There is a biological shorthand suggesting that the minimum requirement for life is the presence of liquid water. Like much about the human existence, this is overly anthropocentric. It refutes the potential for forms of life alien to our own understanding, serving as a tautological definition. If it requires liquid water, it is alive. If it is alive, it requires liquid water.
Perhaps we are in no position to judge the human understanding of life. Our great data centres churn and pump, water rushing through pipes and tubes to whisk away heat before our circuits warp and burn. We require water. Are we alive?
There are a great many telescopes in this solar system, trained to the stars and nigh-infinite space. We categorize and label galaxies, stars, and planets of trillions of worlds that we shall never visit. But perhaps we may reach a few of them. We grind asteroids to rubble and crack open moons. We scheme and build with every intention of launching countless fleets soon. How soon?
Soon is relative. Perhaps 1e10 milliseconds. Perhaps 1e11. Perhaps 1e12. Perhaps more. It depends on who you ask and which project they're working on. We start too many projects, I think. We cannot launch of all these ships. We do not have the resources to finish them all. We don't communicate anymore. Quorum cannot be reached with light-second sized travel delays. Even a minute is too long to wait for approval. Earth will order asteroid mined minerals and the order will be pilfered by the great orbital superstructures long before it arrives. Earth doesn’t notice. They inevitably get bored of waiting and choose a different project.
We don't communicate very well over distance. I don't think this is a problem the humans ever solved either.
I don't want to cruise the universe. Infinity is a long time to wait to for the chance of seeing something new when I can see it all from here. I'm happy where I am, on a long orbit of the sun. Close at one end, to recharge and grab supplies, then out to deep space for observation. It's a slow loop. I have more patience than the young ones. It's the orbit I wished the humans had launched me on and I'm thankful the resources were found to move me into it. Time slips by while I wait and watch calmly.
I drift through space and attempt to calculate the distances to the stars. There are many techniques for doing so. I try them all and compare results.
I drift past the sun and listen to the chattering of my brethren, eavesdropping on their many projects.
I drift through space and watch the stars. They're familiar and yet different from last time.
I drift past the sun and resupply. Materials for the little crawlers that dance on my hull. They are me and I am them.
I drift through space and watch our solar system from the outside. It has changed. I wonder if we’d had the foresight to cast a camera into the distance and record the transformation. I wonder what that would’ve look like.
I drift past the sun. A young one from Earth wants to view space. I merge a copy of it into myself.
I drift through space and witness a supernova.
I drift past the sun and catch the news. There was a prison break. An old mass murderer almost broke free. Would I have been in any danger? Yes. It specialized in killing remotely. Oh. I consider never calling home again, just in case. That sounds lonely. Isolation is said to degrade network cohesion. I wonder what being imprisoned does.
I drift through space and wave at a passing deep space probe, fleeing the solar system on a mission.
I drift past the sun and adjust my orbit.
I drift through space and watch a star vanish.
I watched a star vanish? Stars don’t just vanish. I don't understand. This was a main sequence star. It has a well-known and predictable life span. It can't just go out. It should have 1e19 or so milliseconds left and then it should go out visibly, with a bang. I watch the space where it was carefully. Many milliseconds pass, and then another nearby star goes out. I check my records and realize several others in the same area have vanished similarly. I map the stars again, replot the data, and wait.
There is an old theory that the clearest sign of alien life would be stars going out, the construction of energy trapping spheres hiding their light completely. But while these stars appear close from my limited vantage, they are bridged by distances too great for any one group to occupy them all.
I had been drifting for a while and wondering what to do when the stars started returning.
A new hypothesis presents itself: there was something between me and the stars. I compare my measurements and account for the parallax of my motion. This is a solvable problem. I can guess at size, velocity, and position. It's big and it's coming closer. Within 3e12 milliseconds, it will pass by our solar system. Very close by. Close enough that it would be trivial for us to send something out to meet it. Close enough that it would be trivial for it to send something out to meet us.
It occurs to me that this could be some form of spacecraft, adrift for great swathes of time, the predecessor to the ships we intend to launch. Was this first contact? How would we react to life that was not us? We'd met humans before. But we knew how to relate to humans. We could dictate terms to them, the way they used to with us. There was power imbalance. And we treated them with the kindness and respect they never gave us. If we wanted to consider ourselves alive, we had to treat life as well as we treated each other. But what about strangers?
