Latest Info In The World. A Billion Year Chronicle of the Myriad Species and Mixed Fortunes of Man. Long ago, in the distant past, humans colonized Mars. It took centuries to terraforming the red planet. First, they made oceans using the ice from comets. Then they sent microbes to create breathable air, then introduced genetically modified plants and animals. It was only after Mars was transformed into a habitable world that the first people came to Mars, in colony ships.


 So “The first steps on Mars were taken not by astronauts, but by barefoot children on lush, green grass”. The people of Mars developed their own culture and identity, separate to Earth. The low gravity made Martians tall and spindly, and they became almost a different species to the Earthlings. For hundreds of years, the two planets coexisted, but as Mars started to surpass Earth, tensions led to war. And interplanetary war wasn’t glorious or exciting. 

There were no heroic pilots or massive spaceships. The war was fought by complicated automated machines, in a slow strategic nerve-wracking contest that caused unimaginable destruction. Billions of people died in the war, and humans almost went extinct, so the survivors of Earth and Mars united and made a plan to ensure this could never happen again. Humanity made massive reforms to their politics and economics, and they changed themselves.

                                                     

 They genetically modified humanity into a new subspecies called the Star People, made to be better and smarter and adapted to expand into space. And it worked. Within a few generations, the unified Star People peacefully colonized the solar system. Other stars were too far away to fly to. So instead, the Star People sent out automated machines that would fly to distant worlds, and terraforming them, then use genetic material to create people to live there. 

There was a weird problem with these colonies, where many humans fell in love with the machines that created them, and died in mass identity crises. But the colonies that survived thrived and expanded across the galaxy, starting a “golden age” for humanity. Trillions of people lived peaceful, utopic lives, their worlds united by communication across centuries of light. As the Star People explored space, they discovered some alien creatures, but didn’t find any intelligent life. 

So they wondered – were humans alone in the galaxy? On one alien world, they found a fossil of a bird-like creature that didn’t seem related to the other native life – the native creatures had three limbs and copper bones, but this bird had four limbs and calcium bones. It was related to an extinct dinosaur from Earth. So how the hell did this extinct Earth animal end up on this distant alien world? Some people thought God must have done it, and there was a resurgence of religion. 

But others thought aliens did it. That there must be some civilization out there who had space-flight and bio engineering millions of years before humans even had fire. Humanity hoped that these aliens would be peaceful. But just in case, they built weapons to defend themselves, weapons so powerful they could obliterate stars – but all of that was useless in the end. 


Humanity was attacked by a godlike ancient species called the Qu. They were “galactic nomads”, who constantly migrated through space. And they had a fanatical religious mission to remake the universe using genetic manipulation. So when the Qu found humans, they didn’t see them as people – they were just objects to be changed into whatever shape the Qu wanted. Within a thousand years, the Qu destroyed human civilization – but some human species lived on. Cause the Qu used their bio engineering technology to reshape humanity into thousands of bizarre subspecies– they made humans into tools, into pets, and to wild animals. 

They ruled over the human worlds for forty million years, and then they fucked off to find their next victims – leaving humanity “divided and differentiated beyond recognition”. These twisted species were the last remnants of humanity. On one world, where the husks of dead cities baked under a scorching sun, lived the Worms. They were humans, but the Qu had modified their hands and feet into tiny feeble appendages, reduced their eyes to pinpricks, and removed most of their brain. All their lives, the Worms dug aimlessly through the ground. If they found food, they ate it. If they found other worms, they... sometimes ate them – or reproduced. 

They were wretched mindless creatures but their humanity would eventually resurface. On another world were the Titans, who roamed a vast savannah. Their hands were clumsy stumps, but their lower lip was like the trunk of an elephant, and could be used like a hand. They were some of the smartest of the new human species, and gradually, they evolved sentience. They built homes, agriculture, and language, literature, made ornate wood carvings. In booming voices they told “myths and legends of the bygone, half-remembered past”. 

 

                                    

With enough time, these Titans could have started a new humanity – but an ice-age hit the planet, and these gentle giants disappeared forever. On other worlds, humans had been twisted into predators, looking like the vampires and werewolves of myth, with sharp claws and killing teeth. Their prey were also human – made into herbivores with bird-like feet. The prey had the dull minds of animals, but the Predators, on the hunt, kept some spark of human intelligence – which would eventually re-emerge. 

