Our computers, of course, had prepared us to some extent, but what we saw as we materialized in Earth orbit made us gasp. It was unmistakably our beautiful blue planet, but the continents had shifted in our absence, coalescing along the equator, forming odd, unfamiliar coastlines. With a few exceptions — the outline of the British Isles, though much farther south, was still recognizable (there will always be an England) — every other landmark had been obliterated, though with some imagination we could still guess where South America had snuggled into the embrace of Africa, our archaic homeland.
Our instruments indicated a humid, tropical world, densely covered with forest and jungle, surrounded by one warm ocean.
We decided, at my urging, for totally sentimental reasons, to land our spacecraft — almost as large as a good-size city — where our computers calculated Paris had once been.
Our original, much humbler mission had been to journey, at 80% of the speed of light, to the center of the Milky Way, a round trip of nearly 100,000 light years. At that speed, because of time dilation, we would have aged relatively little during the journey, but we had been warned of the consequences. Returning to Earth after the passage of a hundred millennia, we were to assume that no one would remember sending us; that the social and political situation could be anything: warring regions, a planet devastated by atomic war, a regression from science into superstition and fear, or a much advanced civilization, perhaps with values and motivations beyond our comprehension. In short, we volunteered to sacrifice our lives for the sake of science.
Most of us were young when we left, between our early twenties and early thirties. We grew up together in a cohort as tight as any village. We did no reproduce because we thought it irresponsible to raise children in the severe austerity of a spacecraft, and because none of wanted to expose a child, even an adult child, to the social and cultural death that awaited us.
Although we rarely discussed the subject, it was on everyone’s mind that whatever knowledge we brought back with us, might not be of the slightest interest to the humans of a hundred millennia in the future; indeed, the knowledge might have by then been obtained by other means, for example, by space probes or advanced observational equipment.
On the one and only occasion we discussed this matter, I told the following story, and then remained silent.
At the beginning of the twentieth century it was theorized that penguins were a remnant of a species of proto-bird that spanned the transition from dinosaur to Aves. To test this theory it would be essential to gather the embryos, that is, the eggs of a certain type of penguin. To reach their remote breeding grounds it would be necessary to scale a high plateau in the Antarctic winter, and then transport this precious cargo, while protecting it from freezing, back down the steep slopes of the plateau, pack it carefully aboard a ship, which would sail to England, where it would be delivered into the hands of scientists at Oxford and Cambridge.
The men who carried out this perilous mission were brave explorers skilled in mountain climbing and survival in the harshest climate on Earth. The weather conditions were appalling — high winds day and night, a never-ending gale in near darkness almost twenty-four hours a day. One of these exceptional men was killed in a fall, his body disappearing into an abyss.
They gathered the eggs, wrapped them for maximal warmth and protection from damage, and repeated their exhausting, horrific journey in reverse. The men reached their base at the edge of the ice shelf, half-dead from exposure and malnourishment. But they recovered and reverently stowed the eggs aboard the ship. After many delays caused by being stuck fast in the ice which threatened to crush their ship like the eggs they were carrying, they eventually reached the open sea.
This is when they discovered that Europe was at war. They managed to safely hand over the eggs to those eminent scientists. But the eggs were not immediately examined; instead, they languished untouched in the laboratories until the early 1920s because of wartime disruptions. By then it had been proven by other means that the theory of the penguin as a living relic of the proto-birds was in fact mistaken. The hard-won specimens were useless.
We half-expected something like this to be our fate, but the explorer in us drove us past these misgivings. Perhaps we, consciously or unconsciously, were drawn to the romantic notion of the nobility of failure, or the existential notion of authenticity, that how you play the game is more important than winning. We were young.
But what transpired on the first half of our voyage dwarfed these concerns almost to a mathematical point. In fact, we ourselves were reduced to a mathematical point, while at the same time being everywhere in the universe at once.
In the course of that voyage we stumbled upon a way to increase our velocity from the already unprecedented 80% of the speed of light to what the laws of physics, as we understood them then, decreed impossible: 95% of the speed of light. The solution was breathtaking in its daring and simplicity, while at the same time having that elegance that is almost as convincing as the mathematical proof.
Once again, in the spirit of adventure and self-sacrifice, we decided to abandon our original mission and increase the range of our exploration from 50,000 light years to thirty million light years. We would be away from our home planet a total of sixty million years. We understood all too well that the odds were greatly against us. We were gambling that civilization would still exist on Earth, despite the strong likelihood of a comet or asteroid collision, like the one that had caused a mass extinction of not only the dinosaurs, but a wide range of plant, land and aquatic life, and had occurred about sixty million years before our departure. Yet we could not pass up this opportunity, even though we were aware of the fact that at this new speed we could have completed our original mission and returned to an Earth not much changed and within living memory. Our curiosity won the day over these sensible options.
