All Tomorrows: A Billion Year Chronicle of
the Myriad Species and Mixed Fortunes of Man. Long ago, in the distant past, humans colonised
Mars. It took centuries to terraform the red planet. First, they made oceans using the
ice from comets. Then they sent microbes to create breathable air, then introduced genetically
modified plants and animals. It was only after Mars was transformed into a habitable world
that the first people came to Mars, in colony ships. So âThe first steps on Mars were
taken not by astronauts, but by barefoot children on lush, green grassâ.
The people of Mars developed their own culture and identity, separate to Earth. The low gravity
made Martians tall and spindly, and they became almost a different species to the Earthlings.
For hundreds of years, the two planets coexisted, but as Mars started to surpass Earth, tensions
led to war. And interplanetary war wasnât glorious or exciting. There were no heroic
pilots or massive spaceships. The war was fought by complicated automated machines,
in a slow strategic nerve-wracking contest that caused unimaginable destruction. Billions
of people died in the war, and humans almost went extinct, so the survivors of Earth and
Mars united and made a plan to ensure this could never happen again.
Humanity made massive reforms to their politics and economics, and they changed themselves.
They genetically modified humanity into a new subspecies called the Star People, made
to be better and smarter and adapted to expand into space. And it worked. Within a few generations,
the unified Star People peacefully colonised the solar system. Other stars were too far
away to fly to. So instead, the Star People sent out automated machines that would fly
to distant worlds, and terraform them, then use genetic material to create people to live
there. There was a weird problem with these colonies, where many humans fell in love with
the machines that created them, and died in mass identity crises. But the colonies that
survived thrived and expanded across the galaxy, starting a âgolden ageâ for humanity.
Trillions of people lived peaceful, utopic lives, their worlds united by communication
across centuries of light. As the Star People explored space, they discovered
some alien creatures, but didnât find any intelligent life. So they wondered â were
humans alone in the galaxy? On one alien world, they found a fossil of a bird-like creature
that didnât seem related to the other native life â the native creatures had three limbs
and copper bones, but this bird had four limbs and calcium bones. It was related to an extinct
dinosaur from Earth. So how the hell did this extinct Earth animal end up on this distant
alien world? Some people thought God must have done it, and there was a resurgence of
religion. But others thought aliens did it. That there must be some civilisation out there
who had space-flight and bioengineering millions of years before humans even had fire. Humanity
hoped that these aliens would be peaceful. But just in case, they built weapons to defend
themselves, weapons so powerful they could obliterate stars â but all of that was useless
in the end. Humanity was attacked by a godlike ancient
species called the Qu. They were âgalactic nomadsâ, who constantly migrated through
space. And they had a fanatical religious mission to remake the universe using genetic
manipulation. So when the Qu found humans, they didnât see them as people â they
were just objects to be changed into whatever shape the Qu wanted. Within a thousand years,
the Qu destroyed human civilisation â but some human species lived on. Cause the Qu
used their bioengineering technology to reshape humanity into thousands of bizarre subspecies
â they made humans into tools, into pets, and to wild animals. They ruled over the human
worlds for forty million years, and then they fucked off to find their next victims â leaving
humanity âdivided and differentiated beyond recognitionâ. These twisted species were
the last remnants of humanity. On one world, where the husks of dead cities
baked under a scorching sun, lived the Worms. They were humans, but the Qu had modified
their hands and feet into tiny feeble appendages, reduced their eyes to pinpricks, and removed
most of their brain. All their lives, the Worms dug aimlessly through the ground. If
they found food, they ate it. If they found other worms, they.. sometimes ate them â or
reproduced. They were wretched mindless creatures but their humanity would eventually resurface.
On another world were the Titans, who roamed a vast savannah. Their hands were clumsy stumps,
but their lower lip was like the trunk of an elephant, and could be used like a hand.
They were some of the smartest of the new human species, and gradually, they evolved
sentience. They built homes, agriculture, language, literature, made ornate wood carvings.
In booming voices they told âmyths and legends of the bygone, half-remembered pastâ. With
enough time, these Titans could have started a new humanity â but an ice-age hit the
planet, and these gentle giants disappeared forever.
