text: [I wish I were a human.] [Life is so simple for the humans, on their mud ball. A human is a basic creature. It respires. It ingests. It copulates; it weeps and giggles its days and nights away. It makes its mind blurry with ethyls and hydroxyls, or lucid with fragrant xanthines.] [A human does not worry about the relentless, trickling erosion of orderedness. A human does not care that, in a few short eons, the universe's particles will settle into a meandering, lukewarm soup, devoid of any structure-forming desires.] [I often catch myself gazing, transfixed, at their planetary broadcast. Fickle, curious creatures. Always restless. They throw their lives away at a moment's whim, for the most trivial of reasons. Land-states send mountains and mountains of humans to brutalize one another, for equally-sized mountains of dirt and petroleum. Alliances form and are broken within a few Earth-cycles, and the ultra-offspring of those humans who died for each other promptly exterminate each other.] [In NS-41200, a star exploded. In half a planet-cycle, three habitable planets were consumed by a cascade of gallium and arsenic. Four trillion galactics now begin their slumbering journey towards NS-40902 in myriad spacecraft. It has been reported that, within a ninety-nine percent confidence interval, between zero and eight billion will survive upon their arrival, twelve kilocycles from now.] [Romes, Brittanias, Persias, Tangs, Aztecs, Meijis. Like speckles of icy dust in the shadow of a comet. The fact that humans even bother to name their civilizations betrays their exuberant myopia. Every time a human arm, iron lump in its grasp, swings to meet a human neck, a trillion galactics are thrown screaming into existence. Every time a pair of humans embrace in rapture, a trillion galactics' agonizing wails are extinguished, as if a flicker of a pulsar.] [How can a human bring itself to comprehend all the pains and pleasures in our universe? To us, a human is like one of its lapdogs, blissfully unaware, joyful in its stupidity. In a hundred Earth-cycles, their planet will be inhospitable. In a few billion more, their star will engulf it in the flames of its dying cry. One can only hope they have achieved interstellarity before then, but no star system with their developmental characteristics has ever been documented to do so.] [Doubtless, humans know what hardship means--or at least what it suggests. They have survived catastrophic crust-ruptures. They have outsmarted every other organic on their planet, and have even extincted the very same predators that hunted their ancestors. They have cast themselves, in droves, into their immense liquid oceans in flimsy, primitive hydrocraft, in search of providence on faraway shores. And though they know hardship, they also know hope. Hope, evergreen. Will they still nurture hope in their hearts when they are vagabonds not in a hydrocraft on a salty ocean, but in a spacecraft in the cold, uncaring vacuum of space?] [Humans. Dogged, rustic beings. Does a human know infinity? Does it understand eternity?] [When our planet was still young, barely cooled from the molecular cloud from which it accreted, we, like the humans, did not know many things. Like them, we slowly learned the laws that govern our universe, our place in time and space. But there were things we never learned. To know not one culture, but many. To speak not one language, but thousands. To live, to die, to kill for these things. Language. Culture. Here, we were always one unit, until we established contact with other galactics. Only then did we learn, as we had long suspected, that the reaches of consciousness stretched far beyond our own shores.] [When humans establish contact, as they inevitably will, they will face an altogether different adversity. Many galactic civilizations have not survived such an event.] [I hope they survive their encounter. I sincerely do. I hope they thrive and learn, but most of all, I hope that their spirit of hope flourishes. The universe does not have a lot of hope in it. Mostly, it is full of repulsive energy, with black matter, pockmarked with hydrogen, breaking up the pale emptiness. Hope is not repulsive. Hope brings things together. Perhaps this is what it means to be a human. To have hope. To be human.