Wordcount: circa 3500

AI disclosure: No generative AI was used in the writing, correcting, or reviewing any component of this essay, and neither was used in assisting research.

Dear terrestrial, we are excited to finally meet you. We would like to apologize towards all your civilization entering your sphere of influence. We hope this book will explain why we had to do that. But first, don’t be afraid. We are not here to cause harm.

This is not dedicated to you as a reader, or you as a civilization, or as a species, but to all those on your planet and its uplayers.

We come from a star 100 light years away. My ancestors departed a millenia ago. We suspected there was life in your world based on chemical readings. But we assumed it was an anomaly that would make more sense as we study it more. It was with great excitement that my great grandparent detected your first radio transmissions 120 years ago. Your morse code signals were impossible for us to decrypt, but only 5 years later, we detected your first analogue voice transmission. My great grandparents dedicated time from our schedule to decipher your languages, but besides appreciating your music we could not decode it or translate it. We thought to give up, and wait until we are closer to make contact.

However, it was my great parent who detected the first video broadcast, them and their team were the ones who managed to decode it. Since then, learning your languages was trivial, my parents grew up watching you, and so did my generation. It was not just for entertainment, but it helped us learn about you and how to communicate. By the time we had a concise understanding of your languages and cultures you began broadcasting fiction, which confused us. My grand parent was in fact charged with researching and synthetising kryptonite in case Superman would interfere with the Solution. And the confusion when we reported to All that you have detected so many alien species. It was soon understood that they were just myths.

In the monotonous life of a thousand year journey, we lived vicariously through the development of your modern history.

We are sure you have a lot of questions, and we hope this booklet will answer most of those. And if you have more questions, we chose to listen to 604.66 megahertz radio frequency for any communication you wish to have with us. Besides that, we will not interfere with you.

You are all safe.

Our All planet

Unlike you, our home planet has a thick sky. During the day, our sky is a sulfur color, and during the night it is a featureless black. We believed that our world was all that there was. When our first explorers circumnavigated the world we had so many questions. Yet we had no reason to think there was more in the universe than our world. There were accounts from mystics who climbed our highest peaks, they claimed that at night, you could see candles in the sky. We dismissed them, assuming they were suffering from hallucinations caused by mindchill and breathing thin air.

Even when we invented flight, and our earliest pilots climbed high enough at night to see the stars, we did not believe them. We asked for evidence, they tried drawing the lights in the night sky to see if they match, but as we sent pilots at different times of the year, they drew different skies, and we considered that they were delusional, that it was an effect of a thin atmosphere, or maybe how our bodies were not designed for flight. It was easier to assume they were faulty observers rather than understand that planets and stars dance in the sky or how small we were in the universe.

When we invented chemical photography, they failed as well, the airplanes were too shaky to successfully photograph it. Some decided that there was no use in climbing so high, especially if it is damaging the pilot’s and crew’s cognition. Others still tried to treat and cure this altitude disease. But it was one pilot, being regularly drugged and flown at night, realized the patterns in the sky, noticed how the planets and stars dance. And even how to use the stars as a compass. It wasn’t until his notes and drawings were compared with other pilots with similar claims that we took them seriously. Then finally, instead of trying to cure the stars, we began to study them. Our world suddenly became tiny. Old religions adapted or disappeared, new religions were born. The myths that told that all there was was All, the myths that had other realms like afterdeaths suddenly had new worlds to exist into. But with time, those fell out of fashion as we understood the stars.

Within a century we have sent people to other planets, and wondered if we were alone in the universe which just opened up. But no matter how hard we looked, we were alone. Even when we discovered the Problem and began the Solution. We thought we were alone. Not until we discovered you.

Given how rare life is in the universe, and how special it is that we found sentience, we all decided to include you in the Solution, there was no debate, besides on the practicalities on how you will be included in the Solution. But you are. You are safe, protected.

Who we are

Lets begin with the basics, the meaningless stuff, the facts that are important to know but mean the least. Like the name of your loved ones. The name of a friend is the least important reason for why they are friends, yet, it is the first thing you would tell about them.

Our home, where our ancestors lived and our descendants will return to, is the fourth planet in a star 97 light years away from the constellation you call monoceros, once translated to your languages, our planet would be called All. In the past, before we looked above our clouds we did not have a name for it as a planet, and we believed that our planet was all that there was, only once we learned of the other stars that we realized how wrong we were, but the name remained and we named the universe “Everything Else”. Our sun is currently a warm yellow star, too hot for our liking. But we are already working on it. In your archives you have named it Cicala, and based on your conventions you will likely name us Cicalans, although if we have misunderstood your naming conventions feel free to correct us. Given all your complex naming conventions, all we can do is hope we got it right, same goes with my chosen human name.