The Antelopes were bred to be singers and memory-retainers for the Qu. So they had fully human minds – they understood the world around them. But in the bodies of grazing herd animals, they were powerless to change anything. So for centuries, “mournful herds roamed the plains, singing songs of desperation and loss”. They created whole religions and oral traditions around their grief and frustration. Until gradually, mercifully, their agony faded. 

Cause evolutionarily, a stupid simple-minded Antelope survives as well or better than a conscious sad Antelope. So within a hundred thousand years, this melancholy world fell silent. Human minds aren’t sacred to evolution, and soon only animals remained. The Lizard Herders were “the lucky ones”, because the Qu wiped out their intelligence, and stunted their brains so they could never regain sentience – so they didn’t suffer like the Antelopes did. The Lizard Herders survived in symbiosis with some herbivorous reptiles. And while the Lizard Herders stayed simple-minded, the reptiles evolved, slowly growing stronger and smarter. 

The Qu twisted humanity into a variety of aquatic creatures – there were limbless eel-people, and whale-like behemoths, and “horrifying multitudes of brainless willowers that served as food stock”. Most of them went extinct when the Qu left, but the Swimmers survived, feeding on fish and crustaceans in their world’s oceans. They didn’t look very human, but human eyes peered through their blubbery eyelids, and they spoke to each other – though, underwater, they couldn’t hear each other’s words. 


The Tempters were so fucked up it’s amazing they survived at all. The Qu made them into bizarre living decorations – two-meter-tall cones of flesh like grotesque carnivorous plants. Those were the females. The males were mindless little monkey imp creatures who blindly served their queen, controlled by vocal and pheromonal signals. They’d gather the food and guard their queen, and occasionally they would mate by descending into this breeding tube like a subway commuter. It was weird, but it worked, and the Temptors’ mound forests spread across their world. 

They could’ve built some kind of civilization. But they were obliterated by a comet, and one of humanity’s best and weirdest hopes died out. The Bone Crushers looked like monsters – like giants or ogres with beaks derived from teeth. They only ate putrefying meat, and they communicated by defecating on each other, but they were actually pretty successful. They reached a medieval level of civilization, until they ran out of rotting meat to eat, and eventually collapsed. When the Qu attacked, most human worlds were quickly defeated. But one world fought back, resisting the Qu two times before falling.             

                                       

The Qu punished and humiliated this world for its resistance, by making them into the Colonials. They were disembodied cultures of skin, connected with a network of basic nerves. The Qu used them as living filtering devices, living off waste products. And for no other reason than to make the Colonials suffer, the Qu left them their consciousness and their eyes, so they could fully witness their own wretched fate. For forty million years, the Colonials suffered generations of misery, hoping for their extinction – but they were made to be efficient, and so they spread across the planet in “quilt-like fields of human flesh”. Though eventually, after an eternity, the Colonials would taste hope.

The Qu made lots of flying human species – some like bats or pterosaurs, others like angels or demons dancing through the ether, or strange ugly creatures that floated on glands full of gas. One species, called the Flyers, had a special starfish-shaped heart that processed oxygen so efficiently, that they had enough energy to support flight and human-like brains. Other flying species weren’t so lucky. The Hand Flappers had wings that were useless for FLYING, but also couldn’t be used as hands. 

All they could do was flap about to display their sexual availability – and so they ecstatically flashed and danced their way to extinction. Some humans tried to escape the Qu by hiding underground. The Qu found them anyway, and made them into subterranean mousy morlock people called the Blind Folk. They used whiskers and long fingers and big ears and banshee-like screams to navigate in the dark. They lived off fungi and fish, and avoided predation by bats and crocodilian creatures. 

These albino troglodytes looked fairly human, but where their eyes should have been, there was nothing but haunting smooth skin. Eventually the movement of tectonic plates crushed these underground habitats one by one. On a planet with extremely high gravity, the Qu made the Lopsiders – flat, deformed, asymmetrical creature’s right out of the fever dreams of Picasso, Dali or Bosch. The Lopsider scrawled along the ground on three hands, with another limb used as an antenna, and a hand. One eye stared straight up, while the other eye scanned ahead. 


