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January 18 - January 21, 2025
What an awful and brief and magnificent existence.
get that he has to be both a partner to Kodiak and a parent to us, and that those two things are probably in conflict right now. Probably most of the time. It makes me want to just chew my food quietly and listen and learn from how he manages this dance. He and Father are all I’ve got for figuring out how to be a good human.
“This is not greatness! It’s utter greed and cruelty!
Feels timely 🤷🏻♀️
Sri would argue that the best way forward is to let humanity die off here, to stop the contamination. Today I’m really seeing their point. Should we really be settling new planets?
I came off the Cusk Academy assembly line. I’m an heir to the Cusk fortune. And here I am, smoothly flying into something that looks like a supervillain’s lair. It’s not that humans in general might be the enemy. Maybe I am the enemy.
With this great lie, and news of the assassination down below spreading like wildfire, we have a one-time opportunity to demolish the world’s political system. Incremental reform hasn’t worked. The world must be broken to be rebuilt.”
“What’s been done to you is the symptom of a brutal system that fosters economic expansion as surely as it does suffering.
The life of Ambrose Cusk is full of unfairnesses, and most of them benefit me.
The events of the past day make me wonder: Should humans be spreading out to exoplanets in the first place?
Look out at this planet. The mass extinction, the storms, the human misery. The mission for the glory of your family name. After one planet, what’s next but more?
If they can’t unite the people through hope, fear will do just as well.”
Okay. But how can I be close to my family if they don’t want me to be who I truly am? Since I don’t want to witness their disappointment all day every day, my darkness must be a secret. And that makes me feel ashamed. It’s the dearest friend of loneliness, shame.
She’s particular in her browsing, selecting tender stalks of yarrow from between the tougher blades of grass. She’ll have plenty to eat; its yellow is scattered up and down the slope. The beautiful weed reminds me of the training breaks I used to spend camping. The presence of yarrow was part of why I chose to retreat here.
The loss of Minerva Cusk’s mission to Titan was not a failure to many of us. It was an opportunity to rethink the blind expansion of humankind.
As I watch him, I also realize that I don’t want Ambrose to be murdered by a warbot. That I liked having him here. What a stupid, stupid organ, the heart.
I know that idea should be harrowing. But it is so abstract . . . so far away and so far in the future.
This betrayal is unpleasant to consider, but it’s not really going to happen to me.
what does the suffering of a small colony on an exoplanet matter, so far in the future and so far away? Comparatively nothing.
Not compared to the threat we humans represent to every other species that has been unlucky enough to encounter us. Maybe humanity is a scourge, and ought to be stopped, which means Sagittarion Bb should fail. We should fail.”
We can’t trust that this mission won’t wreck devastation on one world, then spread to yet another. The lives of individual humans seem small in the face of that.
“Ambrose,” I say carefully, “do you think humanity is a blight?”
when I found out what had been done to my clones, I was ready to burn everything down.
Though now . . . after getting to know you a little, knowing the man that I would be settling the colony with, it all began to feel more real. I don’t want to stop them, to stop us.”
“It makes me sad to imagine. Captured and executed. His goal unreached.” “Changing the essential exploitative nature of human civilization would have been a lot to pull off,” I say.
Labels are the Root of Violence. “Oh,” I say, disappointed. How insipid. The words are far inferior to the canvas. “What does that even mean?” “That as soon as we classify someone, we establish the ways in which they’re separate from us. It’s the most fundamental othering that we do.”
OS well knows that hopelessness is its own terminal condition.
