Remarkably Bright Creatures: A Novel by Shelby Van Pelt - 3

The level of ego and emotional centricity in the human species knows no bounds.

How else could we feel compelled to assert that the Sun, Moon, and stars revolve around us, affecting our financial circumstances and our romantic lives? The entire pursuit of astrology, with its horoscopes conceived by professionals who channel a caring universe, is among the most egocentric things we do. Although, in all fairness to everyone before the telescope was invented, the skies themselves aided and abetted our delusions of centricity. We even retain geocentric phrasings that preserve these notions. Instead of asking, “What time does Earth’s rotation bring my location on its surface into view of the Sun at my horizon?” We simply ask, “When is sunrise?” I’m all for the simplicity as a quaint remembrance of cosmic ignorance. But such shorthand comes with risks for people who take such phrasing literally.

How else could any of us believe that the creator of the universe cares about when and where you worship, who you mate with, or what foods you eat or don’t eat and what time of day you eat them?

Out of concern that rampant UFO sightings might test the faithful, the conservative magazine National Review featured an article in 2021 titled “UFOs Don’t Cancel Out Christianity.” 1 Practically speaking, Christianity is a two-thousand-year-old religion with billions of followers. It’s not going to close for business simply because there might be Aliens. Although if your brand of Christianity today matches that of the Catholic Church up to the year 1600, when Bruno was burned, then Aliens just might make you lose your religion.

Imagine a pair of Aliens, perched halfway across the Milky Way, staring at a dense star field, and one says to the other, “See that distant star? The one that’s indistinguishable from a billion other stars just like it? On its third rock in orbit, there’s a species that’s certain the whole universe was made just for them.” To visiting Aliens, we are just one of many life-forms on Earth. We sport a rectangular middle with four appendages sticking out from within, topped by a round bulbous thing with a front-facing hole that emits sounds. Not a master plan for animals on Earth, just one of many. Insects have six legs. Flying insects have six legs plus wings. Birds, bats, and anatomically correct dragons I have two legs plus two wings, having forfeited their forelimbs to fly. Snakes have no arms and no legs and they can see in the infrared. Arachnids and octopuses have eight legs. Centipedes have dozens. Millipedes can have hundreds.

So, when wondering what we might look like to Aliens, we must first abandon all our preconceived notions of self, and we must especially abandon our unbridled human hubris. Only then might we imagine what the Alien’s first impression of our planet and of us will be. Some hubris presumes we’d make immensely interesting objects of study for them, accounting for their persistent pursuit of our body orifices. Or maybe what’s manifesting is not human hubris but Alien curiosity. Are they behaving any differently from my Natural History Museum colleagues, who specialize in the physiology of all manner of animal species on Earth, from worms to spiders to primates?

The eighteenth-century French philosopher, writing as Voltaire, II explored some of these themes in his playfully imaginative novella Micromegas (1752). 2 He’s writing after the discoveries of Isaac Newton, so gravity and motion are well understood. And by then, the microscope and telescope had become staples of scientific inquiry for one and a half centuries. Unconstrained by the then-unknown limits of biophysics, Voltaire comedically confronts our provincial senses of size, time, and life itself.

He describes an Alien called Mr. Micromegas, who hails from a huge planet that orbits the bright star Sirius. Micromegas is 120,000 feet (23 miles) tall and loves to explore. He has a huge, brilliant brain, and lives for more than 10 million years. He and his fellow Sirians wield a thousand senses, and it’s all completely normal to him—until he travels the Milky Way Galaxy and comes upon the planet Saturn in our solar system. There he meets one of its dwarf residents, the secretary of the Academy of Saturn, a man standing a mere six thousand feet tall, with a brain just a tiny fraction the size of his, and who lives a mere fifteen thousand years. These poor Saturnian souls wield only seventy-two senses. Micromegas wonders how a creature so small, with so few senses, could have any intelligence at all, and is surprised to learn they do. They become fast friends. But the Saturnian, ready to leave his home planet with Micromegas to explore some more, learns that the female ruler of Saturn yearns for him to stay because they had just begun a promising relationship:

“Cruelty! After resisting you for 1,500 years, just when I was beginning to come around, when I’d spent hardly a hundred years in your arms, you leave me to go on a voyage with a giant from another world.”

