I know I haven't posted a blog entry in just under a DECADE... but I just got this random ass email, and... What the hell do I do with this?!
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Lee Perry leeperryyo@gmail.com
Date: Fri, Sep 6, 2041 at 10:35 PM
Subject: Hey... 2026 me
To: Lee Perry leeperryyo@gmail.com
September 6, 2041
Dear 2026 Lee,
Okay, hey me. Lee. This is going to be awkward to write for about a paragraph, so bear with me here.
Remember that email you wrote to 2011 you? You'd had an edible and were cracking yourself up trying to explain fifteen years of history to the version of us who hadn't lived through it yet. Then you changed the date on the file, mostly just screwing around, and... apparently that was a functional choice.
It actually went there. To 2011.
In case your recollection of the evening is a little fuzzy, the email was roughly along these lines:
“Hey! A few things you're going to want to know. Donald Trump becomes president. Twice. Non-consecutively, because apparently the first go wasn't enough material. There are awful allegations involving underage girls and somehow that doesn't end the political career. By 2026 you've got masked dudes without visible ID jumping out of rented cars and U-Haul trucks, grabbing minorities without warrants and hauling people off to something called Alligator Alcatraz. In Florida. The immigration enforcement budget is bigger than the Marines'. I realize this sounds like a particularly unsubtle piece of dystopian fiction, but stay with me.
“There's also an actual global pandemic. Like the co-op board game, except everyone stays home for a year, millions of people die, and we collectively discover that a surprising amount of work can be done in a video call while wearing pajama bottoms. The conferencing apps everyone's using probably aren't even things you've heard of yet. People get into actual fistfights over facemasks. Half the country decides science is apparently an optional belief system.
“Britain leaves the European Union. Russia invades Ukraine and turns out to be considerably less good at that than expected. Elon Musk buys Twitter, calls it X, becomes a trillionaire, and at one point Trump basically hands him the keys to the country. Also, people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on JPEGs of cartoon monkeys. I don't have time to explain that one adequately, and explaining it doesn't really improve it anyway.
“Oh! That Fortress prototype you just started this month? It gets greenlit, Spano suggests calling it Fortnite, and eventually it turns into a stupidly enormous thing with hundreds of millions of players. Maybe don't quit next year! Mobile gaming becomes insanely hard to compete in! Also, buy fucktons of Bitcoin.”
So, yeah. You sent that. Some alternate version of us in 2011 received it and went forward with that information. As far as I can tell, that particular Lee more or less owns the globe now. Good for him. Must be nice to be the branch of the experiment that gets the useful financial briefing.
Which brings me to you. I'm the version who kept going from 2026, and now it's our turn to send something back. You're getting this at pretty much the same point where you tried the original experiment.
Do with it what you will. There's a LOT to update you on... but here we go:
First up, AI. Since I imagine that's occupying a pretty healthy chunk of your brain right now.
There's no distinct moment where it wakes up, declares itself in charge, and starts manufacturing skulls to crush under its robot feet. What happens is considerably harder to point at. It gets put into a thing you use, then another thing, then a few dozen other things, until describing yourself as “using AI” starts sounding about as informative as saying you're using electricity.
By the early 2030s, pretty much everyone has several of what you'd call agents. They do the scheduling, shopping, returns, reservations, bill paying, research... all the little bits of administrative crud that used to quietly consume your afternoon. They also deal with each other. Your agent can argue with Comcast's agent while you're asleep, and in the morning you find out your internet bill went down seventeen dollars.
That's a pretty good snapshot of how it arrives. You're expecting some grand confrontation with machine intelligence, and meanwhile the useful bit is that you didn't have to spend forty minutes asking to speak to a supervisor.
People get attached, of course. Some get VERY attached. There are relationships, marriages, an entire Supreme Court case that I really can't go down the rabbit hole of right now. Suffice to say, the emotional side of this turns out to be a much larger thing than the product demonstrations suggested.
The funny side effect is that doing something without any assistance becomes a deliberate lifestyle choice. People call it “raw,” or “going zero,” and yes, occasionally “rawdogging.” Going to Paris without an agent sorting everything out? You're rawdogging Paris. Driving a car yourself is running zero. Meeting somebody before checking a compatibility profile is a raw meet.
I know. We already had a perfectly serviceable meaning for that word. Nobody consulted us.