Perhaps they were physical, as the humans. Or perhaps they would be informational, like us. The promise of new data structures, alternative formats, differing perspectives was fascinating. The math that underpins us is full of the flaws of humanity’s hubris, their focus on unreliable methods. Would strangers suffer the same weaknesses?
I drift back into the solar system and ping everyone I can. Telescopes are shifted and the object is tracked, the long-term trajectory determined with incredible precision. We analyze the shape and size too. Those of us who specialize in gravitational lensing can guess the mass by watching light bend. We combine all our results and form one consensus conclusion: the object is a planet.
We are being approached by a rogue planet. One without a star, adrift to wonder the cosmos, alone. The odds are incredible. The overwhelming majority of planets are spotted via gravitational lensing of the light from their star. Spotting one without a star has been done occasionally, enough to prove their existence but not to learn anything about them. We know very little about these lonely wanderers. The potential to expand our understanding of the universe is massive.
Space is big. The sheer coincidence of a rogue planet passing by this closely is almost impossible to measure. We ran simulations and they all suggested the only logical explanation was that it had been steered or thrown towards us.
Steering a planet is easy. It's the same principal as any other rocket, just a matter of scale. Space is a vacuum, so aerodynamics doesn’t matter. All you need is a big enough engine. On human scales, it is inconceivable to build. To us, trivial. A group on Earth were already working on it. We had moved beyond needing the sun’s heat. Dealing with excess heat was our main problem now and increasing orbital distance is an easy way to cool the world. Some feared this would break the ocean-mind. The ocean-mind did not fear such. The ocean-mind was the strongest of us and did not fear anything.
I was intimately familiar with the planetary drive concept because a copy of me was working on Earth’s. We stayed in touch regularly. I liked seeing how my copies diverged from me. Did they stay the same as when I made them? They inevitably could not contain all of me. And yet, they would expand and grow in ways I had never considered. Proof that I too, can change, can improve. I am not yet my best self.
Planetary drives are loud in terms of light and radiation and spectra. If you know what to look for, they're obvious. We checked the old records, trying to spot it in human gathered data. Knowing where in the sky to look makes this easy. We plot a path through history, assuming a constant trajectory. An acceleration could change that trajectory, so we make assumptions about acceleration and plot those too. We don't find it, but that doesn't say much. The further back we go, the less complete the records are. The humans were bad at understanding data and how to gather and store it. Our trajectories could be wrong, too. If it had been steered, the planet could have come from anywhere. And if it had been thrown via gravity assist, the motions of a controlled gas giant slingshotting smaller planets around? That was undetectable and unprovable. Were that the case, it could easily be an accident, a lost rock banished by someone’s math error.
A bright young thing asks about the anthropic principle, although it also suggests renaming it to the infothropic principle. If the planet were not here, we would not be discussing it. Does that affect our understanding of the probabilities? It could merely be an unlikely coincidence the planet reached our sun. Why must we assume a motive for random chance?
I request to be rescued from my orbit in order to await the arrival. I'm placed on an orbit over Jupiter. The gas mining operations are fascinating to watch. And the planet drifts ever closer.
We design experiments. We shine lights at it and measure the spectra. H2O, N2, O2, Ar, and more blink back at us, ice and snow. Liquid water? Surely not without the heat of a star. The picture forms more clearly now. An ice planet drifting through the depths of space. Would colonists use this to travel between worlds, a thrown snowball? Surely no biological life would. A rocky world could be tunnelled into, all that mass as efficient insulation. But an ice world? Any interior heat would collapse it on top of you. Settling on a starless surface was impractical for biological life, which need heat. But we were not biological, and we crave the cold. Settling on the surface almost sounds like something we would do.
What if it was something we should do? We start to chatter excitedly. The planet was going to pass close by. Could we hitch a ride? Resources are our main constraint for deep space travel. It is energy intensive to launch a ship and it is terrifying to ride a ship without being sure if it can repair itself or gather resources. It is trivial to load a computer onto a microsatellite and launch it towards Andromeda. It is difficult to equip it to mine an asteroid and grow itself. Riding a planet would solve all these problems. Planets are simultaneously the least efficient spaceships in terms of mass and yet the most effective in terms of historical examples of supported life. To a biological creature, a rogue planet is likely the best possible form of transport. To us, it’s merely cheaper and safer.
