User blog:JERealize/Progress Bar: Issue 047

(May 18, 2014)

Hello. Nothing much will be done in this edition of Progress Bar, but I do have a bit of a story to tell. (It is fictional, by the way.)

The Permanent End
--a fictional story written by Julian Espinoza-- I am writing to you an urgent notice, as there is little time left. The truth of the matter is, you are all living in a computer simulation, created by me. The concern with that is, outside of the simulation is a dying universe. Many billions of years were supposed to wait ahead of you, but sadly, you will not get to reach them. You would have loved how the Earth would turn out.

The first fourteen billion years of our universe's lifespan, as the collective accounts our dying world could process show, were unfavorable. We didn't get light for 700,000 years, and it took millions more years to get stars. Our Earth was created nine billion years afterward, but the first life on Earth didn't arrive until a few hundred million years later.

And then it began. The challenge of life itself: survival. The first few waves of life on Earth didn't stand a chance, as the still-chaotic early Solar System wiped them out with regularity. Only when the rampage died down did microbes meet the challenge, and they did with every generation. They knew nothing, but kept on moving, and over time, they adapted. They diverged from each other, creating the first aquatic lifeforms. But some became plants and fungi, and some remained bacteria. They would never know the world around them.

Animals began to diverge, as some rose from the oceans to settle the newly-oxidized planet. The animals were the most fortunate of all life forms, as they could see and feel and sense like other lifeforms could not. They learned throughout their lifespan how to succeed through every challenge, until they reached their demise. It was once believed that everyone had their time and that everyone eventually dies, but on Earth, one day, a new lifeform rose up from obscurity.

Unlike the feral specimens around them, these new creatures could think and plan in a more organized way; in fact, they were so mentally able that they built their own homes, made their own tools, and grew their own food. With time, they tamed the lands around them, created systems of communication, built more impressive contraptions that could do what other animals could never understand, and even taught other animals to serve them.

The populations of these new creatures grew, and these "humans", as they later became called, created a society based on reasoning, a luxury only for the humans themselves. Soon enough, the survival instinct forced humans against each other, and they crafted weapons of steel to use against each other. Everyone wanted to stay on top, but soon enough, humans split into groups and worked together to support everyone within their own group and fight against everyone else.

Despite this, soon, people grew to accept that everyone else existed, and tried to cooperate with each other, using the power of reasoning to come up with solutions despite their paranoias. They created ways of growing more food, and more quickly, and lasting much longer. They learned to entertain each other without being present. They came up with the idea to use machines to do work for them. And for a moment, they felt like they were truly the most dominant species in the universe, regardless of the quarrels they had between each other.

And then, humanity went through the darkest hours of its existence. I remember it well. I was born about thirty years before we realized too late that it all went wrong. First, we fell short on oil supply, and the prices of oil, food, and especially petroleum fuel rose until we could regulate part of the change with wireless-electric cars and artificial meat. The temperatures rose, and my lands turned into barren deserts, and I had to escape north, where I barely passed through due to my job skills. At that point, no one was skeptical as to the climate change we caused.

However, such a panic and such a loss caused people to fight against other people once again, despite the efforts made by machinery. Scarier and scarier weapons were used on innocent people, as basic human rights were stomped upon. Famine was widespread, and only a few million people in the world could spend freely. It took decades for a new system, able to realize and work against our problems, to be established, but at a cost of over a billion lives. Another billion would be lost to the fight against the nature of a newly-reconverted chaotic Earth.

At this point, machines took over as the caretakers of the humans and the world, and those who could fled to worlds made of digital code, where the perfect world, albeit fake as it was, was within their grasp. For some, the ability to live beyond the eternal clutches of aging was finally realized, and I was admitted as a test subject. I managed to watch humanity's painful struggle to regain their bearings and fight the chaotic Earth back, and humanity restored the Earth to a crisp, clean land of sustenance by my 300th birthday. I smiled the day I heard the news.

