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Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 18th, 2023
  • kautau@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyz•On Venus.English
    20·
    4 months ago

    Yeah one of my favorite little stories / poems is something I read on Tumblr years ago. It’s currently attributed to Swan Jolras:

    we spent hundreds of years looking up at the stars and wondering “is there anybody out there” and hoping and guessing and imagining

    because we as a species were so lonely and we wanted friends so bad, we wanted to meet other species and we wanted to talk to them and we wanted to learn from them and to stop being the only people in the universe

    and we started realizing that things were maybe not going so good for us— we got scared that we were going to blow each other up, we got scared that we were going to break our planet permanently, we got scared that in a hundred years we were all going to be dead and gone and even if there were other people out there, we’d never get to meet them

    and then

    we built robots?

    and we gave them names and we gave them brains made out of silicon and we pretended they were people and we told them hey you wanna go exploring, and of course they did, because we had made them in our own image

    and maybe in a hundred years we won’t be around any more, maybe yeah the planet will be a mess and we’ll all be dead, and if other people come from the stars we won’t be around to meet them and say hi! how are you! we’re people, too! you’re not alone any more! , maybe we’ll be gone

    but we built robots, who have beat-up hulls and metal brains, and who have names; and if the other people come and say, who were these people? what were they like?

    the robots can say, when they made us, they called us discovery; they called us curiosity; they called us explorer; they called us spirit. they must have thought that was important.

    and they told us to tell you hello.

    The astronauts of today from various nations literally live and work together in shared space stations, less concerned with who’s tribe is better and more concerned with, you know, space, which is vast and doesn’t give a shit about our petty differences

  • kautau@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyz•Expert here.English
    16·
    9 months ago

    “Incredible. A new species. The chitinous shell, the impossibly long legs, the delicate, veined wings folded tight against its back. It is a creature unlike any you’ve ever seen, a marvel of evolutionary design. The scientific community will be astounded. Your name will be etched into the annals of entomology. You lean in closer, notebook and pen at the ready, to jot down the physical characteristics. And that’s when it hits you. It… it looks exactly like a stick. The profound truth, ugly and unshakeable, settles in your guts like a stone. Of course, you didn’t find it. Nobody found it. You were just the first one to stop and stare long enough to realize that the stick wasn’t a stick.”