The Firstborn
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
There are three fundamental questions posed by every single species that has gazed upon the stars. The first is "Is there life out there?" The second is "If so, is it sentient?" The third, asked once both questions have been answered as 'yes,' is "Who came first?"
It is a strange fact that one hundred percent of all spacefaring races have had one author or another who wrote a science fiction story about strange, black, frictionless monoliths made by those from space whose dimensions in space have a ratio of 1:4:9, the squares of the first three integers. Every single one of them has involved someone flying out alone to one of them, and getting sucked in by an inertial field, saying their equivalent of "My god! It's full of stars!" replacing "My god" with their deity of choice.
The strange thing about this is, an amount of time divisible by sixteen* later, one of these monoliths has been encountered. The being going alone says "(deity of choice)! It's full of stars!" either as the stars appear on a surface of the monolith, or as a joke a few moments before. This implies that there was, indeed, someone who came first. They have been known as the "Firstborn," eventually, in all of the stories.
What follows is an excerpt from Arthur C. Clarke's book, 3001: The Final Oddysey*:
Call them the Firstborn.
Though they were not remotely human, they were flesh and blood, and when they looked out across the deepness of space, they felt awe, and wonder -- and loneliness. As soon as they posessed the power, they began to seek fellowship among the stars.
In their explorations, they found life in many forms, and watched the workings of evolution on a thousand worlds. They saw how often the first faint sparks of intelligence flickered and died in the cosmic night.
And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the field of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped.
And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.
The great dinosaurs had long since passed away, their morning promise annihilated by a random hammer-blow from space, when the survey ship entered the Solar System after a voyage that had already lasted a thousand years. It swept past the frozen outer planets, paused briefly above the deserts of dying Mars, and presently looked down on Earth.
Spread out beneath them, the explorers saw a world swarming with life. For years they studied, collected, catalogued. When they had learned all they could, they began to modify. They tinkered with the desitinies of many species, on land and in the seas. But which of their experiments would bear fruit, they could not know for at least a million years.
They were patient, but they were not yet immortal. There was so much to do in this universe of a hundred billion suns, and other worlds were calling. So they set out once more into the abyss, knowing that they would never come this way again. Nor was there any need: the servants they had left behind would do the rest.
On Earth, the glaciers came and went, while above them the changeless Moon still carried its secret from the stars. With a yet slower rhythm than the polar ice, the tides of civilization ebbed and flowed across the Galaxy. Strange and beutiful and terrible empires rose and fell, and passed on their knowledge to their successors.
And now, among the stars, evolution was driving toward new goals. The first explorers of Earth had long since come to the limits of flesh and blood; as soon as their machines were better than their bodies, it was time to move. First their brains, and then their thoughts alone, they transferred into shining new homes of metal and gemstone. In these, they roamed the galaxy. They no longer built spaceships. They were spaceships.
But the age of Machine-entities soon passed. In their ceaseless experimenting, they had learned to store knowledge in the structure of space itself, and to preserve their thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of light.
Into pure energy, therefore, they presently transformed themselves; and on a thousand worlds, the empty shells they had discarded twitched for a while in a mindless dance of death, then crumbled into dust.
Now they were Lords of the Galaxy, and coould rove at will among the stars, or sink like a subtle mist through the very interstices of space. Though they were free at last from the tyrrany of matter, they had not wholly forgotten their origin, in the warm slime of a vanished sea. And their marvelous instruments still continued to function, watching over the experiments started so many ages ago.*This is the extent to which we know about the Firstborn, written on every single world. This cannot be a coincidence, so we must assume that the Firstborn are responsible.
It has been discovered that there is only one archetypal Monolith, and any others found are merely "projections" with a frictionless field around them to prevent damage. However big man's yardsticks say the sides are, Monoliths are always the same size: as large as necessary. We may not know the origins of the Firstborn, but until we discover how to become Energy Beings ourselves, we will continue to speculate on what they were.
And we will think of something.
It is a strange fact that one hundred percent of all spacefaring races have had one author or another who wrote a science fiction story about strange, black, frictionless monoliths made by those from space whose dimensions in space have a ratio of 1:4:9, the squares of the first three integers. Every single one of them has involved someone flying out alone to one of them, and getting sucked in by an inertial field, saying their equivalent of "My god! It's full of stars!" replacing "My god" with their deity of choice.
The strange thing about this is, an amount of time divisible by sixteen* later, one of these monoliths has been encountered. The being going alone says "(deity of choice)! It's full of stars!" either as the stars appear on a surface of the monolith, or as a joke a few moments before. This implies that there was, indeed, someone who came first. They have been known as the "Firstborn," eventually, in all of the stories.
What follows is an excerpt from Arthur C. Clarke's book, 3001: The Final Oddysey*:
Call them the Firstborn.
Though they were not remotely human, they were flesh and blood, and when they looked out across the deepness of space, they felt awe, and wonder -- and loneliness. As soon as they posessed the power, they began to seek fellowship among the stars.
In their explorations, they found life in many forms, and watched the workings of evolution on a thousand worlds. They saw how often the first faint sparks of intelligence flickered and died in the cosmic night.
And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the field of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped.
And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.
The great dinosaurs had long since passed away, their morning promise annihilated by a random hammer-blow from space, when the survey ship entered the Solar System after a voyage that had already lasted a thousand years. It swept past the frozen outer planets, paused briefly above the deserts of dying Mars, and presently looked down on Earth.
Spread out beneath them, the explorers saw a world swarming with life. For years they studied, collected, catalogued. When they had learned all they could, they began to modify. They tinkered with the desitinies of many species, on land and in the seas. But which of their experiments would bear fruit, they could not know for at least a million years.
They were patient, but they were not yet immortal. There was so much to do in this universe of a hundred billion suns, and other worlds were calling. So they set out once more into the abyss, knowing that they would never come this way again. Nor was there any need: the servants they had left behind would do the rest.
On Earth, the glaciers came and went, while above them the changeless Moon still carried its secret from the stars. With a yet slower rhythm than the polar ice, the tides of civilization ebbed and flowed across the Galaxy. Strange and beutiful and terrible empires rose and fell, and passed on their knowledge to their successors.
And now, among the stars, evolution was driving toward new goals. The first explorers of Earth had long since come to the limits of flesh and blood; as soon as their machines were better than their bodies, it was time to move. First their brains, and then their thoughts alone, they transferred into shining new homes of metal and gemstone. In these, they roamed the galaxy. They no longer built spaceships. They were spaceships.
But the age of Machine-entities soon passed. In their ceaseless experimenting, they had learned to store knowledge in the structure of space itself, and to preserve their thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of light.
Into pure energy, therefore, they presently transformed themselves; and on a thousand worlds, the empty shells they had discarded twitched for a while in a mindless dance of death, then crumbled into dust.
Now they were Lords of the Galaxy, and coould rove at will among the stars, or sink like a subtle mist through the very interstices of space. Though they were free at last from the tyrrany of matter, they had not wholly forgotten their origin, in the warm slime of a vanished sea. And their marvelous instruments still continued to function, watching over the experiments started so many ages ago.*This is the extent to which we know about the Firstborn, written on every single world. This cannot be a coincidence, so we must assume that the Firstborn are responsible.
It has been discovered that there is only one archetypal Monolith, and any others found are merely "projections" with a frictionless field around them to prevent damage. However big man's yardsticks say the sides are, Monoliths are always the same size: as large as necessary. We may not know the origins of the Firstborn, but until we discover how to become Energy Beings ourselves, we will continue to speculate on what they were.
And we will think of something.
