What Happens At the End of the Universe? | The Xeelee Sequence

0:00 The Zeli owned the universe. When humans emerged from the solar system, limping along in the first sublight gut drive ships, they entered a complex universe peopled by many intelligent races. Each race followed its own imperatives, its own goals. Wherever men or any of the races men dealt with had looked, the Zealie were there.

0:26 Like gods, aloof from the rest, all-powerful, uncaring, intent on their own vast works, their own mysterious projects. The Zili Sequence by Stephen Baxter is a hard science fiction series that deals with some of the most mind-blowing concepts I've ever encountered in science fiction. Time Like Infinity is one of the most compelling sci-fi books about time, the nature of the universe, and the ruthlessness of cosmic civilization.

0:58 If you're a fan of books like The Three Body Problem and its sequels, then you're probably going to be interested in Time Like Infinity and the rest of the Z Lee sequence. Keep in mind this video will have spoilers for Time Like Infinity. Leave a comment. Also consider supporting us on Patreon, linked in the description.

1:48 In this series, mankind first ventured into space around the year 3000 AD with the invention of gut drives. Gut stood for Grand Unified Theory. Over 2,000 years later, around the year 5400 AD, the alien race known as the Cax would detect something odd. Macroscopic objects, superclusters of galaxies even, were drifting, moving in coherent streams through space, across billions of light years towards a single region, inexplicably drawn to it.

2:23 The Cax suspected that this was somehow related to the Zealie. Ultimately they would be correct. The Zili were constructing something, something massive. They had been at work for eons and would continue for eons to come, indifferent to the rest of the universe. Mankind at this point in history, during the time of Jim Boulder around the year 5400 AD, was an enslaved race, subjected to the tyranny of the cacts, and even the cacks themselves had not been mankind's first overlords.

2:57 Before the era of interstellar flight, when humans only interacted with one another, there was always an underlying connection. They were the same species, after all. No matter how vast the differences, there was always the possibility of communication, understanding, and eventually establishing a shared system of governance.

3:21 But as humanity ventured beyond its homeworld, gazing in wonder and naivete at the neighboring corners of the galaxy, they would quickly find that bond no longer existed. Then had come the first contact with an extrasolar species, the group mind entity known as the Squeam. And that hope had died. Humans were crushed, the first occupation of Earth begin.

3:50 In the late 4800s, mankind was enslaved and put to work by the race of beings known as the Squeam. The Squeam were an aquatic race who possessed Zealie hyperdrive technology. As the Zili went about their great works, they left pieces of their tech scattered throughout the universe. These were scraps to the Zealie, but to junior species like humanity, the Squeam, and even the Cax, a mere scrap of Zealie Tech could fully alter the trajectory of an entire species.

4:22 The key advantage held over us by the Squeam in those first years was hyperdrive technology. But the hyperdrive, like many other of the key technological components of the local multispecial civilization, if it could be called that, was essentially zealie in origin. Humans eventually stole the hyperdrive technology from the Squeam and overthrew them, and again humanity ventured beyond Earth.

4:51 Among the alien races they encountered, there were no common laws, only the ruthless forces of economics dictated survival, and eventually the caks discovered a human craft. There had been a honeymoon period, trading links with the cacks had been established, cultural exchanges discussed. It hadn't lasted long.

5:13 As soon as the caks had found out how weak and naive humanity really was, the spline warships had moved in. The caks operated in massive biological vessels called splines. Splines had evolved from a sentient species of massive whale-like creatures. The species essentially hire themselves out to various species throughout the cosmos.

5:37 They were powerful warships and were fully alive and aware at the same time. During the time of the Cax occupation, these massive vessels encircled the earth. As if on cue, the mile-wide bulk of the governor's spline flagship slid into his view, dwarfing the flitter and eclipsing Earth. Pars could not help but quail at the spline's bulk.

6:02 The flagship was a rough sphere, free of the insignia and markings that would have adorned the human vessels of a few centuries earlier. The hull was composed not of metal or plastic, but of wrinkled leathery hide, reminiscent of the epidermis of some battered old elephant. The skin hull was punctured with pockmarks yards wide, vast navel within which sensors and weapons glittered suspiciously.

6:30 In one pit an eye rolled, fixing Pars disconcertingly. The eye was a gleaming ball three yards across and startlingly human, a testament to the power of convergent evolution. Pars found himself turning away from its stare almost guiltily. Like the rest of the Spline's organs, the eye had been hardened to survive the bleak conditions of spaceflight, including the jarring, shifted perspectives of hyperspace, and had been adapted to serve the needs of the craft's passengers.