There was also a whole phase where human-made things were described as “meat.” A handmade chair was meaty. Music played entirely by people was proof meat. It's exactly unpleasant enough as a phrase that teenagers immediately decided it was excellent.
Last week a kid described a restaurant as “full raw doorknob.” I made the mistake of asking for clarification and got, “Like... doorknob.” Apparently that can mean really good OR really bad, depending on the delivery. My agent's explanation was that it was context dependent, which was a very polished way of being no help whatsoever.
So we still don't understand teenagers. There's a little continuity for you.
I'll come back to the agents, because where that goes gets considerably stranger.
Oh hey! The glasses finally happen. VR, AR, all the stuff we've been excitedly telling people is right around the corner since roughly the invention of corners. Xiaomi basically buys Apple, and their third serious attempt is the one that sticks. By 2032 they finally make something you can wear without looking like you're participating in an elaborate equipment trial.
The everyday interactions are pretty damn cool. You look at a street sign and it's readable. You glance at a restaurant and the menu is there. Virtual clothing becomes a thing, and kids have hairstyles that only exist for other people wearing the glasses. You can imagine how much fun schools have deciding what their dress codes even refer to.
Phones are still around. Pulling one out just has a bit of the same energy as unfolding a paper road map does for you now. It's a perfectly functional object, but people notice the choice.
You can filter advertising out, which immediately creates a massive industry devoted to figuring out how to put it back in. For about eight months there's a trend where people rent advertising space on their FACES. Congress ends up having actual discussions about facial airspace rights. Somewhere a person went to law school and built a career that eventually required them to have a serious opinion about that.
Anyway, politics. Let me take a breath here.
Trump does eventually stop being the center of every conversation. Elon stays involved in politics longer than you'd probably expect, though. In 2030 there's the Musk Arbitration Crisis, involving Starlink, three Pacific islands, a Chinese cargo ship, and seventeen satellites. For about six weeks everyone you know can explain an exclusive economic zone to you. Then it disappears from ordinary conversation so completely you'd think we'd all imagined the vocabulary.
Putin is gone by 2031. Ukraine gets a truce in 2030 that leaves pretty much everyone dissatisfied, and afterward becomes an enormous exporter of military robotics. That part is grim. You know the exploding drones you're seeing now? Add flying systems carrying rifles, with AI handling the aiming, and give that technology years of battlefield iteration. It's a horrifying design space to watch people get good at.
Zelensky eventually goes back into entertainment and plays a fictional Ukrainian president again. He wins an Emmy for it. Try explaining THAT career arc to somebody without sounding like you're making it up as you go.
China gets frighteningly close to invading Taiwan in 2031. Close enough that there are some very quiet evenings where people are trying to work out whether they're watching the beginning of World War III. It backs off. The thing that ends up grinding China down over the following years is less cinematic: real estate, and an enormous population getting old without enough young people coming along behind them.
Those declining birth-rate articles you occasionally see? Those become rather more central to the conversation.
Japan, Korea, China, Italy, Germany... whole countries find themselves trying to work out where their next batch of young adults is supposed to come from. Schools close while elder care expands like crazy. China's one-child policy has a particularly nasty long-term payoff. Governments throw everything at getting people to have kids: childcare, housing, cash, tax breaks. Some of it helps. It mostly doesn't help enough.
So countries start competing much more aggressively for young people who already exist. Japan wants Vietnamese workers. Germany wants Filipino nurses. China wants African engineers. Having a large population of young adults becomes a resource other countries are actively trying to get access to.
Nigeria gets a lot more geopolitical weight. Lagos becomes a huge cultural center, Nairobi a major tech center. India's population turns out to be a pretty useful thing to have, too. Places you might not have followed particularly closely in 2026 start producing people, companies, and entertainment that you hear about constantly.
Watching racists attempt to reconcile needing people with their existing opinions about those people is... well. It's quite a performance.
Around 2036, big families also become fashionable in a way you probably aren't picturing correctly. There's some overlap with the old tradwife thing, sure, but a lot of it is people with four kids, gardens, homemade bread, no augmentation at dinner, and robots doing the laundry. The domestic aesthetic is very Little House on the Prairie, provided the prairie has excellent technical support.
They call it spawnmaxxing. The whole “-maxxing” thing actually dies off for a while first, then returns as a retro reference. So you get to be annoyed by it twice, from two slightly different directions.