Our biology is distinct to your’s, we both are carbon based, but our life solvent is ammonia rather than water. Our biochemistry is so incompatible that we believe contact might be possible, but given the risk towards your planet, we have decided that no physical contact should ever be allowed. The galaxy might have countless stars with our colonies in them, but there is only one place in the universe with you in it. You must be protected.

We departed our star over a thousand years ago (we are using earth units for your convenience). Historically, we used to keep long term time scales based on All days, and celebrate special events based on the unit digits. We currently prefer to count time in multiples of base six, which just as you did, was developed based on the number of our digits.

Our ancestors, just like we are, and like you are too, used to debate about everything, and when debating wasn’t enough they would fight, and if that was not enough they would send the youth to die. Yet we grew, we advanced, maybe because of the arguments and fights, or maybe despite it. But we grew. At the beginning we bickered over resources like you did, we had empires which collapsed like all empires do. Eventually we were lucky to be stable enough to reach for the sky. We lived in unknowns of the future. Until we discovered the Problem.

The problem

There is an event that separates our children from adults, a rite of passage. Most commonly, our children discover the problem by themselves, then we provide them with the Answer. Past that day we no longer consider them children. The child life of ignorance is such a blessed period, we treasure it. It is similar to your custom of Santa Claus. There is no clear age for this change, and even if one reaches elderly age as a child, they are not told of the Problem, and are cherished as beings of innocence and joy, and consider those who die, even of old age to be blessed if they do so in their innocence. And telling any child about the Problem regardless of age, is considered a crime, akin to how your society views showing adult content to children. That is our taboo.

We are all mortals, whatever we experience only exists as long as there is someone to experience it. There is no solution to it, even if we were to cure or fix death, we will still perish. It is not a bad thing in itself. We find comforting ways to cope with it. We know we will still be loved by those who we helped during our time. We know many of our good deeds will bear fruit beyond our passing. We might be as inconsequential as a particle of ammonia (or water for you) in an ocean but the waves we pass along will continue in perpetuity. In effect, our existence will exist beyond our lives.

This was how we comforted ourselves, all while we thought All will always be there, before we understood that stars die. That’s how we learned that there’s no such thing as perpetuity. At some point life will end, and there will be a last generation, and we just hope our next generation won’t experience it. But we still are condemned to experience it. Once they are gone, the ocean that spreads our waves will be gone. We won’t be there in any way. As if we have never existed at all.

The evident solution is to expand, leave the planet, become a society that can survive a planetary death, or even the death of their star. But that will only extend our time, put our waves in other oceans, even if it will extend it for a long time, all stars will die, the march of thermodynamics is a mathematical proof. At some point, there will be a last generation. The universe will have no ocean left.



This is one thing our ancestors reached an agreement on, and this is something no one has managed to deny, or even debate. This is what separates our children from our adults. And as soon as they mature, we inform them of the Solution, the one thing that gives us not only hope, but meaning. This book contains the Solution. The Solution is why we are here.

Remember, you are all safe.

Layering

Uncertainty, there is likely something we will never know, deciphering the layers of the universe. Our ancient ancestors took their time to learn how the All works, at first they relied on observable intuition, how things interact with other things, this led to chemistry, we learned and predicted how substances changed and interacted, but it was not the bottom layer. Eventually we discovered atoms, the smallest unit of chemistry, and as we studied it, we learned that they are not the bottom layer. Then we found even smaller pieces which allowed us to obtain once thought impossible levels of energy. But there was always a lower level of reality. What began as a statistical analysis on how much work it took to reach a new layers ended up as a science in itself, yet another layer. It took us centuries to learn it, to predict it, to navigate it, to see how it creates the laws and rules that affect its upper layers. How we are made of cells which are made of atoms which are made of particles. Our understanding is not that far off your’s, you are about a few generations away from where we were when we left our star.

We believe it’s similar to your concept of emergent behaviours, which in time you might develop into the science of layering. One true and basic fact of layer science is that understanding and controlling a lower layer will grant unknown and unpredictable tools with unexpected powers. Powers which were unfeasible before said layer was understood.

To give a human example, which parallels a similar development in our technology. Communication was only as fast as someone can run, or a vehicle can go. But then by studying something completely unrelated to communication, you discovered electricity, which you used to allow instant communication across any distance. By digging into an underlying layer, we discovered how to do the impossible in another layer.

It is interesting to know that said layers do not only go one way, natural upper layers form, one of us alone has different properties than many of us together, as we naturally form societies and cultures, and when many of those interact we form civilizations, and well. now that we have found you, perhaps many civilizations will form another layers. Some layers only exist because we manufactured them, either unintentionally, in which case we decided by convention to consider them natural, or artificially, and we can layer upwards. Such as how you manage to harness electricity to make circuits to make computers or how people form institutions that make economies we can go largewards to make things that were inconceivable beforehand. or how people make economies which make institutions which we domesticated to power the Solution (we recommend you domesticate your institutions before it destroys your planet). However the understanding of layer networks is beyond the scope necessary to understand the solution. This was included as a way for you to see if you understand the basic concept of layering.

