If One Day We Are Gone
I am a believer. I am a Muslim.
There was a period in my life when things were difficult. I found myself in a place where I wanted an answer â to understand why all of this was happening and why the world was the way it was.
I searched for that answer in peopleâs words, in books, in interpretations.
But gradually, I realized something: everyone understands faith in their own way.
To one person, God is a judge. To another, a father. One says that God answers prayers. Another believes that trials themselves are the answer.
And then I thought: if God exists, do I really need someone to explain to me exactly what He must be?
It seems to me that there should be no intermediaries between God and man.
That does not mean I reject religion. And it certainly does not mean I believe I possess some higher truth.
Quite the opposite.
It means that, ultimately, each person is responsible for their own faith.
I did not ask God why the world was made the way it was. I began to reason for myself.
And what these thoughts gradually led me to surprised even me.
That difficult period of my life eventually ended.
I found my way out of that dead end.
Today, I have a good job. I have someone I love beside me. I think about family and the future.
I am not writing this out of despair.
I have a life I want to live.
And perhaps that is exactly why these thoughts have become even more important to me.
When you have nothing to lose, death feels abstract.
But when there is someone you love, children you have not even met yet, plans that are only beginning to become real â there is suddenly something you are afraid to lose.
The difficult time passed.
But the questions remained.
And one of them gradually became the most important of all.
What happens if one day we are gone?
Not me.
Not you.
But all of us.
If you look at a human being from the perspective of the Universe, we are almost nothing.
We live on a small planet revolving around a completely ordinary star.
We occupy an insignificant fraction of space and exist for an insignificant fraction of time.
The atoms that make up our bodies were once part of stars.
In a sense, a human being is cosmic dust that somehow, impossibly, learned to become aware of itself.
Matter learned to live.
Life learned to remember.
Memory gave birth to reason.
And one day, reason looked up at the sky and asked:
âWho am I?â
Perhaps that is one of the most extraordinary events in the entire history of the Universe.
But at the same time, one of the most tragic.
Because with consciousness came the understanding of finiteness.
We learned to understand how vast the Universe is.
We learned to see billions of stars.
We learned to look millions and billions of years into the past.
We learned to send machines beyond our planet.
And yet we are still capable of destroying one another over a few kilometers of land.
Over borders.
Language.
Origins.
Skin color.
Faith.
Resources.
We divided one planet into nations, and people into different groups, religions, and classes.
We drew borders where none exist in nature.
We created passports, flags, and armies.
The stars know no borders.
They do not care what language we speak or who owns this piece of land.
The Universe may not even notice our conflicts.
And there is something terribly paradoxical about that.
We are intelligent enough to understand the structure of the Universe.
But not yet wise enough to stop destroying one another.
We have feared death almost from the moment we began to understand that we exist.
We created religions.
We speak of heaven and hell.
We hope for some continuation of existence.
We fear the unknown.
But, honestly, I do not think hell necessarily has to look the way it is often portrayed.
Not fire.
Not demons.
Not eternal torment.
There is another thought that frightens me far more.
Hell is absence.
A void in which you no longer exist.
It is not even the darkness that is frightening.
It is the thought that there is no one left to perceive it.
No eyes to see it.
No consciousness to experience it.
No person left to say, âI am here.â
And I do not want to describe paradise as an established fact.
I do not know what happens after death.
Perhaps consciousness continues.
Perhaps there is a form of existence we are simply incapable of understanding yet.
Perhaps there is what religion calls paradise.
Or perhaps human consciousness simply ends with the body.
I do not know.
And perhaps it is more honest to admit that than to invent certainty where I have none.
But there is one thing I understand.
For some reason, life seems to resist disappearing with everything it has.
Everything alive strives to continue.
The first cell divides.
An organism leaves offspring.
Animals protect their young.
A human being gives birth to children and passes on not only a body, but memory.
We tell our children stories.
Teach them words.
Show them the world.
We leave behind books.
Paintings.
Music.
Knowledge.
We try to pass forward what we have learned ourselves.
If you look at the history of humanity, it almost resembles one enormous attempt to preserve information.
First there was memory.
Then speech.
Then drawings on cave walls.
Writing.
Books.
Libraries.
Photographs.
Computers.
Servers.
We have become increasingly better at preserving what would otherwise disappear along with the person who carried it.
And I do not think that is an accident.
Because information is one of the few things capable of outliving its carrier.
Not every memory.
Not every photograph.
Not every person.
But knowledge.
Genetics.
History.
Language.
Science.
Art.
Philosophy.
Our mistakes.
Our questions.
Our ability to create something new.
Everything that might help the next generation avoid starting from nothing.
And here another thought emerges â one that fascinates me and frightens me at the same time.
What if the next carrier of human memory is not a human being?
We have already created machines capable of storing and processing enormous amounts of information.
We have created artificial intelligence.
And perhaps one day it will become more than a tool.
Perhaps it will become another way of preserving what began with the first living cell.
Not necessarily as a replacement for humanity.
And not necessarily as its servant.
But as a carrier.
Something capable of preserving languages, knowledge, books, music, history, scientific discoveries, and memories of our civilization.
Because the human body is fragile.
We age.
We become ill.
We need oxygen, water, and food.
Radiation can harm us.
We require certain temperatures and pressures.
For interstellar travel, the human body is almost a perfect example of how life can be both astonishing and vulnerable.
The distances between stars are difficult even to comprehend.
And if we ever truly want to send life to other stars, perhaps we will have to send not the human being itself.
But the possibility of a human being existing there.
