What Extraterrestrials Think Of Us
Humankind, as seen from space.
Floating in space alone can get very boring, very quickly. So sometimes, when I’m not writing, I talk with an imaginary group of extraterrestrials who call themselves Florg (or something that sounds like that). Their civilization is older than ours by a few thousand years, so they’ve solved most modern-day problems like food scarcity, clean water and diseases. With all their free time, they contemplate important philosophical topics like Life, The Universe, and Basketball.
Yesterday, over tea, they talked about Earth. Or, more specifically, about Homo sapiens, and our collective actions since we evolved. Countless articles have been written about us, they say; we are an ET favourite. For some strange reason, we even have our own TV show—Keeping Up With Homo Sapiens, running non-stop for over a thousand years. Here’s what they think of us.
Our planet.
They absolutely adore Earth, one of them tells me. This one is a tad talkative, and he says wars have been fought over lesser worlds. In fact, Earth remains unoccupied because of a long, obfuscated Land Use Agreement that someone found floating in a bottle in the Kuiper Belt four millennia ago. Most life-forms settled for much less.
Another one chimes in—you’ve got horrible taste, she says. She questions our early cave-dwelling habits, calling them “ungrateful".
She says we should have roamed the Earth, sleeping under trees and such, like our more sensible cousins, the orangutans.
“And did you have to cause so much havoc?”, one says. “Over a million species driven to extinction. And there’s more to come". I mumble a few lame excuses—that we were savages, fighting for survival, Darwinism, and stuff like that, but they don’t seem to understand.
They say our species had the slowest Agricultural Revolution in all known civilization. Almost ten thousand years, we didn’t see the obvious cycle of growth and regrowth happening all around us. And when we eventually figured it out, a younger male says, what did we do? We clustered, and formed polluted cities. Slavery, violence, tyranny took over. He shakes his head.
They liked the Romans. If there were a few more Julius Caesars in the world, it would be a better place, a female says. The rest nod in agreement.
Us.
They all ask for more tea; humans are difficult to understand without sufficient refreshment.
They admire our biologies. One of them, a female with that distinct, scientist look all over her, says that Nature outdid herself in our case. Most life in the Universe is nothing more than protozoa. The other scarce sentient forms are plantlike. The Florg themselves are very lucky; they have a distant relationship with Earth molluscs. Our waste processing systems especially. Flatulence and indigestion are still problems in many parts of the Universe, it seems.
A male recalls a documentary he watched recently, about human consciousness. Our minds are incredible, he says. Able to adapt to any situation, given enough time. Most species are much less intelligent, he adds. I feel a touch of pride at this; we aren’t all that bad.
Speaking of bad things, they had a lot to say about World Wars I and II. It was a very tense moment on Keeping Up, they say—the ultimate cliffhanger moment. One of them whispers that they’ve seen entire planets explode, and that it is quite a spectacular sight, but most are anti-violence. I’m happy to hear that Hitler had some haters across the Galaxy, too. They know where he’s buried, but they won’t tell.
In modern times, we’ve lost a lot of love with the ET community. They think we could handle global warming much better than we are doing right now. In fact, the only thing that keeps them coming back to us is our night sky, as seen from space. Beautiful, the scientist says.
At this point, I ask them why they don’t intervene. After all, with their superior technology and our human brains, we could do quite a bit. A huge male sitting behind says it’s a part of the process. Frankly, they’d watch us nuke ourselves to extinction with less remorse than you feel when watching an apple get eaten. Circle of Life, I guess.