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Seventeen stars vanished in six hours. Not collapsed. Not destroyed. Simply deleted from the universe as if they'd never existed.
The entity consuming them was heading straight for Earth, moving at impossible speeds, leaving perfect voids where solar systems used to be. Humanity's first contact with intelligence beyond Earth wasn't with friendly aliens or explorers. It was with a cosmic horror that treated stars the way we treat plankton—as food to be consumed without thought.
This is the story of when humans met the Devourer, a billion-year-old entity existing across higher dimensions, feeding on stars to postpone its own entropy. When it reached Tau Ceti, home to 40,000 human colonists, humanity faced a choice: flee, fight, or do something no species in galactic history had attempted.
Captain Webb chose defiance, sacrificing his ship to buy evacuation time. Admiral Okonkwo ordered the entire fleet to commit coordinated suicide attacks—not to destroy the Devourer, but to confuse it. Dr. Elena Vasquez made psychic contact with a god and asked it a simple question: "Why?"
What happened next shocked even the Devourer itself. Humanity didn't just resist extinction. We offered partnership. We proposed guiding it to sustainable energy sources in exchange for knowledge from the millions of civilizations it had consumed. We turned our apocalypse into our greatest ally.
Today, the Compact holds. Humanity shepherds a dying god through the galaxy, learning technologies from species that existed before Earth formed. We befriended cosmic horror by refusing to accept that some things are too powerful to negotiate with.
But deep in intergalactic space, something else heard our broadcasts. Something that's coming to investigate what kind of species makes allies of their own destroyers.
Can compassion work on cosmic scales? Should we help a predator survive when it's consumed thousands of civilizations? What does it mean that humanity's first diplomatic contact was with something that eats stars?
Subscribe for more HFY stories about humanity's place in the cosmos, our ongoing partnership with the Devourer, and why our refusal to accept "impossible" keeps making the galaxy question everything it knows.
Because we're the species that looked at god and said "want to be friends?"—and somehow, it worked.
--~-~~-~~~-~~-~--~-~~-~~~-~~-~--~-~~-~~~-~~-~-
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0:00
Observation Station Kepler 442, year 2384.
0:07
Astronomer Dr. Elena Vasquez watches 17 stars vanish from the signis arm in 6
0:13
hours. Not supernova, not collapse, just gone. 17 main sequence stars, each with
0:21
planetary systems, each burning for billions of years, simply cease to exist. The light stops. The
0:28
gravitational signatures flatline. Space itself goes silent where they used to
0:34
be. But that's impossible. Stars don't just disappear. Conservation of mass
0:40
energy is fundamental. You can't delete a star from the universe without consequences, without radiation, without
0:47
gravitational waves, without some trace that it ever existed. Yet the data
0:53
doesn't lie. Where 17 stars burned 6 hours ago, there's now nothing, not even
0:59
residual heat, just perfectly empty space, as if the universe had been edited. And those stars were never there
1:06
at all. However, as Elena watches her instruments in growing horror, she
1:12
detects something worse. The void where the stars used to be is moving. All 17
1:18
points of absolute darkness arranged in a pattern that spans 200 light years are
1:24
traveling through space in perfect formation at.3 light speed and their
1:29
trajectory points directly toward the densely populated core of human explored
1:35
space toward Earth. Elana's hands shake as she runs the calculations. At current
1:42
speed, the phenomenon will reach solar system in approximately 300 years. Three
1:48
centuries sounds like a long time, except for one chilling detail. The voids are accelerating, and every 12
1:56
hours more stars disappear ahead of their path, consumed by something
2:01
humanity has no name for, no framework to understand. We called it the
2:06
devourer, and its first contact with humanity would force us to confront a question we'd never seriously
2:13
