Space was the fabric of its existence.

A skein of superdense yarn—knitted and purled in ten dimensions—it was unravelable. A deep well—sunk into a microscopic point—it was unfathomable. Blacker than blackness, it emitted nothing, yet the tortured space around it blazed hotter than the cores of suns.

It had been born within a machine, one that had traveled far to reach this modest basin, pressed into the rippling universe-sheet by a lesser star. On arrival, the apparatus set to work crafting the assassin’s tight weave out of pure nothingness. Then, in its final death throes, the factory slowed its progeny onto a gentle circular path, skating among the star’s retinue of tiny planets.

For two revolutions, the assassin lost mass. There were atoms in space to feed its small but hungry maw, but nowhere near enough to make up for its losses … loops of superdense brightness that kept popping out to self-destruct in brilliant bursts of gamma rays. If this went on, it would evaporate entirely before doing its job.

But then it entered a shallow dip of gravity—a brief touch of acceleration—and it collided with something solid! The assassin celebrated with a blast of radiation. Thereafter, its orbit kept dipping, again and again, into high-density realms.

Atoms fell athwart its narrow mouth—little wider than an atom itself. There were still very few real collisions, but where at first it dined on picograms, soon it gobbled micrograms, then milligrams. No meal satisfied it.

Grams became kilograms …

It had not been programed to know the passage of years, nor that the feast would have to end someday, when the planet was consumed in one last, voracious gobble. Then it would sit alone again in space, and for a time the solar system would have two suns … while the essence that had once been Earth blew away in coruscating photons.

Of all this it neither knew nor cared. For the present, atoms kept pouring in. If a complex, fulgent knot in space can be called happy, then that was its condition.

After all, what else was there in the universe, but matter to eat, light to excrete, and vacuum? And what were they? Just subtly different kinds of folded space.

Space was the fabric of its existence.

Without fuss or intent, it grew.

Worldwide Long Range Solutions Special Interest Group [SIG AeR,WLRS 253787890.546]. Space Colonization Subgroup. Open discussion board.

Okay, so imagine we get past the next few rough decades and finally do what we should have back in TwenCen. Say we mine asteroids for platinum, discover the secrets of true nanotechnology, and set Von Neumann “sheep” grazing on the moon to produce boundless wealth. To listen to some of the rest of you, all our problems would then be over. The next step, star travel, and colonization of the galaxy, would be trivial.

But hold on! Even assuming we solve how to maintain long-lasting ecologies in space and get so wealthy the costs of star-flight aren’t crippling, you’ve still got the problem of time.

I mean, most hypothetical designs show likely starships creeping along at no more than ten percent of the speed of light, a whole lot slower than those sci-fi cruisers we see zipping on three-vee. At such speeds it may take five, ten generations to reach a good colony site. Meanwhile, passengers will have to maintain villages and farms and cranky, claustrophobic grandkids, all inside their hollowed-out, spinning worldlets.

What kind of social engineering will that take? Do you know how to design a closed society that’d last so long without flying apart? Oh, I think it can be done. But don’t pretend it’ll be simple!

Nor will be solving the dilemma of gene pool isolation. In the arks and zoos right now, a lot of rescued species are dying off even though the microecologies are right, simply because too few individuals were included in the original mix. For a healthy gene pool you need diversity, variety, heterozygosity.

One thing’s clear, no starship will make it carrying only one racial group. What’ll be needed, frankly, are mongrels … people who’ve bred back and forth with just about everybody and seem to enjoy it. You know … like Californians.

Besides, it’s as if they’ve been preparing themselves for it all along. Heck, picture if aliens ever landed in California. Instead of running away or even inquiring about the secrets of the universe, Californians would probably ask the BEMs if they had any new cuisine!