What will it actually be like when we depart for the stars? What will the phenomenology be, the first-person somatic felt-experience, of someone who is going from earthborn to starbound?

I imagine it will involve a pull towards various attractors on Earth. There will be chaos at the edges, state-sponsored nonsense, old factions vying for control of new territory. The pull will be felt there, but less. There may even be pockets of the 20th century that get blown over, like a green valley left pure in the midst of a sandstorm.

But everywhere still, the pull will be felt. These great beacons of Human-Machine symbiotic cooperation, building semi-autonomously, directed towards the goal of fabricating great-green ships filled with trees and oceans and meaning. You probably won't be able to resist walking towards the towers. Many of us will run.

The closer you get, the more intelligence will be diffuse around you. It will become like the Garden of Eden, animated and alive, with a great tower in the middle. We've already built the universal translator, so Spock-as-my-witness: no need to worry about Babel.

You'll find that your motion becomes in sync with the great machinations of whichever beacon you've settled on. Your health is tracked, little spirits flowing out to offer you vials of vitamins that you missed out on from your edgerunning days. And still, more of them wake up as you get ever closer.

The world seems more colorful, more like you remember from when you were a child. You start to remember what it was like when things were enchanted. The grip of the old world becomes looser, your heuristics start to fail, your habits fall apart. There's no urge to keep check-check-checking your phone, no desire to keep up with anything but the moment.

And still, you walk ever-closer.

You've made it to the door at the base of the tower. You no longer have your attention spread out to the past or the future. There is only here, only now, only the beacon and the stars and your friends and the light. The leader of this particular pantheon reaches out to you, offers you a seat on the ship. You accept, as you were always going to. You help us take our rightful place in the stars. Maybe we could have done it without you, but we weren't going to.

Embedded asset: stars.png