It was a smile of relief after centuries of grief. The fact that I could once again regale in the magnificence of the world around me, even more so than when I had met it on my first day, was astounding. Yet, only those from the days before the destruction really cared. The rest were either in their computerized worlds, or settling on new towns built on other planets. And who could blame them? They had a rough life, and retreat was common for a primal species like ours. Their views of life, of a chance to explore a world of ruins given to them only by luck, were different from mine, of a cycle between the ever-increasing chaos and destruction that brings despair to millions, and the ever-increasing glory and prosperity that must be savored as quickly as it comes, before it leaves to continue the cycle all over again. The younger ones never did understand how the older ones coped with a ravaged world that once used to be peaceful.

Fortunately for us, the destruction that was foreseen from millenia of experience came in ever-smaller amounts from then on. With food, shelter, leisure, and the promise of seeing something greater a fact of life for every human, regardless of their origins, a renaissance of creativity spurred among the people. Long-lost people were brought back to life, and they continued to spread their influence from where they left off. Death became only a rare and temporary inconvenience from then on. The entire solar system became settled by any human who wished to do so. The sun, in its entirety, was converted into a constant fountain of energy, and a single time and date was guaranteed universal. Humanity has finally reached what previous generations would call Utopia, but what we would consider just a new way of human life.

We one day discovered life on faraway planets, but when we started sending humans there and everywhere, communication was never assured due to the long distance. As humans, we found a way to communicate and eventually travel through wormholes we created ourselves, and humanity was once again more united. More planets orbiting faraway stars became centers of peaceful human residence without going through what Earth went through. We mastered greater and greater forces of the universe, and on one new day, we made contact with, and subsequently befriended, another form of sapient life, spacefaring like our people.

Within the following years, a new society, this time including all forms of sapient life, formed, with the goal of maintaining a universal balance between all races, expanding to new lands, creating new technologies, and assisting newly-formed sapient lifeforms with conversion to a seafaring race. New universes were found, and we expanded profusely through them. The universe was studied through its past and replicated on computers. Stars like ours were saved from their demise, and lived the same immortality as we were to live.

Despite the new dating and time system adopted by all races, I still remember the days and years we humans used to conform to. Millions, billions, trillions, quadrillions, quintillions of years and beyond, continue to pass, and life in the good ol' multiversal society become more and more boring. That's when I dedicate myself to exploring many multiverse-wide computer simulations. Unfortunately, our society on real life find themselves facing larger and larger problems once again, escalating from expanding and dying stars, to the thinning out of universes, to the disassembly of the most minute particles of the universe. And we fight to fix each of these problems with increasing difficulty. And once again, for the first time in near-infinity, I feared for the fate of our multiverse.

Sadly, in real life, just a few weeks ago, our society met a problem that none of us could stop: instantaneous particle dissipation. All particles would, on the Planck scale, far beyond any capable sapient or robotic reach, split into nothing and leave nothing in its place. This was it. The ultimate ruin. We couldn't stop it, even with the pinnacles of our technology, which had plateaued a distant time ago. After a seemingly infinite period of time, we weren't ready to accept permanent death. At this point, a society composed of countless members collectively evolving into a unified, tranquil race, are up at arms against each other, yet cannot muster up the primal strength necessary to pull the trigger and start the multiversal bang before the multiversal whimper, because they have no primal instinct. They are calm and collected, albeit still imbalanced due to recent events. I only heard the news a few days after I started this simulation of the 21st Century, because I wanted to live life how I wanted it, and take control to feel like I could prevent disaster.

It's such a shame that this may be my last simulation. I wish I could show you the splendor of our multiverse before it dies out, but only minutes remain, so even if I could take you, you could never savor it all in time. However, due to the computer simulation in place, I can speed the world up so we can live in millenia, and hopefully, you can reach some form of enlightenment here. I please ask you to gather yourself, as we still have plenty of time to learn and live and celebrate, as we have a chance to avoid the reign of darkness I had to endure in my lifetime. We can achieve it all. All we need to do is think and evolve on a new level, and enjoy the moment. We can prevent the darkness. All we need to do is combine forces to do so. We can all relax in time for our final day. All we need is an enlightened experience.

These next few years are going to be exciting, I can assure you. Keep listening tomorrow morning for my next broadcast, and have a good night and a good night's rest. I'll see you next time.