lately i've been thinking a lot about earth and her future - about who we are, who we've been and where we can even go from here. it is a tumultuous time afterall, with numerous wars, incursions, and genocides on-going, and, atop it all, at least 3 different world leaders all getting antsy to press the big red "kill us all" button. and with the new START treaty having ran out on february 2nd, nuclear warfare seems closer and closer every day. how else can you save a dying empire that to deploy the death star?
and yet, i keep thinking about Voyager 1. we sent her (and her twin, Voyager 2!) out there back in 1977. right now, as of march 2026, she's 172.59 AU from earth. by november, she will be a full light day away. which, if it isn't clear, is pretty fucking far.
if some apocalypse or another does happen and all the human race is wiped out, she'll still be out there, drifting through space at around 35,000 mph. if another species, an alien race finds her, or her twin, and one day, maybe, finds us, what then? what is left of the earth - of our cultures?
in the most selfish (and human) way, i ponder the "last man on earth" idea. what if you, the reader, are the last human alive on earth? your mind, body, largely intact, despite it all and you meet these aliens. somehow, you learn to speak with them or they learn to speak with you. and they ask you:
what was earth?
can you represent earth? can you tell our stories? our love, our hopes, our dreams? can you be our Voyager?
i don't think i can - or, in truth, anyone can. the world is too wide, wild and wonderful for one person to know it all. too many cultures, countries, empires and republics have risen and fallen. too much has been lost to time, to those who wish to erase certain cultures, to even nature itself.
there is more storage on the average phone today than on the computer that sent us to the moon - and, most likely, on Voyager herself. and yet, it's still not enough, is it? not for everything.
anyone who says they can represent the culture of all the earth is surely lying to themselves - arrogance or foolishness or maybe just... the optimism of a dreamer.
but we would still try.
so, where do you begin? do you start with telling the history of earth, as much as you remember? do you tell the story of art? of science? of technology? or - do you start with your own life - where you grew up, your family, your friends -- what it meant to be you on our little blue dot?
or maybe you begin with music, a story, a tv show, a movie, a game; what it means to small, then big, then suddenly very small again; to see the seasons change- to see the world change; to fall in love; to live and work and laugh and every little joke and smile and all the quirks of those you love?
just where do you begin?
i cry a lot thinking about earth and how much we might lose to a single mad man. sometimes it feels inevitable. i recently saw a video about nuclear disarmament from tom nicholas. he lives in dartmouth, a town in the South of England, where there's a nuclear submarine base, and every monday, at 10.30am, a siren rings out. it's only a testing siren, and, he says, something very novel to grow up beside.
until one day it won't be. what if - in our lone human scenario - someone from this town is our Voyager?
how will they tell these advanced aliens that our world saw it coming, prepared and practiced, that we knew - that our children knew - and we did nothing?
no more endings. no more doomsday clocks.
where do we begin?
we need to take what we have, what we know now, and we need to begin. saving our world can't be just finding a way to preserve our culture after the ending of it all.
because we will fail.
we won't preserve everything, we will lose our cultures, our nature, our lives and loves and our beautiful, tiny blue dot. even Voyager, as much as i love those cold mechanical twins with all my heart, hasn't preserved everything.
we need to find a way to stop the ending, before it can begin.
because we aren't Voyager. Voyager is just a machine, trying to save us. we're alive and we need to save us.
i'm not sure how just yet. but i know it starts with a choice - the world won't end.