considered. What do you do when you meet something that treats stars the way we treat plankton? This is the story of how
2:20
humanity looked at a god and refused to worship it. How we faced cosmic annihilation and chose defiance over
2:27
surrender. And why the thing eating the galaxy learned that some prey bites
2:33
back. So get ready to witness the moment we discovered we weren't alone in the universe. We were on the menu. Humans
2:40
didn't ask to be the devourer's next meal. In fact, we'd only just started
2:45
believing we might be alone in the cosmos. By 2,384,
2:51
humanity had colonized 47 star systems, established outposts in 200 more, and
2:58
sent probe networks across 12,000 light years. We'd found ruins of extinct
3:04
civilizations, detected techniques from long dead species, but never encountered
3:09
living aliens. The galaxy appeared to be a graveyard full of evidence that
3:14
intelligence had involved countless times, and something had killed it every single time. We'd assumed it was the
3:21
great filter, some inevitable catastrophe that advanced civilizations couldn't survive. war, climate collapse,
3:30
I I nanotechnology, the usual suspects. We'd prepared for all of them, built
3:36
safeguards, considered ourselves the species that would finally break the cycle. Nevertheless, we'd never
3:43
considered that the filter might be something alive, something hungry, something that had been feeding on
3:50
civilizations for longer than Earth had existed. Dr. Elena Vasquez transmitted
3:55
her findings to the United Earth Science Directorate within minutes of confirming
4:00
the pattern. The response was immediate and bureaucratic. Verify, reverify,
4:07
submit to peer review, avoid public panic. Therefore, Elena spent 6 weeks
4:13
confirming what she already knew. The voids were real. The acceleration was
4:18
measurable. The trajectory was unmistakable. And during those 6 weeks,
4:24
43 more stars disappeared, consumed by the approaching darkness. But when the
4:30
data finally reached the directorate's crisis assessment board, the response wasn't panic. It was confusion because
4:37
the phenomenon violated everything humanity understood about physics. "Stars don't just vanish," argued Dr.
4:45
James Chun, chief astrophysicist at the board's emergency session. The energy
4:50
has to go somewhere. Conservation laws are non-negotiable. Either your instruments are
4:56
malfunctioning or we're seeing some kind of gravitational lensing effect that makes the stars appear to vanish. I've
5:04
checked the instruments, Elena replied via quantum link from Kepler 442.
5:10
And gravitational lensing doesn't leave perfectly empty space. There's no background radiation, no gravitational
5:17
distortion, nothing. The stars aren't hidden. They're gone. And what's taking
5:23
them? Demanded Admiral Sarah Okonqual, head of the United Earth Defense Fleet.
5:29
Helena's answer would haunt every human who heard it. Something that eats them.
5:34
All of them. Star, planets, asteroid belts, everything in the system just
5:40
ceases to exist. and whatever's doing it is heading toward us at an accelerating
5:46
rate. Yet, the truly terrifying revelation came when researchers analyzed the pattern of disappearances.
5:53
The voids weren't random. They were strategic. The Devourer was consuming
5:58
stars in a specific sequence, following the densest concentrations of heavy elements. The signatures of planetary
6:06
systems, of life supporting worlds, of civilizations it was hunting. and it had
6:12
detected us. Therefore, Admiral Okonquo ordered an unprecedented mobilization.
6:19
Every human ship capable of reaching the phenomenon's projected path was redirected. Scientists, weapon
6:26
specialists, xenobiologists who'd never expected to encounter living aliens. All
6:32
converged on the forward monitoring station at Tao City, a system closest to the Devourer's approach vector. Captain
6:40
Marcus Webb, commanded the Heavy Cruiser Defiance, humanity's most advanced warship. He'd fought in the Mars
6:47
Independence War, survived the Titan Insurgency, earned his reputation as the
6:52
man who'd held off a separatist fleet of 60 ships with only three. He was the
6:58
best humanity had. Yet, as the Defiance entered Tao CT system and began
7:04
deploying long range sensor networks, Webb felt something he'd never experienced in 20 years of combat.
