The behavior emerged naturally. 

Despite lacking real eyes or wings, the virtual body was able to move around and explore its surroundings, search for food and fly, the way a real animal would do. All of this without any of the expensive learning process normally involved during the training of a new AI. It proved that the fly’s behavior, rather than deriving from a mental process, it’s actually written in the physical wiring of the brain, the connectome. 

Although this might not be true for higher lifeforms with bigger brains, that rely on thought as well as pure instinct, it does open the door to new terrifying possibilities, maybe none more frightening that the following: 

In 2024 Ukraine’s newly established Unmanned Systems Forces (USF), featuring elite tactical units like the 412th "Nemesis" Brigade, launched a test assault against Russian forces with a squad of 10 AI-controlled "Terminator" quadcopter drones, supplied by a Ukrainian defense manufacturer. 

The drones were launched toward the front line near of Bakhmut, with orders to cover an operational area of 3 to 5 kilometers. Once they reached the zone, human operators completely cut the communication link, leaving the drones in full "Terminator mode" to independently search for, track, and strike targets. 

The onboard AI visual-tracking systems successfully locked onto targets and killed two Russian soldiers. Making it the first confirmed instance in military history where fully autonomous drones without any human in the loop executed a fatal strike on human combatants. Although this information has only very recently been disclosed. 

This new form of warfare is advancing at an alarming rate. Some experts argue that the change in military paradigm is comparable to the wide adoption of mechanized warfare and machineguns prior to WWI. If a new major conflict were to occur now, this would lead to a rude awakening for the factions still relying on traditional non-AI methods of combat. Fully aware of this reality, the US government is pouring insane amounts of money to upgrade its own drone arsenal and AI systems.  

It is only conceivable that, in the search for an advantage, new alleys would be explored and tested. And here comes the flies: An AI capable of managing a combat flying vehicle is complex to train and upgrade. A fly’s brain, although difficult to scan at first, provides an already fully built and trained AI, tested by millions of years of natural evolution. 

In Frank Herbert’s Universe humanity has grown weary of artificial intelligence, which is strictly forbidden under the universal command: “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”

But nothing is mentioned about the likeness of a fly’s brain. 

The image above is a concept art piece for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movie. A “hunter-seeker”, a miniature drone, not bigger than an insect, operated remotely and capable of delivering a deadly poison to its victim. In the book’s version the seeker it’s even smaller: a microscopic, floating needle, no longer than a few centimeters. Suspended in the air by a miniature anti-gravity field. 

Our drones are not yet that small or terrifying. But they are about as rudimentary right now as they ever are going to be. Technology advances quickly, more so when lives are on the line, and there's a military budget footing the bill. 

Perhaps, in a not so distant future, new flies would come into the sky. To wage a very different war.

Deep beneath the Indian Ocean, in the abyssal plains of the Diamantina Zone, lies a macabre anomaly: For millions of years, the ocean floor has accumulated an unnatural density of fossilized remains of whales, sharks and ancient marine megafauna.

These creatures did not choose this remote trench as their final resting place. Instead, they were victims of the ocean’s dynamics: When a massive marine animal dies, its carcass becomes caught by global currents, sometimes drifting thousands of miles until the specific topography of the seafloor slope funnels the remains into these precise geographic traps. 

The depths of earth and the sea have been fertile grounds for archeology and paleontology, but as we venture further into the universe, we are beginning to realize that space, just like deep sea, has its own currents and trenches, and maybe even its own graveyards. 

For over sixty years, SETI efforts focused on radio astronomy and the detection of active broadcasts. Following decades of silence, this silently shifted towards the hunting for technosignatures: the physical, more material footprints of ancient long gone civilizations, that can endure billions of years longer. 

Specifically, if we are looking for space artifacts, there are some places we definitely wanna look first. 

In the 18th century, mathematician Joseph Lagrange proved that when a planet orbits a star, there are five specific pockets where their gravitational forces cancel each other out. Any interstellar object that remained for some time in our inner solar system could be searched here, in these stable Lagrange points. And we know these traps work, because we have already found trojan asteroids caught inside them. 

