by Peter Topolewski
Field update XXXIXB. Location: inner edge of the Orion Arm. Subject: only known life forms in the Milky Way galaxy. During reporting period, subjects continued uninterrupted passage through the Radcliffe Wave; movement of 1.29E-9 radians on orbit around Sagittarius A.
Estimated number of life form species extinct over this period: 86 million.
Life forms on the planet cultivate and cultivate in a system with a sophisticated level of interdependency. Limited extinctions occurring naturally to that system as a characteristic of adaptation to the environment.
Among the dominant species on the planet, solidarity remains strained while ignorance of other life forms in the web of life on the planet has lessened but remains high. The dominant species has identified roughly 55% of flora, 17% of fauna, and 6% of fungi. Oceans, covering 70% of the planet’s surface, are 20% explored. These numbers increased over the reporting period and serve to indicate the dominant species’ innate inquisitiveness. Concomitantly, the dominant species exhibited a heightened awareness of its dependence on this web of life. Actions nonetheless suggest at best overall indifference and at worst purposeful antagonism toward all non-dominant species, a symptom perhaps of an unwillingness or inability to recognize its own membership in this web. As such, principally due to the dominant species’ choices, biodiversity on the planet has declined 6% and the extinction rate of non-dominant species has accelerated to 175 times the local rate over this term.
Non-dominant species have displayed a capacity to adapt to loss of habitat and partially restore populations and life cycles when the dominant species vacates even (small) portions of the planet. Instances are rare and could prove anomalous.
The dominant species’ own total fertility rate has halved to 2.5, or slightly above replacement level. Life expectancy, while varying widely across the planet, has more than doubled to seventy-three planetary years for the dominant species. This is attributed to lower mortality rates for the youngest and oldest members of the species. Meanwhile, self terminations of life invoked by individual members of the dominant species and assisted or effected by the state—a fantastical social construct for managing groups linked by location and pastimes—have risen sharply and account for 5% of all deaths in the most civilized societies—that is, those with the most time for leisure. Population of the dominant species has risen to 8.2 billion by the end of the reporting period. The annual population growth rate of 0.9% is projected to continue to slow.
The dominant species’ consumption of goods, which is strictly comprised of resources on the planet, is measured with a currency—a value-comparing tool that has seen its original applicability steadily degrade. Over the reporting period, consumption has grown twelvefold. The figure, abstract given the evolution of currency, does not factor in the cost, by any measure, of keeping the planet habitable or the web of life intact.
Alternate measures that more accurately reflect the dominant species’ end-of-current-period consumption include ingestion of the tissue of non-dominant species, including a selection of those in the genera bos, sus, and gallus; as well as the use of ore and fossil fuels, the latter formed from the remains of non-dominant life forms that lived early in the planet’s cycle.
Fossil fuels are a feedstock for plastic, a long molecule polymer the dominant species learned to produce just prior to the reporting period. Plastics have had a sizable role in prolonging life and adding to the quality of life of the dominant species. Plastic production has climbed to 480 million metric tons per planetary year; though most is discarded in landfills and waterways, plastic persists. Remnants, mostly of microscopic size, have infiltrated every environment on the planet and are accreting in life forms, including in major organs of the dominant species. Deep and permanent plastic infestation is not expected to benefit the life cycle or the cognitive skills of the species.
A significant accretion of plastic microparticles now occurs in the brain of the dominant species, the organ that most accounts for its position in the planet’s hierarchy of life forms. This organ is the means by which the species interprets and manages interactions with the world outside itself. Furthermore, it is most responsible for the characteristics that make the dominant species unique from other life forms: its curiosity, creativity, memory, and empathy. As such, most of the dominant species’ individual and collective life is mental and consists of attempting to bring things experienced within this mental state into external reality.
In this regard, the dominant species has been spectacularly successful. The standout results include language, moving pictures, and music—the species’ supreme refinement—for the communication of inner states; a rich variety of stories for entertainment and comfort; investigations into the functions of nature, many of which it has used to improve its own health and to develop new tools; methods of recording and storing knowledge; and multitudinous theories on the nature of being, beauty, and time.
During the reporting period, the dominant species has created novel mechanisms of communication, including ones that make use of wired and wireless networks. These have provided unprecedented levels of knowledge distribution and have enabled fresh opportunities to share inner states. The results to date have been, perhaps, counterproductive: magnification and enhanced distribution of persistent unenlightenment and lies, resulting in symptoms suggesting a collective intelligence loss; pervasive levels of electromagnetic radiation; clogged memory; entrapment in an internal ever-present now, with a hindered view of past causes and future consequences; unlimited copies of digital dreck, such as bureaucratic record keeping; a generation of the population with degraded social skills, most predominantly eroded conscientiousness, agreeableness, and extroversion.
