Us Against Spacetime
On the improbability and promise of being alive on Earth in 2025
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Hi friends 👋,
Happy Monday! I wasn’t planning on writing an essay for today. I have a Deep Dive on one of my long-time favorite companies and new Not Boring Capital portfolio company coming later this week. But this is an idea I’ve been playing with for a little bit, and it felt like the right time to hit send.
When things feel short-term rocky, zoom out.
Let’s get to it.
Us Against Spacetime
I, against my brothers. I and my brothers against my cousins. I and my brothers and my cousins against the world.
-Old Arab Bedouin Saying
On Valentine’s Day 1990, at the suggestion of astronomer Carl Sagan, from four billion miles away, Voyager 1 took a snapshot of Earth. You can see it in the image above, if you look closely. It’s in the sunbeam in the top quarter, a little right of center. That’s it. Our Pale Blue Dot.
“The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena,” Sagan wrote four years later, the same year he was diagnosed with the myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) that would kill him two years later, in his book, Pale Blue Dot:
Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
We are very good at carving the Dot’s inhabitants up into tribes. Last week, the United States imposed tariffs on practically every country that is “not us.” On Saturday night, I sat in a bar and rooted for one group of 18-year-olds I’ve never met to score more points than another group of 18-year-olds I’ve never met (their 18-year-olds, sadly, scored more than ours).
We have conjured up every which way to divide the roughly 8.215 billion people alive on planet Earth in the year 2025. You can always divide further, until you get down to I, against my brother. Jung might argue you can divide further than that.
There’s one division, though, that I haven’t seen made explicitly:
Everyone Alive Right Now vs. Everyone Who Has Lived in the Past or Will Live in the Future.
Everyone Alive Right Now vs. An Incomprehensibly Large and Long Universe.
Us Against Spacetime.
There’s a 0.0000000000000000000000000000000001% (that’s 10-35!) chance that we exist here together right now – Earth is just one of 1024 planets in the observable universe and 2025 is just one in roughly the 100 billion years the universe may survive – and yet, here we are.
That makes us, for all our differences, part of a shockingly rare cohort. A miracle tribe.
I have more in common with someone living in Beijing today than I do with the person who lived on the same plot of land I live on now in 1900. Certainly, the Beijinger and I have much more in common with each other than with alien beings on a remote planet a billion years in the future.
Since I’ve started thinking about this topic, I’ll look at people I pass on the street – people of different races, ages, stations in life, whatever - and think about how mathematically impossible it is that we’re sharing the same sidewalk square at the same moment. What are the odds?!
This is not how we think about things in the present, maybe because there are more acute differences to consider. That asshole at work against whom I compete for the promotion is a much bigger concern than how our generation will be remembered, in the same way that the Moon looks so much bigger than Mars in the night sky: it is closer.
But that is how, given the passage of enough time, we will be remembered, if we’re lucky. We remember the Bronze Age as the time when humans - can you name which human? – learned to smelt bronze. More people know the Industrial Revolution than the name James Watt.
To the extent that we do talk about ourselves as a collective temporal thing, it’s typically in terms of the bad things we’re doing to future generations because we don’t think of ourselves as part of a longer timeline: saddling them with debt, destroying the planet they will inherit.
Usually, when we talk about what we can do for future generations, the best we can muster is: don’t fuck things up.
A more interesting framing would be: how sharply can we, those of us alive now, bend humanity’s trajectory upwards? How much more can we contribute to the universe than anyone before or after?
Where this line of thinking leads is to something like no tariffs, full comparative advantage, no wars. If China has built an excellent Electric Industrial Platform and America remains the best at creating original IP, we team up and accelerate. Everyone wins. Real Globalism has never been tried.
This is obviously impractical. Global supply chains were not resilient to COVID, let alone to malice. In the real world, while tension or the potential for tension exists between the US and China, we don’t want all of our big, autonomous electronics to come with a CCP backdoor (and there’s always the potential for tension). When the Next War comes, you want your country to be able to produce drones at scale. A good guy with IP cannot stop a bad guy with a drone swarm.
There exists a Pareto Frontier so far out you can barely see it from here that, because humans are tribal creatures and because Moloch is real, we will not reach in our lifetimes.
To be clear, there have historically been good reasons for our tribalism. When resources are scarce, you gotta get yours. When the barbarians are at the gate, you gotta protect your own.