If anything, the idea of an alien craft of some kind hiding in our orbit is not new. Following Nikola Tesla’s strange radio interceptions in 1899, and some mysterious Cold War radar shadows, conspiracy maniacs came out with the idea of a “Black Knight”: a supposed alien satellite observing earth for thousands of years. Although I honestly prefer the sentinel from Arthur C. Clarke, as the better science fiction story of the two. In the end, Tesla signals were just pulsars, and the radar shadows were real secret satellites from uncle Sam. 

However, far from being complete nonsense, this is a formalized academic concept. Back in the 60’s physicist Ronald Bracewell suggested that an autonomous alien probe could enter a stable orbit around a promising planet, power down its systems into deep hibernation, and wait for millions, even billions of years. Allowing evolution to cook, while waiting for a technological signature to wake it up.

In 2019, physicist James Benford borrowed this concept and coined a definitive scientific term: "Lurkers." He argued that if a Lurker wanted to observe Earth over geological timescales, co-orbital asteroids are the only logical places to look. They are close enough to monitor our biosphere, but stable enough to survive out of sight with minimum adjustments to their orbit. These points also contain raw resources to allow repairs or restocking if need be. A Lurker would generate no internal heat, emit no radio waves, and reflect light exactly like a common space rock.  

Humanity has some Lurkers of its own, kind of. Back in the 70’s NASA launched the Pioneer 10 and 11, but lost them both after 2003 when their nuclear batteries were depleted. All while they ventured at escape velocities, beyond our solar system. The Voyagers and new horizon will soon follow, and who knows how many more stuff humanity will end up ejecting into interstellar space.  

Yet, because they are traveling through the vacuum of space, protected from atmospheric erosion and tectonic destruction, these probes will easily outlive our entire civilization.  

Now, consider the cosmic timeline. If a young, primitive species like ours can launch five interstellar artifacts in less than a century of spaceflight, what would an older civilization that lasted for a hundred thousand years leave behind? They would have saturated the orbital currents of the galaxy with millions of automated machines, most of them probably long dead. 

In 2023, Dr. Avi Loeb, the former chair of Harvard’s Astronomy Department, led an expedition to the floor of the Pacific Ocean near Papua New Guinea, to the calculated crash site of IM1. A meteor that U.S. government sensors confirmed had entered our solar system from interstellar space at an anomalous velocity.

Loeb’s team dragged the seafloor and recovered hundreds of these weird looking microscopic metallic spherules. When analyzed, a specific cluster displayed an unprecedented chemical signature, rich in Beryllium, Lanthanum, and Uranium. Loeb openly speculated that these weren't fragments of a normal space rock, but the melted remnants of an artificial alien probe. 

Apparently the remains were nothing but terrestrial, having the exact chemical footprint of terrestrial coal ash pollution. But even if this specific expedition failed, it did serve as an example for this modern shift in paradigm: from passively listening, to actively hunting. 