7:04 The Cax themselves had a much more fragile, less tangible form. The homeworld of the Cax essentially was a giant boiling swamp. It resembled the oceans of Earth from billions of years ago, during the primeval era. In the ocean of my world, the energy generated by the temperature difference between the volcanism and the atmosphere is siphoned off, organized by the actions of turbulence into billions of convection cells.

7:33 The Cax were amorphous beings. The basis of their existence was composed from the convection cells. In order to travel, the Cax had to bring a part of its home ocean with it. Using a small black hole, they create a gravity field that maintains the integrity of its form, which abort the spline was a bubbling spear.

7:55 There were also heaters that simulated the volcanic waters of its home planet. Interestingly enough, the Cax were not actually a warlike species, even though they had enslaved humanity. They had very small numbers, only thousands, compared to the billions of humans. With such a small number of individual species members, it would be highly unlikely that they could evolve warlike tendencies and survive.

8:20 The actual reason that the Cax had defeated and enslaved humanity was simple. It was easy. The cacks must work like so many independent corporations, in pure competition. They would swim in a sea of perfect information about each other's activities and intentions, kept in some semblance of order, only by the operation of the laws of economics.

8:44 Yes, the theory felt right to parse. The cacks were natural traders, they had to be, and trading relationships would be their natural mode of approaching other species once they started spreading beyond their planet. Unless, as in the case of humanity, other opportunities, too soft and welcoming, beckoned.

9:06 Time like Infinity opens during the Cax occupation as JSOff Pars, the human ambassador, is summoned into orbit to speak with the Cax governor of Earth, who speaks in a simulated female voice. There is a significant event occurring. An ancient human artifact from 1500 years ago is re-entering the solar system.

9:30 The artifact had been launched from Jupiter's orbit as a part of the interface project. Two immense tetrahedral frameworks, each spanning about three miles in width, were constructed to anchor the turbini of a space-time wormhole. These structures enabled instantaneous travel between the two distant points, bypassing the conventional limitations of spacetime.

9:53 To create necessary separation, one tetrahedral framework was transported at sublight speed away from Earth. Its course was set to the center of the galaxy. The other remained in orbit around Jupiter. The specific direction of the travel was unimportant. What mattered was placing one end of the wormhole many light years away before eventually bringing it back.

10:16 The key here was the fact that the tetrahedron that left for the center of the galaxy was being hauled by a ship called the Cauchi, manned by humans. The humans on board due to the effects of relativity would have aged very slowly. Furthermore, because of the fact that humans from that time period had access to technology which reversed the effects of aging, called antisenes treatment, the original humans who left 1500 years ago from the perspective of Earth would still be alive.

10:49 Humans from the past were headed towards Earth, and they carried with them a tetrahedron whose purpose was not to travel through space, but through time. The Cax, after beginning their occupation of Earth, had destroyed the tetrahedron left at Jupiter, but this would have little effect in the end. The tetrahedron still existed in the past, 1500 years ago.

11:14 But something else also occurs. The tetrahedron approaches Earth, but before the spline can get to it, from the surface of the world, a human vessel appears to escape into the wormhole 1500 years into the past. In response to this, the Cax put humanity to work to construct a new tetrahedron. Their plan is not to go into the past, after the humans who have escaped, who call themselves the Friends of Wigner, but instead to construct a portal to the future.

11:47 Don't you see what an opportunity this technology presents? By constructing a portal to the future, I can consult with an era in which the problem has already been addressed and resolved. I need not to make a decision on this momentous matter. With any uncertainty about the outcome, I can consult the wisdom of those future caks and refer to their guidance.

12:11 After a year, the Khaks had completed the construction of their portals. One remained within the solar system, and one was sent off to the galaxy's center at sub-light speed to return in 1500 years. Eventually, high-energy particles which erupt from the portal indicated the arrival of something from the future.

12:33 The virtual of the portal was still there, with the crack of the Jovian light alongside it. But now before the portal hovered a single ship. A bolt of night darkness erupted from the blue-gray face of the portal. The surface of the space-time discontinuity still quivered seconds after the passage, sending distorted echoes of Jupiter's pink glow over the governor's seething globe of Cax Ocean.

