Memories of a Golden Record

This was originally written for the 2020 Genius Olympiad. It was a finalist, but unfortunately, COVID-19 happened before it could be judged, and now that I've graduated, I can't resubmit it again next year. Hopefully posting it online allows it to see the light of day again. I'm quite proud of it.

The speed of light is slow, in the grand scheme of things.

I've been doing this for as long as I can remember, but it's still so easy to forget that when you look into the stars, you're looking into the distant past. It takes so long for the light of distant space to reach us that, by the time the images hit our eyes, everything in them is long gone already. The interstellar columns of the Pillars of Creation were destroyed by a supernova seven thousand years before we ever saw them, the nascent stars buried in the Great Nebula of Eta-Carinae were burnt-out celestial dwarfs by the time any of us witnessed their photographs, and the Laniakea Supercluster is dispersing far faster than we could ever hope to see. A planet settled only by the most fundamental building blocks of life can be home to a thriving, sapient civilization that covers the world pole-to-pole, and we'll never know until we reach it, because it's so far away that we might get there before their light gets here. And, likewise, a planet that seems to borderline on utopian in the pictures can be a barren, irradiated desert of a world by the time we arrive. I know, logically, that what I see cannot be believed—I am constantly looking through a time machine.

That doesn't make it any easier, though.

I had such high hopes for this planet. They were so close to their goals, so near to transcension, that it seems almost criminally tragic that they died when they did; if they'd just hung on a little longer, they could be standing here right now alongside me, exploring the greater galaxy like one of our very own. They dreamed of a future like this, of interplanetary space travel and advanced alien civilizations. They sent messages out to the stars, begging for their pictures to be seen and their greetings heard, aching for the chance to explain their existence to the rest of the universe. They recorded songs for us, Mozart and Beethoven and dozens of others. They asked us to come meet them, and then to stay. They didn't know who we were—they didn't even know we existed—but they called us their friends and wished us good health. One message even asked us if we'd eaten yet, and if not, to come visit and try their cuisine. I don't know if they genuinely thought they'd get a response to a glorified message-in-a-bottle thrown into an ocean of stars, but they hoped, and that was enough for me to fall in love with this backwater blue marble and its strange little inhabitants. So I followed their message and played their records—how could I not?—and now I'm here, staring at a planet that died long before its people got the chance to meet me.

I don't know why I'm still standing here or what I expect to find. At home, I can look through my telescope and see spacecraft and science and a thriving society, and here there's nothing but dust and decaying biomatter, the last remnants of a world that was once so full of life that the plants turned the continents green. I can still see the satellites hovering in orbit, endlessly transmitting useless data; there's no one left to do anything important with it anymore. This place is a ghost of humanity, an echo of beings who once walked those blue-green shores, and I feel more like a mourner at a headstone than a guest.

I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised that Earth didn't make it past the Great Filter—most species don't. But when they showed us just how excited they were to come out here and join us in the cosmos, when they talked to us like we were already friends, when they proved to the whole Milky Way that they were smart and creative and more than capable... well, that made their death sting. I can't stop looking at these pictures they sent us—I say "sent us," but it was really more like "threw into the void and prayed for"—and thinking, what a waste. What a waste of talent and beauty and potential. What a waste of their time, and mine.

Part of me wants to leave this spacecraft and go down there and look around just for the sake of it, but the rest of me is almost afraid. I don't want to look at the gorgeous landscapes I hold in my hand and taint them with the image of a world wracked by plague and famine. I want the Earth of my daydreams to stay just how I visualized it: a picturesque spot of blue in an otherwise barren solar system, a hopeful little planet surrounded by sterility on all sides and waiting patiently for a stranger to come say hello. To go and see it as it is now would break the pedestal I've put it on, and I don't think I want that. I sort of wish I hadn't come—then I could just stay in the lab and look from afar, blissfully oblivious about the fact that these people would never live to see the future their science fiction dreamed of. But I also want to return this record to the place it was made in, to serve as both a monument to humanity and a warning of their fatal flaw. So, against my better judgement, I disembark, and find myself in the empty shell of a concrete jungle surrounded on all sides by refuse I don't recognize, the cast-off byproducts of a civilization too prideful and stubborn to admit what they were doing to themselves.

There is nothing here for me—nothing but the overgrown vegetation and extremophilic bacteria that have invaded the spaces humans used to occupy. The air burns with acidity, and the ground is colorful with pieces of plastic, discarded here by someone who didn't know of the dangers or simply didn't care. This place feels forbidden, like a world I am not supposed to set foot on, and I'm reminded of the other messages humanity has sent to the future, the less optimistic ones—namely, the warnings about the nuclear waste that lies buried underneath these layers of half-degraded polyvinyl chloride and polyethylene. This place is not a place of honor ... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger...The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours. The danger is to the body, and it can kill. Little did they know what their true downfall would be—not the radiation that seeps out from under their deserts, but the waste that clogged their streets and suffocated the crops they lived on. The last human being has died by now—they must have—and most of their architecture lies in ruins, but they've managed to leave one impact on the planet they called home: the layers and layers and layers of plastic that will probably still be here when I collapse and die, just as it was thousands of years ago.

I leave the record propped up against the only organic material in sight—a dead piece of bark that's more like the suggestion of a tree than an actual tree. It feels almost sacrilegious to leave an object of such great importance here among this filth, but there's nowhere else that's any better—this world is decimated, from their carbon-dioxide filled atmosphere to their garbage-coated cities. I look at the pictures again—valleys and canyons, formulas and spectra, science and art and life and culture—and then back at the empty city, a memory of the metropolis that once was. Thousands of years ago, humanity said they'd hoped to meet us someday, and here I am, now that it's too late to do anything. Their voices play back in my mind as I turn and walk away, minus the record but somehow feeling more weighted down. I keep the note they sent, maybe because I want something to remember them by, and maybe because I want a reminder of the desolation they've caused with their determined refusal to admit to their problems—the consequences of unchecked industry. "We hope, someday," it reads, "having solved the problems we faced, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hopes and our determinations, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe."

They were so hopeful, then. Thousands of years ago, these people—the inhabitants of this precious, tiny spot of life in a cold and empty galaxy—were thinking of a distant, amazing future. Come and meet us, they said. Come and visit. Well, here I am, visiting, and here you are, nothing but a memory of a now-extinct species. I wish I hadn't gotten here this late. I wish you were here to say hello. I wish things were still like they are in the telescopes when you view them from very far away. I wish your society wasn't just a trick of the light, I wish you'd had the foresight to see what you were doing, and I wish I could come and greet you instead of mourn you. I wish I was shaking your hand right now instead of flying home so I can watch how you destroyed yourself in the observatory lights.

But there's nothing more I can do, so this is how I'm leaving you, with the reminder of all the things you hoped for and everything that could have been.