KADOTA

Meaning - To disappear; To vanish or fade away

"One small step for man, a giant leap for mankind"

I rewind the whole sequence again to witness the origin as I drift in spacetime vortex. It was the beginning of everything. In hindsight, it would be unimaginably preposterous to think that this insignificant life form would one day reach the edge of massive galaxies. Several billion years have passed to the day we first landed on the moon. As I sit on my ship drifting towards in vast dark expanse of our galaxies, I bid farewell to our original home, Earth. Our sun has turned into a red dwarf. It is rapidly loosing mass and turning bigger. It has already consumed Mercury and Venus. Humans had already evacuated the Earth. It had become inhabitable several aeons back. Due to growth in the size of the sun, we were fortunate to inhabit the frigid moons of Saturn which became hospitable after the eternal ice age. An expedition was setup up by the High Council of the Milky Way to witness the grand event of the end of our forgotten and original home. The expeditions was headed by me and three other scientists. I had completed my thesis work on Planet Earth. It is interesting how such a weak specie could ever sustain the hardships. I often travel through time to understand how life was on Earth billions of years ago. I have travelled extensively across time in an attempt to understand the purpose of our existence. As much as I wished to intervene in removing the human sufferings, we were strictly prohibited to act in manner which would significantly change the timeline. The consequences could be overarching and potentially mess up the natural laws of this universe. We set our expedition near the asteroid belt region as we looked upon the sheer dwarfness of the Earth.

It makes me philosophical to look back on Earth in a nostalgic way. The place where it all began. I open my diary to read the famous lines about the pale blue dot.

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." - Carl Sagan

I am deeply filled with an unexplained sadness as I watch the third rock slowly disintegrate into nothingness. The fleeting nature of the existence in this universe and such cruel intentions of time have never struck me this hard. The red dwarf slowly disintegrates the lifegiving dust of the Earth. It feels strange somehow. A sense of emptiness dawned upon as I realised that there is no past that remains to be returned. Earth was gone just like that.

She can finally rest.