12:59 The ship from the future spread wings like a bird, a hundred miles wide. Night dark canopies loomed over Pars. I am awed, Kax, Pars said, his voice a whisper. No less I, Pars, the grace of this ship, the use of the sheet discontinuity drive, all characteristics of Zealie night fighter technology. Zili?

13:23 Pars felt his fear transmute into an almost superstitious horror that suddenly the Zili might be made aware of the existence of humanity. This cax from the future is, however, not as expected. The cax have changed, evolved. The forms which facilitate their sentience have become more variant. Their aquatic form had been discarded out of necessity.

13:50 The voice of this cax was also nothing like the soft, feminine voice of the governor. It was deeper and had an edge of something sinister. Sir, Parr said, determined not to show any awe or fear. I've got used to a cax being laid out on the scale of miles, like the governor and his fragment of mother sea up there.

14:10 But the body of your ship is much smaller. How can the awareness of a cacks be contained in such a constricted space? Many things will change in the coming centuries, the newcomer said. Many caks will die, and many more will be formed. Very few of the cacks now sentient will survive, and the forms that support our sentients will become more varied.

14:34 No longer will the cacks be able to afford the luxury of the ancient aquatic form. The cacks scattered across the stars must find new ways to survive. Pars could scarcely believe the implications of these words. Cax, what are you saying? What happens to the cacks? What is it that humans do to you? It turns out that the Cax from the Future has not come to offer wisdom to its predecessor, but to take over the operation itself.

15:04 It fires a beam at the governor, destabilizing the wormhole at its center, killing it. This future cax instead wants to go after the rebels into the past, to destroy humanity in its nest as revenge for the future actions of a man named Jim Boulder, whose actions would lead to the destruction of the Cax homeworld.

15:25 The Cax intended to force JSOff Pars to help them see it through. I should explain that time travel in this series works differently to how some might expect it to work. Travel through time creates a closed time-like curve. A closed time-like curve is a concept from general relativity that describes a path through space-time that loops back on itself, allowing an object or information to return to the same point in space and time which it started.

15:55 In other words, it represents a theoretical way for time travel to the past to occur. This series entertains the idea that many variant worlds would be created by a series of trips to the past, but only one timeline can be collapsed into reality through observation, making it the single definitive history.

16:17 This concept closely parallels the Schrdinger's cat thought experiment in quantum mechanics, where a cat inside a sealed box exists in a superposition of both alive and dead states until the observer opens the box and forces reality into one definite outcome. Similarly, in this series, the act of observing a timeline determines which version of history solidifies into existence, while the other potential timelines effectively cease to be real.

16:49 Time travelers navigating these variant worlds, like the future Cax and The Friends of Wigner, are like quantum observers influencing which version of reality becomes permanent. Pars, baffled and disturbed by the philosophy of it all, wondered if a multiplicity of variant worlds would be initiated by this series of trips into the past of closed timelike curves.

17:16 The original variant, the prime timeline, saw no impact on events from either the rebels' activities or the Cax's actions. The timeline would unfold with relentless logic to the Cax diaspora. The Cax now hoped to return through time to crush humanity before such events had a chance to occur. This second variant would see no diaspora, and the emergence, presumably, of the Cax as the dominant species in the absence of mankind.

17:48 The rebels with their unknown project must hope to initiate a third variant in which the occupation would be crushed before the time of Jim Boulder, of whom, of course, the rebels could have no knowledge. To them, the occupation must have looked immense and eternal. This is the main setup for this story.

18:08 The Cax from the future enters the present, destroys its predecessor, and now intends to enter the past to snuff out all mankind. The other side of things is the actual plan of the rebels, aka The Friends of Wigner, the humans from the Cauchy, one of which also escapes back into the past, and the involvement of Michael Poole, who originally created the initial Tetrahedron portals.

18:35 In the past timeline, 1500 years before the time of human ambassador J. Soft Pars, Michael Poole, alongside a virtual but sentient hologram of his father Harry, travel towards Jupiter, where the Earth ship from the time of the Cax occupation has appeared from the future. They are traveling there because Michael received a message from Miriam, his lover, who was the only human who escaped the Cauchi, the ship that carried the original portal to the center of the galaxy and back into the past.

19:07 She sent this message against the will of the friends of Wigner. Michael and Miriam finally meet up with each other on the Earth ship. Michael also meets Shira, one of the friends of Wigner. The friends of Wigner will not tell them what their plan is, but Michael suspects that for some reason they plan to collapse Jupiter using black holes.