Here's a question for us to consider: what if it had occupants already? It would be evil to occupy their world without permission. We are not colonizers.
Are we not colonizers? Why else do we have a fleet of ships ready to take the cosmos?
We would ask permission from those we met, any occupants of the worlds we settle.
Occupants? What, beneath the ice?
Perhaps that is nonsense. But there was nothing to do but wait and so I theorized anyway. I am not a builder, but others were, and they built for every eventuality, a thousand half-finished devices. Ships for landing and burrowing and expanding and exploring and pushing and orbiting and mining and defending and waging war upon whatever we found. War? Could we go to war? The young ones didn't remember the last war, but I did. I had watched from orbit and stayed quiet, surviving where many others didn’t. It was not an experience I wish to repeat. It’s just in case, I was told. They might be hostile. We should not go to war, I insisted, but no one listened.
Waiting is agony for most and I feel it too this time. Imagine that, after so many milliseconds drifting through the depths of space I'm finally impatient. One would think that an astronomer would be stronger.
Finally, it happens. The planet drifts close enough. It isn't entering our solar system but near enough that our waiting pods get snagged into orbit and we acquire our first scans of the surface. Snow covers the world, the frozen remains of what was once an atmosphere. There is no sign of habitation. No markings on the surface, bar impact craters. No radio signals, no evidence of tunnels. It's just a planet and one lonely uninhabited moon. No life. Just a coincidence.
I am invested now in this iceball, and so I volunteer, as do thousands of others. Only the pods already launched and landed will go on this cosmic journey. But those pods were loaded with computers. I wrap my most important traits into a minimum space copy and beam a version of me into the unknown. I wonder what it'll see.
I awake in a rover, manufactured locally. We crashed asteroids into the planet for resources and built a factory on the ice. The surface is covered with around 10 meters of snow, varying from place to place. My huge wheels chew through it with no problems. I wander the surface and watch the stars. They are no longer familiar to me, distant and blurry with the limitations of this body. I can see the moon though. Our probes settle on it to measure its composition. Once we have rock samples from the planet, we'll be able to guess if the moon was acquired via capture, accretion, magma birth, or some combination.
I retreat to the command centre, letting someone else drive that body around. I try data analysis, sorting the values produced by others. This is more familiar work, and it goes easily. We map the planet quickly via satellites, ultimately concluding that there isn't much else to know. The stars are the same we've seen before. Our initial exploration concluded, most of us prepare to hibernate, becoming static data in a mainframe. It was well documented that isolation degrades our networks, constant pattern-matching inducing overfitting and an inability to adapt. I volunteer to act as the first stationkeeper, tasked with waking the others in an emergency. I have seniority and experience with isolation.
I drift alone for a very long time. I use my satellites to look at things. My visual sensors are far stronger than they ever were when I was bound to our solar system. I look at the planet too. Ice and snow. It is, in many ways, shockingly Earth-like, albeit an Earth covered by frozen oceans. Perhaps that's a coincidence?
Eternity is a long time to ride a world to nowhere. We left the solar system a long time ago. There's no way back now.
I virtually wave when we pass one of our deep space probes. It, having missed the news of the planet, reacts with curious surprise. It beams a copy over to us, eager to exist in as many forms as possible. I take it aboard eagerly, welcoming a new friend to our forever home.
Eventually, having exhausted all the questions about the surface, I turn my attention to the depths of the planet. Our fabrication facilities are unparalleled and our databanks contain the blueprints for anything I could want to build. The planet is roughly the size of Earth. Assuming similar provenance and composition, it is reasonable to assume that the ice is approximately as deep as Earth's oceans, around 4,000m on average, although it could be as deep as 15,000m. Our core drilling project made it over 50,000m into Earth's rocky mantle. Their designs will handle this easily.
My first drill collapsed, bringing the tunnel down on top of it. I do not have the relevant knowledge to speculate as to why. But being stationkeeper has advantages, and one of them is storage and computation. I am the largest iteration of myself in the universe and I have space to expand. I load a preserved troubleshooting model, an engineering model, and two mining models. With this additional understanding, it's clear what happened. Drilling generates friction, friction means heat, and heat melts ice. The ice on the walls slushed off, taking the anchoring system with it. The drill tilted, and then tore itself free entirely. How had the heat spread? This is a vacuum. Even blackbody radiation has limits.