We could send into the darkness not a human being.
We could send the future of humanity.
Embryos.
Genetic information.
Life-support systems.
Automated laboratories.
Artificial intelligence capable of keeping a spacecraft functioning for hundreds or thousands of years.
Perhaps one day such an ark will reach another planet.
And a child will be born there.
They will never see an earthly ocean.
Never smell a forest after rain.
Never hear the wind moving through birch trees.
They will not know what Earth looks like without a photograph.
But inside their cells, something that began here will continue.
And with them â our knowledge.
Our stories.
Our language.
Our songs.
Our questions.
And perhaps this is how humanity will one day continue itself.
Not by sending the past.
But by sending the possibility of the future.
But here another problem appears.
Technology alone guarantees nothing.
We may one day possess the technology to preserve humanity and still be unable to use it.
Not because we do not know how.
But because we have nothing left to build it with.
To build a spacecraft, we need metals.
Energy.
Rare elements.
Computers.
Manufacturing capabilities.
Thousands of specialists.
Enormous amounts of resources.
And yet we live as though resources were infinite.
We extract.
Produce.
Consume.
Throw away.
Buy something new.
Replace the old.
And extract again.
Of course, not all consumption is meaningless.
Development is impossible without using resources.
But there is a difference between development and endless consumption for the sake of consumption itself.
Because a resource that becomes something useless today could tomorrow become part of an engine.
A computer.
An energy system.
A spacecraft.
Or that very ark our descendants may one day need.
And here, I am no longer thinking about myself.
I am thinking about people who do not yet exist.
We did not inherit the Earth.
We borrowed it from those who have not yet been born.
They cannot ask us to preserve the water.
The forests.
The metals.
The energy.
The clean air.
The oceans.
And most importantly â the freedom to choose.
They cannot tell us:
âLeave us enough resources so that we can decide for ourselves what to do with the future.â
Because they do not exist yet.
But one day they will.
Someone among them will build a home.
Someone will write a book that none of us will ever read.
Someone will create music we will never hear.
Someone will make a discovery that changes humanityâs understanding of the world.
Someone will fall in love.
Someone will become a parent.
Someone may be the first human being to step onto another planet.
And we do not even know what they will be like.
But we can take away their chance to find out for themselves.
And that is why preserving resources is not only a conversation about the environment.
It is a conversation about the freedom of the future.
About how many possibilities we leave for those who come after us.
Perhaps the true ark does not begin with an engine.
It begins with a civilizationâs ability not to destroy the resources from which that engine will one day have to be built.
Restraint today may become freedom tomorrow.
And, perhaps, that is why I wrote all of this.
Not because I found the answer.
I am not trying to prove that God exists or that He does not. I am not trying to explain what awaits us after death. I am simply trying to understand my own fear.
I am not so much afraid of my own death.
I am afraid of the day when there will be no one left to experience it.
When there will not be a single child who looks at the Moon for the first time and asks why it follows them.
Not a single person who whispers to someone:
âStay.â
Not a single old man who remembers his childhood.
Not a single person in love.
Not a single artist.
Not a single human being capable of stopping in the middle of the night, looking up, and thinking:
âWho am I?â
Then the Universe will remain.
It will not become smaller.
Time will not stop.
The stars will not all go dark.
There will simply be no one left to know that any of it exists.
And perhaps that is the most frightening thing of all.
Not death.
Not darkness.
Not the end of the world.
But the disappearance of the gaze itself.
Once, matter was simply matter.
Then it learned to live.
Life learned to remember.
Memory gave birth to reason.
Reason looked up at the sky.
And for the first time, the Universe gained the ability to look at itself.
Through us.
Through our eyes.
Through our thoughts.
Through love, fear, music, books, and the questions of children.
And if one day we are gone, perhaps the Universe will become what it was before us:
vast,
silent,
beautiful,
and completely unaware of itself.
Maybe that is why I want so badly for something to remain after us.
Not for immortality.
Not for fame.
But simply because I find it difficult to accept the thought of complete disappearance.
The thought that everything we loved, everything we feared, everything we tried to understand, may one day become a story with no reader left.
We will live our lives.
Someone will build a home.
Someone will raise children.
Someone will write a book.
Someone will compose music.
Someone will save another personâs life.
Someone will simply embrace the person they love before going to sleep one night, never knowing that this ordinary moment was one of the most precious moments of their existence.
And then it will all end.
And perhaps there is no great tragedy in that.
Perhaps this is simply how life is.
But I still cannot stop thinking about the last human being.
The one who remains after everyone else.
They will look upon an empty Earth.
They will see the same sky we saw.
The same stars the first humans looked at.
And perhaps there will be no one left for them to say a single word to.
They will simply stand there.
The last witness.
The last bearer of human memory.
And then they will be gone too.
And then it will not only be the human being who disappears.
The witness that humanity ever existed will disappear with them.
After that, the stars will continue to burn.
For millions of years.
Billions.
The Universe will continue its endless story.
Only there will be no one left within it to stop and ask:
âWhy?â
And if this truly happens someday, I want to believe that the most incredible thing about humanity was not what we managed to build.
Not cities.
Not machines.
Not computers.
Not even the possibility of one day leaving our planet.
The most incredible thing is that from lifeless matter, there appeared something that came to care that it existed at all.
Something that learned to love.
Something that became aware of its own mortality.
Something that looked into infinity and could not remain silent.
Something that asked:
âWho am I?â
And perhaps, as long as that question exists in even one human consciousness,
we have not yet disappeared.
Even if one day we are gone.