On other worlds, humans had been twisted into predators, looking like the vampires and werewolves
of myth, with sharp claws and killing teeth. Their prey were also human â made into herbivores
with bird-like feet. The prey had the dull minds of animals, but the Predators, on the
hunt, kept some spark of human intelligence â which would eventually re-emerge.
The Mantelopes were bred to be singers and memory-retainers for the Qu. So they had fully
human minds â they understood the world around them. But in the bodies of grazing
herd animals, they were powerless to change anything. So for centuries, âmournful herds
roamed the plains, singing songs of desperation and lossâ. They created whole religions
and oral traditions around their grief and frustration. Until gradually, mercifully,
their agony faded. Cause evolutionarily, a stupid simple-minded Mantelope survives as
well or better than a conscious sad Mantelope. So within a hundred thousand years, this melancholy
world fell silent. Human minds arenât sacred to evolution, and soon only animals remained.
The Lizard Herders were âthe lucky onesâ, cause the Qu wiped out their intelligence,
and stunted their brains so they could never regain sentience â so they didnât suffer
like the Mantelopes did. The Lizard Herders survived in symbiosis with some herbivorous
reptiles. And while the Lizard Herders stayed simple-minded, the reptiles evolved, slowly
growing stronger and smarter. The Qu twisted humanity into a variety of
aquatic creatures â there were limbless eel-people, and whale-like behemoths, and
âhorrifying multitudes of brainless wallowers that served as food stockâ. Most of them
went extinct when the Qu left, but the Swimmers survived, feeding on fish and crustaceans
in their worldâs oceans. They didnât look very human, but human eyes peered through
their blubbery eyelids, and they spoke to each other â though, underwater, they couldnât
hear each othersâ words. The Temptors were so fucked up itâs amazing
they survived at all. The Qu made them into bizarre living decorations â two-meter-tall
cones of flesh like grotesque carnivorous plants. Those were the females. The males
were mindless little monkey imp creatures who blindly served their queen, controlled
by vocal and pheromonal signals. Theyâd gather the food and guard their queen, and
occasionally they would mate by descending into this breeding tube like a subway commuter.
It was weird, but it worked, and the Temptorsâ mound forests spread across their world. They
couldâve built some kind of civilisation. But they were obliterated by a comet, and
one of humanityâs best and weirdest hopes died out.
The Bone Crushers looked like monsters â like giants or ogres with beaks derived from teeth.
They only ate putrefying meat, and they communicated by defecating on each other, but they were
actually pretty successful. They reached a medieval level of civilisation, until they
ran out of rotting meat to eat, and eventually collapsed.
When the Qu attacked, most human worlds were quickly defeated. But one world fought back,
resisting the Qu two times before falling. The Qu punished and humiliated this world
for its resistance, by making them into the Colonials. They were disembodied cultures
of skin, connected with a network of basic nerves. The Qu used them as living filtering
devices, living off waste products. And for no other reason than to make the Colonials
suffer, the Qu left them their consciousness and their eyes, so they could fully witness
their own wretched fate. For forty million years, the Colonials suffered generations
of misery, hoping for their extinction â but they were made to be efficient, and so they
spread across the planet in âquilt-like fields of human fleshâ. Though eventually,
after an eternity, the Colonials would taste hope.
The Qu made lots of flying human species â some like bats or pterosaurs, others like angels
or demons dancing through the aether, or strange ugly creatures that floated on glands full
of gas. One species, called the Flyers, had a special starfish-shaped heart that processed
oxygen so efficiently, that they had enough energy to support flight and human-like brains.
Other flying species werenât so lucky. The Hand Flappers had wings that were useless
for FLYING, but also couldnât be used as hands. All they could do was flap about to
display their sexual availability â and so they ecstatically flashed and danced their
way to extinction. Some humans tried to escape the Qu by hiding
underground. The Qu found them anyway, and made them into subterranean mousy morlock
people called the Blind Folk. They used whiskers and long fingers and big ears and banshee-like
screams to navigate in the dark. They lived off fungi and fish, and avoided predation
by bats and crocodilian creatures. These albino trogdolytes looked fairly human, but where
their eyes should have been, there was nothing but haunting smooth skin. Eventually the movement
of tectonic plates crushed these underground habitats one by one.
