Pilot’s Log
12 March 2130
Days to Deployment: 5
Infinity is beautiful. If you’ve never seen it, it would be hard for me to describe the breathtaking wonder of an endless void. Some might find the solitude disquietning, but I have come to take comfort in the isolation.
It gives me time to think.
They told me this mission would be simple. Long and mentally and physically taxing, but simple in its directives: Locate Planet X1506-78, Locate fertile terrain, Deploy and Dust terrain with panspermia capsules.
Simple.
I know what’s riding on this mission, what’s at stake. I feel the weight of hopes millions and millions of lightyears away.
Physically and mentally taxing. But, for me, I have come to see this mission as morally taxing as well.
Do we deserve to perserve our species? What right do we have to disrupt the natural evolution of an alien planet? Is life sacred or profane?
I do not have the answers to these questions yet.
Pilot’s Log
13 March 2130
Days to Deployment: 4
I spoke with my wife today. It’s just a room now, I told her. It’s time, I told her. You need to do this, it’s healthy, I told her.
It’s easy for me to say that. I’m not the one who has to remove the crib, the toys, the pictures on the wall. I’m not the one that will have to paint over all of those animals and their bright smiles and frolicking feet.
It’s just a room now. Walls and a window and a floor and a ceiling. It’s just a room as sterile and inhuman and indifferent as the white-walled hospital room with its machines and their beeps and hums and numbers on screens signifying a decline.
It’s just a room now. Just like it was just a body in the end. A tiny 14-month old body. It wasn’t even a body. It was a host. It was a tiny 14-month old cancer host.
It’s just a room. It’s just a body. It’s just a host.
Pilot’s Log
14 March 2130
Days to Deployment: 3
Is it better to have never been born at all? Given the unpredicatble nature of life, given all of the possibilities for pain and pleasure, given the uncertainty of the ratio of pain to pleasure, given the question of the duration of the pain, of the pleasure, of the act of being alive itself, is it a gamble worth taking?
Thought experiment: I come to you with a proposition to join a game. If you choose not to play the game, you lose nothing. Everything stays the same.
However, if you choose to join the game, there is no gaurantee as to how long you will play the game, how much pain or pleasure will come your way, and, most importantly, you have very limited agency in this game, your will is imposed upon by outside forces and is therefore not free.
Would you play?
Pilot’s Log
16 March 2130
Days to Deployment: 1
Hope is a strange concept, a strange bedfellow, a savage lover. The concept itself has become a little absurd and irrational and naive to me. What good is it to invest in something that’s wholly beyond your control?
Why has an entire planet of people placed their hope on me, on this mission, on these panspermia capsules?
To continue the human race? But what good does that do for them? They’re dead anyway. Is there really any comfort or consolation in the notion that our species will live on this foreign planet?
And do we deserve to? After what we’ve done on and to ours? On and to our own species? On and to every other species that we claimed dominion over?
And what about these capsules? Do they even want to start the long and arduous process of evolution to become something so staggeringly inconsistent as us?
So loving and hateful and compassionate and indifferent and charitable and greedy and peaceful and murderous and on and on and on and on.
Do they even want to play the game?
Pilot’s Log
17th March 2130
Deployment Day
This will be my last entry. I have made a decision, a choice, a commitment. Or I feel that it has been imposed upon me, so maybe I am not to blame for the consequences.
For poserity, in case this recording is ever transmitted: I feel that the moral course of action here is to self-destruct.
This will be a beginning just as violent and firey and random as the beginning of all things.
There will still be a chance for some of the capsules to survive and fertilize the terrain.
Those that fight to live will have made their choice. They will play the game, for better or worse or whatever.
Who will survive and what will become of them?
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