She continues, exasperated:

“Go, you’re only curious, you’ve never been in love: if you were a true Saturnian, you would be faithful. Where are you running off to? What do you want? Our five moons III are less errant than you, our ring less inconsistent. It’s over, I will never love anyone ever again.”

Her reaction, especially coming from a Saturnian, sounds like it could be summarized by a single line from Beyoncé’s 2008 hit song “Single Ladies”: If you like it, then you shoulda put a ring on it .

Unrequited love be damned. Off they go, equipped with scientific instruments. Next stop, Earth. After they eat a mountain, they wade ankle-deep in Earth’s oceans, and have occasion to pull out their microscopes. The Sirian’s is 2,005 feet in diameter. The Saturnian’s just 160 feet in diameter. Both were intrigued by a whale swimming in the waters, tiny as they are, and “began laughing… at the ludicrously small scale of the things on our planet.” Next, they lift from the water a sailing ship, about the same size as the whale they just examined. The Saturnian utters, “Here is a very different animal from the first.” In this threesome, the humans are the most Alien of the bunch. Micromegas can’t believe his senses. He—

clearly saw that the atoms were speaking to each other. He could not hear the atoms talk, and he supposed that they did not speak. Moreover, how could these impossibly small beings have vocal organs, and what would they have to say? To speak, one must think, more or less; but if they think, they must therefore have the equivalent of a soul. But to attribute the equivalent of a soul to this species seemed absurd to him.

Lastly, sizing up the Saturnian and the Sirian, the Earthling shared with great confidence his own view of the universe:

He looked the two celestial inhabitants up and down. He argued that their people, their worlds, their suns, their stars, had all been made uniquely for mankind. At this speech, our two voyagers nearly fell over… with laughter. Their shoulders and their stomachs heaved up and down, and in these the Sirian… spoke to them with great kindness, although in the depths of his heart he was a little angry that the infinitely small had an almost infinitely great pride.

Hailing from a brilliant mind in the age of enlightenment, fantasy that was—fantasy this is. But it benchmarks so many assumptions about who or what we might be to visiting Aliens.

On the small end, perhaps the tiniest Aliens ever conceived came from the mind of American astronomer Frank Drake. In a December 1973 interview, appearing in Astronomy magazine, Drake imagined Aliens that live on the surface of neutron stars. A neutron star is the small, dense end-state of stellar evolution for a high-mass star that has gone supernova. What were once atoms, comprising empty space between the nucleus and the orbiting electrons, are now nuclei packed cheek to cheek, after nearly all the electrons and protons are crammed together to make neutrons. For reference, if the nucleus of an atom were a kernel of popcorn in the center of a baseball stadium, the baseball stadium would be the size of the atom. Yes, atoms are mostly empty space.

A ball that is almost entirely neutrons, a mere dozen miles across, packs the mass equivalent of the entire Sun, creating the densest material known in the universe. Cram a herd of twenty million elephants into a sewing thimble and you’ve matched the density of a neutron star. That density renders a surface gravity so high that to ascend the thickness of a sheet of paper you would exert more energy than would a rock climber on Earth ascending a three-thousand-mile-high cliff. Drake’s account in the interview is even more stark: “If you work it out, the amount of energy required to climb [a] half-inch mountain exceeds the total energy your metabolism can produce in a lifetime.”

These Aliens would be made of nucleons, the subatomic particles that live within the nucleus of an atom. For practical purposes they’re ordinarily protons and neutrons, although each is comprised of more fundamental particles called quarks. Combining the density, the high gravity, the forces at work, and the particles involved, nuclear fusion would be common, allowing many combinations of nucleons with all the complexity we find in atoms and molecules that gives rise to life as we know it. The surface temperature of a typical neutron star can reach hundreds of thousands to millions of degrees. Those temperatures break apart all molecules and strip atoms of all their electrons, leaving naked nuclei zipping about at nearly the speed of light. Naked nuclei thrive in this high-temperature environment. That’s why Drake imagined nucleonic Aliens that live for only fractions of a second, running through many generations every moment.

In the spirit of Voltaire’s Micromegas , Drake inverts our perspective on what is normal:

For all we know, out there on a neutron star there’s a scientist who is the size of a pinhead describing something which is even more bizarre. He may be trying to show that there could be life “out there” in those places, the ordinary stars, which are very high vacuums to him. It just could be that it is not they who are preposterous, it is we.