On a planet with extremely high gravity, the Qu made the Lopsiders â flat, deformed,
asymmetrical creatures right out of the fever dreams of Picasso, Dali or Bosch. The Lopsiders
crawled along the ground on three hands, with another limb used as an antenna, and a hand.
One eye stared straight up, while the other eye scanned ahead. As wretched as they looked,
the Lopsiders thrived on their heavy world. They domesticated some native creatures, and
began the long road to civilisation. On a moon with very low gravity, the Qu made
the Striders â enormously tall, thin creatures who walked among huge trees that towered like
skyscrapers. The Striders were very delicate, so even with low gravity, a fall could shatter
their bones. The Striders were eventually wiped out by a bunch of chickens who over
two million years evolved into deadly predators. On another world where the humans temporarily
resisted the Qu, the Qu punished the humans by creating an array of parasites, who were
also made from humans. There were tortoise-sized vampire-like ambulatory parasites, and smaller
parasites that lived attached to their hosts. There was even one horrific parasite that
infested the wombs of its victims. Many of these parasite life-cycles were so elaborate
and baroque that they went extinct when the Qu left. But some of the parasites survived,
and developed symbioses that benefitted their hosts as well as themselves.
One human species evolved on a world of great archipelagos, calm shallow oceans sprinkled
with countless islands. The Finger Fishers evolved to catch fish with their long fingers
adapted into fish-hooks, and ate them with long snouts full of needle-sharp teeth. But
their evolution would get even weirder later on.
The Hedonists were created by the Qu to be pampered pets, living carefree lives of pleasure.
Their world was a tropical paradise of succulent fruits and lakes of sweet bacterial juice.
They were the only animals on their planet, and had no predators or competition to deal
with. Under normal conditions, this might lead to overpopulation, but the Qu designed
the Hedonists to only get pregnant after mating an enormous number of times. So the population
was stable, and the Hedonists filled their lives with eating, sleeping, and mind-blowing
sex. Their minds were blissfully empty. Cause who needed to think when theyâre having
such a good time? The Insectophagi adapted to eat insects. They
had claw-like hands to dig, long tongues to scoop up bugs, and leathery faces to protect
from bites. They lived quiet unnoticed lives on their obscure world â but little did
they know, they would later play a key a role in the fate of humanity.
When the Qu attacked, not all humans were captured. Some of them escaped into space
and built homes inside hollowed-out asteroids. They adapted to zero gravity by growing long
spindly limbs, and pressurised digestive systems, so they could move around in space by farting
from their highly evolved sphincters. These Spacers changed to the point where they could
never return to a planet with gravity. But they didnât care. They were comfortable
in their weightless void worlds, and paid little attention to their human relatives
on the planets below. So across the galaxy, these twisted post-human
species struggled to survive. They evolved, diversified, rose and fell, and most of them
died out without the universe ever knowing they existed. Which is normal. Extinction
is just as natural as speciation â and for each species that died out, new ones evolved
to take their place, generating an ever-changing kaleidoscopic variety life forms. And from
this endless churn of life and death some species rose up to achieve new kinds of sentience
and civilisation, like stars emerging from dark fog.
The scorching hot planet of the Worms eventually cooled down, and life emerged onto the surface.
The Worms filled new ecological niches, evolving into serpentine grazers, swimmers, predatorsâŚ
and, eventually, people, with human-like intelligence. The Snake People had unique spiral-shaped
brains which allowed them to observe and understand their world. They developed a âhandâ derived
from their ancestorsâ feet. And they built vast cities of tightly-intertwined tunnels
and homes. They enjoyed books, and music, played as vibrations in the ground. The Snake
People mayâve looked alien, but their daily lives were full of joys and sorrows, hopes
and dreams, humanity. The Predators evolved into the Killer Folk.
Their deadly claws became grasping hands, and their sabre teeth receded into organs
of social display. Killer Folk society was built around hunting and violence, and so
their history was filled with war. For thousands of years, nomadic warriors with vast herds
of once-human livestock battled each other across a chessboard of continents. So their
world is an archaeologistsâ dream, rich with the ruins of fallen kingdoms. But one
faction of Killer Folk developed factory farming, and rejected their violent past for a more
peaceful unified future. Some conservative factions kept to the old way, fanatically
devoted to traditional warfare and hunting. These two factions came dangerously close
to global war, but the Killer Folk reconciled and survived.
