Lost Cities

The Greeks were astute when they made Cronus, who is Time, a devourer of his own children. Time is, indeed, the Great Devourer and though we may stand in the moment and look upon our monuments thinking that these are proof against the corrosive winds of change, in the fullness of time they, too, shall erode and fade away.

Troy, Abu Simbel, Machu Picchu, Mycenae... all of these places were once great cities. All that remains of them now are ruins and remnants to remind us that there was once a people there who were prosperous and who, like us, could not imagine a time that would not contain them.

Gaze upon this collection of dead cities and ponder that there shall be a time when London, New York, Bejing, and San Francisco shall, too, be nothing more than a faded memory.

The Future Viewed as the Collapse of a Wave Function

I remember the future.
When I was born
It was the size of worlds.
Every time I closed my eyes
I could see galactic whirls
Filled with potentiality.

By the time I was ten,
The future had shrunk
To something merely planetary
In scope and scale.
I could point to some far place
And say that someday,
If I started walking right now,
I could be there before I died.

By the time I was twenty-one
The future had suffered
An environmental catastrophe.
Some Velikovskian god had taken
Whole continents of possibility
And tossed them into the void-dream,
Perhaps to be found by another,
But forever lost to me.

Now the future
Is barely larger than the present;
Where I once wandered
A labyrinth of possibilities,
There are now only
A few dozen paths,
Most of which are pointing
In the same general direction.

One day the future and I
Will collapse to a point.
In the absence of uncertainty
There will only be
The thin line of history
Leading to a singularity.