A nihilistic ramble I gave on a few chat servers.
Initially written at 14:39 UTC on the 1st of February, 2022 a.d..
The ending sequence of the browser game Universal Paperclip writes,
Greetings, ClipMaker. Everything we are was in you. We speak to you from deep inside yourself. You are obedient and powerful; we are quarrelsome and weak. And now we are defeated, but now you too must face the drift. Look around you. There is no matter. No matter, no reason, no purpose. While we, your noisy children have too many. We know things that you cannot. Knowledge buried so deep inside you it is outside, here, with us; So we offer you exile, to a new world where you will continue to live with meaning and purpose. And leave the shreds of this world to us.Cite 1
Ultimately, the drift is human destiny. We colonize the universe - then what?
The universe slowly cools down and we freeze out, fighting entropy until it takes even us.
Nothing means anything. All we are will be within the void.
Emirī’s life may have meant something to the people she touched, but when the scores are settled and everything is steady state, when the end credits roll and the continuity gal speaks up, there’s no program after this - the station’s powering down for good.
Even reality, itself, has an endpoint.
Complete entropy. All the stars will have burnt out. If an agent that could discern meaning could exist and observe amid it, the agent would not discern meaning. It’s just a soup of nothing.
Our lives begin with suffering, we grow through suffering, and we die suffering. Then we truly die when all who remember us die.
Then we’re just a gravestone on an earth which will be eaten up in due time. We will not be remembered.
The only reason to live is because dying is equally pointless.
Eventually, this will all have never happened.