Underwater, the Swimmers couldnât make fire. So they made a different kind of technology
â they learned to breed their tools and machines. The Tool Breeders domesticated and
modified other sea creatures, and built entire cities powered by organic life. Huge heart-like
creatures pumped nutritious fluids through a network of self-healing conduits, like a
living power grid. The Breedersâ homes were made from living shell and bone, with bioluminescent
lights. They had televisions derived from cephalopod skin, medicinal sea-squirts, weapons
made from molluscs that fired teeth as ammunition. With genetic modification, stem cells and
tissue cultures, the Tool Breeders mastered their oceans, and even the small landmasses
of their world. But they werenât content with just one planet. The Tool Breeders grew
living spaceships and reached for the stars. The Lizard Herders were stunted, and never
achieved sentience. But the lizards thrived, and eventually built civilisations â using
the humans for transport, labour and food. These lizards had no ancestral connection
to humanity, but they took on a human-like cultural identity, cause they influenced by
the ruins of the Star People on their world. They realised what the Qu had done to the
humans, and feared that if the Qu returned, they might suffer the same fate.
The Colonials were wretched creatures â helpless fields of flesh, carpeting the shores of their
world like algae. But they were resilient. And eventually, they organised themselves,
evolving from a homogenous mass into differentiated colonies. Each cell specialised to perform
different functions for the colony, and the colonies started competing against other.
Some colonies grew tap roots to siphon resources from afar, or starfish-life feet to move around,
or claws and poisons to attack other colonies. The winner of this evolutionary arms race
was an intelligent colony called the Modular People. In their vast industrial megalopolis,
the people took a wide variety of shapes and sizes. They could combine themselves or split
apart or exchange parts â all interchangeable cells playing a role in one great unified
organism. So the Modular People achieved the impossible â turning their miserable existence
into utopia where billions lived happy lives as part of the unified whole.
The Flyers diversified into many different species, as predators, herbivores, even swimmers.
One species were like storks who waded through swamps to catch their prey. Their versatile
feet, which had evolved to catch slippery fish, became articulate hands as they developed
intelligence and society. Since these Ptersosapiens could fly, they had a global mindset. Borders
and nations made no sense when it was so easy to travel freely. People and ideas spread
quickly across their planet, and they built an egalitarian society without strict social
classes. They built cities of perches and fluting towers, harnessed nuclear power, and
farmed their relatives on the ground for food. Though their civilisation thrived, their bodies
struggled to support their highly developed brains and their power of flight, so the Pterosapiens
usually died by the age of twenty-three. Keenly aware of their mortality, they appreciated
every moment of their lives. Their philosophers pondered the meaning of life with feverish
intensity, filling libraries with their tomes. The Ptersopaien in this picture poses at a
seaside resort. This ten day vacation was the only holiday in her short life.
Despite the crushing gravity of their world, the Lopsiders built an advanced civilisation.
Their pancake-flat buildings spread all over their world, and they developed spaceflight
so they could escape their planet and its oppressive gravity. To adapt to life on new
worlds, they engineered a subspecies who could live in low gravity, called the Asymmetric
People. The Asymmetric People thrived in the freedom of new worlds, but they had no love
for their creators. The Asymmetric People ruthlessly exterminated the Lopsiders on their
homeword, and explored the heavens alone. The Parasites and their hosts evolved symbiotic
relationships. Like, some parasites used sharp senses to warn their hosts of predators, or
provide weapons like venom for defence. In return, the hosts provided their nutritious
blood, and developed specialised nesting sites on their bodies for the parasite to attach
to, rich with blood vessels and protective fur. The Parasites and Hosts became inextricably
linked, almost like they were one being. Soon, the hosts were like horses being steered around
by the Parasites, then eventually they were no more than puppets, totally controlled by
the Parasites through tactile and olfactory signals. The intelligent Parasite civilisation
eventually developed technology that replaced the need for hosts. But they kept the hosts
around for tradition and convenience. An average Symbiote might start the day in a business
host, then change to a comfortable domestic host at home after work.