7:10
Existential dread. Sensors are reading gravitic anomalies at the edge of the
7:16
system, reported Lieutenant Sarah Kim from the science station. Consistent
7:21
with Elana's data, three stars in the neighboring cluster just went dark. How
7:26
far? Web asked. eight light years. But Captain, the propagation speed doesn't
7:32
match. The stars disappeared simultaneously, but light from those systems should show sequential vanishing
7:40
based on their distances from us. Instead, they all went dark at the same
7:45
instant. Whatever this is, it's not limited by light speed. Nevertheless,
7:50
Web ordered the fleet to battle stations. 47 human warships armed with
7:56
relativistic kinetic weapons, antimatter missiles, quantum disruption warheads,
8:01
enough firepower to sterilize a planet. It felt absurdly inadequate. "What's the
8:07
plan?" asked Commander Chun Wei, Web's executive officer. "How do you fight
8:13
something that eats stars?" "We find out what it is first," Webb replied. "Then
8:19
we figure out how to kill it." However, finding out what it is proved more
8:25
difficult than any human could have imagined. The Devourer entered sensor range 14 hours later. What the
8:32
instruments detected made every scientist on the fleet question their sanity. It wasn't a ship. It wasn't a
8:39
swarm. It wasn't any configuration of matter that should exist in normal spaceime. The entity measured
8:46
approximately 40 million km across roughly the diameter of Mercury's orbit.
8:52
But it didn't have a surface, not in any conventional sense. Sensors reported
8:57
that it existed in multiple states simultaneously, matter and energy,
9:03
particle and wave, present and absent. It was as if reality itself was
9:09
uncertain about whether the devourer was actually there. Its phasing. Dr. Yuki
9:14
Tanaka reported from the science vessel Curiosity. She'd spent 30 years studying
9:20
quantum mechanics and still couldn't parse the data in and out of our
9:25
dimensional framework. It exists mostly in higher dimensional space. But it
9:30
projects down into our three dimensions when it feeds. Feeds on what? Web
9:36
demanded everything. Matter, energy, spaceime itself. It's not consuming the
9:43
stars. It's absorbing them, converting them into something else. The energy
9:48
signature suggests it's using stellar mass as fuel for some kind of exotic process we don't have physics to
9:55
describe. Think you know where this is going? Keep watching because what humanity discovered next would make us
10:02
question whether we had any right to survive. The devourer approached Taetti
10:07
at what sensors measured as 6 light speed. Though the math didn't work, it
10:12
was moving too fast for its apparent mass, violating conservation of momentum
10:18
in ways that made physicists weep. Therefore, Admiral Okono authorized
10:24
first contact protocols. If this thing was intelligent, maybe it could be reasoned with. Maybe it didn't know it
10:32
was approaching inhabited systems. Maybe it was just a cosmic predator that could
10:37
be redirected toward uninhabited space. The broadcast went out in 1700
10:42
languages, mathematical proofs of sensience, images of human civilization,
10:48
cultural achievements. Everything we prepared for first contact with aliens.
10:54
The devourer's response came not as a transmission, but as a pressure in the minds of every human within sensor
11:00
range. Not words, not language. Pure concept transmitted directly into
11:06
consciousness. hunger, necessity, consumption, and underneath it,
11:12
something that felt almost like regret, like a whale apologizing to Krill before swallowing them by the million. "It
11:19
knows we're here," Elena whispered from Kepler 442, feeling the psychic pressure even at her
11:26
distance. "It knows we're intelligent, and it doesn't care. It's dying. It
11:32
needs the energy, and we're just food." Nevertheless, humanity had never
11:38
accepted being prey. Not from predators on Earth, not from hostile environments
11:43
on colony worlds, and sure as hell, not from a cosmic horror that thought we
11:48
were beneath consideration. All ships web ordered, his voice carrying across
11:54
the fleet. Prepare to engage with what someone asked. How do you shoot
12:00
something that exists in higher dimensions? We shoot where it intersects our reality, Webb replied. And we keep
12:07
shooting until we figure out what hurts it. Yet even as the fleet opened fire, even as antimatter warheads detonated
12:14
against the devourer shifting mass and relativistic kill vehicles punched through its quantum superp position,
12:21
humanity faced a horrible truth. We were mosquitoes attacking an elephant. Our
12:27
most powerful weapons produced effects the devourer didn't seem to notice. It
12:32
continued its approach toward Tao City, unconcerned, unstoppable. But here's the
12:38
part that went viral across 12 star systems and would later be studied in every zenup psychology program in human
12:46
space. The devourer reached Tao City and began to feed. The stars light dimmed as
12:52
the entity wrapped itself around the systems primary, drawing mass energy directly from the stellar core. Every
12:59
instrument watching showed the impossible. A star being drained like a battery. Its fusion core stuttering.
13:06
Spacetime itself warping as the devourer consumed not just matter but the fundamental geometry of the system.
