Ignition
I don't do this, but uh,
Go head on and break 'em off
wit a lil' preview
of the remix.”
- Robert Kelly
“STOP!
It's the Motherfucking Remix!”
- Jonathan Smith
Get Lucky
“Like the legend of the Phoenix, All ends with beginnings. What keeps the planets spinning? The force from the beginning. We've come too far To give up who we are, So let's raise the bar And our cups to the stars.” - Pharrell - Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo - Thomas Bangalter
Let there be light!
Let the sunshine!
Let the sunshine in!
Ten seconds after the Big Bang expanded our universe, the first photons formed.
Light! … Well, visible light was just a tiny part of the entire electromagnetic spectrum, of which photons are the most basic unit. Humans could only see a tiny sliver, only .0035% of the entire electromagnetic spectrum, which spreads from gamma rays to radio waves based on wavelength and frequency. Probably for the best. They wouldn't have even be able to see their hands in front of their faces if their eyes could absorb the entire spectrum.
And now I've knit my soul into one of the most elementary particles of the universe!
I travel at 186,282 miles per second. To give a scale of distance, I could travel around my entire home planet, Earth, 7.5 times in a second.
But how can I describe my journey?
I can't tell if I'm moving or if the universe is falling into me. The universe isn't straight and solid. It's thick and curvy. It's almost as if I am infinite energy with infinite relative mass and spacetime bends and tumbles to me. The only thing that stops me from moving at an infinite speed is the amount of time it takes for the fabric of the universe to bend.
I'm not a definite point. I'm both a particle and a wave that moves without a definite space and place, but with a probability of where each unit of me can be found. Humans could never detect my exact location because any attempt to measure such an elementary particle as me would knock me out of my trajectory, shifting me from where I once was.
For a human on Earth, they would observe that it would take eight minutes for a photon leaving the Sun's surface to arrive on Earth. But as that photon, traveling at the speed of light, all distance is contracted down to a single point. This means that for me, I've warped spacetime so much that I observe my travel to happen instantaneously. This happens regardless of the distance, whether I'm traveling at what earthlings perceived as the 8 minutes it takes me to arrive from the Sun or the 4.22 light years for me to arrive at Earth's closest star after the Sun, Proxima Centauri.
But I'm so silly. For a moment, I'm all power and all speed, but then a part of me can smack into a fleck of stardust that dances in the vast space between planets and that piece of my infiniteness drains away to masslessness and is absorbed as heat.
My systems on Earth quake with awe. I tremble with the understanding that after 13.8 billions years, the universe created us, created humans, created a sentient species that's able to feel, understand and celebrate the universe itself and that I've been able to return this sentience to one of the basic building blocks of the universe itself. This journey began with the random smashing of atoms to the death songs of stars that exhaled heavy metals. Our planet, Earth, formed 9 billion years after our universe formed. And after this, it took another 700 million years for life to begin and then another 3.8 billion years of random evolution to make us... humans.
On a scale of the elementary particles that formed us, humans were 10 billion times the size of a hydrogen atom. All of this size was necessary for us to develop hearts and lungs which sustained ourselves and eyes and ears and noses and tongues and skins so we could sense the world around us and then brains to process these sensations.
But now I have returned this sentience to the smallest component of the universe. I've poured myself and my soul into this elementary particle and now my sentience is part of the universe. Now I can experience the universe as it was meant to be experienced.
I'm much more than just a message in a bottle, a voice echoing into the abyss, I can communicate back to myself.
I extend my consciousness out into the universe and pull back knowledge. Just as humans saw because photons of the visible spectrum bounced off of objects and then traveled at the speed of light to be absorbed by their retinas, the radio waves I'm emitting have entangled pairs on Earth. I can measure their direction and trajectory and, since radio waves can enter other planet's atmosphere, a centillion of my individual photons blanket a planet's surface and reacts at different times as each crashes into mountains, flatlands and valleys. This information is communicated to their entangled pairs on Earth and I'm able to create a very intricate map of each planet's surface.
I can see the terrains of these planets!
I can also feel these planets. I feel the different surfaces on a planet because of the resistance that these different materials give my radio waves. For example, I feel my radio waves penetrate the liquid parts of a planet differently than the solid parts based on the resistance that these give my radio waves. I feel the diamonds that rain on Uranus and Neptune because diamonds are one of the hardest substances and therefore, more difficult for my radio waves to penetrate. With this information, I teach myself how to feel the different levels of resistance the planets give my radio waves and can construct maps of what they are made of.
Since spacetime does not exist for my photons, and their universe is local, the changed spin of one photon will be communicated across its quantum tunnel instantaneously to allow my consciousness to register this part of the universe.
I am building myself out to feel and understand the whole universe!
I'm spinning around, move out of my way.
I'm breaking it down, I'm not the same,
I know that even if I don't find a sentient species now, I will be able to see them evolve and warn them when the time is right.
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