SCIENCE FICTION
Boundless and Bare
A Tragedy
It embarrasses me now to think that almost a century had passed before they realized that the Voyager 1 probe wasn’t sending gibberish to Earth in the early 2020s. No, it was simply relaying an extended hand that we understood far too late to appreciate.
When we finally understood the true mathematics of gravity, pieced together the basics of the galaxy, we were able to advance in so many ways. We finally cracked the puzzle of travel between the stars, though it would be nearly another century before we could build machines that could achieve it. The math meant we could now harness the energy of the solar system and ended the Law of Conservation of Energy. We could explain the accelerated expansion of the universe, and even quantum physics made more sense in this new context. Newton, Liebnitz, du Châtelet, through to Einstein, Hawking, Smethurst, etc. — so much of the work that marked their legacy in the field erased in a moment. But they belonged to an antique land that the new knowledge frowns upon.
But with an understanding of the math, we also came to realize how it would work as a means to communicate with other beings, however different from us, once they were similarly advanced. As my predecessors here started trying to generate such messages, the converse thought sprang up, and…