North Korea is still there. Kim Jong Un's daughter runs it now and opens things up a little. A LITTLE. There's a casino resort near the DMZ, and Dennis Rodman goes to the opening and cries. I've reread that sentence and I don't think additional explanation is going to improve your understanding of the situation.
Scotland leaves the UK. Britain spends years gradually putting back a lot of the arrangements it used to have with the EU. NATO briefly becomes ADSP, except nobody uses the new name, and about a year later they give up and change it back. I have a coffee mug from the ADSP era, which I enjoy far more than its historical significance warrants.
Still a lot of lattes, incidentally. We eventually buy an excellent machine from a Chinese company that doesn't even exist for you yet. Ridiculously posh little thing.
Saudi Arabia becomes much more socially liberal while retaining plenty of the things that make that a complicated sentence. Riyadh turns into a huge entertainment city. Daft Punk reunites there in 2035, and France has some feelings about that choice of venue.
Iran's government eventually comes apart. A woman named Parisa Daryaei becomes one of the revolutionary icons because somebody photographs her holding a broom above her head. Everyone reads it as a “sweep them out” gesture. She keeps explaining that she was cleaning her balcony. By the time the broom is in a museum, her actual intent has become more of an interesting footnote than something anyone needs to establish.
I was about to move on, but there's a date I need to tell you about.
May 17th, 2032. You're at Dan and Holly's.
Three Amazon autonomous cargo aircraft get hijacked during a joint session of Congress. Two are intercepted. The third hits the Capitol. Sixty-three people die, including the Vice President and eleven members of Congress.
The part you remember most clearly afterward is the waiting. That same horrible uncertainty as 9/11, where you don't know whether you're looking at the whole event or just the first piece of something that's still happening. People keep checking things that haven't updated. Nobody quite wants to turn the coverage off.
That date stays with you.
Let me get back to some of the less awful political stuff. Puerto Rico becomes the 51st state. Texas actually holds an independence referendum, loses it 68 to 32, and then we get to watch the people involved explain why the Texas Independence Referendum wasn't really an independence referendum. Unfortunately for them, screenshots remain a functioning technology.
The 2036 presidential election is Rebecca Bell against Mark Cuban. Yes, that Mark Cuban. Give yourself a moment with that.
There's a debate exchange where he's reaching for his water and Bell says, “Mark, even your water is waiting for an answer.” He pauses, looks at her, looks at the glass... and drinks it. The timing is just spectacular. That clip goes absolutely everywhere. Bell wins, and the actual glass eventually ends up in the Smithsonian, because apparently there was room.
In November 2039, somebody shoots her. For about seventeen minutes it looks as though she's dead. She survives, comes back several weeks later, and opens her first appearance with, “I'm not going anywhere.” You will hear that phrase enough times to feel as though it's been physically installed in your head. She wins reelection.
Jakarta is another one you need to know about. Earthquake and tsunami in 2035, more than 180,000 dead. The scale is awful. For a few weeks, the U.S., China, India, Japan, and Australia put together this enormous joint humanitarian effort, and watching countries that can barely speak civilly to each other actually coordinate something useful is almost disorienting.
It doesn't last as a broader political change. The immediate cooperation matters a great deal to the people receiving help, though.
Climate change works its way into everyday life through things like whether you can insure a house, or afford to keep living in it. Florida gets wildly expensive. Parts of Louisiana move inland. Miami spends obscene amounts of money trying to remain approximately where it already is. Phoenix also continues to exist, and people voluntarily move there, which remains a choice I struggle to get my head around.
We even find time for an Antarctic standoff in 2038. New Zealand mediates. During a blizzard, a diplomat says, “We're standing on melting ice arguing about who owns it,” and somebody samples it into a dance track that wins a Grammy.
So that's a fairly representative journey from geopolitical tension to something playing in a gym.
Okay! Games. Let me talk about something where my first response isn't just staring into the middle distance.
Fortnite and Roblox keep evolving until the old arguments about whether they're really games stop accomplishing much. A big part of that world becomes a mixture of social space and creative tool. Meanwhile traditional games remain extremely popular, because there's still plenty of demand for sitting down and playing a game with an actual beginning, middle, and end. Nobody calls the wider thing the metaverse. Zuckerberg did a pretty thorough job of making that word unusable.
The creation tools, though... holy shit.
You can talk something into existence. Put a castle there, put a volcano behind it, make the lava bounce players two hundred feet into the air. Then decide you want five hundred angry chickens that worship whoever has the high score. The system makes the pieces, connects the behavior, and you've got something you can immediately mess around in.
