Last and First Men (2017) - full transcript
Listen patiently.
We, who are the Last Men, earnestly
desire to communicate with you.
I am speaking to you now
from a period about two thousand million
terrestrial years in your future.
Astronomers have made
a startling discovery,
which assigns a speedy end to humankind.
We can help you -
and we need your help.
When your writers romance
about the future,
they imagine a progress
toward some kind of utopia
where beings like themselves
live in unmitigated bliss.
No such paradise existed
through the eons
that lie between your age and mine.
Instead, we have watched
huge fluctuations of joy and woe,
the results of changes
not only in humanity's environment,
but also in its fluid nature.
Human existence has been less
like a mountain torrent
than a great sluggish river,
seldom broken by rapids.
Ages of dormancy,
often of stagnation,
filled with monotonous problems and
toils of countless almost identical lives,
were punctuated by rare bursts.
Existence has always been precarious.
At any stage of its career,
humanity might have been exterminated
by some slight alteration
to its chemical environment,
by a more than usually malignant microbe,
by a radical change of climate,
by the manifold effects of its own folly,
or by some celestial event.
And so it was that humanity detected
a volume of non-luminous gas.
Calculation showed that
this object and the sun
were approaching one another
at a tangent and would collide.
As a result of this, the sun would flare up
and expand prodigiously.
Life would be quite impossible
on any of the planets
save, perhaps, Neptune.
Some of our predecessors,
realizing that they themselves could never
live on the inhospitably remote planet,
advocated an orgiastic celebration
of pleasure until the end.
But at length, our earlier species
excelled itself
in an almost unanimous resolve
to devote its remaining centuries
to the production of a new human species
into a new world.
Ten more species succeeded one another
on the plains of Neptune.
We, the 18th, are the Last Men.
If you could enter
this world of the Last Men,
you would find some things familiar
and much that would seem strangely
distorted and perverse.
You would encounter creatures
recognizably human,
yet in your view grotesque.
Some of these fantastic beings you would
find covered with fur or mole velvet,
revealing the underlying muscles.
Others display brown, yellow, or ruddy skin,
and yet others a translucent ash-green.
You might call us faun-like, ape-like,
bear-like, or even elephantine.
Yet some characteristics
are common to all of us.
The upward-looking astronomical eye
on the crown of the skull would shock you.
This organ, when fully extended about
a handbreadth from its bony case,
reveals the heavens in as much detail
as your astronomical telescopes.
Scattered about the green plains
of our colonized planet,
you would notice many buildings.
These buildings would seem like
geometrical mountains to you.
In many cases, the whole fabric
is translucent or transparent.
So that at night, with internal illumination,
it appears as an edifice of light.
Springing from a base
twenty or more miles across,
the star-seeking towers attain a height
where even the atmosphere is breached.
Some of them are almost
as old as our species.
Some are not yet completed.
Every successive culture
has expressed itself
in one or more of these
supreme monuments.
In their summits work
the hosts of our astronomers:
the essential eyes through which our community
peers across the boundless ocean of space.
Each of us goes there,
at one time or another.
Together, we perform
the symbolic acts
which replaced the debased rites
of your religions long ago.
Our children are very different beings
from the First Human children.
Their number in our world is small
in relation to our immense population.
Yet, seeing that every one of us
is potentially immortal,
you may wonder how we permit ourselves
to have any children at all.
Our policy is to produce new individuals
of a higher order than ourselves.
As a result, we need
a continuous supply of children.
The fetus is carried for twenty years.
Infancy lasts for about a century
when the foundations of body and mind
are slowly laid.
When our children attain physical adolescence,
nearly a thousand years after birth,
they leave the safe paths of childhood
to spend another thousand years
in one of the polar continents
known as the Land of the Young.
There, our young people live
the half-primitive, half-sophisticated life
that suits their nature.
They love
and hate.
We live through all the
mistakes of thought and action
that humankind has ever made.
And, at last, we emerge ready
for a world of maturity.
The designers of our species set out
to produce a new order of mentality
in a system of distinct brains
held in telepathic unity.
The immense difference between ourselves
and all other human species
lies in the group-mind.
When these individuals join
in simultaneous mental unity,
the entire past of the species
appears as a personal memory.
They are able to enter into past minds.
Away from those contented to remain
on the planet's surface are the navigators
who embody humanity's
proud mastery of interstellar space.
The navigators mentally form
a unique class among us
because they spend so much of their time
in the empty regions beyond the range
of telepathic communication.
They are a hardy, simple,
and modest folk.
Recently, an exploration ship returned from
a voyage into the outer tracts through space.
Half the crew had died.