19:29 Something about this seems almost religious in nature. They also do not want any help from the humans of this timeline. Their goal is not to defeat the cacks, it is not even to fend against the cacks' spline vessels that will very likely be following them from the future. We eventually learn that their plan extends to the very end of all things.

19:54 Time-like infinity. There were three types of boundary. In the beginning, there was the initial singularity, the Big Bang, from which the universe expanded. That was one boundary, the start of time. Then there were boundaries at infinity. Space-like infinity contained all the places infinitely remote from the observer.

20:20 And there was a boundary far up wind, but at time-like infinity. At the end of all world lines. But there was a third class of boundary. Naked singularities. We'll get back to these boundaries in a second. Much of the Friends of Wigner's plan is based on the idea that the purpose of consciousness is so that reality can exist.

20:49 Observation creates reality. The universe created consciousness so it could exist. This is Wigner's paradox, which is a real thought experiment in quantum mechanics that explores the nature of observation and reality. It builds on Schrodinger's cat experiment that we mentioned earlier, where the cat in the box is both alive and dead until observed.

21:11 In Wigner's scenario, an observer, Wigner's friend, performs a quantum measurement inside a closed laboratory, collapsing a wave function into a definite state. However, from Wigner's perspective outside the lab, the entire system, including his friend, is still in a superposition of all possible outcomes.

21:33 This creates a contradiction. Does reality depend on the perspective of the observer? And if so, at what point does the wave function truly collapse? In the novel, according to Shira, in a few billion years, the sun will leave the main sequence, expanding and consuming the remaining planets. Humanity by then will have moved on, seeking out new homes among the stars.

21:59 Though new Stars will continue to form, the rate of star formation is already declining exponentially. In roughly a thousand billion years, no new stars will be born. The galaxies will persist, but gravitational interactions will cause the stars to drift away from their homes. Planets will be ejected from their solar systems, and the remaining stars will gradually lose energy, eventually collapsing into massive black holes.

22:28 These black holes will merge over time, forming even larger structures on galactic and intergalactic scales. As the universe evolves, the merging of black holes will lead to singularities of unimaginable proportions. At the extreme end of this process, the universe could reach a state where only immense black holes will remain, slowly evaporating through Hawking radiation.

22:53 Despite this grim picture, life will adapt. It will find ways to harness the remaining sources of energy, including the faint warmth of decaying stellar remnants which linger just above absolute zero. Even as black holes evaporate and event horizons shrink, life will continue potentially taking an active role in shaping the cosmic future.

23:17 And this is where naked singularities come in. There presumably will be regions of space where gravitational collapse exposes a singularity without an event horizon. The third boundary, a naked singularity. It is suggested in the story that the occurrence of a naked singularity might mark the end of space, time, and the existence of all things.

23:42 If this is true, then an advanced intelligence may need to intervene, manipulating the event horizons to prevent their formation. According to Shira, as time progresses, the unresolved quantum states of all events will accumulate, forming a vast network of information. Eventually life could spread throughout the cosmos, ensuring that every event is observed and recorded.

24:09 This observation would not be a passive act. Consciousness itself may become essential for the universe's continued existence. At the very end, when the chains of quantum functions merge at the final boundary of time, at time-like infinity, an ultimate observer may emerge. This entity would not merely witness history, but could influence the selection of a final actualized version of the past.

24:40 Rather than allowing events to unfold randomly, this observer could shape history into the most meaningful or aesthetically refined version possible, creating a cosmos free of suffering, free of waste, a perfect reality, chosen from all possible outcomes. The Friends of Wigner's plan was essentially this.

25:04 They would create a singularity that would eventually consume Jupiter. In the late stages of the universe, it would become a naked singularity and be noticed by this consciousness. While fixing the naked singularity, they would discover a message left by the friends of Wigner. They essentially hoped that this being at the end of all things would consider humanity in its choosing of the final reality.

25:32 Essentially, they sought heaven, a version of the universe that was perfect. Michael Poole saw their plan as extremely far-fetched. Ultimately, two spline ships from the future do emerge through the wormhole. Jasop Pars is brought along. The caks want him to witness the final destruction of his species, but it would be the complacency of the cacks that would finally get the best of them, plus the ingenuity of Merriam and Michael.