And what might the scientists be saying among themselves?

“Our theoreticians have predicted things called atoms… almost empty space… we never thought they could exist but they seem to exist out there. Could there be life? Suppose those things bond together to make a big molecule? Well it wouldn’t be alive. After all, the temperature is too low and everything happens so slowly that nothing ever changes.” 3

Voltaire would be proud. And yes, it’s not all that hard to imagine Aliens whose worldview precludes any awareness or even acceptance of our existence.

The award for dissing humans comes from a 1991 short story titled “They’re Made Out of Meat.” Sci-fi writer Terry Bisson imagines a conversation between two ethereal Aliens—whose state of existence is not revealed—as they debate how humans can possibly transmit radio signals, even though they’re made entirely of “meat.” 4 Later in the dialogue, one Alien attempts to describe how humans communicate with each other:

“You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat.”

Kinda makes you embarrassed to be human.

What if Alien civilizations made movies that feature Aliens? Are we the Aliens in that scenario? In their stories, do we lay waste to their homes and slaughter with abandon? Do they fear us? What do we look like to them? Consider Los Angeles, a large city heavily crisscrossed by major freeways, many of them twelve lanes wide. Hardly anyone ever walks anywhere. People are content waiting in their cars on slow lines to obtain fast food handed to them through a window. They eat the food while still seated, never exiting their vehicles. If Aliens landed in Los Angeles, their first impression might be that Earth’s dominant life-form is the automobile. An obvious conclusion. When one gets injured, another version of that life-form shows up to haul it away and get repaired. Some of the larger life-forms on the freeway carry multiple automobiles within them. To the Aliens, these car haulers are surely pregnant.

And if they happen to see a human exit from a car, that’s just the vehicle’s squishy middle emerging from its own exoskeleton. Curiously, the invading Aliens in H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds were in fact small squishy creatures nested within mobile attack weaponry.

Or maybe the Aliens first land on our waters. Seventy percent of Earth’s surface is water, dominated by miles-deep oceans that grant Earth an extraordinary environment to manifest its biodiversity. Learning this, the Aliens would surely presume Earth’s dominant life-forms to be aquatic. The largest whales sport brains around seven times the mass of the human brain. So, if Aliens figure out that brain size is where the action is, humans would not necessarily be their object of interest. By that measure, we’re fourth in the animal kingdom—whales, elephants, dolphins, then humans, two of which live in water.

As detailed extensively elsewhere, 5 in biology class we were told that humans have the largest brains as a fraction of body weight. But there’s our ego again. After realizing we don’t in fact have the largest brains in the world, we invoke some math-magic to get us back on top. That fact, however, applies only to large mammals. If we include any and all life-forms in the brain-to-body-weight-ratio contest, then ants win (come to think of it, they do walk around with huge heads), followed by the tree shrew, then small to mid-sized birds such as crows, the magpie, and some parrots, followed by the elephant fish, then humans. Yes, we come in fifth by that measure, in a photo finish with mice. 6 This ranking would not go unnoticed by brain-focused Aliens.

If the Aliens happen to be plant-based rather than flesh-based, they’d be astonished to learn that all humans kill living things for their sustenance. All they’d need during their journey to Earth would be “grow” lamps for photosynthesis. As plant life, they wouldn’t ever need to eat anything. They wouldn’t have kitchens at home, nor restaurants in their towns. The idea of sentient plants has not escaped creative storytellers. The cantankerous apple trees in the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz are sentient. So too are the old, wise, and contemplative Ents in The Lord of the Rings series from the 1950s. Fast-forward to E.T., from the 1982 film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial , IV and then on to the lovable, barely literate chunk of driftwood named Groot, from the 2014 film (series) Guardians of the Galaxy .

If the Aliens are chickens, then Americans are in big trouble. We hatch, raise, slaughter, bring to market, buy, cook, and eat one million chickens per hour—for every hour of every day. And the only thing worse than getting killed by an Alien is getting eaten by an Alien.

Aliens of any stripe might be further surprised to learn that humans spend one-third of their lives—one-third of each Earth rotation—in a limp, unresponsive, semicomatose state. For many of us, uncontrolled fantasies unfold in our minds with little foundation in objective reality. To the Aliens, the fact that we sleep and dream might be one of the odder features of being human.

