| Mail for ET |
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To: Extraterrestrial Intelligence
We are a carbon-based multicellular life form breathing oxygen in an environment of dihydrogen monoxide.
About 8 million circumnavigations of our star ago our ancestors split off from a peaceful tree-dwelling relative of ours.
Only recently have we realised that we are probably not alone in the galaxy.
As we are all afraid of our individual death and do not know what we are here for, we have invented numerous myths that we call Religions. They were meant to give answers to the deep questions about our existence and our surroundings.
But some of us, we call them Heretics, disagree that this is the best way to get our excessive fertility under control.
Now we are also in the process of depleting our resources, both the renewable and the non-renewable kind. Thus we are pulling the roots of our own lives. Simultaneously we eliminate the evolutionary potential of all the other biological forms on our planet, that we summarily call non-intelligent life.
Each of our various religions thinks it represents the only true way to find God. Many of them try to extend the circle of their influence. War and terror are some of their means to achieve that goal.
Although we are making progress in the study of natural science and of our own history, there is no decrease of the influence the myths have on our behaviour.
The level of intelligence in our species encompasses an appalling range.
To plan our future we install representatives from our midst, whose mission is to organise our society. Sometimes they are groups, asked to follow given laws, sometimes it is individuals, who make their own laws. We call them governments or dictatorships.
Another of our problems is represented by weapons, in particular those of mass destruction.
We need you to make the use of weapons impossible.
In case you have intercepted our space probe Voyager 2, please disregard the message contained therein. The description of ourselves on the golden disc is wrong. It does not refer to the state we have brought our home planet to. In the meantime, the speaker of the message has been recognised as responsible for crimes of war.
If you are capable of visiting us, you must be more intelligent than we are.
With our shortsighted planning we are unable to avoid our premature demise.
Please invade us!
From: Earth
Via: S.E.T.I.
Subject: Mayday
Our home is the third planet from the main sequence star Sol.
During the last 0.00001 percent of our history, we are actively working on the destruction of not only our species, but all organisms on our planet we call Terra. The tree-dwelling cousin was just our first target. We call him The Missing Link.
Now we put our last hope on your intervention.
Religions are laid down in books we wrote long ago. On their pages we promise ourselves another, better "life" after death in the presence of a higher existence called God. In most of our religions God resembles very much us, as we were at the time and place each myth was invented.
Our God orders us to kill as many as possible of our fellow beings and their children, especially if they do not belong to our religion.
Overpopulation is our main problem, it has resulted in terminal crises for many of our endeavours.
Instead of decreasing our population by directly influencing fertility, we are producing ever more effective weapons to kill ourselves in ever more efficient ways.
Some religions maintain the female of the species to be inferior to the male. As a result, the females are repressed by the males.
This situation must be difficult for extraterrestrials to understand, especially if they are told that in our species the male derives much pleasure from the act of copulating with the female.
The feeling of lust during reproduction of the species is one of the main reasons why we are suffering from excessive population pressure.
Nature once ensured our survival by giving us pleasant feelings when we eat, drink or fornicate. But we have unbalanced the equilibrium by applying scientific discoveries to massively increase our life-span without simultaneously reducing our birth-rates.
Had nature linked our biological conception with pain, we would probably have died out before becoming capable to destroy our planet.
But the process of reproduction is painful only for half of the species, the females when giving birth. As females are considered inferior, the males accept the situation.
While there are those of us, capable of unravelling nature's laws, from the particles of the atom to the structures of outer space, many of us do not even know about the connection between conception and childbirth.
Our various forms of government all select their top figures by methods which invariably identify the most unsuitable individuals. Their programmes surface as incompatible with the long-term future of the planet.
We now have about fifteen times the amount needed to annihilate all life on our planet, ready to be used.
Our leaders tell us weapons are needed for what they call "defence". So they make them widely available. So they are used by all those that have a minor disagreement among themselves. The outbreak of this disease we call War and Terrorism.
Our "conventional" weapons rely on the spontaneous oxidation of compounds we call explosives. Their expanding gasses were meant to make holes in the bedrock of our planet by their inventor, one of our scientists. He had realised too late, what horror he had brought over us and was so heartbroken about the misuse of his invention, that he gave away much of his possessions even after his death. Once every time our planet orbits its star, our most intelligent representatives receive rewards for their ideas from the dead inventor. Some of the rewards are used to improve weapons.
If you are more intelligent than we are, you have successfully negotiated your period of self-destruction. Tell us how we can survive our crisis.
We desperately need temporary dictatorship from outer space.