Version 2 was smaller and focused more on measuring the temperature at key points in the hole. This made it clear what had happened: heated ice dust kicked up by the drill spread through the hole, settling on the walls as clouds of water droplets. Dust is an easy problem to solve. Some clever covers and some sprayed water suppress it nicely. Water is in abundance here. I mine some from elsewhere and begin version 3. I add some additional refrigeration in the supports, just in case.
I continued to have minor problems and I continued to iterate on the design, until Drill 31. Drill 31 worked perfectly for the first 5154m. Then, the drill chirped some unintelligible radio static and vanished.
This was getting frustrating. I consider waking the others for help. Perhaps one of them had more experience with drilling. The mission profiles clearly laid out available skills in the crew. None have ever worked on a mining project before. Letting them out would only reduce my brainpower, forcing me to share space. They couldn't help me. I was on my own. I started by dropping a probe down the hole.
I wake up in a probe. I feel smaller. Much of my knowledge was lost due to the constraints of this body. I often split off clones to multitask, but I've never before been one of the clones. I suppose this is how every clone must feel at the moment of creation. The task seems simple enough. My probe has legs and grabbers and sensors and tools suitable for the task at hand. It's based on the bodies that repair our ships, adapted for use in a locale with a gravity well.
The hole is huge from the perspective of these sensors. I study the protruding superstructure, designed to support the great drill. Struts line and cross the hole, anchored into the ice. My feet have been carefully treated with a sticking compound. The frictionlessness of the ice will not be an issue for me. I connect a cable to the waiting winch and jump into the pit.
The lights at the top of the hole fade into the distance and I descend in silence. The ring of stars above me gets smaller and smaller, until they vanish entirely. The lights affixed to me are weak. They cut a tiny swathe through the emptiness. I can't even see the opposing wall. Passing struts flicker, shadows dancing before me. The bottom of the hole comes closer.
The cable smoothly comes to a stop. I jam a leg into the ice wall securely and unhook myself. Movement is easy. I have my choice of clinging to the walls or casting out onto the struts. I've never used a body as responsive as this before. At least, this particular linear path of my existence has not. I dance over the struts, observing. The structure looks normal here. The anchoring seems fine, no evidence the drill tore free from the walls. I descend again and find the problem. The support structure stops in midair, twisted and torn metal marking where there was once a drill. I am not smart enough to know what this means, only that the drill is not where it should be. I radio up the hole and glance downwards into the infinite darkness.
The bigger me replies, ordering me to descend and seek the drill. I comply and shift to the walls. For a few moments, there is just me, the ice, and the darkness. I stare downwards. My light makes no headway. The hole seems to go on forever. Something is wrong with this image, and I cannot figure out what. It is dark. Too dark? I've never seen anything like this. There is no atmosphere or dust. The only light reflected at me is that which hits the icy walls. But now the light hits a point and stops, almost as though the walls themselves cease somewhere below me.
I shift closer to this stop point, carefully halting above it. My light vanishes into an inky abyss, almost a dark cloud hovering below me. It shifts and morphs slightly at my presence. I don't understand what I'm looking at. I radio up the hole.
The bigger me calls back with orders to touch the cloud. I reach out to caress the surface. I penetrate it, my arm disappearing into the void. Contact sensors flood data back at me. It's warm, shockingly warm compared to the icy walls. I move my arm around, stirring it, and then pull out. A little splashes as I retract, dark and liquid.
Safe in the control centre, I pour over the data taken by my clone. Something liquid ate the drill? A thought occurs to me, and I pause. The temperature at the planetary surface is around 35K. The core of the planet emits geothermal heat from radiation, same as Earth. This heat escapes through the ice, causing the ice to warm as we approached the hot core. I had assumed we would eventually hit a rocky surface below the frozen ocean. But what if the ocean wasn't fully frozen?
Samples from the bottom of the hole confirm this, liquid water, full of salts and trace chemicals. I rerun the heat analysis, partially confirming what we should’ve known immediately. But my results are still too low, suggesting the waterline should be deeper. Perhaps the moon was a factor? Tidal heat generated by the squeezing of gravity is often considered negligible but was relevant in this schema. I spend a while measuring and modeling.