The survivors were emaciated
and mentally unbalanced.
Throughout the voyage,
an unexpected alteration
taking place in a neighboring star
was observed.
It began to change from white to violet
and increase in brightness.
When the ship returned,
the crew flung open the ports
and staggered blubbering
into the arms of the crowd.
These poor human wrecks
have shown a phobia of the stars
and of all that is not human.
They dare not go out at night.
They cannot find companionship.
They cling piteously
to the sweets of individual life,
a mere defense against reality.
Listen patiently.
The navigators have made
a startling discovery.
It is something unprecedented:
a normal star suffering from a
fantastic acceleration of its vital process.
We hoped that our sun might prove
too distant to be seriously influenced,
but this hope had to be abandoned.
Within thirty thousand years,
life will be impossible anywhere
within a vast radius of the sun -
so vast a radius
that it is quite impossible to propel
our planet away fast enough to escape.
The discovery of this doom
kindled in us unfamiliar emotions.
Outwardly, everyone behaved
with perfect serenity,
but inwardly, every mind was in turmoil
as we faced the sudden destruction
of our world.
There was nothing left for us to do
but to crowd as much as possible
into our remaining life
and meet our end in the noblest manner.
And there again came upon us
the rare experience
of a unified mind among the species.
For a whole year,
every individual entered a trance
in which we resolved
many ancient mysteries.
And in consequence of this,
we found ourselves faced with two tasks
that had not yet been contemplated.
First, we have set about the forlorn task
of disseminating the seeds of
a new humanity among the stars.
We have devised minute
electromagnetic wave-systems
individually capable of sailing forward toward
the most promising regions of the galaxy.
These units are so cunningly interrelated
that they combine to form spores of life.
We shall project these particles
in immense quantities.
But the chance that any of them will survive
to find a suitable environment is small.
It is clear to us that the work
will not be completed
until the disintegration
of our community has begun.
The second task that occupies us
relates to the past.
We need your help.
We have long been able to enter and
participate in the experiences of past minds
as passive spectators.
But recently, we have discovered
the power of influencing the past.
This may seem to be an impossibility.
A past event is what it is.
But, in certain cases,
some feature of a past event
may depend on an event in the far future.
In certain rare cases,
mental events far separated in time
determine one another directly.
The past can help us learn once again
that supreme achievement
of the human spirit:
the loyalty to the forces of life
embattled against death.
But what is it that we seek
to contribute to the past?
We want to help the past
make the best of itself.
We seek to direct the attention
of past individuals to truths,
which would otherwise be overlooked.
Those of us who still care
for the life of the mind
are tempted to regret that humankind
did not choose decent suicide
before the degeneration began.
But this could not be.
The mission we undertook
had to be completed.
This is the last office of humanity.
I am speaking to you now
from a period about two thousand million
terrestrial years in your future.
It has become very difficult to reach you,
and still more difficult to speak to you.
Some centuries have now passed
since the sun began to show
the first symptoms of disintegration:
namely a slight change of color
toward the blue,
followed by a definite increase
of brightness and heat.
The deluge of solar radiation has had
a disastrous effect on the human organism.
We are the wreckage of our former selves.
The normal power of telepathic
communication is now so unreliable
that we have been compelled to fall back
upon the archaic practice of vocal symbolism.
Away from the sun's destructive heat,
we are forcing our planet outward from
its old orbit in an ever-widening spiral.
But we have not been able to prevent the
climate from becoming more and more deadly,
even at the poles where we have migrated.
The intervening regions
have all been deserted.
Evaporation of the oceans has thrown
the whole atmosphere into tumult.
Now and again, we meet together,
the few that prevail,
to hearten ourselves
with one another's presence.
We can only sit in silence,
groping for consolation and for strength.
Sometimes, the spoken word
flickers between us,
shedding a brief light but little warmth.
But listen patiently.
This is not our last word.
We, the Last Men, still have something
in us left from the time that is past.
The stars have their beginnings
and their ends.
For a few moments,
somewhere in between,
a few, very few,
may support thought.
The universal End comes in due course.
After the End,
events unknowable will continue
in a time much longer than that which
will have passed since the Beginning.
The whole duration of humanity,
its evolution and many successive species,
is but a flash
in the lifetime of the cosmos.
Looking at the heavens and at the violet
splendor that seeks to destroy us,
we are filled with awe and pity:
awe for the inconceivable potential
of this bright host
and pity for its self-thwarting effort
to supplant the universal spirit.
We find ourselves filled,
in spite of everything,
with a triumphant love of our fate.
Great are the stars,
and humankind is of no account to them.
But humankind is a fair spirit,
whom a star conceived
and a star kills.
