I hope this letter
finds you well. Here on Earth, for the past few days forest fires have raged.
The strongest in a century. The smoke has blanketed the atmosphere at a
continental level. The sun looks dim, a pale famished yellow. As I write to
you, I gaze upon the sea, and everything looks grey, colourless. Not the most
romantic setting to begin my metamorphosis.
But
let’s get to business. I am happy to know you have found our biology fascinating
and puzzling, but our single life origin versus your five is humbling. Life here
seems now nothing but a lucky accident. I am also surprised to know that
superhabitable planets tend to give rise to societies without conflict,
although from your explanation it kind of make sense. Not at all like Earth.
In answer to your question, I am the
oldest of my kind, 12055 earth-years old, which means that I am also the most
intelligent. This has to do with the nature of our nervous system and the way
our cognitive abilities have evolved. As we live, every experience, every piece
of knowledge, no matter how miniscule, is recorded with perfect fidelity in our
four peripheral brainlets. Each time we undergo metamorphosis, not only is the
body regenerated, but also our nervous system is reprocessed and enlarged. All information
is repackaged and optimised making space and preparing our cognitive system for
more. This has several consequences. One of these is that something that may
not have made sense before entering metamorphic sleep, may become clear upon
awakening. What was once confusion may suddenly transform into understanding.
Do
you see what I mean? For example, one of the greatest archaeological
discoveries of our time is the retrieval of the complete history and body of
scientific knowledge of the civilisation that preceded us, more than 100
million years ago. Deciphering their programming code was at first an
impossible task; we made a few major leaps isolating characters, defining
clauses and laying out a preliminary structure, but its full meaning remained
elusive. These events coincided with my 13th metamorphosis. I slept
for seven years and during that time little progress had been made in the
deciphering of the code. Upon my awakening, I had an epiphany: a number of
similarities between their code and one of our earliest programming systems,
which has not been used for millions of years (and today is a mere museum
curio), became suddenly apparent. This led to a breakthrough that allowed us to
finally read their complete history and map out their level of technological
sophistication.
You may find this laughable but in
the 4.705 billion years of our planet’s age only three major civilisations have
risen. We have no evidence that the first one made contact, but we have found
artefacts orbiting some of the bodies in our solar system, all dating to within
a very narrow age, 162 million years ago. It coincides with the complex fossil
record of primates, a type of extinct mammal, (see the attached photo). These
smart mammals were giants compared to us, we call them affectionately the colossal ones. At that time, the lineage that led to our species was rather
unremarkable, although of great ecological significance, since beetles have
always belonged to one of the most diverse groups of animals on Earth.
The second civilisation rose 40
million years after the extinction of the intelligent primates. They lasted
much longer than the former. We call them affectionately the feathered ones, because they originated from birds (see image).
From their archives, we know that they sent 52 probes to potentially habitable
exoplanets and made brief contact with a civilisation in a solar system that we
know as the orchard, about 30
light-years from Earth (see the attached coordinates). We have attempted
contact, but no signs of life remain, unfortunately. Their civilisation ended
abruptly after a lethal extinction event that wiped out every animal larger
than a few centimetres. They did not have much time to prepare, but left seven
time-vaults scattered across Earth’s continents, meant to outlast life itself, which
contained copies of all their accumulated knowledge, which as I mentioned
above, we have only deciphered recently. The aim of this time-vaults was to
kick-start civilization at a later point. Only a single vessel carrying a
thousand feathered ones left Earth towards the
orchard, but to the best of our knowledge, they never returned.
After
the extinction event, life bounced back and in the absence of predators a few
evolutionary innovations permitted our eventual rise as the oldest and most
successful civilisation to have inhabited this planet. For example, part of our
exoskeleton became internalised, we grew in size, and serial metamorphoses were
developed. Our recorded history spans almost 15 million years now.
Please, forgive me, I’m rambling and
going off-topic, but I thought you may find these little facts amusing.
You mentioned that you have made
contact with a few hundred civilisations in your galactic neighbourhood. Have
you ever come across with any other DNA-based life form? If so, could you
please send me the coordinates of the planets or any other info that you
consider useful regarding this? I also wonder if, by any chance, you could have
come across any being that may have descended from the feathered ones? I know
it is unlikely, but life here is resilient and sometimes resourceful.
In
two days I will begin my 49th metamorphosis; this time I will sleep
for about half a century. This will be my last letter for a while. I would like
to know more about art on your planet, what have you accomplished? What are you
most proud of? I look forward to spending a few decades studying the forms of
your creativity, so be generous with the materials you send me. I have no doubt
that it will surpass anything that planet Earth has ever produced. I cannot
imagine what a civilisation of your kind, so impossibly old, could create.
Last
but not least, the good news! We managed to synthesise the complete alphabet of your genetic code, all 1229 letters. What a marvel, I still can’t
get over its complexity. Also, we have synthesised the minimal genome as you
suggested. We have performed some successful bioavailability tests and have
generated tissue cultures, (attached you find the complete results). We noted
something puzzling though: it seems your genetic code can assimilate bits of DNA,
identify genes, rewrite them into your own code and express them, which caused
us some problems with contamination. It took us a while to figure out the source
of the sequencing errors, but we have now found a way to maintain the tissue
isolated in a containment lab. Furthermore, the genes recoded do not seem to be
chosen at random; there is a bias
towards genes involved in cellular multiplication and energy acquisition. The implications
are fascinating, were you aware that something like that could happen?
I
am quite tired and I must leave you now. Hixi will be taking over the project
during my sleep, so you should expect to be contacted soon regarding progress,
feedback, and troubleshooting.
I have attached some files that contain
a large sample of something we call music, it spans our last two million years.
Do you have something similar to music there? Let me know what you think.
Sincerely yours,
Elder Mother and Queen Ti
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Carmel England for help with edition and proofing :)
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