Belittle Me, Big Man

Microscopes? How quaint. They won’t help you, though—we’re just too small.

We use elementary particles like your quarks for planets. An imperfect analogy, I’ll grant you—at our scale they’re more like masses of non-euclidean hyper-dimensional spaghetti with several layers of floating continents wrapping around their strands, but we do colonize them.

Our civilization remains safely concealed from you by the physical limitations of the Plank length. It is physically impossible for you to detect us. The reverse is far from true, however. We know much more about the 93 billion light years of your observable universe than you do. When our school children go on field trips to photons from the big bang we assign them each their own treasure trove to explore so that they can each have mysterious cosmic secrets of their very own.

Our community of astronomers has been scrutinizing your entire life from the countless of our colonies throughout the particles forming your own body. Myriad worlds filled with myriad peoples are watching, and recording, everything you do.

We find your brains, unsophisticated though they are, especially interesting. We can map their every molecule with the greatest of ease—that’s what the star charts of our civilization are, after all. It’s fairly easy to computationally model the neural network encoding the content of your mind when you have countless worlds with countless universities for each and every brain cell, all working together. Our civilization knows far more about what you think, know, and feel than you ever will—not that we care.

There are the bores that follow the politics of their local molecule, the nerds that educate themselves on the astronomical biology of their local cell, tissue, and organ, but only the thinnest margin of weirdo outcasts obsesses over learning the recent gossip about you. Yes, they entertain themselves reading about your love life failures and what you think about when you masturbate, but don’t let it go to your head that they might be cheering you on. The fact that there are entire interstellar academic disciplines devoted to spying on you says more about just how vast our society is.

Perhaps now you see the advantages of being small. While you waste yourself just being you we’re getting an entire universe of automated anarcho-socialist utopia out of the same material. We see your kind fetishizing fascistic ideals of gigantic, hulking, muscle-bound Olympians who would, in reality, bankrupt themselves on groceries to feed their meats. Imagine what liberty you’d enjoy as Pygmy-midgets it’d take nothing to feed!

Were humans reduced to the 1/6th scale of your dolls, your stomachs would be 1/216th as large—that’s 1/6th to the power of your paltry three Euclidean dimensions. Your farms and mines would have hardly any impact on your natural resources. And if you lived on a crumb you treated like a moon made of cheese, would anyone go hungry? I note to your vegans that lunar cheese is an astronomical phenomenon not resulting from a particular mammal.

Obviously those of my kind living on the quarks composing your cheeses can’t eat the dirt any more than those living on the quarks released from the radioactive decay of a uranium isotope, but believe me, you can get a lot out of such a big universe when you’re this small.

The vast majority of us in this solar system live in the sun. That it is so very hot to you is no impediment to us. Just as you fail to notice your own planet rotation and orbit through space despite the vast energy involved, molecular vibrations are all but unnoticeable to us. Yes, it is a terrible inconvenience having your world flung into space at close to the speed of light, but hardly dangerous enough to be deemed a natural disaster.

The sheer number of us ensures optimal self-sorting liberty. We have planets for every conceivable interest. There are planets people move to because everyone was born with the same full name. There are planets whose surface the people try to completely cover in a single layer of the finest grains of sand as a sort of meditative hobby. There are planets for suicide, and planets dedicated to every sexual fetish conceivable—there are multiple federations of empires of them, in fact, so that you can have your pick. And, of course, there are the 99.9999999999% of planets where people like more than one thing.

It is a very complicated problem to arrange a planet to cater to all the many and multiple things people like, especially when we want others held to a different standard than ourselves. But, with an entire universe of vast worlds engaged in constant leftist experiments it was the easiest thing you could imagine working out the socio-economic matrix of complimentary passional attractions necessary to please every possible psychic permutation. We did it eons ago and recorded it in the final chapter of our histories, which thereby ended happily ever after.

Oh, certainly, we leave open the possibility of a sequel. The poorest amongst us consider it a fine diversion, when they run out of things to buy (one’s tropical island mansion complex and yacht armada can get only so big before one is liable to get lost) for the unwanted over-excess of their resources to be expelled to the sciences.

Our science is quite a bit better at studying what we consider the elementary subatomic particles of our own existence. They work different than yours—sort of like a cross between medieval alchemy and video game programming—but there’s quite a lot we’ve yet to learn. Namely, we are searching always for microscopic civilizations colonizing the subatomic particles of our universe as we have yours.

Long eras of passionate devotion have been spent on this mission. We recognize, according to countless infallible mathematical proofs, that such a civilization must be as much superior to our own as ours is to yours. Therefore, what our people covet more than anything is to develop a shrinking technology capable of transporting us there. According to weird physics it is very difficult to explain, it should be possible to immigrate into the elementary particles of our own bodies.

We strongly recommend that, once we are displaced from our current scale, your kind makes arrangements to shrink down likewise and occupy our utopia. Though we will be done with it, by then, it would be a shame for it to go to waste. Then again, you haven’t figured out what sort of Pan-Gu cosmic giant your own galaxy is essentially a molecule for so we might be expecting a little much from you yet. We won’t spoil it for you just in case you do manage to discover what your universe really looks like.