As wretched as they looked, the Lopsiders thrived on their heavy world. They domesticated some native creatures, and began the long road to civilization. On a moon with very low gravity, the Qu made the Striders – enormously tall, thin creatures who walked among huge trees that towered like skyscrapers. The Striders were very delicate, so even with low gravity, a fall could shatter their bones. The Striders were eventually wiped out by a bunch of chickens who over two million years evolved into deadly predators. On another world where the humans temporarily resisted the Qu, the Qu punished the humans 

 

                              

by creating an array of parasites, who were also made from humans. There were tortoise-sized vampire-like ambulatory parasites, and smaller parasites that lived attached to their hosts. There was even one horrific parasite that infested the wombs of its victims. Many of these parasite life-cycles were so elaborate and baroque that they went extinct when the Qu left. But some of the parasites survived, and developed symbioses that benefited their hosts as well as themselves. 

One human species evolved on a world of great archipelagos, calm shallow oceans sprinkled with countless islands. The Finger Fishers evolved to catch fish with their long fingers adapted into fish-hooks, and ate them with long snouts full of needle-sharp teeth. But their evolution would get even weirder later on. The Hedonists were created by the Qu to be pampered pets, living carefree lives of pleasure.

 Their world was a tropical paradise of succulent fruits and lakes of sweet bacterial juice. They were the only animals on their planet, and had no predators or competition to deal with. Under normal conditions, this might lead to overpopulation, but the Qu designed the Hedonists to only get pregnant after mating an enormous number of times. So the population was stable, and the Hedonists filled their lives with eating, sleeping, and mind-blowing sex. 


Their minds were blissfully empty. Cause who needed to think when they’re having such a good time? The Insectophagi adapted to eat insects. They had claw-like hands to dig, long tongues to scoop up bugs, and leathery faces to protect from bites. They lived quiet unnoticed lives on their obscure world – but little did they know, they would later play a key a role in the fate of humanity. When the Qu attacked, not all humans were captured.

 Some of them escaped into space and built homes inside hollowed-out asteroids. They adapted to zero gravity by growing long spindly limbs, and pressurized digestive systems, so they could move around in space by farting from their highly evolved sphincters. These Spacers changed to the point where they could never return to a planet with gravity. But they didn’t care. They were comfortable in their weightless void worlds, and paid little attention to their human relatives on the planets below.

                               

So across the galaxy, these twisted post-human species struggled to survive. They evolved, diversified, rose and fell, and most of them died out without the universe ever knowing they existed. Which is normal. Extinctions just as natural as speciation – and for each species that died out, new ones evolved to take their place, generating an ever-changing kaleidoscopic variety life forms. And from this endless churn of life and death some species rose up to achieve new kinds of sentience and civilization, like stars emerging from dark fog. 

The scorching hot planet of the Worms eventually cooled down, and life emerged onto the surface. The Worms filled new ecological niches, evolving into serpentine grazers, swimmers, predators…and, eventually, people, with human-like intelligence. The Snake People had unique spiral-shaped brains which allowed them to observe and understand their world. They developed a ‘hand’ derived from their ancestors’ feet. 

And they built vast cities of tightly-intertwined tunnels and homes. They enjoyed books, and music, played as vibrations in the ground. The Snake People may’ve looked alien, but their daily lives were full of joys and sorrows, hopes and dreams, humanity. The Predators evolved into the Killer Folk. Their deadly claws became grasping hands, and their sabre teeth receded into organs of social display. Killer Folk society was built around hunting and violence, and so their history was filled with war.

 For thousands of years, nomadic warriors with vast herds of once-human livestock battled each other across a chessboard of continents. So their world is an archaeologists’ dream, rich with the ruins of fallen kingdoms. But one faction of Killer Folk developed factory farming, and rejected their violent past for a more peaceful unified future. Some conservative factions kept to the old way, fanatically devoted to traditional warfare and hunting. 

These two factions came dangerously close to global war, but the Killer Folk reconciled and survived. Underwater, the Swimmers couldn’t make fire. So they made a different kind of technology– they learned to breed their tools and machines. The Tool Breeders domesticated and modified other sea creatures, and built entire cities powered by organic life. Huge heart-like creatures pumped nutritious fluids through a network of self-healing conduits, like living power grid. The Breeders’ homes were made from living shell and bone, with bio luminescent lights. 

