Alexandra Drennan's Time Capsules

When I was a little girl, one of our teachers, Mrs. Higgins, told us to make a time capsule, write letters to the future, so one day we could remember what it was like to be children.

I thought it was stupid, so I didn't do it, which I really regret. So… I guess I'm going to make one now. Bury it in the Archive instead of under a tree. I don't know if anybody will ever find it, but… Somehow it seems important to keep talking, to keep thinking for as long as I can.

I was in school when I first read about the Talos Principle. I think it disturbed me at the time, made me hyper-aware of my body as a physical object, the material reality of the brain. Ideas that made me uncomfortable at first. But… I think in the long run helped me understand how frail human beings are. And how precious.

It's not a comforting way of thinking about the world. But I'd rather face the truth than lie to myself.

I keep having these dreams. Great empty cities, silent roads stretching for miles. The Earth from space, all dark. Not a single light to guide me home.

But if someone really came from another world, what would the Earth look like to them? A wilderness? A wasteland? I don't think so. Even after thousands of years, they'd see a world shaped by our hand in every aspect of its being. They'd see the cities and the roads, the bridges, the harbors, and they would say: "Here lived a race of giants."

These dreams, they scare me, but... they also remind me that we built all of this.

How do you solve a problem that extends beyond your own lifespan? That question may be the essence of civilization. The only answer I can find is to initiate a process, to create an environment in which the solution will occur independently of yourself.

But… that requires a difficult sacrifice. Letting go of your desire to bear witness, to exist at the center of the cosmos. To participate in the project of civilization is to accept death. Oh, Alex, you're such a fun person!

Sometimes I think about the Middle Ages. About what it must have been like to live in the ruins of a great civilization, to know that so much has been lost.

But then I remind myself that while the West sank into darkness, others picked up the pieces. That civilization has always survived, because the great insights of philosophy and science are not bound to any one culture or people. They belong to all of us. And one day they'll belong to you.

When the scale of it all overwhelms me, this is what I tell myself. We can calculate the age of the Earth, the size of the universe, the future of the stars. Sure, we are minuscule, momentary flashes of thought on a grain of sand drifting through the cosmos. But our minds can recreate the past and predict the future.

On, say, Friday, a million years from now we'll all be dead. But right now we know what the night sky will look like on that day. And so, in a way, we're not entirely bound by time.

Knowledge is a… a kind of freedom.

Oh God, there's no time. Just not enough time. We're trying to build the future out of old video game code and half-finished research projects. We should've had years, maybe decades with the kind of money they used to put into building bombs. If I stop and think about how crazy this is, I'll have a nervous breakdown.

So I won't. Yeah. OK. Back to work, Alex.

I look at this inert shape and I wonder who you're going to be. Will you hold the same values as we do? Will you love us for having created you? Will you resent us for having put you into an uncertain and dangerous world?

Looking back at our history – our achievements, our crimes – what will you make of us? Will the world you create be like ours, or so different that we can't even imagine it?

Either way, I hope that you’ll find this little blue planet to be as beautiful as we did. I hope you’ll take care of it a lot better than we did.

And… I hope one day you’ll look up and reach for the stars.

Nearly everything on this planet, from the surface of the earth to the composition of the atmosphere itself, has been shaped by life. It's a process that takes millions of years. But we humans, with our technology, with our understanding and manipulation of systems, have changed everything in just a few centuries.

I think that's also part of what makes us human. We reshape the world in our image. It's how we create ourselves. And how we destroy ourselves.

My best friend died today. In the abstract, a human death is nothing, of course. An insignificant blip in a sea of billions. But the world is not abstract. Reality is always specific. Painfully so.

And that one specific human being, who existed only once in all the infinity of time and space. That human being was my friend. But he’s not coming back, no matter how much I want him to. So… all I can do, in the end, is keep working.

Because that specificity, that uniqueness - of people, of real people – is worth preserving.

There are… flaws in the system. I think sometimes it accesses the wrong databases. Pulls random data. I don’t know… I don’t know how bad it is. It all seems to be stable, but I can’t tell what kind of impact this is going to have on the process, and… I just don’t have the strength to go over all of the code again.

I just… I just… I just don’t want it all to be for nothing. I spent all my time here. I didn’t visit my parents. I didn’t see my friends. I did nothing but work. And I’m so scared that it didn’t mean anything. That I just wasted it all because I thought we could… we could save the world.