In hindsight it was not an entirely bad decision. We encountered an advanced civilization that freely shared with us its extraordinary knowledge, technology and insights. We were bringing back the Holy Grail of the utopian dreamers. We were ourselves so transformed by this exposure that our old selves seemed well-meaning but pathetic, as crude in our understanding as alchemists and theologians. We had, like the caterpillar in its cocoon, dissolved in our own juices to nourish new cells that would coalesce into a beautiful butterfly.
We arrived with the Grail in hand and with godlike powers and understanding, to a home unrecognizable and — though we tried not to be profoundly shaken — unpopulated. The human species, in any form, was simply absent.
We undertook an archeological investigation by using ground-penetrating radar and boring deep into the earth and examining the strata of the cores. From the first technique we discovered the original piers — like worn-down mammoth tusks — of the Eiffel Tower. We sent in robot-excavators that quickly exposed them to the light of day for the first time in tens of millions of years. From the second technique we found a broad band of carbon and fossilized bone that indicated a mass extinction of human life. But we did not find associated with it a stratum of any extraterrestrial elements. Therefore, something other than an asteroid or comet impact was responsible, although we did find evidence, as we orbited the Earth, that it had been struck a number of times by objects in excess of a kilometer in diameter. It may be the case that our ancestors (although by Earth chronology they were our descendants) had been sufficiently advanced to divert or shatter objects capable of causing an extinction-level event (euphemism of euphemisms).
We bored cores all over the enormous supercontinent and under the sea and found the same carbon-and-bone layer at the same depth everywhere, thus pointing to a nearly simultaneous catastrophe that raged for about a century. The layer was dated rather precisely to 59.7 million years ago, roughly a hundred thousand years after we left in the twenty-sixth century.
Our sensors picked up a number of weak signals originating deep underground in areas that had once been mountainous but were now high-altitude plains, and one signal from the dark side of the Moon (now considerably farther away than in our day). We dispatched a team to the Moon since no excavation would be required to investigate the source. They found hardened concrete bunkers with thick metal doors, like vaults but unlocked, and inside a complete, or nearly complete, account in holograms of what had happened.
First breaking out in a remote tropical location, a zone deliberately left undeveloped to preserve its rainforests and biodiversity, a virus, hitherto unknown, infected scientists at a research station. Being at first asymptomatic, the infected scientists attended conferences in densely populated megalopolises. The disease, a type of hemorrhagic fever, spread so rapidly that researchers had no time to analyze it and manufacture a cure. In fact, it first decimated the scientists themselves, further slowing an effective response.
The virus proved particularly protean, mutating so quickly that mass distribution of medication always lagged behind new strains of this deadly pathogen.
After a few decades the Earth became virtually uninhabitable; therefore, it was decided to transport as many of the uninfected as possible, abandon the home planet and populate a number of scattered colonies that were in the very early stages of settlement.
There the record ends, no doubt also abandoned in the chaos when every conceivable resource was being utilized to evacuate the healthy population. We estimate they attempted to rescue about 150 million of a total world population of one billion.
It is evident no effort, or no successful effort, was made to repopulate the Earth. Perhaps it was forever quarantined. Neither do we think the colonizations were ultimately successful, for a sweep of many millions of light years in all directions did not pick up any signs of intelligent life. It is possible that they evolved into a life form that survived, but was more animal than human, such as the miserable survivors of Dr. Moreau’s hideous and pointless experiments.
We ourselves are not concerned about this apocalyptic virus, or any virus for that matter, because of the Holy Grail we found, that is, less poetically, the vast knowledge and technology given to us by the highly advanced civilization we encountered thirty million light years from Earth.
The question now is what to do here on Earth. To use the expression we are of one mind is literally true for us: we communicate without speaking, reading each other’s thoughts and arriving at a consensus as if we were a single individual examining a problem.
We are not many, about a thousand, essentially the crew of scientists, technicians and scholars who manned our flying city-state. We have the ability to clone ourselves, even to engineer a race of Übermenschen if we wish, and to implant in the young all we know. We can also re-engineer the Earth, reshuffle the continents, replicate the world we left, the world of four seasons, ice caps and deserts, recreate the globe as it was in our childhood.
But who are we to do this? We are one species among millions. We had our day in the sun, and perhaps for intelligent apes our record, though mixed, is not without its accomplishments and insights. Now the Earth is as strange to us as an alien world. The planet has gone on evolving, with its weird bird life, its huge insects with wings like owls, a bewildering array of sea creatures with scales like mosaics and with bolts of electricity — it is all of a piece.
We have decided to let it be and reside here, briefly, as guests. Essentially we are one family, having grown up together, having faced the challenges and excitement of discovery, and now are fundamentally changed. We have peeked behind the mask of reality, we have seen into the inner workings of the universe, and this knowledge, once eagerly sought, has altered, so quietly and subtly, our perception.
We as a collective organism will die off mind by mind. We will mourn the loss of each mind, especially its memories of the old world, including the Paris of my youth, the Paris of charm, refinement and eccentricity, the Paris of Proust and Picasso and Hemingway, yet it is time to trade reminiscences as we watch the tropical night fall with that surprising suddenness.
