spacetime, happiness, and 17776

adapted, edited, and expanded upon from my dreamwidth post.

"They have achieved their final form, and they are resting in an eternal moment.

They are creatures of play. They will be creatures of play until the end of time."

when i think of the multimedia fiction work 17776, i very vividly remember being on a family road trip while the first updates were being released. as a teenager who lived and breathed all things internet at this point in time, i saw firsthand how word spread like wildfire that something interesting was happening on some football news site, and it seemed to be updating serially, on a regular basis, with no end point in sight. as a (then) homestuck in remission, i was itching for something similar enough in format to grab my attention. 17776 worked, and i was hooked. 

while it would only turn out to be a ten-day project, what could be perceived as a blip in the not-so-memorable year of 2017, the themes of the work stuck with me near instantly. i love scifi and thinking about the distant (or not-so-distant) future, and the pov characters being three sentient space satellites had me immediately curious.

the basic premise is that in 2026 (then nine years away, now three years away) everyone stopped dying, and babies stopped being born. infants and children grew up and became developmentally stagnant. the multimedia story honed in on what happened to america after the earth stood still for just one species, and then zoomed in even further: what happened to american football after the earth stood still?

the story mostly follows three satellites watching and commenting upon the state of the earth from space. the older satellites have less battery, and time between messages could be days, months, or years apart. additionally, while these satellites can communicate with one another, they are trillion of miles apart from each other and nowhere near earth, either. time is not limited in the traditional sense, but restricted nonetheless; time is stretched onto a far larger scale. space is distorted alongside it, and these mutated concepts are both at play in football in 17776; football game endzones can be states apart, and games can take years, or decades. humanity has barely changed in almost 16,000 years.

17776 asks "if time no longer matters, and the planet is all stuck in the same space forever, what happens to joy?" and answers with this: the base feeling of want that all humans have is vital to possessing a sense of humanity.

"they decided to leave their existence just a little short of perfect, because they wanted to want."

in the era of time no longer being a limited resource, or "post-scarcity humanity" in 17776 terms, there are no more real problems in the world. without death and birth plus thousands of years with a constant population, concepts like war and disease became irrelevant. Humanity hit a standstill for everyone born within 1910 and 1926. the people have somehow collectively coped, mostly by keeping things the same. the only huge loss was our climate (some regions are very underwater now) and that probably had so many unseen effects on the world that it would spur a million other 17776 works.

in a therapy group i was in, one group leader asked us if a world that only felt complete elation, with no sadness in existence, would truly feel happiness, even if there was no pain or anguish to compare that happiness to. i was the only one in the group that said that happiness is still happiness even if the counterpart isn't there. not knowing a thing doesn't mean it doesn't exist. not knowing what a dog is doesn't necessarily mean you can't know what a cat is, either. humans had five fingers before we knew how to count them, and we can know a feeling is good without knowing the deepest darks on the other side of emotion. 

how could the notion be measured, anyway? everyone's happiness and sadness and anger and so on is unique to that person in at least some nuanced way. someone who may somehow quantitatively have the "worst" life could be stacked against others and score "happier" than someone with a quantitatively "better" life. it's all subjective, no?  

does the idea of wanting make us human in the same way wanting sends cheetahs into the chase and rabbits down the hole and whales to the surface of the ocean? do all of the wants anyone could have break down into wanting time, space, or a combination of both? if dying is the only thing we all have in common, then dodging the event is surpassing a (formerly universal) scarcity of time and space, and places one into a distinct category that's closer to the satellites than anyone who died before that day in 2026. and yet, still, their cells are distinctly human, their lineage is decidedly established.

post-economy and post-need, human and satellites alike have a shared trait: an absolute abundance of time. how non-human is that? time cannot be wasted anymore, and boredom is the only problem. everything is blowing through its original structure, but holding on to the barest frame of an original form. its the final generation, there's no legacy to establish, there's nothing coming after you. ever. one of the satellites, juice, says that one of the few scarcities left is uncertainty, and there's almost a scarcity of scarcity; for some, a there's a yearning for untouched places, undone things, and beating lottery-level odds in the most mundane things.

basically, with time being nothing more than a label and space being a resource to be bent to humanity's will, 17776 tackles questions of what makes a person a person, and if lifting the pressures of time and space takes away happiness and sadness and want. i believe, and i think 17776 ultimately believes, that yes, we can retain humanity without want, and we can feel happiness even if we haven't really felt pain for fifteen thousand years. the scales may shift, but, some systems will keep going in perpetuity if left alone. people included.