13:13
However, Taeti had planets, four of them, including Taedi, a colony world
13:20
with 40,000 human inhabitants. The evacuation order came immediately, but
13:26
there wasn't enough time. The Devourer was accelerating the stellar consumption. Tao said he had perhaps 6
13:33
hours before complete collapse and the evacuation ships needed 12 hours minimum
13:38
to reach all the outlying settlements. Therefore, Captain Webb made a decision
13:44
that would define humanity's response to cosmic horror. He positioned the defiance between the Devourer and the
13:51
colony world. "What's the plan?" Commander Chun asked again, already
13:56
knowing it was suicide. The plan is we buy time. Webb replied. The Devourer can
14:03
have this star, but not while there are still people alive on that planet. So,
14:08
we make ourselves annoying enough that it deals with us first. That's insane.
14:14
Yeah, Webb agreed. But when has that ever stopped humans? Nevertheless, what
14:20
the Defiance did next violated every tactical doctrine, every survival protocol, every rational calculation of
14:27
acceptable risk. Webb rammed his ship into the Devourer's feeding zone. Not
14:33
physically, the Devourer's higher dimensional structure meant there was nothing solid to ram. But the Defiance's
14:39
fusion reactors, when overloaded and deliberately breached while inside the entity's quantum field, created a
14:46
cascade reaction that rippled through both normal and higher dimensional space. The ship exploded with the force
14:54
of a small star going supernova. The blast didn't damage the devourer.
14:59
Nothing humanity had could damage it. But it got its attention. For the first
15:04
time since entering human space, the entity paused its feeding. Its consciousness, vast and alien and
15:11
incomprehensibly old, focused on the debris field where the defiance had been, trying to understand what had just
15:18
happened. Prey wasn't supposed to attack. Prey ran. Prey hid. Prey
15:24
accepted the natural order of consumption. Yet these strange beings had deliberately destroyed themselves,
15:31
not to escape, but to cause pain, to express defiance, to send a message. The
15:38
Devourer had encountered millions of civilizations in its billion-year existence. Most fled, some tried to
15:45
hide. A few attempted resistance. All eventually accepted the inevitable. But
15:51
it had never encountered a species that responded to cosmic indifference with rage. What happened next made the entire
15:58
Galactic Council, which didn't exist yet, but would form in response to these events, go silent for the first time in
16:06
4,000 years. Admiral Okonko, watching from the command ship Indomitable, saw
16:13
the Devourer's feeding pattern change. It was no longer draining Taeti efficiently. It was probing the space
16:20
where the defiance had exploded, trying to understand the phenomenon of deliberate self-sacrifice.
16:27
"It's confused," Dr. Tanaka reported, her voice filled with something between terror and wonder. "It's encountered
16:34
countless species, but it's never seen suicide as an attack before. It doesn't
16:40
have a framework for understanding what we just did. Therefore, Okono ordered
16:45
every ship in the fleet to do the exact same thing. You're ordering the entire
16:50
fleet to commit suicide. Someone protested. I'm ordering the fleet to be
16:55
human. A conquo corrected. The devourer thinks we're just complex food. Let's
17:01
show it what happens when food has a civilization, a history, and a really bad [ __ ] attitude about being eaten.
17:09
Nevertheless, the crews understood. 46 remaining warships, each one carrying
17:16
hundreds of personnel, each one representing years of training and billions in resources, positioned
17:22
themselves throughout the Devourer's feeding zone. "For everyone, we're saving," Captain Maria Santos said
17:29
aboard the destroyer Resilience seconds before overloading our reactors. "For
17:35
everyone who gets to live because we chose to die. For Earth, 46 ships
17:40
detonated across the Devourer's quantum structure in a carefully orchestrated sequence. The explosions themselves were
17:48
irrelevant to an entity that fed on stars. Yet, the pattern, the coordination, the sheer irrational
17:55
commitment to protecting others at the cost of self annihilation that the devourer couldn't ignore. Its feeding on
18:02
Talcetti stopped completely. Its consciousness distributed across higher
18:07
dimensions, focused entirely on the debris fields, analyzing, trying to
18:13
comprehend. In that pause, the evacuation ships completed their rescue operations. All 40,000 colonists escaped
18:21
Taoi. The Devourer could have pursued, could have consumed the fleeing ships,
18:27
but it didn't. It was thinking. For the first time in a billion years, it had
18:33
encountered something that didn't fit its understanding of how prey behaved. And that anomaly demanded investigation.
