Think about it this way: Everything you’re doing at this present moment has already happened. You’ve already reached your destination. All you’re doing right now is letting yourself (go through the) experience (of that moment).
In the next 30 years, this will be much better understood, with our (scientific) tools and "consciousness" evolving to a point that we can measure, proof and present this as fact.
Go back to the middle ages and try not to fall for the common belief that the “The Black Death” is a punishment by God for your sins, simply because there were no tools to locate and fight “Yersinia pestis”.
Go back to when it was a common belief that the earth was flat, until someone ventured out across the (then) vast oceans and prove otherwise.
And don’t forget, it already happened. Your just in for the ride.
A really fine piece of flash SF. Thanks!
I like this! crash Another!
Perhaps the existence of consciousness is also the result of time running backwards, somehow reaching up from the quantum to the macroscopic level. It would be just as good as the weak anthropic principle to explain why we humans seem to be the only intelligent life in the Universe. If the rise of consciousness was somehow planned and executed from the future, it would perhaps even require only one instance of consciousness evolving somewhere given how difficult it might be for those in the future to execute it.
One hint this is actually what's happening is the fact the distribution of the planets in the solar system appear to be fine-tuned for inter-stellar space travel. There's only about 10 other solar objects with gravity comparable to Earth's and hence suitable for long-term civilization. The Moon has already been walked on, and humans will one day easily build large contained cities there using telepresent robots with a 1 second response time. Then they will be experienced enough to tackle Mars and Mercury with semi-intelligent robots to cater for the much longer response time. Mercury will be a good candidate to build a huge particle accelerator around its equator because its very slow rotation allows human workers aid in construction, and its highly elliptical orbit around the Sun would give many gravitational variances for experiments. Jupiter's 4 large moons would provide humankind with experience of much longer travel times, a single large moon of Saturn eliminates any initial choice of target, then the huge gap skipping Uranus's lack of sizable moons to Neptune's Tritan gives an even longer travel distance. Concurrent with all this, humans will spend probably thousands of years to terraform Venus, the ultimate in hostile environments. By then humankind will have trained up, apparently serendipitously, for inter-stellar travel using knowledge from terraforming Venus, travelling huge distances to Tritan, and whatever's learnt from the Mercury particle accelerator.
Perhaps humans will build a silicon-based consciousness in each star system they colonize. Each planet-based consciousness in the galaxy could then communicate with one another to build a one-off galactic consciousness by structuring the gravitons flowing between the star systems, though its speed of thought would be far slower than that of humans. Ditto for each galaxy humans eventually reach in the observable Universe, and then the whole Universe. This Universal Consciousness based on gravity then "begins" to reach back in time using quantum retrodiction to ensure fine-tunings so one planet in one galaxy 14 billion yrs after the Big Bang evolves monkeys then humans who then mutate as they colonize the galaxy and build silicon-based AI and eventually a single Universe-wide gravity-based consciousness. If the Universe continues expanding and never comes to an end, then such a Universal gravity-based consciousness need never finish being built, it only needs to be continually being built. If a graviton-based consciousness can indeed reach back in time through retrodiction, not only would the Universe increase in entropy over time, but also increase in intelligence. Perhaps there's a law of physics saying that as entropy increases, so does intelligence.