Dear Aliens, we are doing our best.
Back in February, Obama casually mentioned on a podcast that aliens are real, though, to be fair, he also admitted he hasn’t actually seen any. Very reassuring. Whether humanity is ready for that revelation is one thing, but honestly, the bigger question is whether aliens are ready for us.
Trying to explain human life to an alien would be funny. Take something basic like explaining food: we need energy, so we eat. Simple enough, until it isn’t. Because after carefully fueling our bodies all day, we then lie down in the dark for about eight hours and basically shut ourselves off. Not in a clean, efficient way either, our brains decide that’s the perfect time to start playing completely random movies, where we’re often the main characters. Sometimes they’re amazing, sometimes they’re terrifying, and sometimes they make absolutely no sense. There’s no way to control it, no way to skip it, and somehow it’s essential. If we don’t do it, we turn into irritable, barely functional versions of ourselves. So yes, as a species, we’re essentially running on food and mandatory nightly hallucinations. We even eat gummies shaped as bears to make sure we can sleep. Some drink tea, some say the best thing is turning on the TV: a pre movie before the subconscious movie. And that’s just physiology, belief systems are even worse for us humans.
Because humans have managed to split themselves into countless groups over almost everything imaginable. Some people believe in a higher power, actually, many higher powers with different names and forms, even though no one has ever seen them. Others believe in nothing at all, which is already a strange concept, but it gets weirder: those same people usually don’t believe in aliens either, meaning an actual extraterrestrial standing right in front of them would still count as “nothing” in their worldview. Naturally, both sides think the other is ridiculous. The “nothing” group laughs at the “God” group for believing in something they can’t see, while the “God” group thinks the “nothing” group is absurd because, if anything definitely can’t exist, it’s… nothing. So humanity ends up stuck in this endless loop, arguing over two concepts that are equally impossible to see, touch, photograph, or properly define.
The way we organize time? Uuuufff, where to begin? We humans track time using a system that is partly scientific, partly historical, and partly “we just stuck with it.” So there's this thing about the Earth going around the sun, which is reasonable enough, that’s a year. We divide that into months that used to follow the moon cycle, but not really anymore, so now the lengths are kind of uneven just for tradition’s sake. And then comes the really interesting part: the calendar. At some point, we decided to count years based on the estimated birth of a man called Jesus Christ. He is said to have lived over 2000 years ago, and many people believe he was the son of God. Others believe he was just an important historical dude. Either way, his supposed birth became the zeroish point of our timeline, except it’s not exactly zero, because there is no year 0. We just go from 1 before dude straight to 1 after dude, which is mathematically bold. So right now, we believe to be in 2026, since we think it’s roughly 2026 years after that the cool dude. So naturally, we built our global timekeeping system around something we’re not even fully sure of. Yes, exactly, alien friends, an entire planet coordinating business, science, travel, and daily life using a timeline based on a historical birth, calculated slightly incorrectly, divided into uneven time chunks. But you know what is cool? This is by far our most organized system. We tend to fight over everything else.
I think that at that point, any reasonably intelligent alien would reconsider first contact, head straight to their ship, asking us to sort ourselves out first.
/Jun26