18:40
Yet, humanity wasn't done. Dr. Elena Vasquez, still at Kepler 442,
18:47
had spent the entire battle analyzing the Devourer's psychic emanations. The
18:52
entity communicated through concepts rather than language, broadcasting its thoughts across dimensional barriers.
19:00
And Elena, with techniques borrowed from meditation practices and advanced neural
19:05
mapping, had learned to send concepts back. She transmitted a single idea
19:11
compressed into a burst of pure meaning. Recognition, not food, people. The
19:16
devourer's response came as a wave of alien confusion. It understood tools. It
19:23
understood lower order consciousness. It had encountered countless species with language, culture, technology, but
19:31
they'd all been ephemeral brief flickers against the cosmic time scale it operated on. Nevertheless, Elena
19:38
transmitted again, "We choose. You consume by necessity. We resist by
19:45
choice." Different. And for the first time, the devourer transmitted something
19:50
that felt like a question. Wh Elena's answer would be debated by Zeno
19:56
philosophers for centuries. Because we matter to each other. Even if we don't
20:01
matter to the universe, the devour withdrew from Taetti. Not defeated, it
20:07
was still dying, still needed energy, still faced the same existential crisis
20:12
that drove it to consume. But it withdrew because something unprecedented had occurred. For a billion years, it
20:20
had existed as the apex entity in the galaxy. Everything else was resource.
20:26
Everything else was fuel. Nothing else had successfully argued that it deserved
20:31
consideration. Yet, these humans, these impossibly brief beings, whose entire
20:37
species would rise and fall in the blink of the devourer's eye, had done something extraordinary. They'd made it
20:44
hesitate. However, the reprieve was temporary. The Devourer still needed
20:49
energy. It would still consume stars. It would still approach inhabited systems.
20:56
Humanity had bought time, earned consideration, but not survival.
21:01
Therefore, Dr. Yuki Tanaka proposed something that every rational scientist called impossible. We feed it ourselves,
21:09
not our stars, not our worlds, but we give it what it needs. How? Admiral
21:16
Okunquo demanded. It consumed stellar level energy. We couldn't generate that
21:21
much power in a thousand years. Not right now, Tanaka agreed. But what if we
21:27
helped it find better sources? What if instead of consuming randomly, we guided
21:32
it to dead systems, stellar remnants, neutron stars with no planets? We become
21:38
its shepherds instead of its prey. You want to domesticate a god? Someone asked
21:44
incredulously. I want to offer a mutually beneficial relationship, Tanaka corrected. It gets
21:51
sustainable energy. We get to keep our civilizations. It stops being a predator and becomes
21:58
something else, something new. Nevertheless, the proposal faced a
22:04
critical obstacle, communication. The devourer's consciousness operated on
22:09
scales humanity couldn't fully comprehend. How do you negotiate with something that experiences time
22:15
differently, thinks in dimensions we can't perceive, operates on motivations
22:20
we can barely translate? Elena volunteered. She'd made contact once.
22:26
She could do it again. For 6 weeks, she broadcast to the Devourer, not with
22:32
words, but with concepts, building a shared framework of understanding. She
22:37
showed it images of symbiosis and nature cleaner fish and sharks, microisal
22:43
networks in trees, bacteria, and human gut biomes. She demonstrated that
22:49
predator and prey could become partners when both benefited. The devourer's
22:54
responses were slow, each one arriving after days of processing. Its consciousness wasn't designed for this
23:00
kind of interaction. It had never needed diplomacy before. Yet gradually,
23:06
something remarkable emerged, curiosity. The devourer wanted to understand these
23:12
strange beings who refused to simply die, who chose extinction over
23:17
surrender, and offered cooperation instead of revenge. Therefore, humanity
23:23
proposed a compact. We would map the galaxy's stellar remnants, black holes,
23:28
neutron stars, white dwarfs, high energy sources with no planets, no life, no
23:34
civilizations. The devourer would feed only on these dead systems, sustainable energy that
23:41
wouldn't require destroying the living galaxy. In exchange, humanity would
23:46
study the Devour, learn from its billion-year existence, access the knowledge of the millions of
23:53
civilizations it had encountered. Not conquerors and conquered partners.
