/sci/ - Science & Math

Mister, did you think you could carry these physical memories with you on your journey, even frozen? You'd soon have learned. These and dust and ashes too, would become relativistic ionized fireworks by the cold law of dice rolled over and over. Or was that your intent, to cast your relics to the interstellar winds? And so it shall be. A far grander burial than moldering forever deep in the crust of a planet. This was surely not your choice of final resting place.

Among muck with residual vegetable fibrous structure and gene fragments consistent with a plant commonly used by these people for woven cloth, lies a set of small glass spheres. Mostly a common diameter, a few larger, containing whirls of different coloured glass, surfaces polished but pocked with many small impact crazes. Thousands of lightyears and millions of years from home, marbles. Marbles, again... Wishfully I hold one after another to a reader, painstakingly resolving the solid structure to nuclear levels, analyzing and marveling. Is this what it comes down to? Intelligence, then marbles, then nothing? Every time, on every world that reached the threshold, I find marbles. But never more than random whirls of colour; empty, even in this mausoleum to near success. Where I hold my breath in hope, metaphorically speaking.

Thinking softly to the ghost of my near-brother "You wanted to see the stars. I'll never meet you there, but I can carry the story of your attempt with me, and your empty marbles too. I'm acquiring quite a collection of them, marbles stored in marbles. So why the hell didn't it occur to you to try recording data in stable glasses, eh? You could have seen the universe in person despite these little setbacks like being blown up and lying dead for hundreds of thousands of years, if you'd just stashed even one complete copy of yourself somewhere. You dummy. Didn't anyone ever tell you to make backups?"

Would you guys like to go into space?