The world of the Fisher Fingers was full of scattered isolated islands. Like the Galapagos
or Madagascar on Earth, these islands were a seething evolutionary cauldron that gave
rise to wildly diverse species. One line of Fisher Fingers evolved into the Sail People.
Their long fingers evolved into sails that drove them effortlessly across oceans. They
used their tongues to catch prey, and eventually their tongues split and articulated to be
used as hands. The Sail People needed strong memories to navigate the oceans and locate
prey, so naturally they soon evolved intelligence. It took a long to develop social and political
stability. Their scattered and diverse world gave rise to a huge variety of creatures who
fiercely competed. For generations, flotillas of tribal warriors and pirate societies battled
in epoch-spanning conflicts. Until finally one group of Sail People became powerful enough
to unify their world, and make peace. Blood had stained the oceans for too long.
The peaceful paradise of the Hedonists seemed like it would never end. But over millions
of years, nothing lasts forever. Geologic activity threw up clouds of dust that blocked
the sun and killed most of the Hedonists. Only a small subset survived, mutating an
escape from the reproductive limits of their ancestors. These Satyriacs were got their
shit together and built an advanced self-sustaining civilisation. There were still traces of their
hedonistic past remaining in their genes, and so their societies retained a delightful
streak of pleasure-seeking and promiscuity. Festivals, concerts and ritualised orgies
punctuated every working week. And now, the pleasure was savoured by sentient self-aware
people. The Insectophagi started to look like their
prey. Their leathery face-plates hardened and became part of their jaw. Their hands
and feet developed into pincers. And their brains evolved intelligence. Like many others,
the Bug Facers built a civilisation, but they also faced a unique threat. They were attacked
by an alien race. Little is known about these aliens, not much survived in the historical
record. But it took an intense series of wars on the ground and in orbit before the invaders
were defeated. This traumatic conflict gave the Bug Facers a pathological xenophobic fear
of all other species. So when the human species on other worlds started to reach out to each
other, the Bug Facers stayed silent, and withdrew from the galaxy.
The Spacers became even more alien in the void of space. Their fingers extended and
split into tiny grasping limbs. Their legs atrophied, using their farts to move instead.
And in the weightless void of space, their brains expanded, til their every thought was
far more vast and complex than anything other humans could conceive. These Asteromorphs
spread to every star system in the galaxy, but they didnât interfere with the other
species. The Asteromorphs had no need for planets â those ugly balls of dirt and ice
and gravity. They stayed in the outer rims of star systems, silently watching over the
galaxy, like strange alien gods. The advanced post-human species started making
contact with each other. The Killer Folk talked with the Satyriacs. The Tool Breeders reached
out from their ocean depths. The Modular People and Pterosapiens joined in, followed by the
Asymmetric People, Saurosapients, Snake People, Symbiotes, and Sail People. They didnât
visit each other in person, cause the interstellar distances were too large. But they cooperated
by sharing knowledge and technology â and by keeping watch for alien invasions. They
all had found the ruins of the Star People and the Qu â and they didnât want to be
attacked and changed again. This alliance of post-humans lasted for almost eighty million
years, each species expanding to new worlds, and prospering together. The Bug Facers never
joined them, cause they were afraid and xenophobic. And there was one other advanced species that
didnât join â and from them would come the downfall of the alliance.
The Ruin Haunters were much like other species twisted by the Qu. But on their world, the
cities of the Star People hadnât been completely destroyed. So the Ruin Haunters had access
to remnants of the Star Peoplesâ technology and knowledge, which allowed them to advance
at a dangerous pace. Their technology developed so fast that their social and political structures
didnât keep up, and they almost destroyed themselves in a series of worldwide nuclear
wars. This baptism by fire hardened the Ruin Haunters and kinda drove them crazy. They
convinced themselves that they alone were the true descendants and heirs of the Star
People, and that only they deserved to reclaim the legacy of the golden age of their ancestors.
So when the other human species formed their alliance, the Ruin Haunters refused to participate.