23:58
You're proposing an alliance with the thing that tried to eat us. Someone asked during the United Earth Council
24:04
session to ratify the agreement. I'm proposing we turn an extinction event into the most valuable partnership in
24:11
human history, Helena replied. The Devourer has seen the rise and fall of countless species. It's witnessed
24:19
technologies we can't imagine, philosophies we haven't conceived, mistakes we haven't made yet. If we can
24:26
access that knowledge, if we can learn from a billion years of galactic history, we'd advance our civilization
24:33
by millennia. However, not everyone agreed. The new sovereignty movement
24:38
argued that the devour was too dangerous to trust, that any cooperation was just
24:43
delayed consumption. They called for continued resistance for developing weapons that could actually hurt the
24:50
entity, for preparing for the inevitable betrayal. Nevertheless, the compact was
24:55
ratified by a narrow vote. Humanity would attempt something we'd never done before. Befriend our own apocalypse. The
25:03
first year was tentative. Humans guided the devourer to a neutron star in an
25:09
uninhabited system. The entity fed and for the first time in recorded observation, it communicated something
25:16
that translated as satisfaction. Not just energy absorption, but appreciation
25:21
for the gift. In return, it shared knowledge. Not all at once. Its
25:27
consciousness was too vast, too alien to simply download into human minds. But
25:33
slowly, carefully, it taught us technologies that previous civilizations
25:38
had developed. Philosophies about cosmic existence. Warnings about mistakes
25:43
others had made. The devourer had been the filter, yes, but it had also been an
25:49
unwitting archavist, preserving fragments of everything it had consumed. Yet, the most profound exchange came
25:56
when Elena asked the question that had haunted her since first contact. Why do you do this? If you know it causes
26:03
suffering, if you understand what you're destroying, why keep feeding? The
26:09
devourer's response took 3 days to arrive as it formulated concepts that
26:14
could bridge the gap between its existence and human comprehension. I am dying. Have been dying for billion
26:21
years. Feed to extend existence. Alternative is entropy. Cessation. I
26:28
choose to continue as you chose to resist. We are same. Elena understood.
26:33
Then the devourer wasn't evil. It was terrified. A cosmic being facing its own
26:39
mortality, consuming everything in a desperate attempt to postpone the inevitable. Just like humanity had
26:46
sacrificed ships full of people to buy time for others to escape. We were both
26:51
fighting entropy, both choosing survival over surrender, both doing terrible
26:57
things because the alternative was worse. Then let's find another way, Elena transmitted. Together, therefore,
27:05
humanity and the devourer formed with the strangest partnership in galactic history. We became the guides, the
27:13
shepherds, the caretakers of a dying god. We mapped energy sources it could
27:19
feed on sustainably. We developed technologies to help it process stellar energy more efficiently. We even began
27:26
researching ways to slow its entropy to extend its existence without requiring
27:31
constant consumption. And the devourer in turn became our teacher. It showed us
27:38
civilizations that had solved problems we hadn't encountered yet. technologies
27:43
that seemed like magic until we understood the physics. Warnings about evolutionary paths that led to
27:50
extinction. The galaxy watched in stunned silence as humanity did the impossible. We'd met a star-reing cosmic
27:57
horror and convinced it to become our ally. To this day, the compact holds.
28:03
The devourer feeds on dead stars under human guidance. We've learned more from
28:08
it in 50 years than we discovered in 500 years of independent exploration. Our
28:14
technology has advanced by centuries. Our understanding of the cosmos has been
28:19
revolutionized. Yet questions remain. We still don't know where the devourer came from. Was
28:26
it always this vast entity? Or did it evolve from something smaller? We don't
28:32
know if it's unique or if there are others like it in distant galaxies. We
28:37
don't know if our partnership is sustainable or if we're just delaying an inevitable catastrophe. Most troubling,
28:44
we don't know if helping it survive is the right choice. The devourer has consumed thousands of civilizations.
