Aliens, Coronavirus and Planet Earth

The alien spacecraft swept low over the colorless moon of Earth, and settled into its trajectory to make soft landing on the planet itself. Inside the craft, the alien was not so much an individual, more one of millions of components of the exogenous brain, the interconnected intelligence of their civilization that traveled throughout the universe, constantly communicating, multitudes of nodes thinking as one with all the others in real time. An anthill of sentient being, and more knowing that we may ever know.

The aliens knew that most, but not all civilizations annihilated themselves for three reasons that fed on each other. Only a very few civilizations survived their own fumbling attempts to kill themselves. Firstly, when science on any planet managed to split the atom, they invariably developed nuclear weapons, and the aliens knew that nowhere in the universe had any weapon ever been developed that was not eventually used. The awesome power of nuclear mass destruction, coupled with the other two driving forces of planetary annihilation, were oftentimes irresistible. In one famous case, so many nuclear devices were detonated that an entire planet was thrown off its axis and crashed off into the outer darkness, leaving its atmosphere behind, and taking with it all of the dead protagonists. The aliens knew from radio broadcasts from Earth that the humans called their balance of nuclear power Mutually Assured Destruction, but without a trace of irony in the acronym, MAD.

The second cause of planetary self-immolation was exactly that. Once a civilization discovered fire, it was harnessed to serve three basic needs: light, heat and power. But once the beings got busy busy, they started wildly burning through the thin mantle of hydrocarbons on and just under the surface of the planet, the living beings of previous times that had taken millennia to accumulate: the remains of other animals, of plant life, and of their own ancestors. And through their carefree burning of fossil fuel, the species eventually raised global temperatures exponentially, melted their polar icecaps, raised sea levels and lost most of the land mass on which they lived. Oh, and compromised the planet’s atmosphere, on which their lives depended. Forced migration, a lack of potable water, great storms, forest fires, famine, pestilence and plague resulted in wars for survival. It seemed odd that there were hundreds of eminent scientists among them pointing all this out, but not enough paying attention to them, or perhaps the wrong ones: their leaders did little real leading, and hardly ever showed long term thinking amid the concerns of short term election cycles. 73,000 fires set in the Amazon rainforest for commercial gain this year. Way to go, President Bolsonaro. When was the last time you saw the sky from your palace? Truly it was most odd, and difficult to fathom if you were yourselves a rational species.

Both of these challenges were greatly worsened by the third syndrome that killed off most species of medium intelligence. The aliens had visited some 100,000 years earlier, during a time the humans would later call the Stone Age. Human life was run entirely on the basis of existential fear: fear of dying, fear of the dark, of hunger, cold, wild animals, and most of all, of any other human who did not live in your cave. They surely must be after your food, your women, your cave itself perhaps. And with brutal violence, you had better kill them before they killed you and yours. This was stirred to a high pitch by the cave leaders, who built their power by stoking the fear of outsiders: “They want what is yours. They want to kill you. Do what I say, and I will keep you safe.” Life was cold, dark, hungry and brutal. Average life expectancy in the Stone Age was 27 years.

Of course, it did not feel good to reveal that you were scared stiff most of the time. Better to dress up all the fear as hatred, which gave the leader and you a sense of agency, of being a bit more in control. And it was helpful in stoking the hatred to come up with easy visual identifiers so you could keep track of whom the enemy were supposed to be this year: skin, hair, facial shape, body sizes, as well as suspiciously different clothing, the way they sounded, the gods they worshipped, and whom they loved. You didn’t actually know or experience any of them, probably a good thing for your cave leader selling the hatred, because it was much easier to make you fear and hate others if you didn’t get to know them. If you got to know them, you might realize that they were as scared as you, and just trying, like you, to raise their kids, feed them, and not die. They also yearned to be left alone.

And back then of course, the prefrontal lobe of the human brain, the rational thinking part, had hardly begun to develop. Thinking about long term consequence was not possible when you ran your life from the amygdala, the reptilian back of the brain that was binary in the options it presented, fight, flight or freeze. And of course, in males younger than 25, the prefrontal lobe was not fully developed even in 2019. Which was handy for leaders sending the young men off to die in wars. Strange, the females got the front part working much earlier and saw the whole picture. But the men did not much listen to them.

The aliens thought all this was perverse, irrational and deeply fascinating. They knew from radio and television broadcasts that humans had analyzed their own DNA, the double helix of their ancestors that they carried throughout their own bodies. So the more educated of them knew full well that every single human being, all 7.7 billion living on Earth, descended from a single woman, their common ancestor who shared their DNA and who lived in East Africa around 120,000 years ago. The aliens wanted to know how humans could hate their cousins, other relatives, their own ancestors? Did they not realize that when the great migrations happened over tens of thousands of years, the humans who went north and south to parts of the planet with less sun lost some of the melanin in their skin... but still carried the same DNA? But they were their relatives. An enigma for sure, thought the alien mind. Why demonize ‘other’ by melanin in their skin? Why not height, or weight? Our aliens had heard of Samuelson’s Law: “You can take the humans out of the caves, but you cannot easily take the caves out of the humans.” Our alien would have nodded, if they had a head.

Well might you ask why the aliens did not give up on humans, why did they not believe on massive evidence that they were well on the way to self-destruction? Well, because the radio and television broadcasts revealed that there were a precious few among them who spoke out heroically and attempted with different degrees of success to put the brakes on the runaway train of self-destruction. They were few, but impressive. The aliens wanted to know if other humans paid them any attention yet.

And in the end, the Aliens knew they could reverse the rampant spiral to self-annihilation, and force a planetary pivot by introducing a viral challenge that would force a re-set, a reboot, for species of medium intelligence and their leaders who had lost or had never developed the rational ability to think and act long term, nor the social structures and leadership to save themselves by thinking ahead, by facing facts. It was regrettable to have to do this, to intervene, to bring the Aliens’ Burden to bear, and as the spacecraft moved towards touchdown, the commander still hoped to avoid the need for an intervention. But they would do whatever was needed to preserve the lifeform. They cared, because caring was rational and they had the means to force the pivot, painful though it would be.

As the alien observed curiously empty streets, everyone apparently confined to their homes, they wondered what exactly was going on… could the humans have created their own pivot? Fascinating, they thought.

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