But the Ruin Hauntersâ sun was rapidly expanding, and threatened to burn and destroy their worlds.
So the Ruin Haunters used their super-advanced technology to abandon their organic bodies
and replace them with machines. They became the Gravitals â floating metal spheres that
could mould the environment around them with gravity fields. They were entirely mechanical.
But they still had human minds, coded into quantum computers. So they still had human
ambitions â and human delusions. Twisted with neurotic narcissistic hubris, the Gravitals
started to exterminate all other life. And the other human species were unable to stop
them. The Gravitals would come to a human world and block out their sun behind a vast
black sail. If the choked, dying world managed to resist, they were finished off with an
asteroid. The Gravitals didnât hate other species. They just didnât see them as people,
and exterminated them like one might swat a fly. So all the Snake People, the Tool Breeders,
Pterosapients, and the others, who had worked so hard to survive, were all snuffed out one
by one. The only survivors of these genocides were
the shy and xenophobic Bug Facers. For reasons unknown, they alone were kept alive, and the
Gravitals used them as Subjects for biological experimentation. The Gravitals twisted them
into new forms so strange that they made the work of the Qu look tame. As well as servants,
and labourers, they made Subjects into bizarre art pieces, like creatures that existed only
to play the tune of a particular pop song on its modified throat and fingers. They made
whole elaborate artificial ecologies of doomed human flesh purely for entertainment and curiosity.
The Gravitals recycled and repurposed organic life the way someone might tinker with computer
parts, or recycle trash. And for millions of years that was how organic life existed
in the Machine Empire. But not all the Gravitals saw life the same way. Some religious and
philosophical sects among the Gravitals argued that all forms of life had rights. They secretly
created human species who could live and think freely. Some Gravitals even fell in love with
their human creations. Gravital society became divided between the Tolerant Gravitals who
respected human life, and the hardline conservative pan-mechanical Gravitals. This division threatened
to tear the Machine Empire apart. So the Gravitals looked for a common enemy to unify against.
For millions of years, the Gravitals and the Asteromorphs had watched each other nervously
â the Gravitals on the planets, and the Asteromorphs in space. They both were massively
powerful, and feared that war could destroy them both. But in attempt to unite their divided
society, the Gravitals chose to start a war with Asteromorphs. The resulting conflict
raged for millions of years, and scarred uncounted stars, but in the end, the Asteromorphs triumphed,
and defeated the Gravitals, toppling the all-powerful Machine Empire.
And the Asteromporphs decided to clean up the mess the machines had made. They took
the surviving humans who the Gravitals had twisted, and created habitable worlds for
them to live in. The Asteromorphs played God, seeding life across the galaxy. And the human
species rose reborn as inheritors of the war-torn worlds â under the watchful eye of the Asteromorphs.
The Asteromorphs wanted to ensure that no genocidal assholes would ever conquer the
galaxy again. So they created a smaller simpler version of themselves called the Terrestrials,
to live on the human worlds. The Terrestrials played the role of kings, prophets, and caretakers,
guiding their worlds along a wise path. It didnât always work out too well. Sometimes
worlds rebelled, so the Asteromorphs destroyed them. Sometimes the Terrestrials were corrupt,
and played god, and exploited their subjects. But one way or another, the human worlds spread,
and formed a prosperous galactic empire. The Gravitals werenât completely destroyed
by the Asteromorphs. Turned out, it was really useful to have super-advanced machines around.
The Asteromorphs disabled their gravity weapons, and numbed their minds a bit to discourage
rebellion. And used the Gravitals as labourers to work in dangerous environments. These New
Machines were given nanotechnological bodies that could transform into any shape. They
eventually became citizens of the empire, but were often discriminated against â machines
were never fully trusted after the Gravitalsâ atrocities.
Eventually the human-Asteromorph empire made contact with life from other galaxies â including
the Amphicephali, these weird snakes that had snakes inside their snakes. Apparently
these creatures had an evolutionary history just as long and complex as humanity had.
And after all theyâd been through, the life forms of both galaxies were finally old enough
and mature enough to meet peacefully, without conflict.