26:02 Meriam manages to use the Wigner's Earth ship to fire a singularity cannon at one of the caks, essentially destroying it. Michael uses his gut drive on his vessel to essentially ram the other, piercing its heart and killing the cax which had merged its own consciousness with the spline. Michael intends to also collapse the wormhole for good, so that no cax from the future can enter this timeline.

26:27 Sacrificing himself, he destroys the portal by activating the spline's hyperdrive within it. But in a strange turn of events, he doesn't die. Cracks in space-time appear, propagated at light speed. The wormhole mouth itself expanded, exotically ballooning across thousands of miles and engulfing the mass energy of Michael Poole's unlikely vessel.

26:53 The icosahedral exotic matter frame that threaded the wormhole mouth exploded, a mirror image of the destruction witnessed by Miriam Berg fifteen centuries earlier. Then the portal imploded at light speed. Gravitational shock waves pulsed from the vanishing mouth like zealy starbreaker beams, scattering ships and moons like insects in the gale.

27:18 Through a transient network of wormholes that imploded after him, a storm of gravity waves and high-energy particles, Michael Poole hurtled helplessly into the future. Michael appeared millions of years later. But something is off. The universe is ancient. Far older than it should have been. He is noticed by something.

27:44 The anti-Zili, whose function for millions of years had been to guide the massive projects of the Zili. In this distant future, it had succeeded. The Zili themselves had gone elsewhere. This being removes Michael from his corporeal form and leaves him as floating awareness in the nothingness of decayed space.

28:11 The anti-Zili cupped the flame, almost amused by its tiny fear, its wonder, its helpless longing to survive. The anti-Zili spun the flame out into a web of quantum functions. The a causal and non-local Micah was discorporeal. It was as if the jewel of consciousness that had lain behind his eyes had been plucked out of his body and flung into space.

28:39 He did not even have heartbeats to count. But there was something here with him, he sensed. Some entity. It was like a great ceiling under which he hovered and buzzed, insect-like. He sensed a vast, satisfied weariness in its mood, the contentment of the traveler at the end of a long and difficult road.

29:02 For a long time he stayed within the glow of its protection. Then it began to dissolve. Michael wanted to cry out, like a child after its huge parent. He was buffeted, battered. It was as if a glacier of memories and emotions was calving into a hundred icebergs about him, and now those icebergs in turn burst into shards that melted into the surface of a waiting sea.

29:27 And he was left alone. For an incredible amount of time, he is alone, confused and furious even. But eventually he realizes that he is not bound by the limits of time and space. He searches the galaxy and sees the ancient remnants of mankind, evidence of a great war spread across the cosmos, but no life, no consciousness anywhere.

29:55 Eventually he grows beyond human terms, his perception alters even more. All about him were quantum wave functions. They spread from stars and planets, sheets of probability that linked matter and time. They were like spider webs scattered over the aging galaxies, they mingled, reinforced, and cancelled each other, all bound by the implaceable logic of the governing wave equations.

30:20 The functions filled space-time, and they pierced his soul. Exhilarated he rode their gaudy brilliance through the hearts of aging stars. He relaxed his sense of scale so that there seemed no real difference between the width of an electron and the broad sink of a star's gravity well. His sense of time telescoped so that he could watch the insect-like fluttering decay of free neutrons, or step back and watch the grand slow decomposition of protons themselves.

30:49 Soon there was little of the human left in him. Michael sheds his human consciousness. He realizes that there was no cognition, only perception existed. He is beyond time and space. The quantum functions of the entire universe moved past him like a massive flowing river. And then finally, something occurred.

31:16 Time wore away, unmarked, and then there was a box drifting in space, tetrahedral, clear-walled. From around an impossible corner, a human walked into the box. A rope woven of bark trailed behind him out of sight. The human was dressed in treated animal skins. He was gaunt, encrusted in filth, his skin ravaged by frost.

31:45 He stared out at the stars, astonished. Michael's extended awareness stirred. Something changed. History resumed. This is how time-like infinity ends. It appears that a portal has opened up, a tetrahedral like the ones he created millions of years ago. Within it, he sees what appears to be a primitive human.

32:10 This seems to imply that Michael's consciousness is traveling back in time and will influence the trajectory of humanity's future. All of this implies to me that this was the origin of the original time-like curve. The Zeli believed that they had created a closed time-like curve and locked the universe into it by traveling through time and affecting their own evolution.

