Hi, everyone!

So here’s the deal:

Let’s say there was an alien civilization far more advanced than our own. They exist across multiple planets, if not galaxies. Their scale is far beyond something we can comprehend. Their numbers dwarf that of ours. Their bodies allow them to be stronger than us. They can fly and survive immense gravitational pulls. Their technology allows them to build cities on gaseous clouds and beneath the harshest of surfaces. Their cities are efficient and always-growing. They can harness the power of entire stars to the benefit of their society. They are less random and do not bicker between one another. They are expertly hierarchical putting the strongest of human militaries to shame, the same way we can put a line of organized ants to shame by stepping on them. Their language does not stop at speech. They communicate with one another on a deep and unimaginable level, harnessing electromagnetic whatever-the-hells. They are a networked society with deep access to each other’s minds and use their linked minds to advance their society at a speed we could never comprehend.

In short: They are better than us in every possible way. And it’s scary. The way our very presence scares a bird away.

Now, would you want to meet a civilization like this? Would we, as humans, be interested in meeting the aliens we have forever longed we would find?

I think not…

Let’s zoom in to ourselves a little bit. On Earth, we are the best, the strongest, the expert communicators, the beneficiaries of all of Earth’s resources. We are hierarchical but with the capacity to change and shift as our societies boom and grow.

What have we done, as the greatest civilization we have ever known? We have explored with our minds and our hearts to create technologies we could never dream of, and art that moves us to our very core. We have merged the advancements of the mind and the beauty of our hearts into beautiful… products? How did we make those? Humans have ravaged the planet that feeds them to come up with increasingly complex products and services. We have abused each other, whether enslaved by each other or with money, and have taken from Earth with little regard for the animals and creatures that called the trees, oceans, and skies home.

Which, by the way, might not be a bad thing from our perspective. I mean, without the resources that allow me to sit here and communicate with all 3 of you, I… would not be doing this. But life is definitely more enjoyable that I can do this and that I want to do this.

And, sure, to a certain extent, it’s easy. Why would we care how we destroy the Earth if it benefits us? Even the want to save the Earth’s climate is likely more about us than it is about the planet. As for the animals that live in their resource-rich habitats, they can’t make noise. They’re mostly dying in silence, sometimes on farms. And then we eat them. And we are all the more ignorant of it. You can’t be sad for what you can’t see or hear. As humans, we are in a position of absolute unquestionable power and we are the true masters of our own fate on Earth. 

By the way, you might argue that it is God who is the master of our fates, and your faith would be respected, but I’m not going to entertain that here because I’m speaking only about what humans have been able to do with the power afforded them by their sheer brilliance.

Anyway, as humans, as the masters of our own fate and our own planet, we have bent nature to our every whim and desire. Even, to an extent, the nature of each other. Economies are driven by greed as much as their balance is held by scarcity. Our social structure has been torn apart turning us from hunter-gatherers to self-serving labor. Our emotions are understood and used against us and we have very few limits to the degree of information we can hold and use. But, of course, we are consumers of resources. It’s a very normal thing to want to consume resources to try and quench our bottomless thirsts.

Going back to the aliens, there is very little reason to believe that they would not be greedy as well. And planet Earth is a gold mine. With vast oceans and lifeforms and sources of energy, Earth would not be far behind the Sun or other stars as one of the best places to turn your eyes to if you were an ultra-intelligent, inter-galactic species living on multiple planets of varying types of climates, gravities, and so on. We’d be zero match for them.

They’d look at all our metals and see value… For themselves. They’d look at our oceans and desalinate them… For themselves and their crops. They’d look at us and… What do we do to animals? They might hunt us and eat us. Or find a way to farm us. Imagine a farmed human: All our nuance reduced to insemination and death. Men would truly not even matter anymore. You could inseminate every woman with a handful of men, genetics be damned. You can be certain a lot of them would be curious to taste us and all the other animals on our blue and green planet. We would be reduced to the same animals that we shrugged off when we tore down their habitats.

Aliens, in concept, are a curiosity but are also scary to me. I would be hesitant to celebrate a day we find aliens but I would definitely be terrified if an alien civilization actually managed to find us. If we can tear through the planet with our technology, what’s to stop another civilization from doing the same? Why do we think we are so special that a civilization would humor a human-infested planet? They’d rather kill us than try to integrate with us, I’d imagine. Finding us would already absolutely guarantee the aliens’ superiority to us. So what could we bring to the table? Maybe they’d treat us like we treat pet dogs, if we could be trained well enough.

Of course, they’d never hurt each other; We are also very averse to harming our own kind. But them killing us? The less they know about us, the less they understand us, and the more valuable our resources are, the more likely they are to kill every last one of us until one of their more sensitive and liberal folk save a few of us for a zoo on Jupiter or something, putting us in an Earth-like habitat while our true home is completely taken apart for their benefit. And maybe only then will they attempt to understand our quirks, stripped of the nature we needed to be able to excel.

I mean why not? I get that it seems pessimistic but it kind of makes sense, doesn’t it?

In a way, the vast emptiness of space is a safety but also a trap. It would take a truly advanced and incredible civilization to be able to make their way to us. Since that seems very very very unlikely, I’m glad we don’t have to think about what a trap it would be if we were actually found.