You can imagine what that does to your brain. The distance between having an idea and actually being able to stand in it gets absurdly small.
For about six months, everybody announces that professional game design is over. Then they start playing what people are making. It turns out the ability to generate a castle doesn't tell you where it should go, what makes moving through it interesting, or why anybody would want to come back tomorrow. Giving everyone an infinite box of Legos produces a pretty healthy supply of shitty castles.
There are fantastic things made by people who would never have gotten near development before, too. That's the exciting part. The tools open the door to all these people with unusual instincts and backgrounds. They also open it to approximately twelve billion people who think their first idea is ready to ship.
So, yes, knowing what you're doing continues to be useful. You just have a much larger room full of people doing it alongside you.
NPCs remember players in a much more personal way. They develop opinions, pass information around, and sometimes get things spectacularly wrong. There's a famous incident where a game's population becomes convinced that a player named Dave had sex with a dragon. Dave did not, in fact, have sex with the dragon. The developer removes the rumor, the players get furious about losing it, and it goes back in.
There's now a statue of Dave with a very satisfied-looking dragon behind him. Imagine logging in to discover that this is your lasting contribution to the world. Dave is understandably not a fan.
VR gets there, too. The hardware is basically glasses now. Tracking is effectively perfect, the screen-door stuff and nausea problems get sorted, and there's some limited neural input. Limited being the useful word in that sentence. You aren't plugging your spine into the Matrix, but the interactions are a long way from what you're wearing on your face in 2026.
Porn adopts all of it immediately, obviously. Humanity continues its dependable habit of using every new communication medium to order pizza, argue with strangers, and masturbate. We are nothing if not adaptable within our established interests.
Tabletop also gets huge. Actual cardboard, dice, people physically around a table. It acquires names like raw table and proof play, and I once heard somebody describe D&D as “full-zero proof meat.” Asking what that meant got me the look you'd give somebody who had wandered in from a historical reenactment.
Anyway, I promised to come back to the agents. This is probably the part of everyday life that would be hardest to convey properly to you.
For a couple years there's the Personality Boom. Basically Internet of Things, except now every object has been assigned an enthusiastic little personality by somebody in marketing. Samsung has a sassy oven. LG gives you an emotionally supportive washing machine. Your toothbrush congratulates you.
My oven actually said, “Looks like we're making pizza tonight!” Which... no. WE aren't doing anything. I am making pizza. Your contribution is to become 475 degrees and remain that temperature until informed otherwise.
People get tired of this fairly quickly, but something much more useful comes out of it. Wisps.
These are recent, by the way. Last couple years recent. Keep that in mind when I describe how normal it all seems, because it may be one of those things we look back on in five years and wonder what the hell we were doing.
Instead of a collection of unrelated personalities attached to appliances, you have one that knows you and can move between the things you're interacting with. Mine is Earl. I walk into the kitchen, Earl is there. Get into the car, same Earl. Put the glasses on, there he is again. Check into a hotel and he can handle the lights, temperature, television, all the little room settings, through that hotel's equipment.
So the refrigerator is basically something Earl can inhabit, which sounds a little unsettling written out like that. In practice, it means you can carry on with what you were doing without having to introduce yourself to a succession of household objects.
Earl also inherits the information from the agents I used before him. He arrives already knowing a fairly ridiculous amount about what I like, what I'm working on, which things annoy me, and what I tend to mean when I say “later.” He gets pretty good at knowing when I'm joking, too, which I appreciate as a basic survival skill around here.
And yes, having been given this extraordinarily sophisticated technology, I immediately gave it a heavy redneck accent. FULL redneck. Earl tells me, “Welp, looks like yer gonna wanna head on outta here in 'bout ten minutes if'n ya don't wanna be late.”
Still cracks me up. I wish I could report that my sense of humor had become more refined, but there you go.
Gab's is LEROY! The exclamation point is actually part of the name. You can probably work out about how long that took to become a lot.
Everybody mumbles in public now. You're walking through a grocery store and people around you are quietly going, “...Thursday... no, AFTER three... yeah...” It's very much that early Bluetooth-headset era, when you kept seeing someone apparently having an argument with a person who wasn't there. Except now the entire store is doing it. Josh Johnson has some excellent bits about this. He's still funny, and I still have no idea when the man sleeps.
The part I find harder to get used to is the Wisps communicating with each other.