28:52
Those species are gone, their achievements erased, their potential futures deleted. By extending its life,
28:59
are we honoring the survivors or betraying the dead? Dr. Elena Vasquez,
29:05
now humanity's chief Zenup psychologist and the primary liaison to the devourer,
29:10
addresses this question in her controversial memoir. We chose to save ourselves by saving the thing trying to
29:17
kill us. Some call that wisdom. Some call it cowardice. I call it human. We
29:24
looked at cosmic indifference at a universe that doesn't care if we live or die. And we said, "We care. We matter.
29:32
And we'll prove it by making everything else matter, too. Even our predator, even our god, even death itself. The
29:41
devourer's most recent communication to Elena, translated and released publicly
29:46
despite government objections has raised new questions about the partnership. You are first to choose cooperation. Others
29:54
chose flight or fight. You chose third path. I learn from this learning
30:00
changes. Ma nitrogen monoxide longer certain what I am becoming. Nitrogen
30:05
monoxide longer certain is bad. An entity billion years old. Fundamentally
30:12
transforming because of contact with a species barely 300 years into space
30:17
exploration. We didn't defeat the devourer. We confused it, intrigued it,
30:23
changed it into something new. And it's changing us, too. Human philosophy has
30:28
been revolutionized by contact with a being that experiences reality across multiple dimensions. Our technology
30:36
advances daily as the devourer shares knowledge from civilizations will never meet. Our sense of cosmic purpose has
30:44
shifted from survive at all costs to survive by ensuring others can survive
30:49
too. Nevertheless, deep in uncharted space, our instruments have detected new
30:55
gravitational anomalies, patterns of stellar disappearance in distant galaxies that match the devourer's
31:01
original feeding signature, which means either there are more entities like it or something else has learned to hunt
31:08
the same way. And when those phenomena reach the Milky Way, they're going to find something unexpected. A star
31:15
devourer that no longer hunts alone. One that has allies. Partners who turned
31:21
their apocalypse into an asset. The galaxy is watching humanity with something between admiration and horror.
31:28
We met a cosmic predator and negotiated. We faced extinction and chose diplomacy.
31:35
We looked at a god and saw a person. Are we insane? Probably. Are we dangerous?
31:41
Definitely. Did we just set a precedent that will reshape how every species
31:47
approaches cosmic scale threats? Absolutely. Because that's what humans
31:52
do. We don't accept that some things are too powerful to challenge, too vast to
31:57
understand, too alien to befriend. We jump in anyway. We make impossible
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alliances. We turn enemies into partners and predators into symbiots. The
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devourer came to consume us. Instead, we consumed it not physically, but
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conceptually, we took a cosmic horror and made it human by extension. We
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showed it that existence could be more than consumption, that power could serve cooperation, that even gods could learn
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new tricks from their prey. So, what does it mean that humanity's first contact with intelligence beyond Earth
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was with something that eats stars, and we decided to help it survive? What does
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it say about us that we'd rather befriend our destroyer than simply be destroyed? Maybe it means we're the
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species the galaxy needs, the ones willing to find third options when everyone else sees only binary choices.
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Or maybe it means we're the most dangerous wild card in cosmic history, the species that will allide with
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apocalypses and teach Oblivion to be merciful. We don't know yet, but we're
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going to find out because somewhere in deep space, something heard our broadcasts to the Devourer. Heard us
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negotiating with cosmic horror. And it's coming to investigate what kind of species would befriend their own
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extinction event. When it arrives, it's going to find humans ready to ask our favorite question. Want to be friends?
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Hit subscribe because this universe has more stories to tell. Stories about what
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the Devourer taught us. Stories about the other cosmic entities approaching our galaxy. Stories about humanity's
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ongoing mission to prove that nothing in the universe is too strange, too dangerous, or too powerful to try
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talking to first. So, what do you think are humans the galaxy's greatest hope for cosmic cooperation? Or the most
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reckless idiots in the universe? Drop your theory below. I respond to every
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comment. Because we're just getting started. We've got a god to keep alive,
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a galaxy to explore, and apparently a reputation for turning cosmic horror
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into cosmic friendship that's spreading across intergalactic distances. And honestly, we wouldn't have it any other
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[Music]