"The stars look beautiful today."
/they are imperceptibly different from yesterday, Twenty.
"And they were beautiful yesterday, too."
/I was under the impression that humans become desensitised to extremes - beauty, horror, pain. Is this untrue?
"No, not really. I mean, if it was a painting or a song, I might become a bit desensitised, but the stars are different."
/I do not understand. Is it because it is not made by humans?
"I don't know. Maybe partially. Iso, people have looked at the stars since we were smart enough to make tools. Probably earlier. In all that time, we never got bored of seeing them. There's something so... I can't think of the word. Ephemeral? They're so far away, and intellectually I know that they are truly gargantuan, but sometimes they look like you could just reach out and... There are so many of them. I think that's part of it. You could spend your whole life counting them and die before you got anywhere close."
/so it is their number that makes them beautiful? Their uncountability? I could generate a string of numbers larger than you could count in a lifetime. Would that be beautiful?
"No, it's more than that. It's... How long have we been out here, Iso?"
/8 years, 26 days.
"8 years. And we're basically going at the speed of light, right?"
/ninety nine point nine nine three percent.
"And after eight years, these stars look no different to me than on the first day. I'm sure they have changed, and you could probably tell me the exact angle and distance, but that doesn't matter. Eight years of nearly-light speed, and we haven't seen a thousandth, a trillionth of the universe. After I die, and my children die-"
/you do not have children, Twenty.
"Hush. After my children's children die and their children's children's children die, all of us combined wouldn't have seen a trillionth of the stars. The universe is just so vast, so utterly incomprehensibly massive and unending and beautiful and the stars look like they've been laid out at random, but that's just because of our perspective."
/I still do not understand why this makes them beautiful. I can identify a beautiful person by the symmetry of and distance between their facial features, or by their knowledge and behavior and moral standing on various key topics. I can identify a beautiful painting by the colour used or the preciseness of the sketched lines or by algorithms based on ratios between focal points. And yet I do not understand why the stars are beautiful. I have searched my databanks and while I have determined that they are indeed beautiful, I cannot find any solid reasoning behind the claim.
"I don't know, Iso. Maybe that's why they're beautiful. You can't quantify it."
/they are beautiful because a convincing argument for their beauty cannot be made? By that logic, Twenty, you are perhaps the most beautiful of all things.
"Haha, ouch, Iso. You know, sometimes I forget you can make jokes."
/I understand jokes. While I do not understand why they are humorous, the concepts of wordplay, irony and subversion of expectations makes crafting jokes relatively easy.
"Aaaand you ruined it again. No matter how many times I tell you; don't explain a joke."
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