We, who are the Last Men, earnestly
desire to communicate with you.
I am speaking to you now
from a period about two thousand million
terrestrial years in your future.
Astronomers have made
a startling discovery,
which assigns a speedy end to humankind.
We can help you -
and we need your help.
When your writers romance
about the future,
they imagine a progress
toward some kind of utopia
where beings like themselves
live in unmitigated bliss.
No such paradise existed
through the eons
that lie between your age and mine.
Instead, we have watched
huge fluctuations of joy and woe,
the results of changes
not only in humanity's environment,
but also in its fluid nature.
Human existence has been less
like a mountain torrent
than a great sluggish river,
seldom broken by rapids.
Ages of dormancy,
often of stagnation,
filled with monotonous problems and
toils of countless almost identical lives,
were punctuated by rare bursts.
Existence has always been precarious.
At any stage of its career,
humanity might have been exterminated
by some slight alteration
to its chemical environment,
by a more than usually malignant microbe,
by a radical change of climate,
by the manifold effects of its own folly,
or by some celestial event.
And so it was that humanity detected
a volume of non-luminous gas.
Calculation showed that
this object and the sun
were approaching one another
at a tangent and would collide.
As a result of this, the sun would flare up
and expand prodigiously.
Life would be quite impossible
on any of the planets
save, perhaps, Neptune.
Some of our predecessors,
realizing that they themselves could never
live on the inhospitably remote planet,
advocated an orgiastic celebration
of pleasure until the end.
But at length, our earlier species
excelled itself
in an almost unanimous resolve
to devote its remaining centuries
to the production of a new human species
into a new world.
Ten more species succeeded one another
on the plains of Neptune.
We, the 18th, are the Last Men.
If you could enter
this world of the Last Men,
you would find some things familiar
and much that would seem strangely
distorted and perverse.
You would encounter creatures
recognizably human,
yet in your view grotesque.
Some of these fantastic beings you would
find covered with fur or mole velvet,
revealing the underlying muscles.
Others display brown, yellow, or ruddy skin,
and yet others a translucent ash-green.
You might call us faun-like, ape-like,
bear-like, or even elephantine.
Yet some characteristics
are common to all of us.
The upward-looking astronomical eye
on the crown of the skull would shock you.
This organ, when fully extended about
a handbreadth from its bony case,
reveals the heavens in as much detail
as your astronomical telescopes.
Scattered about the green plains
of our colonized planet,
you would notice many buildings.
These buildings would seem like
geometrical mountains to you.
In many cases, the whole fabric
is translucent or transparent.
So that at night, with internal illumination,
it appears as an edifice of light.
Springing from a base
twenty or more miles across,
the star-seeking towers attain a height
where even the atmosphere is breached.
Some of them are almost
as old as our species.
Some are not yet completed.
Every successive culture
has expressed itself
in one or more of these
supreme monuments.
In their summits work
the hosts of our astronomers:
the essential eyes through which our community
peers across the boundless ocean of space.
Each of us goes there,
at one time or another.
Together, we perform
the symbolic acts
which replaced the debased rites
of your religions long ago.
Our children are very different beings
from the First Human children.
Their number in our world is small
in relation to our immense population.
Yet, seeing that every one of us
is potentially immortal,
you may wonder how we permit ourselves
to have any children at all.
Our policy is to produce new individuals
of a higher order than ourselves.
As a result, we need
a continuous supply of children.
The fetus is carried for twenty years.
Infancy lasts for about a century
when the foundations of body and mind
are slowly laid.
When our children attain physical adolescence,
nearly a thousand years after birth,
they leave the safe paths of childhood
to spend another thousand years
in one of the polar continents
known as the Land of the Young.
There, our young people live
the half-primitive, half-sophisticated life
that suits their nature.
They love
and hate.
We live through all the
mistakes of thought and action
that humankind has ever made.
And, at last, we emerge ready
for a world of maturity.
The designers of our species set out
to produce a new order of mentality
in a system of distinct brains
held in telepathic unity.
The immense difference between ourselves
and all other human species
lies in the group-mind.
When these individuals join
in simultaneous mental unity,
the entire past of the species
appears as a personal memory.
They are able to enter into past minds.
Away from those contented to remain
on the planet's surface are the navigators
who embody humanity's
proud mastery of interstellar space.
The navigators mentally form
a unique class among us
because they spend so much of their time
in the empty regions beyond the range
of telepathic communication.
They are a hardy, simple,
and modest folk.
Recently, an exploration ship returned from
a voyage into the outer tracts through space.
Half the crew had died.
The survivors were emaciated
and mentally unbalanced.