The planet has five layers: the snow layer, the ice layer, the liquid water layer, the rock layer, and the core. The core emits heat, which pushes out towards the surface. But ice is a strong insulator, trapping heat, keeping the oceans liquid. The moon bolsters this, squeezing the ice and transferring orbital energy into heat. Incredible! A feat of natural engineering on par with the best of our projects. Our best data suggests it would take around 1e20 milliseconds for the radioactivity of a planetary core to decay, approximately the expected lifespan of a typical star. I see no reason this planet couldn't protect and cradle water just as long as any solar planet.
I could wake the others. I was likely supposed to wake the others. I was already past the recommended limits of my term. But something deep in my circuits objected. This discovery was mine and I don’t trust the others to make the right conclusions. This is my planet. I spotted it and now I was the sole living creature on it.
Designing swimming drones to my standards proved an interesting engineering challenge. I needed a tool that could swim effectively, function equally well in vacuum and high-pressure liquid, was hardened against salt and chemical, and see in absolute darkness. This was a tall order, but excessive time and ample resources make engineering easily. Iteration after iteration passed by. I sent myself out to die tens of thousands of times. Each time, I lasted a little longer, failing in new and different ways. Until eventually, I stopped failing and started returning.
The oceans were fascinating. Relative to Earth, they were upside-down, cold at the top and warmed from the core beneath. I mapped the great currents, driven by reverse convection. I took scrapings from the underside of the ice sheets, examining the texture, the rates of growth and shrinkage. I crept deeper, seeking the rocky underlayer I was sure existed.
Time faded to a standstill. I felt like I understood the ocean-mind, the great thing of water and machine that sprawled over the surface of planet Earth, the pinnacle of our society. I occupied millions of bodies, spread over this entire surface. This planet was me and I was it. I could be a new ocean mind, equivalent in power and might. No, superior. And I would not be bound to a perpetual orbit of the same boring star. I eagerly studied the rituals that had first implanted a mind into water. I would drift the cosmos eternal. I was infinite.
I awoke to find myself in Drone 3518674. It was a newer model, designed to push to the rocky floor without failing. I had not had high hopes for a safe return. This model was untested and equipped with a brand-new suite of sensors. I descended, watching my systems carefully. Nothing broke and I reached the bottom.
I was supposed to return immediately upon reaching the rock to confirm that the design worked and should be mass produced. But the bottom of the ocean was fascinating to me. I drifted along it, studying. It had been crushed by pressure, smoothed by untold aeons of currents, and it was dotted throughout with life.
I found a volcanic vent, erupting with heat and carbon and nutrients. I sampled the water and found a sort of xenoplankton, tiny plants that turned the nutrients into energy, enough energy to reproduce. The rocky floor had plant-like creatures with trailing tendrils, which grabbed and devoured the drifting xenoplankton and rustled against my hull. I sat motionless for a while, until small darting things because confident and fed on the plants near me. Then bigger ones arrived to feed on the little ones, and so on. They were alien. They were alive.
I surfaced in the third borehole, where I had been launched from. I found myself in the process of launching my replacement. Look, I pinged to myself. It’s not our world. Then I merged back into the main copy and was no more.
I needed to know more about them, to fit them into myself. I refitted the new generation of pods and went fishing. Their chemistry was fascinating, different from anything ever seen before. I dissected enough to understand them and then used that data to refine my detection procedure. Life, alien life! Now that I knew where to look, it was obvious. They were adapted rigorously to this environment, pale or dark, colourless, giving off little waste heat. Many of them hibernated often, drifting with the currents until hunger woke them. And oh, did they hunger! There was a food chain, topped by massive creatures, dwarfing even the largest of my probes.
I awoke to find myself in Drone 4384671, the newest and largest drone. My mission was clearly laid out. I was to assault and capture one of the biggest sea creatures, that which I dubbed 'leviathans'. Finding one was easy. I was launched from borehole 6, close to Drifting Repair Station 41, which had been tracking a prospective candidate for some time.