Now that Spielberg is out with his "Close Encounters of Third Kind part XVII" again, I think is a good ocassion to reflect on what would happened if we where to make contact with advanced aliens. Of course there's an insurmountable amount of movies, novels and whatnot about the topic (I still prefer Mars Attack), but good sci fi and storytelling is worlds away from real life. My take on the subject is more of a first radio contact, with the vast distances of space making it impossible to have a conversation, unless you're willing to wait a few centuries. Honestly, if we are talking about sci fi, which is the dominion of this topic (for now...), I surely prefer the more philosophical take of Stanisław Lem in "His Master's Voice". In this novel there's a "first contact" (sorta), while analyzing readings scientists manage to identify a signal that is of intelligent origin. Although the matter on whether is genuine or even intelligent is discussed for a time before a consensus emerges. In my opinion, if there's alien radio us, we might have just received and stored the transmission, we just haven't realized yet. The data might be stored for decades, before some newer AI can filter the noise out during a routine analysis on a complete unrelated research, before someone realizes. And even then, it would be highly disputed, not just for a time, but forever, there would be people convinced instantly and those to stubborn to admit anything less than a UFO landing on the white house, this is just human nature. The other thing interesting about Lem novel is the fact, which I find most realistic, that this signal reaching us was probably completely unintentional by the aliens. It wasn't meant to be decipher like in the novel "contact" or in the voyager spacecraft's golden plate (both ideas came from the same guy). So it might be the meaning of life (42) or grandma's Gagh recipe, the point is not what the message means, but what it means to us to have an undeciphrable piece of alien knowledge. And that's what His Master's Voice is about: people getting paranoid, scientists becoming frustrated, and politicians making hollow promises, which is pretty much the last 70 years of world history in a nutshell. In desperation the scientists try everything up to the point of synthesizing a kind of goo following the message data, which some biochemistry doctor reinterpreted as a protein sequence (I'm also quite sure Pluribus borrowed this idea). But this goo doesn't do anything and at the end it all amounts to nothing. Humanity now knows there's someone out there, some new scientific research institutes and initiatives have received green light, but their work remains to be largely theoretical, slowly becoming a bottomless pit for intelligent people and government money. There was initial general skepticism, which was slowly turned as the idea became more and more accepted by the scientific community, but really most of the heavy lifting came from scientific communicators and influencers. It followed a short period of intense paranoia within some groups, the same ones that were already intensely paranoid about other things before this baceme known, like doomsday preppers. There will also be a ton of people seeking to monetize this momentum, social media stakeholders above all, which will feed the misinformation. But after a decade or so, maybe with the coming of age of the new generation, this incredible news would become something more teaching on schools among the periodic table and the history of independence. And why do I think this is so terrifying? We'll, obviously a strange new monumental revelation with insufficient data and a lot of room for speculation is the kind of thing that shows you just how messed up humans are. But also, it's the "irrelevance" that would surely follow. There will always be people fascinated by the possibilities, but the vast majority will default to celebrity gossip once more. This surge in interest and following anticlimactic outcome will irremediable damage the search for alien intelligence, more so, I believe, that having received no message at all.

What do you think? I sure like to hear your opinions, and sorry for tge lenght. My job is repetitive and boring and need to spend the time thinking about something before my brain slowly fossilizes.

The Tullimonstrum that lived 300M years ago and we known only by fossils, doesn't really fit into any other category of animals that we are aware of. Maybe was evolution gambling drunk, or perhaps is a literal alien. A member from a formidable galactic empire that once spanned across the stars and found in ancient earth's oceans a cheap and exotic vacation spot.

Now, seriously. The idea of panspermia is highly interesting. But another very interesting idea is "xenocommensalism". This is the version of panspermia where the aliens arrived at a planet that already has a biosphere, but instead of being immediate eliminated by it or begin to eliminate it themselves, a form of mutualism arise. Here, both the native and introduced life forms adapt without wiping each other out, they may exchange resources or occupy distinct niches. Forming a mutually beneficial or neutrally coexisting biological system. And maybe evwn participate unwillingly in horizontal gene transfer. If their microorganisms may eventually swap genetic material between both groups, creating a new, hybrid ecosystem, to the point that, billions of years latter, it's impossible to tell if there was more than one biosphere to begin with. Even if you dislike the idea of alien traveling trough space, new, very different life could have expontaneusly arisen later on, in parallel with the life existing in primitive earth. And over time they would've become "glued" into the single tree of life we know today. A tree with many branches, a single trunk, but maybe... many roots. What do you think? I believe it's an interesting idea.

I've received some very interesting reviews on my last post; one in particular inspired me to explore the themes of causality and faster-than-light travel a bit more. Although this is naturally a challenge for a sci-fi setting (and what ultimately forbids FTL travel in our universe altogether), it's also an interesting theme to have fun with. The basic idea in this story is that, without FTL travel, humanity would never have become aware of the danger they were facing. However, because this technology exists, they are now trapped in a state of utter, incomprehensible helplessness, since knowledge has ultimately not helped them escape their destiny.

I was watching season 1 of the original "The twilight zone" from 1959 the other day. What does old sci-fi has that makes it soo good? Anyways, I was bored and made this outline intro for a sci fi tale, what do you think? I asked GPT to translated into English, it might sound a bit AI-ish, but it's all me.