Grumpyspacekid - Where Did You Come From And What Do You Want?

gosh but like we spent hundreds of years looking up at the stars and wondering “is there anybody out there” and hoping and guessing and imagining

because we as a species were so lonely and we wanted friends so bad, we wanted to meet other species and we wanted to talk to them and we wanted to learn from them and to stop being the only people in the universe

and we started realizing that things were maybe not going so good for us— we got scared that we were going to blow each other up, we got scared that we were going to break our planet permanently, we got scared that in a hundred years we were all going to be dead and gone and even if there were other people out there, we’d never get to meet them

and then

we built robots?

and we gave them names and we gave them brains made out of silicon and we pretended they were people and we told them hey you wanna go exploring, and of course they did, because we had made them in our own image

and maybe in a hundred years we won’t be around any more, maybe yeah the planet will be a mess and we’ll all be dead, and if other people come from the stars we won’t be around to meet them and say hi! how are you! we’re people, too! you’re not alone any more!, maybe we’ll be gone

but we built robots, who have beat-up hulls and metal brains, and who have names; and if the other people come and say, who were these people? what were they like?

the robots can say, when they made us, they called us discovery; they called us curiosity; they called us explorer; they called us spirit. they must have thought that was important.

and they told us to tell you hello.

never forget that this nebula has a region called “trumpler 15” with a bunch of dead stars

Carina Nebula Panorama

Pretty much my childhood in a nutshell.

the heavens’ embroidered cloths

from Interstellar, 2014

me: (thinks about robots)

me: (starts crying)

me: tthey're just so,,,,, ,, fuckin g cool,,,

i really, really hope that whenever we actually get to space for real, like past mars, the universe turns out to be exactly as goddamn weird as we have all been expecting all this time. like, space whales past jupiter. palaces of methane ice on pluto. old gods lurking around in the asteroid belt. the ghost of ancient vengeful alien sailors crewing their ghost ships in eternal loops through the oort cloud and sirens off alpha centauri. in a hundred years i want one of my great grandkids to unfurl a holographic map, and look at the little notation hovering a hundred light years past vega that says here there be dragons (no really) and smile, and set sail.