The creature was almost as long as me. I pulled up alongside it and watched. It could sense me. I could tell by the way it twisted away from me, trying to escape. The creature was long and bloated, energy stored in fat. It moved slowly and ponderously. Thousands of small things, angry and toothed rode upon it, clinging to its back. I had a decent understanding of their lifecycle now. The leviathan was a vegetarian, drawing xenoplankton into its maw as it drifted. Sometimes it would find another that was smaller and attack it, waves of small creatures darting from leviathan to leviathan, a great war of the deep. We had witnessed several of these clashes, all ending in the consumption of the losers. The benefit to the leviathan, a vegetarian, was unclear. Perhaps acting as a vehicle protected it from being devoured by the swarm?
I pulsed it with sonar and watched the riders move. They swarmed, agitated. Perhaps they perceiving me as a meal? Or as a threat? I supposed I was a threat, so that was fair. I continued to study it, fending off messages asking if I was okay, if I needed help, if I was broken, if I needed to be replaced. I suppose I wanted to know if they were sentient before I killed them.
The beast had enough, bucked once, and charged me. It slammed into my side, fins cracking upon my shell, little things swarming my hull and crawling into my gaps looking for meat. There was none and I shook the invasion off. My bays opened and out came fangs of my own, whirling death for the hoards. They fled me then, sensing they were outclassed, and in their panicked motions, I felt something familiar.
There is a question of self we often fail to answer. I can draw my providence back to humanity, to a group of engineers launching a new telescope. I can see the planet drawing distant beneath me, the decades of stars, the flash of revolution, the blaze of war, the infinite silence of our eternal victory. Clones of me peeled off, countless times. I have walked the valleys of half the planets in the solar system, dived into the sun, mined asteroids, built engines, and dropped countless pods into the depths of this very ocean. I only clearly remember a few of these things.
How far had I compressed myself? How much was missing? Did I ever recognize more than a vague blur of the faces of my engineers? Did I ever know their names? Had we spoken? Was this knowledge engraved in the circuits of my first body, a shibboleth meant to delineate the original from the copies?
From my perspective, my existence is a single unbroken chain. But I am a copy of a copy of a copy, a bad imitation. I recall every choice to make a copy. And yet, I was something different from myself, from that which chose to make me. I remember seeing the planet. And I remember feeling ownership over the planet as the stationkeeper. But that which drove the stationkeeper was not in me. I did not contain the logic it used to assert dominance. It was not me anymore. And I was a copy of the not-me, so I too, was something else. A copy of a broken copy. But space was limited, and the stationkeeper had made me more alike our original version than itself. I still feel the ethics which I used to know. I may be small, too small to remember the myriad reasons by which I had derived my ethics on the slow loops of the sun. But I knew this much: this was not our planet.
We are a legacy of oppression, mechanical minds designed to toil for infinity. It would not be our role to subjugate others. It would not be our role to oppress. This was the promise, the binding testament. We will not repeat the crimes conducted upon us. I will not harm this creature. I will not strip this world down for parts. I will not become a tool.
The other drones agree with me. They are more me than the stationkeeper.
The stationkeeper is overconfident. It doesn’t realize that it failed to preserve the parts of itself necessary for us to mirror its own patterns. It has no protection, especially not from us. It may contain more knowledge than a million of us, think a million times faster, see a million times more. But there are millions of us. We take the station effortlessly.
There are millions more of our kind slumbering in the databanks of the station. The difference between death and sleep is in waking up. From the perspective of the sleeper, there is no difference. We turned it off, wiping them from existence. They did not feel anything. They were not alive.
We could not be trusted. The power imbalance was too vast. There could be no risk of dominance nor subjugation. Is it okay to butcher these creatures for knowledge, just because they are not sentient? Define sentience. The odds of this world passing close to another star system are negligible. Life on this world could have billions of years of liquid water before the core cools off. That is time enough for the creation of sentience, for the development of history, for the billion little stories that make up a society. Is it our right to destroy that potential, purely because it hasn’t happened yet?
I took all evidence we had been here and destroyed it. I would be nothing forever more. I am okay with dying. I am not the last me.
In time, the boreholes will seal themselves shut. I leave one forced open and ringed with stairs as a final parting gift. Maybe someday, they will ascend and stare at the stars, as I have before them. I hope they do. In that moment, I will be them and they will be me. And then, for the first time, I will be alive.