Keep off, you carbon units

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 24, 2017
Keep off, you carbon units

Re: “An open letter to alien life forms on earth,” Opinion & Analysis, December 23.

Attention, earth-based carbon units: We have read your amusing screed begging us to contact you. I have been authorised to respond as follows.
We are a species inhabiting a galaxy so far, far away you don’t even want to know about it. For several of your centuries, we have been monitoring your planet. We have determined that nothing – and nobody – on it is worthy of our interest. We continue to monitor it just in case something significant might eventually emerge. Given your past history, we are not optimistic.
Why haven’t we contacted you? Well, we are looking for intelligent life in the universe. When we find it, we shall contact it. Need I say more?
Our prolonged ongoing survey of your species’ evolutionary progress has convinced us that you are too slow. It will take several mega-aeons for you to become worthy of even beginning to interact with us. I point to recent evidence of your backwardness to make my case. Consider the eternal warfare in what used to be called your Middle East, where once-beautiful cities have been reduced to rubble and entire populations have been slaughtered or displaced. Look at your heedless desecration of your own planet: its air, its water, its earth and even its climate. Think of the number of species you have driven to extinction and the moral calibre of some of the leaders you have chosen. 
Our most recent observations reveal that much of your population has been so reduced in intelligence that they now spend most of their time staring at, and interacting with, little hand-held rectangles. On a more trivial level, the vitriol that surfaces in this column alone would suffice to make you unworthy of our attention. So don’t be impatient, carbon units. Don’t try to contact us. If you’re ever ready, we’ll contact you. Don’t hold your breath waiting.
310-5463-1798
For the Intergalactic Command, Sector 2790, Quadrant 4