Further countering my argument is the fact that, in the process of protecting our own, humans birth technologies that benefit us all. I’ve written at length about the military-industrial complex’s positive externalities (see: solar panels, chips, nuclear power, etc…), and I keep discovering new ones. The other day, I was reading The Box, a book about the history and impact of the shipping container, and I learned that the US’ logistical challenges prosecuting the Vietnam War cemented the 8’x8.5’x40’ shipping container’s place as the global standard.
Competition breeds innovation. Kumbaya breeds peaceful complacency.
This essay contains no policy or economic advice. This shit is hard.
But I guess what I would suggest is that we already spend so much time thinking about the divisions within our miracle tribe that it might be useful to spend a little more thinking about the much larger competition: our miracle tribe against all who have come before us and all those who will come in the future, against entropy and irrelevance and a big, cold universe of which we have experienced just 10-35.
Among all of the miracle tribes that have ever lived – those groups of people who happen to share the planet at any given time – ours is the most miraculous time. We are seriously discussing what we might do with ourselves in conditions of material abundance so plentiful that none of us needs to work. Instead of looking backwards and small, we must look forward and big.
Ours might be the miracle tribe that delivers energy too cheap to meter. Ours might be the one that cures cancer and extends healthspans by decades. Ours might be the one that makes transportation autonomous and supersonic. Ours might be the one to birth intelligences and robots to do our grunt work for us. Ours might be the one that seeds a second branch of the tribe on another world. The first to leave this Pale Blue Dot.
That pale blue dot contains something remarkable: the only known beings in the universe who can contemplate their place within it.
We are the first clumps that are able to change their own trajectory.
We are the clumps of stardust that have evolved the furthest, that we know of.
We have evolved to the point – genetically, culturally, economically, and technologically – that we are the first clumps that have the potential to break free from zero sum competition, to coordinate and cooperate and, yes, compete in a way that benefits our miracle tribe.
Globalism has become a dirty word, because the way globalization has been implemented has left many behind even as it’s lifted many more up. But given the sheer improbability of our being here, given the fact that the 8.215 billion of us are the only teammates we have in this grand cosmic game, a return to a more tribal, divided world is an admission that we care more about beating each other than we do about winning.
I worry that “Globalism,” for its faults, has become a catch-all boogeyman for anything that has gone wrong as a natural consequence of a progress that has in actuality made the world much richer, an excuse to paint “us” versus “them” for personal gain, an enemy jersey to put on the inevitable. I fear that efforts to stem its tide in economically unnatural ways are fingers in dikes.
Maybe “Earthism” works better. Earthlings against space, time, and the elemental foe.
When a man in one part of the world can lift himself out of poverty by making something that someone on the other side of the world could never have afforded before, that is a win-win. When a drug developed in China saves an American patient’s life, that is a win-win. When the reverse happens, that is a win-win, too.
Again, impractical, but if I could implant an idea deeply into everyone’s brain, it would be this: we, these dramatically improbable clumps of stardust sharing a cosmic eyeblink, have the chance to leave gifts for future generations that force them to remember our tribe. What a waste it would be to throw that away. We can continue to throw our energy sideways, or use it for thrust.
I, against my brothers. I and my brothers against my cousins. I and my brothers and my cousins against the world. I and the world against spacetime.
There is an order to the old Bedouin saying. Brother first. For all this talk of Earthism, I am American. I want to see America thrive. I invest in and write about companies building real things in the physical world in America who want to compete fairly and win. We need to be able to construct and manufacture big, important things in America, for our safety and for our soul. If we’re talking America versus the CCP, I’m Team America eight days a week.
I’d just rather we all zoom out a little bit and think about whether we want to spend more of our one-in-1035 chance to scrap with each other over a smaller prize or win so bigly that our winning reverberates through spacetime.
Thanks to Claude and Dan for editing, and to our friends at Ramp for sponsoring.
That’s all for today. We’ll be back in your inbox this week with a new (and wildest yet) Hyperlegible and a Deep Dive.
Thanks for reading,
Packy
Real globalism. I like it.
Great piece!
“Competition breeds innovation.”
The great thing about sports is there’s a lack of IP. The Fosbury Flop didn’t just maximize the largest muscle group in the body in a new way, didn’t just win an Olympic Gold Medal for the U.S., it enabled all future high jumpers to lift the bar higher.