Solitude
24 Oct 2023Iridium Nova
It's been a while since my last post. News comes slow out here, but I still get it eventually. Say what you will about Galnet, but their couriers are real heroes. It sounds like things are still pretty exciting back there in the bubble. Nice to know it's still there. Or maybe it isn't, and the next bit of news I get from the roving couriers will be the equivalent of an entire civilization putting out a distress call. Well, anyway, things out here are pretty chill. I guess that's why I've been quiet. There's something about the black. That isolation, a kind of Zen that comes from spending the night just sitting there with all your systems powered down, except life support of course. You just listen to the sound of nothing - or the universe, translated by the audio processor in your helmet. It's a real marvel of engineering. I know it's old tech, older than me even. But still, the way they designed it, it's like they knew something special about the universe. How to translate all the little, subtle fluctuations, waves, pulses, and signals that an entire universe emits, into something that somehow makes sense to our simple human brains on a level we don't fully understand. I wonder about the person who figured it all out. Without that little piece of tech, we'd all be deaf to the universe that surrounds us. I dunno, maybe we'd still get some kind of Zen from it, but somehow I doubt it'd be the same.
Sometimes, I'll sit and listen to the radio emissions of a pulsar. They can be downright musical. It's a different kind of music, though. It's not human, it's more fundamental than that - like the universe itself singing to you. Those of you back home, whenever you get this, if you get it at all, assuming there's anything left of you folks, try pulling up some recordings of pulsar emissions. There's some good ones out there, but nothing beats the live experience. Plus, when you're there in person, you get a heck of a light show to go with it. Just be careful with it, those things can rip your ship apart if you're not careful.
It's strange, when you think about it, how we humans, the product of a little blue marble orbiting a rather ordinary little white star, have grown to have a kind of kinship with the universe beyond the frontiers of our little world. There's something about space that feels right. As deadly as it is to us, we feel like we're a part of it. Maybe there's something ancient about us that remembers the stardust. Perhaps we were never really meant to spend too much time living on a beautiful marble.