A Letter To The Last Human On Earth

A Letter to the Last Human on Earth

By Abdullah,

If you are reading this, it means the world has outlived us all — all but you. I don’t know your name. I don’t know your face. I only know that you exist, and for now, that’s enough.

This letter was encoded into the memory banks of the last remaining satellite, endlessly orbiting the scorched shell we once called Earth. It was designed to find you, should anyone remain.

I write to you from the year 2187. Or what used to be 2187. Time has since become irrelevant. The days no longer rise and fall the way they used to. The sun is a distant flicker behind the clouds of ash, and clocks are just relics of rhythm we once understood.

When I was a child, humanity still believed it was untouchable. We wore our progress like armor — cities taller than mountains, machines smarter than minds, and weapons more powerful than gods. We lived like kings and died like fools.

The Collapse began slowly. First, the oceans rose, inch by inch. Then came the famines, the wildfires, the mass migrations. Borders dissolved. Nations fell. And then… the silence. The kind of silence that rings louder than war.

I was a climate archivist — a fancy term for someone who collected the dying breaths of ecosystems and filed them into databases no one would ever read. I once watched the last polar bear die in real-time. It lay down on a shrinking ice sheet, curled into itself, and disappeared beneath the surface. I filed that moment under “Extinct: Ursus maritimus.” I cried. Not for the bear, but for the fact that no one else did.

Before the end, they tried to save us. Artificial biomes. Underground cities. One-way rockets to Mars. But humans were always better at dreaming than doing. In the end, the rich fled, the poor stayed, and the planet didn’t care either way.

I stayed behind. Not out of bravery, but guilt. I was one of the architects of our memory, and it felt wrong to leave the ruins behind. I wandered through dead cities, writing poems in the dust on broken windows, speaking to the wind as if it remembered me.

And now, there’s you.

Are you the child of survivors? A sleeper in some cryo-pod that finally blinked awake? Or are you something else entirely — more evolved, less human, a whisper of what we once were?

Do you remember what it meant to laugh until you couldn’t breathe? To share warmth with another body, not for survival, but because it felt good? Do you know the sound of music, the taste of strawberries, the feel of grass under your feet?

Or are those things just myths now?

If you’ve never known these things, let me tell you: they were real. They mattered. The world, broken as it was, held moments of impossible beauty. I once lay in a field of wildflowers as a meteor shower danced overhead, and for a moment, I believed we might make it. We didn’t. But maybe you will.

This letter isn’t meant to haunt you with memories. It’s meant to remind you that you’re not a ghost. You’re a continuation. A chance. You carry in your blood the mistakes of billions — and the potential to do better.

If there’s anyone else out there, find them. Touch their hand. Look into their eyes. Speak. Build. Mourn us if you must, but don’t worship us. We were deeply flawed. We built wonders and burned them down. We loved, and we destroyed. But above all, we hoped — foolishly, fiercely.

Now that burden, that gift, is yours.

I don’t know how much longer I’ll last. My bones ache like ancient tree roots, and my breath comes shallow these days. I write this beneath the dim glow of solar lamps, surrounded by dusty shelves of books no one reads. I sleep with an old globe next to me, spinning it some nights like I’m asking it to remember.

So, if you find this — if you are still out there — promise me something.

Don’t just survive.

Live.

With wonder,
With courage,
With the weight of all we were,
And the light of all you still could be.

Yours,
Elan Mora
Archivist of the Lost World