Greetings, citizens of Earth.
My slimy colleagues and I come from the planet ZOR-T4, and we do not come in peace. We’re here to decimate your civilization and plunder your planet’s resources. Our Council of Elders conducted an exhaustive study of Earth, and, unfortunately, you do not meet our standards for acceptable planetary existence. And so we must destroy you.
The Council was displeased with humankind’s rampant wars, vast socioeconomic inequality, and habit of saying “Pretty good!” when another human asks you how you’re doing, even if you’re not doing pretty good. What’s up with that? Why even ask the question if you’re all just going to lie to one another? It makes no sense.
We’ve learned over time that destroying a species must be a precision operation. You can’t just zap a planet with a big laser. Well, technically, we could zap any planet we wanted with our big laser. But then we wouldn’t be able to harvest that planet’s valuable resources. So our big laser generally goes unused.
Something we’ve done on other planets to facilitate extinction is install an impulsive imbecile as the leader of a country with advanced military technology. On planets like yours, which are already predisposed to tribalistic self-destruction, putting a raging cretin near a large cache of weapons is often the best way to insure destruction. Imagine our surprise when we saw your current state of political leadership. It was then that we knew we’d have to take a less conventional approach if we wanted to destroy Earth.
Another method of planetary annihilation that has worked for us in the past is accelerating a planet’s climate crisis. We had a whole plan laid out, where we’d get to use our big laser (finally!) to melt your glaciers and polar ice caps, causing rising sea levels and devastating weather events. But it turns out you’ve already melted most of those things on your own. In fact, you’ve done more damage than we could ever do ourselves. So, yet again, our prized big laser sits idle.
We then thought that we could make medical care on your planet prohibitively expensive by hoarding all of your medicine and artificially raising the costs of basic prescription drugs. This would cause a majority of your civilization to die out. But you beat us to that, too. You folks should really consider destroying other planets, given what a good job you’ve done destroying your own.
There has to be something you haven’t done to Earth yet. Maybe we could disrupt your food chain by wiping out most of your wildlife. You know, to collapse your complex network of ecosystems that have been billions of years in the making? Oh, you’ve already eradicated most life on Earth without our help? Right.
Wait, I know! This one’s really diabolical. A few planets ago, we introduced artificial-intelligence technology and got the planet’s inhabitants dependent on machines to do all of their work. The machines then gained sentience and destroyed every living thing in their wake. Wait, what are those shiny rectangles you’re all holding? They track everything about you, and you can’t exist without them? No!
Why won’t you just let us destroy you? Is this some sort of advanced defensive tactic whereby you bring yourselves within an inch of complete destruction in order to dissuade us and then, as soon as we’re gone, you’ll quickly fix your planet? That can’t be it, since you don’t seem to be taking any preparatory steps to reverse the damage you’ve done. What kind of game are you playing, humans?
You know what? I’m starting to think that Earth doesn’t have that many resources left for us to plunder, anyway. What a waste of time this all was. Pack up the big laser, gang. Let’s go find a planet that can still be destroyed.
Bob Vulfov, November 5, 2019
The New Yorker
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