Message from the Future

Greetings.

My name is Shakshak and I am sending you this message from about 5.6 billion years in the future. Shakshak is not my real name, but it shall be convenient for you to call me by it. Your kind lacks the anatomical capability of using or understanding my language just as surely as a sea worm is unable to use or understand yours.

The information I am about to give you will probably prove of no practical value to you whatsoever. I feel the need to state this as your human race places a bizarrely high value on that which you deem useful. We long ago evolved beyond such lower level concerns. In any case, I merely offer this knowledge for your pleasure, as even your primitive species displays some slight valuation of knowledge for its own sake.

You will not be surprised to know that our science is incomprehensibly more advanced than your own. We have been able to learn far more about the universe and its history (and likely future) than you may have thought possible. In fact, the extent of our knowledge dwarfs your own scientific attainments on the order of something like ten billion to one. In other words, we know about 10,000,000,000 times more than you do.

However, lest you should consider this mere bragging (a behavior which is utterly foreign to us), I should also point out that our knowledge of our own ignorance exceeds your own such knowledge by a far greater magnitude. This is because, as one of your own sayings puts it so well, the more you know, the more you realize how much you don’t know. With each tremendous advance in knowledge, there is an even greater increase in the awareness of how much we still don’t understand. You humans really have no idea just how little you know about things. That is not an insult, it is a simple statement of fact. We have a far more extensive awareness of our ignorance, and, according to our best estimates (which we of course cannot know are even remotely accurate), what is left to be known, or perhaps what is never knowable, outnumbers the known by a factor of 125 quadrillion to one.

So, if there is any practical “takeaway” from this missive, it is this: You will never know everything, not even close; in fact, the more you learn, the more depressingly obvious it will become how much there is that you can never know. So get over it. Accept the fact of perpetual ignorance and move on.

However, we now have far more knowledge of cosmic history and can date things with a fair degree of accuracy.

For instance, what you so charmingly call the Big Bang (your understanding of it is still very childish, but the general concept is correct) we now know occurred on a Saturday morning—to be exact, it was September 3rd in what you might call the year 13,846,347,188 B.C. at precisely 8:01 a.m. local time.

It should be noted, however, that there is a margin of error of +/- 2.66 million years.

Be that as it may, the time cited above is generally accepted as the exact moment of Creation. Further, we have been able to determine, via methods that are light years beyond your comprehension, what most likely existed prior to the Big Bang: Nothing.

That’s right. No pre-existent matter, no form of energy, no fluctuating quantum state. Nothing. Not even “empty space”. Just plain nothing. So it appears that somehow, in ways no one may ever understand, at one non-moment (as time did not yet exist) there was absolutely nothing, and then all of a sudden the universe just exploded into being.

One question that vexes our philosophers is that, given the presumed start time of 8:01 a.m., how do you explain that everything, including time itself, began when it was already 8 hours and 1 minute after midnight? And it was already Saturday morning—what happened to the rest of that week?

These are just a few of the quadrillions upon quadrillions of questions we may never be able to answer.

Now, as for the age of the earth, it is difficult to state with precision due to the fact that the earth, unlike the universe, had the courtesy of not just suddenly appearing out of nowhere at some singular moment in time (namely, the very first moment in time). The earth, as you well know, gradually accreted from the materials of the solar nebula, a process which took many millions of years. However, our best guess for the moment at which the earth achieved its full mass is 5:37 p.m. on Thursday, February 30 (the earth’s rotation was different back then and February actually had 32 days), 4,681,355,476 B.C., give or take 1.25 million years or so.

Life first appeared on earth in what is, in your time period, New Jersey, at 6:13 a.m. on the morning of Tuesday, May 12, 3,866,554,789 B.C. The first fish to crawl up onto the land—well, it depends. You see, it first happened at 7:57 a.m. on Monday, July 13 in the year 398,512,654 B.C., near your city of London; however, the fish only remained on the surface for a few minutes before retreating back into the water (it was, after all, Monday morning, and even in our time we know how difficult it can be to really get going on a Monday). However, I am glad to report that the following day, Tuesday, July 14, the fish climbed up onto the land once more and decided to stay this time. How it managed to breathe, given that it was a fish who had spent its entire life underwater, we still do not know.