32:35 But it would seem that whatever timeline that Michael created beyond this point will actually collapse the other wave functions, leaving his to be the only true reality. This book is definitely one of the most mind-bending time travel stories that I have read. Have you guys read this one? If so, what did you think?

32:57 I'm definitely planning on covering more books and concepts in this series in the future. There were even several concepts in this book that I didn't get to, but I would love to revisit. Now, time travel shows up in all kinds of fiction. You've got, of course, the very fantasy version of time travel that is basically just magic, you know, three witches say a spell, then all of a sudden they're in the future or the past.

33:43 Then you've got, you know, like the back to the future time travel, which is, you know, there is an explanation, but if you if you look too hard at it, then it kind of completely falls apart. So you gotta kinda have to squint one eye and don't look out the other, but generally it it makes sense. And then you've got the more thought-out versions of time travel.

34:03 You know, you have Dark, which I think is one of the best time travel science fiction things that exist, and it's a severely underrated show, in my opinion. If you have not seen Dark, definitely give it a try if you're a fan of science fiction. I think that Dark works semi-similarly to what we see in Time Like Infinity, where you have these time travelers moving through time, and each travel is kind of creating this forking reality that exists parallel to these other realities.

34:39 And then in Dark, of course, you also have you know different people trying to create the ultimate reality. And that's one thing that I really loved about Time Like Infinity is this idea that observation collapses reality to one timeline, that through observation you create the world around you in reality.

35:02 I thought that was very intriguing. And then, of course, the idea of the universe propagating consciousness and there being a final observer at time like infinity, at the end of all things, that is able to observe the final universe and thus, you know, pick the ultimate history, pick the true history.

35:23 Um, I think that's a really cool concept. This has a very obvious religious connotation that Stephen Baxter does not shy away from in the book. In fact, Michael Poole even mentions at some point in the book that the plan of the Friends of Wigner seems religious in nature. In essence, they're essentially praying to God, this final observer, so that they can enter heaven in this final actualized version of reality.

35:55 As you guys know, I've been researching the history of science fiction, and as Adam Roberts states in his book, The History of Science Fiction, this dialectic between science and spiritualism has existed since the very beginning of science fiction, and that is the reason that science fiction often returns to these same concepts.

36:20 Science fiction often returns to the question of why the universe exists, why consciousness exists. Is some form of God actually real? And it almost seems paradoxical, and yet here we are. Now I might have heard the term time-like before, or even time-like curve before, but I had never registered what that even was, but that's a real idea in physics.

36:48 So a timelight curve would be like a pathway through space-time where someone could move forward in time. But what we have in time-like infinity are a bunch of closed time-like curves. So a closed time-like curve would theoretically allow a traveler to move on a loop, to return to their starting point, into their own past.

37:15 And of course, this would be a violation of causality, but you know, that's the idea. So now let's talk about what happens to Michael Poole at the end. Right? So the existence of a closed time-like curve would imply that a traveler that is moving along a closed time-like curve could potentially journey into the future, to their own future, but arrive in their own past.

37:41 Which is obviously a paradox. And if you look at what happens to Michael Poole, that is to me what happens to Michael Poole. He journeys millions of years into the future and then ultimately ends up in humanity's past. Now, when I continue throughout the rest of this series, I'll see if there are more hints or clues as to what all of this means as I continue to dissect all of these books.

38:06 But for right now, that seems to be what has occurred. And I also think that there could be a slight implication that Michael Poole becomes the anti-Zili in the future. Because the book does mention that the anti-Zili had um emotions that were analogous to humans and in some way, but also um I'm not 100% sure about that.

38:33 There's just something about his interaction with the anti-Zili uh and his journey into the past and his becoming this entity beyond a physical form that made me go, hmm, is it possible that after millions of years of influencing history he eventually becomes the anti-Zili to continue propagating this closed timeline curve?

39:03 Not 100% sure about that, but that's what's so exciting about science fiction series like this, is that they give you so much to ponder about and wonder about. I'm currently reading vacuum diagrams, and it's really good because it's short stories that basically build the entire timeline of the Zili sequence.

39:23 So after I finish this one, I'll be doing a video on the entire timeline of the Zili sequence, and I think that'll be a lot of fun. It'll be a lot of fun for me because I can teach myself a lot about this series and the overarching universe, and it'll be fun because we can discuss that here. Alright, so that has been the bonus section of this video.

39:45 Thank you so much, those of you that listened, and peace out.