Here is another story about a world that avoided a run-in with the Ochivari
and the Darning Wars. It’s also not about a version of Earth. Here, humans
evolved on a planet called Olankaran. It was tidally locked with its host
star, meaning one side of it was stuck in perpetual brightness, and the
other, perpetually nighttime. They could only survive in the terminator
zone, which was a thin strip of temperate vegetation that went all around
the circumference. Despite this wildly different solar dynamic, they developed
about as any other civilization does. They fought with each other, and
formed bonds, and progressed science, and were held back by religion. It
took them about as long to figure out that some habitable worlds weren’t
tidal-locked as it will take a non-tidally-locked planet to hypothesize
about them. One thing they had on their side was a deeper appreciation for
how precious life was. So much of their planet could not support complex
life, so they understood how important it was to protect what little managed
to come into existence. They didn’t ever burn fossil fuels, instead moving
directly to renewables. It might have taken them longer to start harnessing
electricity, but whatever, who cares? Solar was, of course, their number one
form of power generation, as there were places where they could install
panels that worked throughout the entire day. It was very windy on the
nightside, though, so that was useful to them as well. They flourished on
this world, and why they were just as curious about outer space as anyone,
the majority of them chose to stay right where they were. And that was
because they knew, from there, they could go anywhere.
They developed virtually reality constructs, which was a completely normal
and natural progression for any civilization. These people took it to an
extreme. Once they were ready, just about everyone chose to upload their
consciousnesses to the virtual worlds, and live there permanently. To keep
them cool, their processors were placed on the far side of the planet, and
kept them running using highly advanced solar power on the day side. Robots
maintained them from the outside. The temperate zones where their physical
bodies once took up excessive space were returned to nature. Within a
century, it was nearly impossible to tell that people had ever lived there
before. Anyone still using a body was exploring interstellar space. The
uploaded people were exploring space too, they just weren’t doing it with
their own bodies. They dispatched probes to map the galaxy, and one day
reach out to other galaxies. As more data came in from these unmanned
exploratory missions, the virtual equivalent world was updated to reflect
the new information. They just thought it was a lot safer, because it was
impossible to die in the construct unless the servers were damaged, and of
course, they came up with safeguards to prevent that from happening. The
people here were so good at hiding that the Ochivari weren’t even aware that
they existed. When they came to this universe to find out whether any
sufficiently evolved life was here in need of being destroyed, they didn’t
detect anything, and marked it down as empty. They lived happily ever after.
Literally. Because when the universe finally came to a close on its own,
they simply transferred all of their servers to a younger one, and just kept
going on forever.
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