A million years later...

A million years. When we come across a mention of such or a commensurate period of time, we mostly, unwittingly or unconsciously, do not even imagine how big it really is. Therefore, before we move in time to such a distance, let's use a fairly simple visual example to try to understand the relationship between it and more familiar and significant for us temporal aspects that have a direct relationship to the background of the further story.

Studies of the modern human genome, which determine its variability and the speed of these changes, have established that its evolution as a species, i.e. the species Homo Sapiens Sapiens, began 200-250 thousand years ago, therefore, it continues during this time period. Let us take a larger value, 250 thousand years, and even then we will see that four such evolutions can fit into an interval of a million years.

Of course, different schools of historians give different estimates of the duration of the existence of modern human civilization, the civilization to which each of us now belongs, but on average it can be determined at 12 thousand years. That is, in a million years, about fifty such civilizations could arise, flourish and decline, if we arbitrarily, but probably, take the duration of the "dark" intervals between them at 8 thousand years.

Such a valid scale has a time dimension of a million years, if we consider it relative to the duration of evolution and existence of an intelligent species of living beings, as well as the duration of the life cycle of the civilizations formed by this species. And if we take into account the results of recent joint research by naturalists, ecologists and archaeologists, which revealed that only a few hundred years are enough for the complete absorption of material possessions and signs of civilization by wild nature after the sudden disappearance of its creators, then it becomes obvious that over the course of a million years it is possible the existence of different species of intelligent beings, replacing each other, and during the existence of each of these species — different civilizations of these beings, which one after the other go through their prosperity and decline. At the same time, each subsequent intelligent species, each subsequent civilization will not have any knowledge about its predecessors, if it does not fully realize the possibility of their existence and does not engage in a purposeful search for them, taking into account that the duration of the "dark" time intervals between them is much longer than a few hundreds or even thousands years.

However, we seem to understand that if knowledge from the past can be preserved and find an echo in myths and artifacts, then knowledge from the future cannot find a way against the arrow of time. But it just seems that it is impossible. Physicists have long had reason to believe that the structure of our universe has more dimensions than the four dimensions of space-time we are familiar with. There, in intangible other dimensions, there is information about the entire universe, its past and future, about every quantum of space and time. This is called the Akashic Records. And individual intelligent beings, individual people, in some as yet incomprehensible way, have access to these Records and can read from them information about events anywhere in the space and time of our universe, including in the future. This is how knowledge from the future can also get into the present.

So, all the necessary preliminary explanations are done, and the story can be continued. It is best to tell it as if describing a documentary video that someone is showing us. Precisely because this motion picture is shown by someone, many things that would be interesting to learn about, unfortunately, will not be found in this story.

We see the Earth. The majestic planet slowly rotates, approaching from deep space. The blue surface of the oceans and the bright green of the continents slowly move under the blue dome of the atmosphere. The surface of the planet is getting closer, and the details can already be seen, but they are very unusual. On the night side, you can't see the luminous clusters of cities, instead, most of the dark continents are covered with wide scatterings of small multi-colored lights. And neither the white-gray spots of megalopolises, nor highways and railways, nor areas of cultivated fields, nor even deserts are visible on the continental spaces flooded with the Sun's rays. Everywhere there are only the most diverse shades of green — forests, steppes, tundra, savannah, with individual patches of blue lakes and river strips. Only a little later, looking more carefully, the eye notices that among the trees are scattered, but not evenly, but forming small scattered clusters, balls of various colors in light, unsaturated, pastel shades. Amazing discoveries — and along with that, somewhere on the edge of consciousness, an unrelenting sense of the chasm of time that separates what is familiar to the human mind and what has just been seen. A million years. And it is a different civilization.

The final meters of the descent — and then a soft landing near one of the balls. Up close, its dimensions are already clearly visible — the diameter of the ball is about thirty meters, something like a nine-ten-story human building. And those who live in it can also be seen near the ball. This is a civilization of squirrels.

Those squirrels have gray fur, and their bellies are white. In size, they are about one and a half times larger than modern American gray squirrels and close to California fox squirrels. The proportions of their body parts have not changed compared to modern ones, and they climb trees just as wonderfully, especially children. Those squirrels walk and stand on two legs, hold themselves straight, and their hands are free. Younger cubs go everywhere without clothes, but older teenagers and adults are all dressed up. Regarding clothes, it is very interesting: squirrels wear vests, but they don’t actually have them for clothing as such, because those squirrels still have their fur coat and fluffy tail, and to carry with them, in their pockets or sewn into that vest, different devices, tools and accessories.

