Now I understand everything about aliens: why do we keep waiting and waiting for them, but they are still not there? It won't happen like that...
Arrived - couldn't find it
The interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, which entered our Solar System last year and passed relatively close to Earth in December - on a cosmic scale, of course - differed in many characteristics from ordinary comets.
An unusual ratio of substances was discovered in its composition, and gas jets forced especially impressionable observers to talk about course correction. The object seemed to be exploring the surrounding area and looking for someone. Astronomers debated its nature, the public debated its possible extraterrestrial origin, and a familiar suspicion immediately arose around NASA: the agency knew much more than it was telling.
But everything is already clear to me. The mysterious guest who flew from the depths of the galaxy was an artificial device. His desire to move far away from the Earth and the Sun at a speed of about 70 kilometers per second means only one thing.
The guest continued his search because he did not find any intelligence here. There was a lot of biological life on the third planet from the Sun. There were difficulties with the reasonable one.
Is this what they need?
Well, really, think about it: can beings who have mastered galactic travel seriously consider creatures that call themselves humans to be their own kind? What is there here that would make them want to linger and learn what is reasonable, good, and eternal?
People populated the Earth, learned to obtain everything they needed for a good life, and then used a significant part of these opportunities to destroy their own species. For thousands of years they have been killing each other because of power, wealth, faith, other people's opinions and sometimes just because they can. To the true mind, the explanations look rather unconvincing.
“Virus” that eats the rudiments of the mind
Money was invented as a universal measure of value to exchange goods and services. Convenient working tool. But at all levels of so-called human civilization, this instrument gradually turned into an instrument of oppression and at the same time a cause of war.
It looks crazy, but the fact is obvious. People endowed the fictitious measure with an almost independent life. The money supply is growing, money, like viruses, multiplies in a specially prepared environment, and its main orderlies are those who are most interested in infection.
The more money there is, the more persistently they demand new methods of reproduction. The production of useful things becomes just one of them, and far from the most exciting. Profit appears much faster where you can sell expectation, fear or the right not to be afraid for some time.
Conditions are not created so that people as a whole can live better. It is much more profitable to make money on pain, fear and addiction. The auxiliary tool has become the most powerful drug, and instructions for its use are printed directly on the banknote.
Pay so you don't die
People have managed to surround even the reasonable intention to preserve nature and mitigate climate change with financial structures. Electric cars, solar panels and wind farms are needed, but alongside them an industry of promises, subsidies and political lobbying has rapidly grown up. In it, saving the planet sometimes looks like a by-product of a properly designed investment project.
Whoever first convinced politicians to adopt the necessary rules was the first to get money flowing. The rest were asked to pay for the changes through taxes, tariffs and new mandatory purchases. The good intention has not disappeared anywhere. It simply became an advertising slogan above the cash register.
Renewable energy is not a magic button. It works well as part of a sustainable system that can store excess electricity and release it when the wind subsides and the sun goes about its business. Without storage, networking, and control, simply adding more panels and more wind turbines can become an expensive way to spend money. In Estonia, the hope for subsidies sometimes sounds louder than the turbines themselves.
An alien inspector would probably note this separately: the technology is there, the goal is declared to be noble, but the financial report was the first to be plugged back into the socket.
Some fools will be sent to Mars
Now large investments are being made in the development of artificial intelligence. Its capabilities are advertised as if humanity has already assembled a spare mind and all that remains is to coordinate delivery. In fact, it is a powerful working tool that excels at collecting and processing scattered information. However, another financial universe is already being built around it, where income is quite real, and intelligence is still only assumed.
The name itself flatters a person: if intelligence is artificial, then the creator already has natural intelligence. Meanwhile, the machine does not answer the old question: why is all this needed? It only quickly collects the answers that people have accumulated and confidently offers one of them as the most likely.
Receiving sums unthinkable for an ordinary inhabitant of the Earth, investors are simultaneously preparing settlements on the Moon and Mars and searching for traces of life that disappeared millions of years ago. It’s as if on our own planet all questions are already closed.
The search for ancient bacteria on a distant planet is considered high science and is generously funded. A living person who has nothing to eat today turns out to be a task too mundane, complex and poorly suited for a ceremonial presentation.
There is enough fertile land here to feed the people, but people continue to starve. But there is always enough money for weapons, and each subsequent model must kill faster than the previous one. For the interstellar commission this probably looked especially convincing.
Because why?
Boasting of reason and new technologies, people remain powerless in the face of volcanic eruptions, droughts, floods and hurricanes. Where there: heavy snowfall is already called a disaster. And yet, huge amounts of money are again being spent not on the safety of those who live here and now.
Technologies can show the path of a hurricane in advance, measure the movement of the earth's crust and display a warning on the phone screen. But between warning and saving a person, roads, houses, services and someone’s decisions still stand. It is in this area that the human mind invariably asks for additional funding and rescheduling.
Does all this resemble the behavior of intelligent beings? Thinking abilities are especially poor among those who have risen to power and now make decisions for others.
Estonia provided a good example. When adopting amendments to the Gambling Law, the people's representatives did not notice the disappearance of one word. As a result, a tax hole has emerged for online casinos. Probably no one really read the amendments - or read them in such a way that the result turned out to be indistinguishable from the unread text. Prime Minister Kristen Michal has proposed using artificial intelligence in the development of laws to prevent such mistakes from being repeated. Maybe, if all hope lies in artificial intelligence, it’s time to replace the deputies entirely?
You can start with local governments. In Narva, elected deputies just recently promised to work for the benefit of the townspeople. Now the two groups are constantly butting heads with each other and at the same time preventing them from fulfilling their own promises. An alien might mistake this for a complex control ritual. But judging by the speed of removal, he figured it all out.
So it turns out that there is no intelligent life in the literal sense of the word on Earth yet. The mind here has not yet reached a state suitable for interstellar communication. And no one sane will come into contact with an aggressive species that spends its best inventions on its own destruction.
Because why?
It is very sad, but no intelligence has been discovered on the third planet of the solar system.