Aliens may be intrigued that we make sounds in our throat that travel through the air and get interpreted as information by others who can hear us. Of course, maybe they make sounds too. Many insects, birds, and mammals communicate with one another in this way. But it seems only humans can generate single-syllable sounds—simple vibrations of air molecules—that completely offend other humans. We call these sounds “curse words.” Witnessing such an exchange, Aliens might look at us the way I looked at British culture when I first learned that the adjective “bloody” is offensive, vulgar, and never used in polite company. On the flip side, it would be hilarious if we were visited by cussing Aliens. That would surely endear us to them, and perhaps them to us.

Also, to an Alien, it’s not obvious in a first-glance snapshot which direction our physiology works. Do we develop in caskets underground, get exhumed by a gathering of people, and spend the rest of our lives shrinking, until we disappear inside another human? Are children simply tiny adults? Or do children, with food and nurturing, ultimately grow to become adults? The answer would require a long-term study of us, or the Alien’s ability to read our biology and physiology textbooks in advance.

In the classic 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still , starring Michael Rennie, released just as the Cold War was heating up, Aliens visited Earth out of great concern that civilization’s rapidly growing nuclear arsenals would put the safety of peace-loving planets in jeopardy elsewhere in the solar system. They arrive in a shiny flying saucer, with a ramp, of course, that extends to the ground. Two Aliens emerge. Both humanoid. One in human form, the other a silver robot. There’s no obvious threat to us, but of course we bring out the military, brandishing weaponry, including an army tank—all summarily disintegrated by a ray beam emanating from the robot’s head. In a rare reversal of Alien motives, we are the threat. It is we who put the lives of other cosmic life-forms in danger. And it is we who must be stopped. The humanlike character ultimately meets up with an Earth scientist as they compare notes on their mutual problems and challenges. Had the encounter taken place at the beginning of the film, the army might not have lost a tank. The 2008 remake takes place seventeen years after the Cold War and could no longer rely on the threat of nukes to drive the plot. Instead, the Aliens valued Earth’s biodiversity, declared rare in the Galaxy, and worth protecting at all costs. The film included a plan for the complete annihilation of humans, whose callous treatment of Earth puts the planet’s biodiversity at risk. Like the original, this one was in-your-face sci-fi social commentary, forcing us to see ourselves as evil.

This line of Alien thinking is commonly invoked by officials and others to account for why UFO sightings are so common over US military installations. The Aliens are monitoring the buildup of our military arsenals, concerned for their own safety and perhaps for ours. If that’s who we are to the Aliens, then what might we be to ourselves?

Unlike all other animals in Earth’s tree of life, humans invest boundless time and money changing their appearance for one another. Stand too short? Wear heels. Breasts too small? There’s a surgeon for that. Hair too straight? Curl it. Hair too curly? Straighten it. Hair where you don’t want it? Remove it with lasers, one of the great inventions of the twentieth century. Crooked teeth? Get them straightened. Stained teeth? Get them whitened. Eyelashes too short? Glue on longer ones. Cheeks too pale? Add blush. Hair too dark? Lighten it. Hair too gray? Color it. Facial blemishes? Spackle them over with makeup. Too chubby? Burn fat at a fitness center. Muscles too small? Pump them up at the gym.

Aliens, upon observing these uniquely human rituals, would surely conclude humans think that humans are natively and hopelessly ugly, in desperate need of regimens to look like somebody else. Humans have always worshipped at the altar of beauty, from the Greek gods to supermodels to movie stars. A lucrative industry cultivates and preys on our insecurities, fantasies, and dreams of making ourselves more attractive. Observant Aliens might also find it curious that as a show of affection, humans occasionally press their open mouths together and exchange saliva.

Enough about our frailties. What about our planet?

Humans often refer to Earth as a haven for life. A generally true statement that does not apply to humans. Every nook and cranny has got something living there. If not macroscopic animals, then microscopic microbes. Aliens will surely notice that most landscapes are uninhabitable by us. Drop a naked human at a random longitude and latitude on Earth and chances are, you’re dead within hours, or sooner. This includes the Arctic, the Antarctic, the open ocean, and 10 million square miles of sandy deserts. Where and when humans do thrive it’s because we surround ourselves with artificial shelters—homes that shield us from the cold of winters and the heat of summers. When outside our homes, we wear clothes that insulate our warm-blooded bodies so that Nature does not kill us from exposure to hostile weather. Add air-conditioning and heating, and these tactics allow humans to live across much more diverse environments than do most other life-forms on Earth. But the fact remains, Earth does not nurture human life. We thrive despite Earth’s efforts to kill us. Something to notice if you’re an Alien visitor.

