For all the great, powerful civilizations, having risen and fell, it is not of importance. No, the stories worth truly telling come from but a few corners of the whole, the whole being too complex to imagine with just a look. There are those who think themselves an exception in a universe that on close inspection is amazingly barren so infinitely barren. The sight of life clinging to the warm bits of a frozen wasteland is a sight that you should sometimes visit. In visiting these sites, you will see, just how diligent and hungering to thrive even societies as needlessly complex as ours may be, when in the most desolate state of being. When all one knows is hell, hell becomes normal, heaven becomes something that isn't even imagined.

If you look at the endless verity of planets, most of them go fine without the added complexity of self-replicating organisms, harmoniously orbiting in their serenity, observed by creatures of carbon and phosphorous whose existence can only be owed to the microcosmos upon microcosmos of self replicating molecules that managed to be safe from the endless voids of space, making sure to proliferate in the few spots they could exist. Many worlds are after all, filled with life are happy to never have a imaginative thought, or any thoughts that go beyond eat, move and replicate. Why, even some civilizations known to man in their explorations of the endless bound that is just the milky way alone have unveiled advanced, amazingly advanced civilizations who explored not the depths of space, but the endless networks of caves below the surface of their world, their destiny being to go to the core of their planet, as opposed to exploring a frontier than expanded tens of thousands of light years. Billions of stars there may be, if one simply went in a straight line such intrepid explorer would cross but a several thousand star systems. How many sorts of worlds out there no one really is sure, even now it seems new sorts of worlds get discovered as further explorations into the cosmic expanse yield strange worlds, distant worlds from what we know indeed.

There was species of life I found towards the edge of our galaxy that were urchin-like at first glance, but their kind under their knobby, silvery shells sprouting forth complex streams of tendrils and bulbs, interlacing to form complex organelles to perform countless functions, the shell protecting their crucial innards, the whole of the creature acting as muscles and nerves at once in ways that shouldn’t have logically worked. Yet it should be known that they didn’t live on the worlds we came from, they lived on an ancient world nearly void of gravity that barely managed to hold a thin atmosphere that grew from the life that emerged. In the billions of years that passed, systems of trees interconnected to form multiple layers and zones in a endless jungle of a world, the violet shades getting darker the deeper one goes into the world. Other beings, like massive mockeries of Terran butterflies fluttered about using their tarp-like wings to ensnare prey, long, slimy worms far more massive in size than anything on earth eating their ways through the dense, deceptively labyrinthian realm of massive leaves that acted as the landscape on the many layers of the deep jungles, grotesque slime molds that floated about subsisting on the decaying plant matter constantly floating around and colonies of string-like creatures and their multiple limbs binding together to make larger creatures. These creatures are but a few of the many creatures I saw.

The greatest shock however, was that the communal string creatures are used as livestock by the urchin beings, their combining ability being used to make them easier to transport, surprising docile the stringy communal creatures were. I was shocked indeed, that these urchin things were capable of some level of society, so I looked closer and this world and came across cultures and civilizations that believed their world to be all there is. Reoccurring in their beliefs, however deviant the details were, came down to the idea that their kind lived in the guts of god. The implications of their beliefs varied from society to society, some saw themselves as god's immune system, others simply living in fear that they would be the ones purged from god if they didn't behave proper, others believed that they are the descendants of ancestors who were devoured by god eons ago. Unlike the faiths from the world I came from, which made us believe we festered off of god’s rotting corpse, here god was alive and well, their kind being in the innards of god itself.

These urchins are completely locked away from the sprawling galactic civilizations. Their existence, their belief that their kind were inside something far greater than themselves astounded me. For what about us, our species and kind? A many of us have lost our ability to have a creative view of the world, but looking about our galaxy it would seem to me we are in the innards of a system quite complex in its own right. The endless bowels of a galaxy however absurd it sounds in a realm open and vast as the galaxy, mind how we are limited to this petri dish of stars in a universe with billions of isolated cosmic experiments separated by millions of light years. At least the urchins in their little planet barely more than 1100 km in diameter remained oblivious of their true place in the cosmos around them, even those few cultures that could sense the open abyss from the open areas left over from asteroid impacts or volcanic activity.