It is completely pointless to look for intelligent beings
capable of space travel.
Even if they exist, we would not detect them
even if they were here among us.
Because they would have no form
that we could perceive.
They would not build Dyson spheres –
that is a primitive idea.
They would not create cyborgs
or alternative kinds of humans like those in naïve transhumanist fantasies.
They would not fly around in gigantic spaceships
like in movies,
because that is ridiculous.
They would not travel faster than the speed of light,
because that is impossible.
They would not trade,
they would not wage wars,
they would not have kings.
They would do nothing
that primitive human science fiction suggests.
If they exist – and they probably do –
they would not have biological bodies.
They would exist as clouds of particles,
creating anything within their consciousness,
even modelling entire civilisations.
They would think and live
in ways we cannot even imagine.
We humans are still confined.
One human is one consciousness.
One human is one instance.
They are billions upon billions.
Each single instance of theirs
is like an entire civilisation.
As if one being contained a whole world within itself.
All of our science fiction,
all our ideas about them,
are like someone five hundred years ago
trying to imagine
what the twenty-first century would be like
without even having words for microprocessors or quantum physics,
with every technological step leading there
completely unknown to them.
That is our situation too.
Modern humanity is just one step.
I do not know what we will be like in five hundred years.
But if we want to travel through space,
we must overcome time.
And time can only be overcome
when it no longer matters.
When it makes no difference
whether a minute passes
or a million years.
What we are today – one human, one consciousness –
will become nothing more than history,
living on within us as memory.
And if we encounter a planet
like Earth,
we will observe it silently,
and its inhabitants will not notice us,
because we will exist in a form of being
so different
that they would not understand it,
just as we would not understand it today
if such beings were observing us.
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