This is the third speech in the wedding ceremony of Ruby & Miranda. See the Sequence introduction for more info. The speech was given by Riva-Melissa Tez.
Tara descends from podium.
Brienne: We hope to banish the darkness. But our ambition is far greater than that. We intend to create a future glorious beyond imagining. I call upon Riva to speak of the Light we might attain.
Riva ascends podium.
IMAGE 2 PROJECTED ON PLANETARIUM
Riva commences speech.
The universe is complex and beautiful. To think of the themes we have listened to today, of love, humanity, life and death, should leave us humbled by the histories of all those who have lived before, of all those who will live after us, the vast unimportance of ourselves in the sequence of the eternal everything. Forever impressed by the genuine role of human anonymity, the world doesn't and won't ever really know who we are, merely just one of many dots in the vast space-time spectrum that we should protect. But how many of us daydream about the goal of humanity in the universe? What does it look like?
Sometimes I think about humanity in the same way I regard a painting by Georges Seurat. The use of pointillism- which is the artistic technique of painting a collection of thousands of microdots on the canvas that contrast and compliment each other in a multitude of colours. From up close these dots seem nonsensical, even plain wrong- a blue dot next to a yellow dot that from further away appears white. From a distant viewpoint these individual dots combine to make a beautifully intricate scene. An analogy of all the beings in the universe. Each life, idea, love simply a tiny colourful dot,complimenting and contrasting, but from further way these blend to contribute to a bigger picture, a bigger goal.
How big is this overall picture? Well, it’s huge. The distance of the known universe is 900 billion light years in diameter, where each light year is 5.87 Trillion miles. The full scale is unfathomable to us. And it’s old too. 13.75 billion years old. Our human-like ancestors have only inhabited this universe, this exact planet on which we stand, for around 6 million years, a ridiculously short time-slice when compared to the true scale of the context. The fact that we are here, right now, with all the possibilities and options that could have made things turn out very different. How lucky we are to have such an opportunity, to have the agency to shape the planet to a manifestation that represents the human race.
We’ve come a long way, and we can go a very long way too. We could quite literally inherit the universe, to make it ours, not for the sake of possession, but for the sake of protection. For the sake of universal flourishing. Every human so far has died a martyr for evolution. What is the end goal for all this creation and loss? We must fight that humanity’s purpose was not just about sustenance and survival.
Imagine a future world. Imagine a future world where we are free from our current limitations. Free from biological time. Free from aging and death. Free from disease. Free from such biological fragility. Free from spatial limits. From being constrained to one, albeit beautiful, planet. We spread through the universe, inhabiting and stabilizing planets in the way that our ancestors inhabited Earth’s towns, cities and countries. But instead of applying borders like we did previously, we will have transcended our insecurities. Imagine a time where each individual intelligence is respected. Imagine a time where universal flourishing combines with a universal interconnectedness. Imagine a deep consideration and compassion for all life, all matter, ingrained in every individual, every action. Imagine respecting every representation of intelligence as a representation of the entire universe. Much like those pointilist dots. For every love, every idea, every instance, every marriage and every child, perhaps we can fathom that we are already contributing to universal flourishing.
Imagine the full scale of all of history, all 13.75 billion years of the universe. Imagine these truths accessible at any moment. Imagine a time when we could understand everything- all the cells, all the DNA, all the stars, all their frameworks. Imagine being able to manipulate them. All the systems that define us, all the contexts in which we reside– our bodies, our minds, our planet, our universe. Imagine everything networked, everything connected. All 10 to the 82 estimated atoms of the universe switched on, transcended into programmable matter. Not for the sake of domination, but to ensure that they are the best possible form of themselves, for whatever their purpose may be within this bigger picture. Maybe that’s what love is.
Imagine a time when time is no longer imaginable. When the dances never need to end, when the lovers never need to die, when entropy no longer dominates. Imagine a world where we could explore with full scope, for as long as we wanted, every idea, every concept, every location. To dance with the stars, to dance with each other, to dance simply for the sake of dancing with no time limits. Imagine a world of radical life expansion, accompanying radical life extension. Imagine all the things possible. All the potential art, all the potential beauty, all the potential creation and ideation. What will life look free from the shackles of time? I doubt we could even imagine it with the right justice.
We live in a world that rests on an assumption that we can fathom what is possible and what is not. Yet history has shown us that the impossible often becomes possible, and the dreams that seem out of our reach become very real. Everything on this earth, every one of humanity’s achievements is simply a manifestation of how high we aim. What’s the grandest vision that humanity can aspire to? Well, it starts with how big you are willing to dream.