time capsule to be opened in the year 620 million (our eclipses were cooler than yours)

hey, person reading this

you… decoded? English?

i assume my species is extinct?

are there still primates?

mammals?

things descended from?

bits of our genetic sequences carried on by viruses?

machine progeny?

anyhow

hello!

whatever you are

evolved descendant of…

cockroaches?

mushrooms?

birds? (eternal return of the dinosaurs, amirite?)

whole fuckin’ sentient, reading forest-things??

i’m dying to know!

are you in the next biosphere iteration?

we cause a mass extinction, life starts over,

and beauty and intelligence ratchet on up

to you?

or are you the iteration past that?

have there been two mass extinctions between me and you?

anyhow!

i’m honored to have you reading my words, all these eons later

thank you thoroughly for minding my missable missives

you must have dug really deep

your catalog of our era must be nearing completion

how did you find this?

continents have drifted!

many of our cities are in the magma now

and the storage media we used for these words were, uh, not known for longevity

so i’m truly impressed

and humbled

and i won’t waste your time any further.

what i want to say is:

our eclipses were cooler than yours.

they were total.

yours are only partial!

the moon in our era was just the right distance to blot out the whole disc of the sun.

just that cute lil’ corona poppin’ out.

what, you’re not impressed?

what, you have traveled to other worlds with this shocking coincidence of identical apparent-moon-size and apparent-sun-size?

what, you have giant orbital solar arrays or space stations that eclipse the sun? just every now and then, as a treat?

as a necessity?

as a weapon?

i suppose you also know what the sun’s corona even is?

because we didn’t, lol.

our total eclipses let our astrophotographers take really cool pictures

but our best scientific minds still had no idea how even—

how’s it so hot out there?? millions of degrees hotter than the surface???

can you reverse time capsule us some deets?

our minds are blown

our mouths are gaping

the moon has danced a path across our planet,

(from which none of us ever escape)

and we rented out all the Airbnbs (don’t ask) in its path

and declared states of emergency

to watch it break the sky

blot the sun

fool the birds and bugs and

cool the day and

weird our vision and

cast dappled crescent sun spots on the ground through our trees

(holy shit what sort of trees do y’all have now btw???)

and i guess y’all still have that part

but i just need you to know

our eclipses

were cooler than yours.