Existence is Futile

“The pool where you fish your data is of paramount importance to define what is true and what is not” said the pretty young man with tempestuous yellow-green hair. “Where I came from, we believe that existence is a bad. Objectively speaking. Not be is preferable than be.
In my home Universe humanity has travelled the stars for a little more than a million years, growing from the Parallel Planet to Sharitarn, and to your Earth. We have met more than a trillion intelligent species, shared colonies and fought war against most of them. Our data banks have register of a couple thousand extinct species to each one of those species we met which belong to a category very peculiar. “Fallen Titans” we call them.
From written tales and archeologic evidence we reached the conclusion I mentioned to amaze you.
We know for a fact, beyond any reasonable doubt, that every time a people reaches a certain level of technology and science, that corresponds to a particularly high state of intelligence, this people became extinct. There is no natural force, no external enemy capable to endanger them in reach. The process takes a couple of generations or two.
Suicide. Collective suicide: self-genocide, if you want.
When the biologic specie became intelligent enough to understand reality, it abandons it. What better prove can you ask? Exist is a bad thing.
After a long time we found rare exceptions, and they offered an interesting way of confirmation. There are in my home Universe species that are organically incapable of killing themselves. Their bodies evolved in an unlikely process in an environment where is not usually found life are hard to kill, to speak euphemistically. So, they continued existing, but no longer reproduce, and do not expand their knowledge or share it. Instead, they move through life like somnolent ghosts, avoiding interaction with other species.
There are also some species of “Fallen Titans” that left behind children. Babies forgotten in their cribs by their parents when the entire civilization died. Those individuals often grow to be normal and well-integrated part of some multi-cultural community or another.
However, a few among the species that left “forgotten tears” have an organic trait that allow individuals to access the memories and knowledge of their ancestors. A genetic memory of sorts. Individuals from any of those species must take drugs to supress this genetic memory during all their lives, because if they stop the treatment they inevitably kill themselves. So, that was our data. And you will have to agree that from this pool of data we could not have avoided to fish the conclusion we fished about the hidden essence of existence.
You know what? I think we probably got the right conclusion.
I just don’t think that conclusion applies to all existence. Some Universes are created by Gods, others by one God, and some Universes seem to always have existed accordingly with those who came from them. In some Universes is impossible to travel faster than light, in others is just a technical difficulty, and there is Universes where intelligent life flourishes in scary ways and where no sort of light exists. So, I consider objective fact that in my home Universe existence is objectively bad and undesirable.
As for the Universe of Sharitarn, I can’t say for sure. However, they have this fancy “Divination Magic” here. So, if existence was objectively bad here the Mage Brotherhood would probably have figured it out by now.”
I asked us another jar of fermented beverage with spices.
You find all sorts of interesting conversations in those refuges against the elements build to harbour merchant caravans in their passage through Main Continent. Particularly when you fall in a pocket like that, designed to attract mostly human iis like us. And like the faire fellow of metallic grey eyes, and yellow-green hair.
If gods where objectively real in Sharitarn Universe I think I would feel almost thankful to them for the bad weather.
WHAT A PRIVILEGE to live in a world where philosophers can be found among Merchant Castes !