The Fermi Paradox

The night had truly become what was now reality.

But what was the sense of peace that Samuel felt floating above, confined within a tin can as the impending blackness of the void slowly consumed everything around him?

It was like a piece of serenity had found its way within him, even though nothing was okay, and nothing would ever be okay.

But, surprisingly, Samuel knew that was alright. Perhaps it was a paradox, but it was a sensation that could never be explained. And why would we dwindle down such a feeling to something that could be described, wasn’t that how moments were ruined? We couldn’t put our life into words, we could only feel it emitting through our thoughts and through our minds. Was this okay? He wouldn’t know, we wouldn’t know, nobody would ever know. It would all end soon though, and that was the facts.

Perhaps it was the peace of knowing he had made it, he would be the person to take in all the beauty before all was dark. He knew he should have felt disturbed, but he didn’t. Everything was gone, yet he wasn’t. Could this be put into words? Why should it be put into words? It didn’t matter. Nothing really mattered.

We looked up to the stars and told stories of the greatness which could be found above, the places which we could only visit in our dreams, in our hearts. After all, there was a whole lot of space waiting to be explored. Yet it was a mistake. Samuel knew perfectly well that the answer wasn’t above, but more so within. We thought we could escape, a new world, a plane of existence, pushing on into the stars. We wouldn’t do it though, no, we were too lazy! We’d wait until the answer came to us. Sitting by those computers, filtering through incoming signals, seeing the reports of the unknown making contact with us, visiting them in our dreams and in our nightmares.

Nothing ever came. We were alone, beings who were meant to change the universe, see that this was ours to take over and call our own. There was so much to see, so many beauties which would sweep us over and would never be able to be described with any language. Samuel pitied them, as when they sat dreaming and waiting, Samuel found his peace. Within, there were answers. Even in the end, he kept looking deeper and deeper so that an answer could be found, yet all he found was this peace. And maybe that was the feeling we were searching for the entire time. Peacefulness, the calmness in the storm.

But everybody wanted more. There had to be more than peace, and even if the world had collapsed and nothing was there anymore, there had to be more than just accepting it. There was a variety of emotions, ones that made ourselves complete, and inner peace was all there was?

And that’s all there was, at least to Samuel. We can’t bind our goals into one, we all had separate paths we needed to take, but peace was the end state we needed to reach.

This wasn’t okay. There was a way out, and we could find it! In the stars, we could escape demise and create a new civilization, a utopia, one which wasn’t riddled with problems.

Utopia wasn’t real, at least in our existence. Samuel knew this, but nobody listened. We sat, and we waited, and we listened.

Years passed, and the threat of global warming was disappearing. Everything was getting colder, and soon animals were dying out. We sat, listening for an exit to the above. After all, we all knew they were out there. Stories of government cover-ups, secret facilities in the deserts, they were all true.

Years passed, we all banded together and used our nuclear weapons to heat as light slowly dimmed away. It was the smartest solution, scientists proposed the idea years back. But while we sat in our nuclear powered bubbles and looked upwards, Samuel still looked within.

They never did come. Perhaps they weren’t there, or perhaps they didn’t want to save us, but we all went out. The lights in the sky vanished one by one, until darkness was all that was left. Perhaps… we had all worn our time. In the end we stood together and waited, not for the rescue but for the end. We watched the rocket fly away, and hugged each other and felt the emotions bundle up within us. We smiled, we cried, and we said that life wasn’t that bad after all. Actually, it was great. Even if we hadn’t reached our end goal, we had still had a good run.

Maybe we felt what Samuel felt, the last glimpse of hope in the universe. But perhaps we didn’t. Perhaps humans all felt different, they all experienced a different set of emotions that when boiled down to a simple set of words all seemed the same.

The world began with the bang, but it ended in pure silence, a look at what had come to be. But their time was over, Samuel’s time was over. And that was the end. We weren’t going to be rescued or saved, we were just going have to live with it. See if anything really mattered, and try to see a glass half full. But we weren’t wrong, even if it didn’t play out in the scheme of things.

What we did mattered, it mattered to us. And even if the end goal was the peace, we all deserved it. Samuel deserved it. It was what we did, and what we all deserved, all the saints and the sinners finding the same prize after their run of a game we called life.

So we weren’t rescued. The paradox was true, we were alone, we were always and will always be alone, but we still had each other.

We had our lives, and Samuel saw this as melancholy, and perhaps it was. Was this an end that got better or worse when we thought about it? Was there a secret terror which could be found, and if there was did we need to see it?

The end had come, but that was just it. The end, or a pathway to a new adventure which no one could ever describe.

This isn’t a tale of horror or a tale of misery and the end times. It’s a story of beginning, and while we may look at it as a terrifying idea that’s okay. It is terrible, but we accepted it. Samuel accepted it.

Can you accept it?

Because in the end Samuel outlasted everyone else, but he truly could never outlast the universe.