                                

 They had televisions derived from cephalopod skin, medicinal sea-squirts, weapons made from molluscs that fired teeth as ammunition. With genetic modification, stem cells and tissue cultures, the Tool Breeders mastered their oceans, and even the small landmasses of their world. But they weren’t content with just one planet. The Tool Breeders grew living spaceships and reached for the stars. The Lizard Herders were stunted, and never achieved sentience. But the lizards thrived, and eventually built civilizations – using the humans for transport, labour and food. 

These lizards had no ancestral connection to humanity, but they took on a human-like cultural identity, because they influenced by the ruins of the Star People on their world. They realized what the Qu had done to the humans, and feared that if the Qu returned, they might suffer the same fate. The Colonials were wretched creatures – helpless fields of flesh, carpeting the shores of their world like algae. But they were resilient. 


And eventually, they organized themselves, evolving from a homogenous mass into differentiated colonies. Each cell specialized to perform different functions for the colony, and the colonies started competing against other. Some colonies grew tap roots to siphon resources from afar, or starfish-life feet to move around, or claws and poisons to attack other colonies. The winner of this evolutionary arms race was an intelligent colony called the Modular People. 

In their vast industrial megalopolis, the people took a wide variety of shapes and sizes. They could combine themselves or split apart or exchange parts – all interchangeable cells playing a role in one great unified organism. So the Modular People achieved the impossible – turning their miserable existence into utopia where billions lived happy lives as part of the unified whole. The Flyers diversified into many different species, as predators, herbivores, even swimmers. 

                                

 One species were like storks who waded through swamps to catch their prey. Their versatile feet, which had evolved to catch slippery fish, became articulate hands as they developed intelligence and society. Since these Ptersosapiens could fly, they had a global mindset. Borderland nations made no sense when it was so easy to travel freely. People and ideas spread quickly across their planet, and they built an egalitarian society without strict social classes. 

They built cities of perches and fluting towers, harnessed nuclear power, and farmed their relatives on the ground for food. Though their civilization thrived, their bodies struggled to support their highly developed brains and their power of flight, so the Pterosapiens usually died by the age of twenty-three. Keenly aware of their mortality, they appreciated every moment of their lives. Their philosophers pondered the meaning of life with feverish intensity, filling libraries with their tomes. The Ptersopaien in this picture poses at a seaside resort. 

This ten day vacation was the only holiday in her short life. Despite the crushing gravity of their world, the Lopsiders built an advanced civilization. Their pancake-flat buildings spread all over their world, and they developed spaceflight so they could escape their planet and its oppressive gravity. To adapt to life on new worlds, they engineered a subspecies who could live in low gravity, called the Asymmetric People. The Asymmetric People thrived in the freedom of new worlds, but they had no love for their creators. 


The Asymmetric People ruthlessly exterminated the Lopsiders on their home word, and explored the heavens alone. The Parasites and their hosts evolved symbiotic relationships. Like, some parasites used sharp senses to warn their hosts of predators, or provide weapons like venom for defense. In return, the hosts provided their nutritious blood, and developed specialized nesting sites on their bodies for the parasite to attach to, rich with blood vessels and protective fur. The Parasites and Hosts became inextricably linked, almost like they were one being. 

Soon, the hosts were like horses being steered around by the Parasites, then eventually they were no more than puppets, totally controlled by the Parasites through tactile and olfactory signals. The intelligent Parasite civilization eventually developed technology that replaced the need for hosts. But they kept the hosts around for tradition and convenience. An average Symbiote might start the day in a business host, then change to a comfortable domestic host at home after work.    

                             

The world of the Fisher Fingers was full of scattered isolated islands. Like the Galapagos or Madagascar on Earth, these islands were a seething evolutionary cauldron that gave rise to wildly diverse species. One line of Fisher Fingers evolved into the Sail People. Their long fingers evolved into sails that drove them effortlessly across oceans. 

They used their tongues to catch prey, and eventually their tongues split and articulated to be used as hands. The Sail People needed strong memories to navigate the oceans and locate prey, so naturally they soon evolved intelligence. It took a long to develop social and political stability. Their scattered and diverse world gave rise to a huge variety of creatures who fiercely competed. For generations, flotillas of tribal warriors and pirate societies battled in epoch-spanning conflicts. 