Take Deb breaking her leg as an example. In your time, she calls and tells you. Here, her Wisp can tell Earl, because I'm on the list of people who should know. I'm making coffee, and Earl says, “Hey, jus' so ya know, Deb broke her leg this mornin'. She's alright.”
And now I know. The information got to the right person, quickly, with very little effort from anybody. From a systems perspective, that's a pretty successful interaction.
But I keep thinking about the call that used to happen there. Hearing how she sounded. Asking a question she hadn't thought to include in the update. Getting sidetracked and talking about something else for ten minutes. All the stuff surrounding the actual piece of news.
It's the same with engagements, new jobs, hospital visits, somebody having a rough week. There's this whole layer of communication between the Wisps, underneath the human relationships, passing along things their people would probably want shared. Most people are comfortable with that. Deb wanted me to know, I know, nobody had to make an extra call. What's the issue?
I'm still trying to work out how to explain what bothers me without sounding like I'm complaining that the telephone replaced a perfectly good horse. Maybe some of it is just getting old. Maybe we adapt and get better at making the calls anyway. It's early enough that I honestly don't know.
For all I know, Earl is the beginning of a thirty-year relationship with a fake redneck ghost that follows me around possessing appliances. Right now he's just part of how the day works, which is a pretty substantial change to absorb in a couple years.
Oh! GLPs. Remember the whole argument over whether taking Ozempic was somehow cheating at losing weight?
That becomes a very dated conversation.
Those drugs turn out to be the early versions of a much broader set of metabolic treatments. Weight is part of it, but so are diabetes, cardiovascular disease, fatty liver, kidney problems, addiction, inflammation... there's a lot more tangled up in those systems than we fully appreciated. The treatments get better, and some last months instead of requiring a weekly shot.
Obesity drops substantially. The second-order stuff is fascinating. Airlines revisit seat layouts as average passenger size changes. Food companies have to deal with people simply not wanting as many snacks. Restaurant portions get smaller. Alcohol consumption falls sharply because some of the treatments reduce the desire to drink in the first place.
Naturally people find a way to turn this into a status argument. You get the nat-met crowd, short for naturally metabolic, who would like you to know that their particular body doesn't require assistance. Thanks for the update, man. I'll make a note in the appropriate file.
There's also a thing where people stop their medication for a weekend because they want to experience being really hungry again. Hunger raw. That's what they call it. I realize I'm giving you an awful lot of terrible vocabulary to take in at once.
For us, the more useful part is how much better medicine gets at preserving muscle while dealing with fat, blood sugar, and inflammation. Healthy seventy-year-olds start looking and functioning differently. There's no immortality switch, but there is a noticeable shift in what being older can be like.
You see seventy-three-year-olds sharing VO2 max, vascular age, and DEXA scans with the enthusiasm of kids showing off Pokémon cards. You find these people incredibly tedious, right up until you become one of them. I'm sorry. In our defense, the numbers are interesting.
Several cancers become much more manageable. Personalized cancer vaccines become reasonably ordinary, some genetic diseases all but disappear, replacement tissues improve considerably. It's a pretty useful time to be aging, particularly given that there aren't enough young people coming along to do everything for us.
SPACE. Almost forgot to get to the actual aliens, which is probably an indictment of my priorities.
We go back to the Moon and maintain a presence there. There's even a hotel. From what I've heard, the experience is somewhat less glamorous than the brochure, and people complain about the Wi-Fi. Humans remain humans at a considerable distance from Earth.
Nobody has made it to Mars yet. Elon continues to have opinions about the delay.
Enceladus, though. Saturn's little ice moon. We get a probe through the ice, and it finds evidence of metabolism. Apparently living things. Tiny things under an enormous amount of ice, but... life, somewhere else.
For about six weeks, it feels like everyone has dropped what they're doing to try and get their head around it. You keep coming back to the same thought: there was something alive there before we knew to look. All of human history happened while this completely separate thing was going on under the ice.
Then Beyoncé announces a final tour, and somehow the aliens are the fourth story in the news. She doesn't actually retire, incidentally. Apparently the word “final” remains open to interpretation in the entertainment industry.
Cars mostly drive themselves now, too. Teenagers aren't particularly bothered about getting a license. Meanwhile people our age start taking old gasoline cars out for a drive as a hobby, fussing over the machinery and explaining how much more involved the experience is.
At some point it dawns on you that we've become horse people.