Aliens might also wonder why all whales and dolphins of the same species can communicate with one another, but humans on Earth speak seven thousand different languages. And even when they speak the same language, they speak in a multitude of dialects, as noted by the British author Oscar Wilde in 1887: “We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.”

And if there’s anything left of your ego, observant Aliens might also notice that our digestive tract is home to trillions of microbes, happily dining upon our waste products in the absence of oxygen. More bacteria live and work within one centimeter of our lower intestines than the total number of humans who have ever been born. In spite of what we think of ourselves, the Aliens might notice that to bacteria, we are simply dark, anaerobic vessels of fecal matter whose purpose is to sustain a vibrant gut biome.

The subject of Aliens occupied many episodes of the original Twilight Zone television series (1959–1964). At the time, the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union had just begun, turning the exploration of space into a force of ambition and imagination for us all. Like any well-told short story, in the end our assumptions and expectations get upended. My favorite episode among them, “The Invaders” (1961), 7 portrays a rustic, middle-aged woman living alone in a small, isolated, wood-burning farm home. One night she hears mechanical sounds on her roof, as though something had landed there. For the whole episode, she is in a state of high anxiety as she fights two tiny invaders who have arrived in a six-foot-wide saucer as they wield advanced tools to break into and invade her home. She ultimately kills one of the Aliens, and in a final act of fear and desperation she climbs to the roof and bludgeons the saucer with a hatchet. This episode, which otherwise had no spoken words, ends with panicked radio communication from the surviving Alien:

“Central Control. Come in, Central Control. Do you read me? Gresham is dead. Repeat, Gresham is dead. The ship’s destroyed. Incredible race of giants here. Race of giants. No, Central Control. No counter–attack. Repeat, no counterattack. Too much for us. Too powerful. Stay away. Gresham and I, we’re finished… finished. Stay away… stay away.”

In this final scene, the camera slowly pans across the craft, revealing the US Air Force insignia on the side, labeled “Space Probe No. 1.”

In an earlier episode, “Third from the Sun” (1960), 8 the plot is bathed in Cold War fears. Nuclear annihilation is imminent—anticipated within forty-eight hours. To avoid this fate, two government workers plot to steal the country’s latest spacecraft and escape with their families for a safer destination—some other planet that can sustain life. In their scopes and their computers, they identify the perfect place: the third planet around a distant star. That distant star is the Sun. And that third planet is Earth.

How might they have found us?

In the 1970s we formally and purposefully announced to Aliens our precise location in the Galaxy. Back then, NASA launched two identical spacecraft— Pioneer 10 and 11 . After a gravity assist from Jupiter for Pioneer 10 and a gravity assist from both Jupiter and Saturn for Pioneer 11 , they were each imbued with enough kinetic energy to escape the solar system entirely. On the remote chance that one day (one century? one millennium?) these crafts would be discovered by Aliens, NASA affixed a corrosion-resistant, nine-by-six-inch gold plaque to each probe, etched with cryptic symbols and pictograms. Also depicted is a schematic of the craft itself, as well as two unclothed figures of a European man and a woman shown in correct size compared to the spacecraft itself, thus offering the Aliens a sense of how big (or small) we are, relative to the space hardware we created. The man holds his right arm upward in a greeting pose. When you think about it, to non-humanoid Aliens, those figures might be the least recognizable, least comprehensible things on the plaque.

Suppose, however, that the Aliens who recover the plaque are indeed humanoids (as are most Galactic Aliens in the Star Trek universe) and they enjoy wearing dapper clothes. They might react differently, declaring that humans are just like them, except humans run around nekkid, with no pubic hair.

The plaque also displays a spider diagram giving the directions and distances to the brightest pulsars—rare and distinct and easily identifiable objects across the Milky Way. That map is our return address, enabling Aliens anywhere in interstellar space to triangulate on our location and find us.

Seemed like a good idea at the time.

