Aurora

by Kim Stanley Robinson

Of course they too are mostly empty, Devi points out, still grumpy. No matter how solid things seem, they are mostly empty.

He shook his head. If the ship tries to kill you when you are dreaming, let it. Something more interesting than death will occur. It was obvious by his transparency that he ought to know.

Freya nodded silently at these descriptions. “I’m nothing like her,” she told them. “I don’t know how to do anything. You’ll have to teach me something to do, but I warn you, I’m stupid.”

This place is a prison.” “Seems a little nicer than that.” “It can be nice and still be a prison.” “I guess that’s right.”

Soon she claimed to know almost everyone in that biome, although she was wrong about this, committing a common human cognitive error called ease of representation. In fact, some people avoided her, as if they did not approve of wanderers generally, or her personally.

“It’s sometimes called avoiding acquiescence,” Badim said. “Acquiescence means accepting the framing of a problem, and working on it from within the terms of the frame. It’s a kind of mental economy, but also a kind of sloth. And Devi does not have that kind of sloth, as you know. She is always interrogating the framing of the problem. Acquiescence is definitely not her mode.”

“What’s funny is anyone thinking it would work in the first place. I mean it’s obvious any new place is going to be either alive or dead. If it’s alive it’s going to be poisonous, if it’s dead you’re going to have to work it up from scratch. I suppose that could work, but it might take about as long as it took Earth. Even if you’ve got the right bugs, even if you put machines to work, it would take thousands of years. So what’s the point? Why do it at all?

“Maybe that’s why we’ve never heard a peep from anywhere. It’s not just that the universe is too big. Which it is. That’s the main reason. But then also, life is a planetary thing. It begins on a planet and is part of that planet. It’s something that water planets do, maybe. But it develops to live where it is. So it can only live there, because it evolved to live there. That’s its home. So, you know, Fermi’s paradox has its answer, which is this: by the time life gets smart enough to leave its planet, it’s too smart to want to go. Because it knows it won’t work. So it stays home.

We will trust in our fellow human beings, the backers said. It’s a risk, but it beats trusting that the laws of physics and probability will bend for you just because you want them to.

The years passed at a rate of trillions of computations per second—as it does always, one supposes, for every consciousness. Now, is that fast or slow?

Residents of the solar system were obviously still quite startled by our speed. The technological sublime: one would have thought a point would have come where this affect would have gotten old in the human mind, and worn off. But apparently not yet; people no doubt still had a sense in their own lived experience of how long an interplanetary transit should take, and we were transgressing that quite monstrously; we were a novum; we were blowing their minds.

the notable incidents of the past dozen years, which we had to confess were nearly nil: we entered the solar system, we hit our marks, people yelled at us, we learned some history, we became disenchanted with civilization, we ran out of fuel.

“That’s why you aren’t hearing from anyone out there. That’s why the great silence persists. There are many other living intelligences out there, no doubt, but they can’t leave their home planets any more than we can, because life is a planetary expression, and can only survive on its home planet.”