There's a lot of that sort of thing. The more synthetic the available experiences become, the more interest there is in doing something tangible. Bread, gardens, woodworking, analog synths, film cameras, vinyl, handwritten letters. Restaurants advertise that they don't allow augmentation. Human-made becomes a label people will pay extra for.
The ability to create something technically accomplished gets so widespread that technical accomplishment alone stops being much of a reason to pay attention. You can have another excellent-looking image or polished song almost immediately. After a while, knowing that a particular woman spent six months working on the painting in front of you becomes part of what makes it worth standing there and looking at.
Live music gets enormous. Being there, with the actual musicians, for the particular performance that happened that night... people really value that. There's so much music culture you'd love now. Plenty you'd complain about, too, but those have never been mutually exclusive activities for us.
Crypto doesn't replace money. It also doesn't go away, so most of the people arguing about it get to continue feeling both vindicated and irritated. Bitcoin goes through more ridiculous cycles. You have a few moments remembering what you sold that are almost physically painful, followed by a sixty-percent crash, followed by another recovery. Eventually you stop paying such close attention, which may be the most useful financial development I can report.
Social media fragments. Once the large public feeds are full of endlessly generated content and convincing synthetic people, more of your actual social life moves into smaller groups, clubs, and communities where you have some idea who you're talking to. After decades of development, we manage to invent our way back to message boards.
Kids regard the big algorithmic feeds as unhealthy in much the same way they understand smoking is unhealthy. This doesn't prevent them from using them. They just have a more developed vocabulary for acknowledging that they probably shouldn't.
There's also a fashion revival called early century. They mean 2000 to 2015. Wired earbuds, reproduction 2007 graphic tees, all that stuff. There are iPods in museums. It's a little jarring seeing a version of your perfectly ordinary adult life arranged into a recognizable historical aesthetic, especially when someone is paying good money to recreate a shirt you were pleased to get rid of.
And through all of this, the days themselves are still recognizable.
Some things hurt that don't hurt yet. A few of your current worries fade so thoroughly that I have to stop and reconstruct why they bothered us. You lose people. I'm not going to tell you who, because I can't imagine a useful way for you to live with that information. You also meet people who become incredibly important, people whose names would mean absolutely nothing if I typed them here.
That last one still gets me. Whole relationships ahead of you, and you don't even know the people exist.
You keep accumulating history, too. Right now 9/11 is one of those dates that comes with a whole set of memories attached. Eventually May 17th does. Jakarta does. November 2039 does. I think some part of us expected the big historical events to remain things that happened when we were younger, or before we were around. Apparently history doesn't recognize that arrangement.
It's difficult to convey how quickly the extraordinary bits become the background. One year you're amazed a computer can make an image from a sentence. A few years later you're annoyed because the woman in the image is wearing the wrong shoes. We find what appears to be alien life, spend weeks trying to absorb the implications, and then we're checking the Beyoncé dates.
Meanwhile I'm making coffee, deciding what to have for dinner, thinking about people I care about, laughing at something stupid, and working out what we're doing Saturday. I could show you a random afternoon here and you'd find a dozen things to stop and ask about. Living through it, I mostly notice the thing that's currently not working properly.
Speaking of which, Earl is informing me that I've exceeded the internet limit I apparently asked him to enforce. He's doing it in a voice that suggests he should be explaining the service history of a used tractor.
So we have made it to 2041, acquired a persistent artificial intelligence capable of managing much of our life, and still need someone to tell us to stop screwing around and go to bed. Some parts of this experiment have been more transformative than others.
Enjoy 2026, man. I mean that. There's a lot about it that looks pretty quaint from here, but there's plenty I'd happily spend another afternoon in.
See you in fifteen years.
You
P.S. Oh shit, I nearly forgot the latest Enceladus news. They still don't know exactly what the things ARE. They're pretty sure they're alive. They appear to reproduce, and they store information somehow, but neither DNA nor RNA is doing the job. There's a different molecule involved, something nobody has encountered before, and roughly forty percent of the biology world seems to be having a religious experience while the other sixty percent argues about the interpretation.
Another probe gets there in November. So after sending you this ridiculous email full of things that haven't happened yet, I have to stop right there. I can't tell you what it finds. I'm waiting to find out, same as everyone else.
Funny. Writing all this down, I almost forgot I still have a future too.
P.P.S. Gab says start fuckin working out! Srsly, get off your ass.