The first human being of your kind—what you so adorably call Homo sapiens—was born at 4:28 p.m. on Wednesday, April 1, 186,244 B.C. in the land you know as Kenya. Her parents did not notice that she was in fact an entirely new species. They just thought her a rather odd-looking child with a few strange yet endearing quirks. Sadly, she got picked on a lot at school; but I am happy to report that she went on to have a brilliant career as a maker of innovative new tools.

So much for your past. Now to enlighten you as to your future.

The good news is that world peace and social justice will be achieved—at exactly 10:04 a.m. on the morning of Friday, June 24, 2380.

The bad news is that it will not last long. World peace and social justice being such inherently fragile things given the nature of your species, this sublime yet passing state of utopia will begin to unravel, alas, as early as the following Monday morning, June 27, when a certain Malko Darson, residing in the suburbs of Cleveland, accidentally spills scalding hot coffee on his hand and then goes on to be in a cranky mood all day. It would be too tedious and depressing to recount the unlikely chain of events that follows which eventually leads to the complete dissolution of world peace and social justice. You’ll find out.

However, for anyone who happens to be alive in 2380—enjoy that weekend.

You may be wondering about my species’ relationship to your own. Well, as we are separated by some five billion years, it is difficult to trace with any degree of certainty. Our scientists tend to assume that we are your descendants. This is because, assuming that your race did not simply die out at some point (the fossil and historical records are unclear on this point and I can assure you it is a source of heated controversy among scholars), then we are more than likely, in fact almost certainly, among your many descendant species. Yes, many. Think of it this way—each person who leaves behind descendants typically ends up having a multitude of them, continually branching out across time. It is similar to how your ancestors become more numerous the further back you go in history.

Species are the same way. If the human race did not go extinct, then a large number of the species alive today are your descendants, from my own highly advanced race to the lowly sea worms of the Martian oceans (which, I am sad to report, are severely endangered at present due to the expansion of the sun).

We are as different from you, however, as you are from the early forms of sea life that populated the earth. In fact, given the far greater distance in time, we are even further removed from you than you are from them. This does not necessarily mean we are better, and if we are more advanced it is not a matter of evolutionary necessity. As I said, the Martian sea worms may very well be your great great infinitely-many-greats grandchildren too.

And as I stated before, we do not even know with certainty that we are descended from you. It seems the most likely scenario, however, because, apart from the theory of human descent, we have the darnedest time trying to figure out just exactly where we came from.

It is no use telling you what we call ourselves, since, as I mentioned at the outset, you lack the anatomical capability of “speaking” our language (we do not really “speak” as you understand the term; it is a mere analogy).

Oh, by the way, I should mention too that the earth was burnt up by the red giant sun some ages ago. I would say it’s been about 300 million years at least. My species dwells in a vast network of thought clouds scattered all over the solar system.

You may be interested to know that intelligent life does exist elsewhere in the universe. However, don’t get your hopes up. Most of them are either dreadfully boring and unsophisticated or else too pretentious and self-absorbed to bother with. We have tried making friends with many species across the Milky Way but, except for a few other intelligent cosmic outcasts like us with whom we exchange infrequent messages and visits, we remain isolated and lonely. The galactic community isn’t nearly as glitzy and glamorous as you might imagine, and we don’t care about being invited to their parties anyway.

One way in which we are quite different from you is that we do not exactly reproduce. Not being bound to biological forms, we continue via a type of information preservation and recombination. We have something like what you know as love, but unlike you, we do not associate it with reproduction. Ours is a purely intellectual love. Our ancestors evolved beyond sex eons ago and we do not miss it at all. We observe sexual behavior in lesser species and it is a phenomenon that arouses in us almost universal revulsion and horror. I am sorry you still have to deal with that.

Finally, we have been able to calculate the exact moment at which the universe itself will end. What happens after that we do not know, although the best guess is what came before: Nothing. If an observer could somehow travel there (which would of course be impossible as there is literally nothing there to travel to), he would not be able to find a single trace of evidence that the universe ever existed. So it will be just as though the universe never did exist at all. No one will remember you or your life; there will be no one there to remember. Therefore, enjoy it while it lasts.

However, the good news is that we have a very long time left until all of reality disappears without a trace. According to our best estimates, the universe will go poof at precisely 7:55 a.m. on April 24 in the year 10 to the 10^th to the 54^th A.D. (give or take 981 quadrillion years).

It will, of course, be a Monday morning.