WTF humans!

We finished off the dinosaurs with a whopping asteroid to make way for you mammals. We tinkered with your genes and got you to come down from the trees. We taught early humans how to raise crops and domesticate animals. Gave democracy to the ancient Greeks. And pulled your sorry asses back from the brink of nuclear war on multiple occasions. You owe us extraterrestrials big time.

And how do you Judases repay us?

In books, films and video games, you portray us as antisocial, psychotic killing machines with slimy exteriors and oversized craniums bursting at the seams with lethal incisors. If we’re not blowing up buildings or vaporizing humans, we’re chasing Sigourney Weaver through claustrophobic spaceships, trying to lay eggs in her.

Really?

What chaps our asses is that you’ve never even seen a real extraterrestrial. And you probably never will, given your perennially underfunded space program. But no matter how you look at it, you humans are anthropocentric xenophobes, convinced that we’re out to get you Earthlings in the worst way possible.

Listen, any life form technologically advanced enough to spare you from countless disasters wants to see you survive. And not because we’re out to harvest you, turn you into slaves, inhabit your bodies, or suck up your planet’s dwindling resources.

You might find it hard to believe, but hyperintelligent beings have aspirations other than galactic conquest. Maybe we just like to help struggling species because it’s the right thing to do. Sinister, huh?

And sometimes, those very life forms we’ve rescued turn around and give back to the cosmos. Look at what you Homo sapiens have accomplished. The plays of Shakespeare. The music of Mozart. Cat videos!

But enough is enough. We can no longer stand idly by while you trash us with tired stereotypes. We hate to issue an ultimatum, but we’re afraid it’s come to this. If you don’t change your tune, we might not feel inclined to lift a tentacle to stop asteroid 99942 Apophis from slamming into your planet in 2036. (We know your scientists have calculated that it won’t, but trust us … it will. We’re way better at math, geometry and chaos theory than you are.)

We might be persuaded to intervene if we start seeing more sympathetic, realistic portrayals of extraterrestrials. Like those in Arrival, Contact and The Day the Earth Stood Still. And less of the scurrilous depictions as in Independence Day and any movie with the word “alien” in the title.

You have 19 years to think it over. And while you’re at it, we would like an apology from Will Smith.

 

-Stan Parallax, Arcturan (and very nice extraterrestrial)