The Death

A Plead

Medicine and science have been at the forefront of human progress into prosperity and long life since the first human picked up a rock and used it to kill it's food. Over time, our species went from hunting and gathering tribes, to the most dominant organism on Earth, save for bacteria. It was thought that progress would be never ending and life everlasting would be our greatest achievement.

This message was sent at great cost and even greater risk. We are writing this from a time where all of the universe's secrets are well known to us. The year, as described by Earth however, is not known to us any longer. Though, the age of the universe beginning from it's birth is around 20 billion years. Approximately 2 billion years ago, our neighboring galaxy collided with our own and gravity shifts caused Earth to fall into it's own sun one and a half million years later. 

The collision with Andromeda is not what I have sent this message to warn of however. I have sent this message 6.228 billion years into the past in order to warn of a great mistake that in your time, will be made very soon. This mistake is now known as the single greatest error humanity has ever committed. This mistake is not something that will cause the extinction of mankind, but rather the opposite. We are still not certain of how exactly, but it seems that the very force that causes life to become death, has ceased. 

I belong to a group that believes this message may be our only hope. In my time, humans and other intelligent life cover the entire universe. To avoid heat death, we managed to stop the universe's expansion, and created more order in the cosmos. Suffering of nearly all commonly known kinds, has been eliminated. War, poverty, famine, sickness, insanity, and pain are extinct and have been for almost a billion years. 

This likely sounds like a utopia, and in a sense, it is. However now, that all that could be achieved has been, there is no reason left for us to exist. There are no new stories to be told, nowhere to progress, and nothing to look forward to. Because nothing can die, we are doomed to spend eternity existing without any purpose. 

I was born about 6.2 billion years ago on the original Mars shortly after it had been terraformed to support Earth life. This was only a few millennia after the unknown "cure" for death was created. By that time, the concept of death was only told by those who lived before it was stopped. Many new generations believed death was nothing but a fairy tale and only grew more mythical as new generations severely outnumbered the old generations. The oldest generations were known as the ancients and for every billion people from the new generations, only one ancient who had witnessed death existed. Even they began to be regarded as myth eventually.

By the time I was born, many people were tired of life and sought ways to end it. Some tried for hundreds of years to figure out how to induce permanent, dreamless comas only to inevitably wake up a few days later at most. It seems whatever method was used to induce sleep, something unknown would stop it's function shortly after. DNA was analyzed and found to stop degrading at around 30 years of age. Ancients were the only people you could find who looked older than 30, having been beyond that age when death was eliminated.

The first major crisis as a result, was not the overpopulation of humanity, but rather bacteria. Not even microorganisms were dying anymore and so as long as they had nutrients, they would continue to reproduce indefinitely. About 200 years after death ended, scientists figured out a way to stop bacteria from being able to reproduce on it's own using a form of radiation that was applied to the entire planet. Some unaffected bacteria was stored to be grown under controlled conditions, but now bacteria across the globe no longer grew on it's own. Cancer was also stopped by a similar method that destroyed it ability to grow using constant radiations. Eventually, a more permanent solution was implemented by relocating all organisms that would simply continue to overpopulate unchecked to black holes. Eventually black holes would become dumping grounds for anything we found to be problematic.