0. Don’t worry. The fact that you are reading this implies that your universe exists.

We recognize unease regarding the blink. This is normal. Anxiety is to be expected. The following list of considerations has been created to address this understandable concern.

1. Don’t worry. What you are about to experience, though becoming common, is not actually physically possible. It is a well established scientific principle that the amount of energy required to accelerate even a single colonizing vessel beyond light speed is more than the energy contained in the entire universe.

2. Nonetheless, it will take your vessel seven impossible blinks to reach one of the first-wave colony worlds. We are working to bring that number of impossibilities down to one or two, but for now things are gravitationally complex at either end of the journey. Smaller blinks are easier to calibrate.

3. Don’t worry. You will not feel anything. The thing you will not feel is the energy required for each impossible blink being siphoned from a network of neighboring universes.

4. Don’t worry. The drain is randomly distributed across universes that lie closest to our own on the higher-dimensional multiversal manifold. Some universes contribute very little of their total energy. Others contribute all of theirs. It is mathematically impossible to determine how much energy is contributed by any single neighboring universe.

5. Remember: the multiverse is an inexhaustible resource. Quantum mechanics implies that each minute variation in our own universe spawns a new one. This means in the moment it takes you to ponder the ethical implications of siphoning energy from neighboring universes, the processes of consciousness alone—the variations of the billions of quantum states involved in thinking—have generated another trillion universes.

6. Of course, if you are still troubled by the ethics of sacrificing entire realities for the sake of instantaneous travel, you are welcome to join the relativistic colonizers venturing outward in hibernation ships for the thousand-year journey to the first-wave colony worlds at a fraction of light-speed. You may find comfort in the knowledge that a centuries-long dreaming will birth billions of realities from variations in every conceivable aspect of your dreaming.

7. In addition, consider that there are countless universes in which you decided to board a relativistic colonizer vessel, even if in this reality you are choosing to blink. And there are billions of universes in which various versions of you are blinking.

8. Don’t worry. The statistical probability of any one particular universe (this one, for instance) being siphoned of energy to allow for a blink in a neighboring universe is effectively zero. (If you are still worried, please see the first item at the head of this list.)

9. Consider: this is the universe in which we get there. This is the reality that endures. Every decision creates universes that this you is not a part of, universes from which you are permanently excluded. Those alien universes for all intents and purposes do not exist for you and for everyone else in your own universe. You owe those universes nothing. Let them be the fodder that gets us to the stars.

10. The first-wave colony worlds are waiting. Don’t worry.