Today, you probably wouldn’t give your email address to strangers in the street even though they’re your own species. Yet here, we’re offering Earth’s cosmic coordinates to potentially evil Aliens.

Not to worry…

The lower pictogram represents our solar system, with the Sun on the left. We see the spacecraft’s trajectory, launched from the third planet, as it passes Jupiter and Saturn on its way out to deep space. All nine planets are there, in correct order, but not to scale, either in size or relative distance. The plaque was conceived in the 1970s. But by 2006, Pluto was deservedly demoted, reducing the number of bona fide planets in the solar system from nine to eight. More importantly, the solar system harbors six moons larger than Pluto, Earth’s Moon included, none of which are portrayed in the pictogram. So if evil Aliens seek to become our overlords, and they survey our region of the Galaxy, they would be completely confused by the eight planets and six huge moons they see in our actual solar system. The Aliens will surely pass us by, in search of the nine-planet star system portrayed in the plaque, leaving us undisturbed, making Pluto the savior of all mankind.

If they somehow did find us on a map, there could be other reasons why they’d decline our invitation. On October 3, 1957, the number of artificial satellites orbiting Earth was zero. On October 4, 1957, that number increased to one, with the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union. That number has grown steadily over the decades, and exponentially in recent years, rising through 15,000, most for commercial use. That number includes at least 3,000 defunct satellites. 9 But that’s not all. The full orbital inventory includes rocket and satellite debris, comprised of booster stages, lost wrenches, purposefully destroyed satellite parts, and paint chips, which vastly outnumber the satellites themselves. NASA tracks more than 25,000 objects larger than a softball. 10 The estimated population of particles bigger than a marble is approximately 500,000. The number larger than a pinhead exceeds 100 million. All moving at 18,000 miles per hour.

What could go wrong?

At those speeds, even pinhead-sized debris carries one hundred times the kinetic energy of an AR-15 rifle bullet. And the total mass of all debris orbiting Earth is rising through ten thousand metric tons. We are enshrouded, cloaked, encased by our own detritus. Earth’s orbital space has become a lethal shooting gallery not only to our own satellites but to any Aliens who might want to visit, leaving them to question our wisdom and foresight as a space-ambitious culture. Regardless of those hazards, Aliens could still learn all about us without ever entering Earth’s orbital space.

One may be surprised to learn that humans have been sending messages to Aliens since the 1930s—all in the form of leaked radio and television broadcasts. As chronicled in the 1997 film Contact , starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey, among the first and strongest broadcasts came from Hitler’s rallies in Nazi Germany. These signals have been traveling at the speed of light ever since they escaped Earth, filling an ever-expanding “radio-bubble” rich with information about our culture, social mores, and our treatment of one another. By now, the outermost signals have washed over thousands of known exoplanets. Any intelligent, tech-savvy Aliens living among them, equipped with highly sensitive receivers, might be able to decode our earliest broadcasts, including Hitler rallies, Amos ’n’ Andy, Howdy Doody, Flash Gordon , and The Honeymooners , in which the main character, an otherwise loving husband, would occasionally threaten with clenched fist to punch his wife so hard that she would ascend into space and collide with the Moon.

The 1999 film Galaxy Quest , with an all-star cast, may have portrayed the most benign radio-bubble outcome we could hope for. An octopoidal race of Aliens known as Thermians take on a human appearance to blend in when they arrive at Earth after intercepting our science fiction TV shows, such as Star Trek. The Thermians want to meet the brave Captain and crew, having presumed the signals they intercepted from Earth are real and that we actually have starships that cross space via warp drives.

There you have it. A selection of embarrassing and misleading first impressions we will make on eavesdropping Aliens. And there’s nothing we can do about it. If we manage to recover from those first impressions, and they still choose to visit us after dodging our orbital space debris, our goal will be to convince the Aliens that among Earth’s biodiverse creatures, we’re the smartest ever and that we’re worthy of their attention, admiration, and respect. But upon seeing evidence of rampant irrationality in human civilization, in which humans oppress—or kill—one another over which creator of the universe they worship, or who they sleep with, or what side of an arbitrary line on Earth’s land masses they’re born, or how absorptive their skin is to sunlight, or what set of sounds come out of their mouths, the Aliens would surely rush home and report no sign of intelligent life on Earth.