A View from the Stars by Cixin Liu

Author:Cixin Liu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

CIVILIZATION’S EXPANSION IN REVERSE

TRANSLATED BY ADAM LANPHIER

Written September 14, 2001, at Niangzi Pass

First published in Science Fiction World, 2003, no. 2

When the alien civilization that generations have dreamed of, have called out for, have sought—when that civilization finally comes to Earth, humankind may find itself faced with an uncomfortable situation that has never occurred to it, even in its dreams: The aliens might ignore our welcoming, outstretched hands, choosing instead to embrace and converse with the ants.

This raises a question we’ve never seriously considered:

Who’s the Earth’s head of household?

If you take it for granted that we are, you’ll find you’re deluding yourself: It hasn’t been much more than a million years since we climbed down from the trees, and the oldest civilization whose legacy we can realistically claim as our own arose just five thousand–odd years ago. Hundreds of millions of years ago, ants were already forging their great empires on each of Earth’s ancient continents. Compared to them, we’re nothing but homeless orphans who’ve just wandered into the room and asked for a cup of water. We’re nowhere near head-of-household level.

You’ll no doubt protest: That’s ancient history! We have civilization, and human civilization is what raises Earth’s standing in the universe.

Yet so far, at least, the evidence hasn’t proven that. We think of the Late Cretaceous, with its asteroid impact and the subsequent extinction of most life on Earth, including the dinosaurs, as the most horrific period in the history of life on this planet. What you might not know, however, is that species are going extinct at a much faster rate now, in the Era of Civilization, than they did at the end of the Cretaceous. The most horrific period in the history of life on this planet is now! Civilization might be the path of light by which life perpetuates through the generations … or it might be a trap, a one-way road to the extinction of all life, ours included.

The defining feature of modern, technological civilization is its tendency toward expansion. Civilization constantly extends its borders, growing in scale as if it were a balloon being blown up, without a thought as to when it will pop.

Consider the Age of Exploration, full of desire and passion at sea. In that short era, European civilization, roused from sleep by the Renaissance, spread like a swarm of locusts to every corner of the globe.

As for what’s ahead: If civilization manages to persist, it will by necessity expand in scale indefinitely and become an enormous macrocivilization. Sci-fi writers have offered many vivid depictions of such superscale civilizations. Larry Niven’s Ringworld, for instance, depicts an enormous structure encircling a star that such a civilization has constructed; in Asimov’s Foundation series, humans have spread throughout the whole of the Milky Way; and in Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the supercivilization makes use of a hyperspace structure—a thing beyond humanity’s capacity ever to understand—that in effect turns the entire universe into their backyard.

But what we’re writing is science fiction; if we’re to

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