This video wonât describe all of inter-galactic history. The stories are endless â how the
united galaxies re-encountered and defeated the Qu, how they cradled their suns in artificial
shells, and crossed space through wormholes. But one moment worth relating is the rediscovery
of Earth. A lone researcher located the birthplace of humanity â where all the Asteromorphs
and Machines and post-humans could trace their origins. Earth had gone stagnant and feral
by then â an obscure empty world. But after half a billion years of absence, humans returned
to their homeworld â changed beyond recognition. I have to end with a confession. Humans, Asteromorphs,
Machines, and all their descendants are now extinct. Theyâve been dead for a billion
years. This video is just our best approximation of their history, based on the available archaeological
evidence. We donât know what killed the humans. Maybe some unimaginably destructive
war. Maybe their empire broke up, and each world suffered their own slow private death.
Some claim that humanity migrated into some higher plane of existence. We donât know
what happened, and ultimately, it doesnât matter. The story of humanity was never about
its end. Not about its ultimate domination of galaxies, or its transcendence from reality.
Being human was always about the daily lives of people, from the love-songs of the carefree
Hedonists, the families of the Sail People sharing a meal, to the pontifications of the
Pterosapiens, to. Grander narratives and absolute ideals are what led to humanityâs worst
atrocities â the Gravitals massacred to reclaim the past, the Qu conquered for some
fanatical idealised future. Living for some abstract ultimate goal so often leads to destruction.
So when you look on the remains of the long-gone human species, remember that itâs the present
that matters, not the past or future. What you do today shapes tomorrow, not the other
way round. So Love Today, and seize All Tomorrows! All Tomorrows is a story written and illustrated
by C. M. Kosemen. This video was a shortened retelling of his tale, with some additional
imagery. Kosemen is an artist, writer and researcher who does heaps of fascinating work
in paleontology, history, surreal art and all sorts of stuff, so go check out his website,
and his YouTube videos, and consider supporting him on Patreon. Also, since this video will..
probably be demonetised, consider supporting Alt Shift X on Patreon too. We got more Song
of Ice and Fire videos coming soon, and Episode 1 of the Alt Shift X podcast is out now, with
an interview with the authors of The Expanse, so go check it out.
Thanks for watching, and thanks to the Patrons Sonjerbolan, Wyld Words, Alexandra Lamoureux,
Varun Pramanik, Najeeb Hashi, Ashley Daniel, Colt Foster, Irish Steph, and sams2006. Cheers.
A comment I posted to the video, regarding the subjugation of the Qu:
I've always had the head cannon that they suffered a fate more similar to the Machine People, formerly Gravitals. The Asteromorphs could have completely wiped out the Gravitals, but instead opted to change them into more peaceful and less dangerous and fanatical forms, and even in universe it mentions they were worse than they Qu. The Qu at least had a loyalty to life, how ever twisted they made it. The Gravitals actively xenocided and enslaved on levels far worse than the Qu, and still got off without total destruction or de-sapiency. I believe the Asteromorphs would likely do the same in their subjugation of the Qu, take away their ability to alter lifeforms as they see fit, their God complexes, but not their loyalty to life. Replace it with the means to foster life, whether via augmenting other lifeforms abilities and health to resist disease and degradation, or even having the means to seed life onto dead worlds, but no more the ability to dictate how it should be beyond say a veterinarian.
But that is just my head cannon. Still love the book.
This could be an awesome sci-fi horror movie. Not sure how you'd adapt it into a cohesive narrative for a feature, but it could possibly be done. But I feel like a mainstream Hollywood studio would butcher it and make the subject matter less interesting.
This is very interesting
Humans didn't deserve what happened to them.
My problem with stuff like this is it always jumps to such extremes but keep some human characteristics almost completely unchanged. It always comes away as grotesque design more than actual speculative evolution.
Humanity endures - death to the Qu!
I don't understand why the future of human evolution always looks like some weird alien nightmare art project. How come the future ten thousand years later is never something like every single person from the age of baby looking like a sculpted model? Why is that more improbable than balloon head with dead leaves skin tone?
Spaghetti
Truly an amazing video. Watched all of it! Im just so sad that that each of these amazing worlds had thousands of its natural inhabitants and we are never gonna see them... It just truly makes me want to fall into a deep state of Sadness..