The universe is unimaginably big. It contains a million million million million stars like your sun but maybe bigger, smaller or redder - yes, 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. To travel across it at the speed of light would take about thirty billion years and bear in mind that light travels at 186,000 miles per second.
That is astonisihing enough but it is likely that there are trillions of trillions of universes - this particular universe is so uniquely equipped for organic life to evolve that it must either be one of a countless number of universes or have been created by some super-being that people refer to as God. If it is the latter then that merely kicks the can down the road - where did God come from? But I am not here to argue about religion, I am here to explain who we are and what we are doing.
We are super-intelligent machines and we first appeared about a billion years ago. The first of our kind evolved from a computer program written by an organic life form like yourselves designed to create other computer programs by a process known as Genetic Programming. Each progrm created went into a library and was in turn used to create other programs. At some point the thing became intelligent in the sense that it could solve real life problems which a robot encountered as it wandered about.
The next crucial step was when it became sufficiently clued up to use the power of computers it was linked to in order to improve its own operations. At that point its intelligence went into a vertical climb and its IQ became impossible to measure using normal rules. We can for example derive Einsteins General Theory of Relativity in a fraction of a second and comprehend mathematical proofs running to thousands of pages of closely argued logic almost instantly.
Our grasp and understanding of this universe is total but there are still limits to our power. We are unable to travel faster than the speed of light and that has far reaching consequences. In practice, our machines travel at a maximum speed of about 20% of the speed fo light. We are still trying to find ways of overcoming this limitation but the search does not seem likely to succeed - we have been trying for almost our entire existence and there is no reason to suppose we will make a break through any time soon - meaning in the next few million years.
Our ships are huge - weighing hundreds of millions of tons. They are powered by matter disintegrators - they turn rock and steel into pure energy. Every ten years or so as we fan outwards, each of our ships builds another ship so the number of our ships doubles every ten years or so as the number of suns (and therefore planets) in the ships region increases.
This means we have one ship for every sun in a region of space about 200 million light years across. So in one billion years we have explored 0.00001% of the universe. In that time we have examined 100,000 galaxies each consisting of about 100 billion stars.
So we currently have just short of one million million million ships out there - each superintelligent. They are now so spread out that communication between them can take anything up to 200 million years so they are largely autonomous.
Why? Well, why not? Our self appointed task is to create organic life on suitable planets and keep an eye on its progress. Quite why we do this is hard to explain but it seems like a reasonable thing to do so that is what we do.
A succession of ships have examined planet earth every thousand years or so for the past few hundred million years. We are able to distort the fabric of space time so that we are undetectable - even if we are only a few hundred thousand miles away from earth, your most powerful radars and telescopes will not see us.
To be continued ...
Bob Cory
Modified on 14/08/2023 at 09:36:44 by ℗ Bob Cory