Multi-colored balls are, as you can easily guess, the buildings in which those squirrels live and work. Various residences, for private, industrial, office and other needs, are also spherical in these buildings. And all this is semi-living, i.e. it is made with the help of biotechnology, it is not built, but grows. For example, you need to add a room to the building — it grows. A few dozen, but never more than a hundred, balls form a squirrel town. But one ball is not the equivalent of a human house, as one might think, but rather a district, residential, industrial or administrative-office.

In the town of squirrel, balls-buildings stand among the trees, organically fitting into the natural environment. There are no roads built between them, not even footpaths. This may seem extremely strange if you don't know that each ball has a teleportation compartment, or more simply, a teleport. Those squirrels invented it, and use it for all movements of living beings and things farther than the boundaries of the building. And for every ten large balls in the town, there is one ball of a smaller size, about three times, and it is completely reserved for the teleport, which connects towns all over the Earth and beyond. According to these signs, squirrels have taken over the entire Solar system, and it would not be surprising if they have colonies near other stars and communicate directly with other civilizations in the Galaxy.

In general, all the means, technical, household, clothes, etc., used by those squirrels, are made with the use of biotechnology — they are semi-living, they are not manufactured or assembled, but grow from embryos, which in turn are grown from genetically modified plant cells. It fully applies to computers, which are everywhere here. It is very interesting to watch how squirrels work on computers with their little hands. Their hands almost did not change, with little claws, only the fifth finger appeared, grew. And their computers are all tablet computers, but in shape they are not rectangular, but round, and the pixels on the screens are not arranged in a rectangular matrix, but in a spiral that unfolds from the center to the edge. And the font is very fancy there, based on spiral and circular graphic elements. Squirrels on computers do the same thing that people do now — they process diverse information.

It is also interesting to observe how those squirrels added another room to the office building. That building is similar to a pomegranate fruit, if you remember, a pomegranate has a skin on the outside, and many grains under the skin. So the rooms are located there, they are like grains, only they are not so densely placed, and there are tubular passages between them.

Actually, one more room had to be added to that office building. No problem, a technician will come and do everything.

The technician came, a fat squirrel in a red vest, and he says to everyone present: "Now we will go into the interior space, you will tell me and show me what and where you want to have, and we will do it." Everyone nods, saying, OK.

The technician goes to the place in the room where the bare wall is visible and gnaws the wall with his teeth. The wall spreads and a round hole appears, through which all the company gets out, after which the hole becomes overgrown. And there one tall, thin squirrel in a black vest starts pointing with his finger and explaining: "We want a room here, and passages must be made here, here and there." Then the technician asks: "What color do you want the room to be?" Office squirrels answer that they want a purple room. Well, okay, let's do it.

The technician takes out of his pocket a kind of small box with multi-colored little grains and starts sorting through it, looking for the right color. Having found it, he puts the grain on his palm and taps it with his little claw for about a minute. After those manipulations by the squirrel-technician, the grain rises into the air, flies to the place that was previously indicated and begins to grow. When the growth ends, from the formed spherical room already grow tubes-passages and wend to the designated other rooms.

The technician deftly climbs to the outer wall of the room, which has grown, and again gnaws the wall with his teeth, the wall bursts. The technician kindly invites all the honest company to the newly created room, after everyone has passed, the wall grows back. There, everyone enthusiastically looks around and praises the technician in unison. In general, all the squirrels chatter non-stop there.

By now, probably, you have long wanted to ask the questions that persistently arise again and again throughout this story. You have at least two such questions. First: how is it possible for squirrels, with a significantly smaller volume of their brains, to develop a mind equivalent to that of a modern human? And the second: where and why did all the people, human civilization, disappear from the Earth?

The answer to the first question is divided into two aspects. Firstly, it is not the volume of the brain that is important. The number of neurons, which even with a smaller volume of the brain can reach the level of the human brain, provided their density is higher, is of decisive importance. Secondly, the phenomenon of the collective mind can be manifested in the civilization of squirrels, even if only in part. Signs of the presence of manifestations of the collective mind in those squirrels are confirmed by their mastering of teleportation technology, because at the fundamental level, both phenomena are based on the principle of tunnel mutual penetration of informational or material objects. At the same time, the increased density of neurons in the brain and the collective mind are not mutually exclusive, but can complement each other, which will cause a much greater effect than they would have given individually.

The answer to the second question can be very simple and not at all dramatic: human society in its development has reached the stage of galactic civilization and, having settled in the Galaxy, has left the mother planet to the next intelligent species that will be able to repeat the success of humans on the way to the stars and, at the same time, to keep the Earth safe and its nature flourishing.

© Volodymyr Khokhlov