The key is that by exploring the layers we can control things that were previously considered impossible. And therefore, whatever is considered impossible, regardless of the strength of said proof, even an absolute mathematical proof, might not actually be impossible. Therefore, even the heat death of the universe might be escaped. Impossibility is only confined to its own layers.

But, there is a limit. The layer space takes time to explore, takes resources, takes generations of minds to crack. Some might be easy, some are so trivial that we accidentally skipped them in our research and call them hidden layers, some are harder, all unpredictable. So if we want to crack whichever layer that will allow us to escape the heat death of the universe, and then whichever ending existence might be afterwards. We must optimize our future for its discovery. That is the key of the Solution.

The Solution

Your own star has approximately ten billion years before it dies, and in only a fraction of that time it will be too hot for your own planet. We have a similar problem with our star, if ignored, it will burn All in about 3 billion years. But it does not have to be like that. You already know that plasma, the main material in a star, can be pushed and pulled with magnetism. We have built a constellation of magnetic satellites to remove fuel from our star. That alone will help the star live longer, turning it into what you call a red dwarf lasting trillions of years. That is already a massive achievement and however likely it is for us to ever discover a layer that will solve the heat death of the universe, this alone will increase those chances by a factor of a thousand. but it still consumes too much fuel.

However, we do not know how hard it is to solve the Problem, and so if we can increase the chance to solve it we must. As a matter of existential survival we must.

Because we have the technology to remove fuel from a star, we can also put it slowly back, allowing us to use the fuel removed from our star to feed it slowly. This will grant our red dwarf a hundred fold extension on its life.

But, that is not enough. The whole idea of the Solution is to extend the deadline as far as possible. And we can do much better with the resources available to us. The galaxy has so many stars. There is no need to let 100 billion stars burn up so quickly.

By using the same devices we used on our star, we can mine all the stars in the galaxy. push their plasma fuel towards Allsun, in such a precise way that it arrives exactly when it is needed. Doing that will extend the time of the Solution another 10 trillion times.

That is why we are here. Our ancestors have sent arks like us to the stars to many stars in the galaxy, with the plan that once we arrive we will build the star-mine satellites and more arks to the other stars. And eventually mine all the galaxy.

We considered reaching nearby galaxies as well, however by the time we would reach them they wouldn’t have enough energy to power the mining process.

These processes will expand our time in the universe from barely a few billion years to approximately 10 billion billion billion years

But because we have found you, we have changed our plans. Instead of pushing the fuel of your star towards ours, we will push all your sun and planets along. Not as efficient, but a worthy sacrifice to save you. The voyage will be long given your experience of time, it will take about 100 million years. Once there, we will place you in orbit around our star. You will be free to choose the specific orbit you desire. Once there you will still be bound to your planet.

Your world

You cannot interfere with the solution. Your society is unknown to us and any risk you might pose, even if purely theoretical, is unacceptable. That is why we have taken measures to protect us from you.

First, your planet is your’s. We will not enter its orbit. with the only exception being the delivery of this letter. The idea of us entering your planet at all is completely forbidden. Our biologies are incompatible but cross contamination can be as unpredictable as dangerous. We have adopted strict engineering rules so even if by accident one of our machines or vessels crashes on your planet, they would break and burn in reentry to safely sterilize it for your protection.

The same way in which we won’t enter your planet’s orbit, you are also unable to leave it. You can have your planet and its moon, to live, develop and/or preserve. We won’t interfere with it. And any further collaboration and communication will be done only if you wish so. We wish no harm unto any living form, and wish to be as unobtrusive as you wish us to be.

Regarding the future, please stay within your planet’s orbit. Any interference to the Solution will mean your planet is dangerous, and we must protect the Solution.

Your planet, is your’s we do not claim it, we will not touch it. Whatever is in its orbit will be yours and yours only. Including your moon all the way to Lagrange points one, two, four and five, although given that those are your borders we recommend you act with caution. We won’t even pollute your radio frequencies unless invited by you to do so.

But anything beyond that, is not yours. It belongs to the Solution. Your star alone will feed life in the universe, including your planet for trillions of years. If you were to interfere with the Solution, and somehow actually stop it, you will only be condemning your planet to die within a few billion years. you would in fact, only exercise your agency to commit slow planetary suicide. We will extend life on your planet for eternity.

If you depart your planet’s sphere of influence, we will be forced to restrict your usage of non atmospheric space. Please do not do so. And if you continue to prove a threat to the Solution, we will have no other choice. Do not interfere as we convert your other planets and asteroid belts into the machines we will use to relocate your sun.

You will retain mastery over your world. Which is an empire as large as you have ever had for all eternity.

You are safe.