We Have A Bright Future/But Not As Ourselves Poem by Shalom Freedman

They tell us
We have a bright future
But not as ourselves
We are going to become something else
Perhaps many different something elses
And spread intelligence throughout the galaxy
And then perhaps through the universe
Our humanity will only have been a chapter
In the story of life and the story of mind
And we will be long gone
When on and on and far and far
Our artificial descendants send their algorithms
Only as far as our too fast expanding universe
Will let them arrive to.