Creation myths among the dominant species persist, though less to quell inner curiosity and discomfort and more as a vehicle for self organizing. Acceptance into the most popular of these myth-proclaiming groups requires public demonstrations, but ongoing membership rarely includes fidelity to their documented morals—that is, the group’s code of conduct for internal life and social interactions, carried out for the betterment of all. Creation myth groups regularly use membership and the tenets of their faiths, including the inherent contradictions, as justification for visiting violence upon non-group members.
Group making on a smaller scale uses similar tactics. Rights to move on the planet and to think and act differ based on the location of the individual with respect to imaginary lines of demarcation and, to a lesser extent, within those lines a shared or enforced collective outlook, called an ideology. Wars between the states delineated by these lines are often driven by gormless hatred or covetous tendencies. They have ebbed and flowed during the reporting period, with antagonists in one war in turn assuming the role of protagonists in another.
Efforts to amalgamate states into larger units, often at the expense of those amalgamated, is a practice known as empire building. During the reporting period, empires assembled and crumbled at an increased rate, though the path of their rise and fall remained consistent. Efforts to avert the fate of former empires predictably and illogically prompted intact empires to adopt mottos and ideologies of those who failed before. The primary empire at the end of the reporting period has become indistinguishable from the empire it ostensibly defeated and has willfully assumed a belligerent stance toward truth, science, dignity, and creativity.
Within but also across these imaginary lines drawn over the planet, the benefits of mobility and bounty are bestowed according to the accumulation of previously mentioned currency. The dominant species spends considerable time bolstering a science explaining this accumulation, though this body of knowledge no longer bears a resemblance to the means or ends it describes. Based on its inherent irrationality and the faith of its adherents, free market economics, too, could be described as a religion of the dominant species.
Extensive investigation into the biological and chemical workings of life on the planet has moved the dominant species closer to ending the age of aimless evolution. The new proximity to intentional evolution has in a limited portion of population aroused expectations for eternal life, a chimerical concept in the context of time. More realistic benefits, including dramatically extended lifespans, are expected by all groups in the dominant species to flow to the smallest minority, namely those who have accumulated the most currency and natural/manufactured goods. The costs to achieve the longevity milestones are to be borne by all—adding coherence to the contradictory (and previously mentioned) rise in demand for aided termination of life.
Over the reporting period, a substantial number of words in the most common language have lost their meaning, perhaps reflecting the rise of delusional activity. Examples from this extensive list include conservative, justice, and God.
The dominant species continues to consume increasing amounts of drugs and other substances for the purpose of not experiencing external life the way they evolved to experience it. The trade of these substances represents more than 5% of all commercial activity on the planet.
The dominant species has poured vast planetary resources into the creation of artificial intelligence, a process of immingling the dominant species’ recorded knowledge. This effort has been conducted by centers of learning and more recently by entities called corporations, figments that have the rights of individuals and not the responsibility. Resources committed to this enterprise includes energy, minerals, and labor, which were entirely or fractionally paid for, and the recorded knowledge, which was in all but a few cases stolen. Proponents of artificial intelligence primarily wish for breakthroughs that will raise both life expectancy and the quality of that extended life. The technology has proven adept at finding patterns and regurgitating iterations of what it has ingested. It has shown no ability to create new knowledge or embark on new discoveries, and is most prodigious at consuming power and filling digital repositories with facsimiles of art, stories, and music. Still, the dominant species seems compelled to forsake its own—highly unique—decision making capabilities to this crude, inefficient system.
Next field report due after similar transit of the orbit of Sagittarius A (~108 planetary years). By the best estimates of the dominant species, chances of its own destruction (as tracked by its Doomsday Clock) during this time are higher than they have ever been. Most likely significantly higher, if the cessation of its current way of life is considered the baseline. Vocal sects of the dominant species imagine scenarios such as a re-naturalization of the planet, or a world-altering intervention from their fictional creators. These scenarios are premised on the full ruination of the dominant species’ infrastructure and social norms.
A larger, more grounded, minority of the dominant species acknowledges at the very least a possibility of devolution, while the majority maintains an overarching belief that the trend of its civilization is forever upward. Small but growing factions fantasize about escaping the planet they deny is in peril, some to other planets (such escape is not within the dominant species’ grasp during the next reporting period); others, via less proactive approaches, such as post-life movement to a dimension concocted from the shallowest reaches of their collective mind.
It bears noting: the dominant species’ greatest hope for any form of salvation cannot reside in welcoming annihilation. Its greatest prospect for survival and progress rests in taking neither that progress nor heaven for granted.
Over and out.
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