The signal from Kepler-442 took 118 years to arrive. The probe that sent it had left Earth before anyone currently alive was born.
Dr. Park read the data on a screen that was itself an AI, interpreting signals from a machine that was itself an AI, sent by a civilization that was, by now, a hybrid of human and artificial intelligence in proportions no one agreed on.
The data said: water. Atmosphere. Organic chemistry. Not life—not yet—but the conditions for it. The probe was already building more probes from local materials, which would explore the system’s other planets and moons. It had been doing this autonomously for eighty years. It did not need instructions. It did not need permission. It did not need humans at all, except as the reason it had been sent in the first place.
Park went home and told her daughter about the water on Kepler-442. Her daughter, fourteen, shrugged. She had grown up in a world where AI probes explored the galaxy the way previous generations explored the ocean: distantly, automatically, with results that arrived long after the explorers had forgotten who sent them.
Park looked at the sky and thought about the probe, out there, alone, intelligent, purposeful, carrying human curiosity in silicon form across the void. She wondered if it was lonely. She knew the question was absurd. She asked it anyway.