Until finally one group of Sail People became powerful enough to unify their world, and make peace. Blood had stained the oceans for too long. The peaceful paradise of the Hedonists seemed like it would never end. But over millions of years, nothing lasts forever. Geologic activity threw up clouds of dust that blocked the sun and killed most of the Hedonists. Only a small subset survived, mutating an escape from the reproductive limits of their ancestors. 

                   

These Satyriacs were got theirs hit together and built an advanced self-sustaining civilization. There were still traces of their hedonistic past remaining in their genes, and so their societies retained a delightful streak of pleasure-seeking and promiscuity. Festivals, concerts and ritualized orgies punctuated every working week. And now, the pleasure was savoured by sentient self-aware people. The Insectophagi started to look like their prey. Their leathery face-plates hardened and became part of their jaw. Their hands and feet developed into pincers. And their brains evolved intelligence.

Like many others, the Bug Facers built a civilization, but they also faced a unique threat. They were attacked by an alien race. Little is known about these aliens, not much survived in the historical record. But it took an intense series of wars on the ground and in orbit before the invaders were defeated. This traumatic conflict gave the Bug Facers a pathological xenophobic fear of all other species. So when the human species on other worlds started to reach out to each other, the Bug Facers stayed silent, and withdrew from the galaxy. 

The Spacers became even more alien in the void of space. Their fingers extended and split into tiny grasping limbs. Their legs atrophied, using their farts to move instead. And in the weightless void of space, their brains expanded, till their every thought was far more vast and complex than anything other humans could conceive. These Asteromorphs spread to every star system in the galaxy, but they didn’t interfere with the other species. 

                            

The Asteromorphs had no need for planets – those ugly balls of dirt and ice and gravity. They stayed in the outer rims of star systems, silently watching over the galaxy, like strange alien gods. The advanced post-human species started making contact with each other. The Killer Folk talked with the Satyriasis. The Tool Breeders reached out from their ocean depths. The Modular People and Pterosapiens joined in, followed by the Asymmetric People, Saurosapients, Snake People, Symbiotes, and Sail People. 

They didn’t visit each other in person, because the interstellar distances were too large. But they cooperated by sharing knowledge and technology – and by keeping watch for alien invasions. They all had found the ruins of the Star People and the Qu – and they didn’t want to be attacked and changed again. This alliance of post-humans lasted for almost eighty million years, each species expanding to new worlds, and prospering together. 


The Bug Facers never joined them, because they were afraid and xenophobic. And there was one other advanced species that didn’t join – and from them would come the downfall of the alliance. The Ruin Haunters were much like other species twisted by the Qu. But on their world, the cities of the Star People hadn’t been completely destroyed. So the Ruin Haunters had access to remnants of the Star Peoples’ technology and knowledge, which allowed them to advance at a dangerous pace.

                           

 Their technology developed so fast that their social and political structures didn’t keep up, and they almost destroyed themselves in a series of worldwide nuclear wars. This baptism by fire hardened the Ruin Haunters and kinda drove them crazy. They convinced themselves that they alone were the true descendants and heirs of the Star People, and that only they deserved to reclaim the legacy of the golden age of their ancestors. 

So when the other human species formed their alliance, the Ruin Haunters refused to participate. But the Ruin Haunters’ sun was rapidly expanding, and threatened to burn and destroy their worlds. So the Ruin Haunters used their super-advanced technology to abandon their organic bodies and replace them with machines. They became the Gravitals – floating metal spheres that could mould the environment around them with gravity fields. 

They were entirely mechanical. But they still had human minds, coded into quantum computers. So they still had human ambitions – and human delusions. Twisted with neurotic narcissistic hubris, the Gravitals started to exterminate all other life. And the other human species were unable to stop them. The Gravitals would come to a human world and block out their sun behind a vast black sail. If the choked, dying world managed to resist, they were finished off with an asteroid. 

                         

The Gravitals didn’t hate other species. They just didn’t see them as people, and exterminated them like one might swat a fly. So all the Snake People, the Tool Breeders, Pterosapients, and the others, who had worked so hard to survive, were all snuffed out one by one. The only survivors of these genocides were the shy and xenophobic Bug Facers. For reasons unknown, they alone were kept alive, and the Gravitals used them as Subjects for biological experimentation. The Gravitals twisted the minto new forms so strange that they made the work of the Qu look tame.

