I went to observe an alien planet the other day. It was pretty amazing just how strange this place ended up being. Really put things in perspective for me.
First, let me describe their planet. They’re literally living on an explosion; the only thing keeping it from engulfing them is a thin rocky shell. Doesn’t seem very safe, and the only reason they have this shell is that the whole planet is surrounded by absolute freezing cold; makes Hoth look like a cruise ship. They’ve managed to carve out a tiny, tiny niche where they can live, but it’s constantly under siege from the heat and the cold, so they have to constantly adapt to survive. They’ve come up with some mind-boggling stuff to help them achieve this goal.
Now, the aliens themselves, they’ve managed to colonize most of the habitable zones on the planet, and their cities are amazing! They somehow invented a way to defy gravity so as to stack hundreds of thousands of living units on top of each other, extending up to the very sky! And each of these living units contains the most wondrous technology!
I saw devices that held the entire history and knowledge of the species just lying around where anyone could access them. Multiple units had full musical bands playing in their living rooms for free, at concert-level quality. These aliens could control the very elements in their units, and they had access to such abundant resources, they could afford to throw food out every day, spoiled or not, without a care for where more would come from. Honestly, it quite offended me at the time!
To make matters worse, these creatures had plenty of resources to go around, but they still kept trying to kill each other for them, which wasted more resources in the process! It seemed absolutely insane to me; anyone could see that if they just worked in concert, there wouldn’t be a problem, but they stubbornly insisted that their way was working the way it was supposed to. In fact, they even trained their young in how to kill each other. Needless to say, this left me aghast.
When they weren’t busy indoctrinating their young in ignorance and hate, these aliens (whom I was now beginning to rather despise) were quite eager to sacrifice their most able-bodied and intelligent in wars and war simulations, despite the large cost involved. It almost seemed as if they had absolutely no vision beyond their immediate environment, like a leech blindly questing around itself, constantly searching for food, confident that the bounty will last forever.
Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t all bad—there were some bright spots amid the madness. Quite a few of the creatures would connect through the omnipresent planetary communication network, and they created communities to help one another. Still others would send warnings and alarms when they witnessed something bad happening, and everyone in the whole vicinity would converge on the area to help out. Most of them wanted nothing more than to be left alone in peace; common enough, I suppose.
I would be remiss, though, if I failed to mention the rare few among them who dared to dream. They wondered what was out in the stars, how things worked, what other aliens they might meet (they didn’t know I was among them), what brave new worlds awaited. You would think that these would have been the leaders of this planet, but the aliens (so strange, even still) believed that popularity was the true determinant of competence—they mainly tolerated the dreamers with a pained acceptance. To this very day, I still do not understand why they valued popularity so highly; I can only imagine it must be ingrained into their young at a very early age.
Finally, my time grew short, and I had to leave the crazy little planet and its bewildering inhabitants. I don’t know that a lot of what I saw made much sense, but I know it sure was a learning experience. Hopefully we will never meet those lunatics here!