Throughout the voyage,
an unexpected alteration
taking place in a neighboring star
was observed.
It began to change from white to violet
and increase in brightness.
When the ship returned,
the crew flung open the ports
and staggered blubbering
into the arms of the crowd.
These poor human wrecks
have shown a phobia of the stars
and of all that is not human.
They dare not go out at night.
They cannot find companionship.
They cling piteously
to the sweets of individual life,
a mere defense against reality.
Listen patiently.
The navigators have made
a startling discovery.
It is something unprecedented:
a normal star suffering from a
fantastic acceleration of its vital process.
We hoped that our sun might prove
too distant to be seriously influenced,
but this hope had to be abandoned.
Within thirty thousand years,
life will be impossible anywhere
within a vast radius of the sun -
so vast a radius
that it is quite impossible to propel
our planet away fast enough to escape.
The discovery of this doom
kindled in us unfamiliar emotions.
Outwardly, everyone behaved
with perfect serenity,
but inwardly, every mind was in turmoil
as we faced the sudden destruction
of our world.
There was nothing left for us to do
but to crowd as much as possible
into our remaining life
and meet our end in the noblest manner.
And there again came upon us
the rare experience
of a unified mind among the species.
For a whole year,
every individual entered a trance
in which we resolved
many ancient mysteries.
And in consequence of this,
we found ourselves faced with two tasks
that had not yet been contemplated.
First, we have set about the forlorn task
of disseminating the seeds of
a new humanity among the stars.
We have devised minute
electromagnetic wave-systems
individually capable of sailing forward toward
the most promising regions of the galaxy.
These units are so cunningly interrelated
that they combine to form spores of life.
We shall project these particles
in immense quantities.
But the chance that any of them will survive
to find a suitable environment is small.
It is clear to us that the work
will not be completed
until the disintegration
of our community has begun.
The second task that occupies us
relates to the past.
We need your help.
We have long been able to enter and
participate in the experiences of past minds
as passive spectators.
But recently, we have discovered
the power of influencing the past.
This may seem to be an impossibility.
A past event is what it is.
But, in certain cases,
some feature of a past event
may depend on an event in the far future.
In certain rare cases,
mental events far separated in time
determine one another directly.
The past can help us learn once again
that supreme achievement
of the human spirit:
the loyalty to the forces of life
embattled against death.
But what is it that we seek
to contribute to the past?
We want to help the past
make the best of itself.
We seek to direct the attention
of past individuals to truths,
which would otherwise be overlooked.
Those of us who still care
for the life of the mind
are tempted to regret that humankind
did not choose decent suicide
before the degeneration began.
But this could not be.
The mission we undertook
had to be completed.
This is the last office of humanity.
I am speaking to you now
from a period about two thousand million
terrestrial years in your future.
It has become very difficult to reach you,
and still more difficult to speak to you.
Some centuries have now passed
since the sun began to show
the first symptoms of disintegration:
namely a slight change of color
toward the blue,
followed by a definite increase
of brightness and heat.
The deluge of solar radiation has had
a disastrous effect on the human organism.
We are the wreckage of our former selves.
The normal power of telepathic
communication is now so unreliable
that we have been compelled to fall back
upon the archaic practice of vocal symbolism.
Away from the sun's destructive heat,
we are forcing our planet outward from
its old orbit in an ever-widening spiral.
But we have not been able to prevent the
climate from becoming more and more deadly,
even at the poles where we have migrated.
The intervening regions
have all been deserted.
Evaporation of the oceans has thrown
the whole atmosphere into tumult.
Now and again, we meet together,
the few that prevail,
to hearten ourselves
with one another's presence.
We can only sit in silence,
groping for consolation and for strength.
Sometimes, the spoken word
flickers between us,
shedding a brief light but little warmth.
But listen patiently.
This is not our last word.
We, the Last Men, still have something
in us left from the time that is past.
The stars have their beginnings
and their ends.
For a few moments,
somewhere in between,
a few, very few,
may support thought.
The universal End comes in due course.
After the End,
events unknowable will continue
in a time much longer than that which
will have passed since the Beginning.
The whole duration of humanity,
its evolution and many successive species,
is but a flash
in the lifetime of the cosmos.
Looking at the heavens and at the violet
splendor that seeks to destroy us,
we are filled with awe and pity:
awe for the inconceivable potential
of this bright host
and pity for its self-thwarting effort
to supplant the universal spirit.
We find ourselves filled,
in spite of everything,
with a triumphant love of our fate.
Great are the stars,
and humankind is of no account to them.
But humankind is a fair spirit,
whom a star conceived
and a star kills.