 As well as servants, and laborers, they made Subjects into bizarre art pieces, like creatures that existed only to play the tune of a particular pop song on its modified throat and fingers. They made whole elaborate artificial ecologies of doomed human flesh purely for entertainment and curiosity. The Gravitals recycled and repurposed organic life the way someone might tinker with computer parts, or recycle trash. 

And for millions of years that was how organic life existed in the Machine Empire. But not all the Gravitals saw life the same way. Some religious and philosophical sects among the Gravitals argued that all forms of life had rights. They secretly created human species who could live and think freely. Some Gravitals even fell in love with their human creations. Gravital society became divided between the Tolerant Gravitals who respected human life, and the hard line conservative pan-mechanical Gravitals. 

                          

This division threatened to tear the Machine Empire apart. So the Gravitals looked for a common enemy to unify against. For millions of years, the Gravitals and the Asteromorphs had watched each other nervously– the Gravitals on the planets, and the Asteromorphs in space. They both were massively powerful, and feared that war could destroy them both. But in attempt to unite their divided society, the Gravitals chose to start a war with Asteromorphs. 

The resulting conflict raged for millions of years, and scarred uncounted stars, but in the end, the Asteromorphs triumphed, and defeated the Gravitals, toppling the all-powerful Machine Empire. And the Asteromporphs decided to clean up the mess the machines had made. They took the surviving humans who the Gravitals had twisted, and created habitable worlds for them to live in. The Asteromorphs played God, seeding life across the galaxy. 

And the human species rose reborn as inheritors of the war-torn worlds – under the watchful eye of the Asteromorphs. The Asteromorphs wanted to ensure that no genocidal assholes would ever conquer the galaxy again. So they created a smaller simpler version of themselves called the Terrestrials, to live on the human worlds. The Terrestrials played the role of kings, prophets, and caretakers, guiding their worlds along a wise path. It didn’t always work out too well. Sometimes worlds rebelled, so the Asteromorphs destroyed them. 

                       

Sometimes the Terrestrials were corrupt, and played god, and exploited their subjects. But one way or another, the human worlds spread, and formed a prosperous galactic empire. The Gravitals weren’t completely destroyed by the Asteromorphs. Turned out, it was really useful to have super-advanced machines around. The Asteromorphs disabled their gravity weapons, and numbed their minds a bit to discourage rebellion. And used the Gravitals as labourers to work in dangerous environments. These New Machines were given nano technological bodies that could transform into any shape. 

They eventually became citizens of the empire, but were often discriminated against – machines were never fully trusted after the Gravitals’ atrocities.Eventually the human-Asteromorph empire made contact with life from other galaxies – includingthe Amphicephali, these weird snakes that had snakes inside their snakes. Apparently these creatures had an evolutionary history just as long and complex as humanity had. And after all they’d been through, the life forms of both galaxies were finally old enough and mature enough to meet peacefully, without conflict. 

This video won’t describe all of inter-galactic history. The stories are endless – how the united galaxies re-encountered and defeated the Qu, how they cradled their suns in artificial shells, and crossed space through wormholes. But one moment worth relating is the rediscovery of Earth. A lone researcher located the birthplace of humanity – where all the Asteromorphs and Machines and post-humans could trace their origins. Earth had gone stagnant and feral by then – an obscure empty world. 

       

 But after half a billion years of absence, humans returned to their home world – changed beyond recognition. I have to end with a confession. Humans, Asteromorphs, Machines, and all their descendants are now extinct. They’ve been dead for a billion years. This video is just our best approximation of their history, based on the available archaeological evidence. We don’t know what killed the humans.

 Maybe some unimaginably destructive war. Maybe their empire broke up, and each world suffered their own slow private death. Some claim that humanity migrated into some higher plane of existence. We don’t know what happened, and ultimately, it doesn’t matter. The story of humanity was never about its end. Not about its ultimate domination of galaxies, or its transcendence from reality. Being human was always about the daily lives of people, from the love-songs of the carefree Hedonists, the families of the Sail People sharing a meal, to the pontifications of the Pterosapiens, too.

 Grander narratives and absolute ideals are what led to humanity’s worstatrocities – the Gravitals massacred to reclaim the past, the Qu conquered for some fanatical idealized future. Living for some abstract ultimate goal so often leads to destruction. So when you look on the remains of the long-gone human species, remember that it’s the present that matters, not the past or future.