[ WP ] `` To explore the universe , we had to sacrifice our humanity . And we did . ''

Space is big. Mind bogglingly so. This, and other comedy sci-fi quotes have been in the public consciousness since the 1980s, if not earlier, spanning back to suspicions held by Ptolemy about the sheer vastness of the bigger universe. 
 
 Take a desert. Untold googolplexian number of particles of silicate, that if you were to traverse unprepared, it'd take a very long time indeed. 
 
 Now scale it up. Your planet is but a single particle, a single grain of sand, in a cosmic desert. And you are smaller than even the most quantumly tiny energy pattern we think sort of exists and yet does n't exist. 
 
 Now, it's technically a really complicated process to get you from this particle to the next particle. It costs a lot of energy for that kind of exchange to take place. 
 
 Traversing the entire'desert' within one's lifetime... Impossible, right? There's too much data to collect on paths, too much energy required, too much time needed. 
 
 But guess what. The real world equivalent of you, the quantum energy bits in all matter... They're always interacting. The molecules on this side of Betelgeuse are interacting with the molecules on the far end of the Andromeda Galaxy. 
 
 It's weak. Unfathomably weak. But there is interaction. 
 
 A pretty clever man once paraphrase-quoted a greater man, and said'with a lever and a place to stand on, I can move the Earth'. 
 
 Such is the potential. 
 
 We hemmed and hawed about it for a good few millennia. Nobody wants to be in the first functional teleporter. 
 
 We sent materials, and self-assembling robots to make the destination point liveable. We... Did n't really like the idea of sending our fleshbodies through a teleporter. Some did, convicts and a few unlucky soldiers went through, but... They tended to come back slightly confused and brain-damaged, some bruising in the hypothalamus that prevented them working quite right. 
 
 Then we figured out brain uploading. 
 
 Now humanity is 90 % robots-dreaming-of-their-human-brain-patterns. 
 
 We're functionally AI, although in a cheaty bastard sort of way, the'well we've got intelligence already, why not just copy that into a machine?' 
 
 The remaining 10 % of humanity are the original fleshbodies. You see, when you have a purely digital existence, breeding is instantaneous and risk-free. 
 
 You want to emulate the resulting child of yourself and Catherine Zeta-Jones? Sure! Simulations of both parents' genetics and a simulation of their childhood can be customised and designed til your resulting child exists. There are rules against lying to children, but sex is cheap and easy and free to do with anyone. 
 
 Want to see what would happen if Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill were gay lovers? There's a simulation you can do for that, and even see the result of their children if you toggle the Futa controls. 
 
 Humanity, for a brief moment, lost all its taboos, because... Quite frankly, when you can simultaneously witness the entirety of human porn in an instant and comprehend it completely and utterly, the common fetishes do n't appeal, and creative growth occurs exponentially. 
 
 Then we decided, at last, to have sex with the moon. We'd all been thinking about it for millennia, and ultimately, it was time for Luna to get a good dickin' 
 
 So, the Fetish Society Of The Nations That Were Formerly The Danish Empire built a giant robotic mech-body to take their love to the moon. 
 
 and thus humanity decided that maybe they were taking the sexual imperative too far. 
 
 And thus humanity decided to use their new robotic existence to explore and catalogue all the things in the universe using the old teleporter technology they had almost forgotten about. 
 
 They had sex with ALL THE THINGS. 

