“OKAY,” HE NODDED. “GUESS we’re this far. It was a typical day. Nothing special. Spring morning. Some of us were on duty monitoring. Some of us doing paperwork. Others were watching TV or in their bunks. I was up early that morning. Oh, and I forgot maybe the most important point.”

“Which was?” Luna wondered, leaning forward to savor his next sentence.

“Before that day, we’d had reports. Like, a lot of reports. My senior officers had blown them off. Attributed them to group-think or mass psychology of observations. I can’t recall, but there’s some psychological mumbo-jumbo about people getting convinced they’re seeing things just because others said they saw it, even though it never really happened. Mass hallucination, maybe. But some of these reports were from friends who worked at other command centers like mine. These were buds I’d get together with on occasion, though most were located hundreds of miles away. Hey, we all suffered the same ailments of being caged-in underground. Like I said, some of them did go bat-shit, and your only mode of sanity was talking with those dudes.”

“So what were the reports?” I asked.

His hands whitened as he clenched them on the glass tabletop. “Sightings. I don’t know how to tell you. Disks. Flying over the missile sites. Hovering over them. Flying around them. Staying there while you took pictures. Big ones. Small ones. Shit, I’m not even sure our analysts could tell you how big they all were. I mean, usually contrasted against a forest of trees? It’s not like we had one of those liquor store robber yardsticks out there to measure the height of a hovering disk checking out our silo. And it’s not like the disks were always consistently shaped. Some were reported to be like that awesome UFO on ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still.’ Others were like what you’d see in Flash Gordon or other movies. Lights. No lights. Slow. Fast. Wobbling. Steady. It was as if a whole menagerie of different alien species with their various spacecraft were taking their turns scoping it all out.”

“Scoping what all out?” Luna asked. Each of us at the table wondered that same question.

“The obvious,” he stated flatly. “Are we humans capable of blowing ourselves up thoroughly? Are the warheads stable? What electronics are we using? What fail-safe mechanisms are in place? What kind of fuel is in the rocket? Will we use this shit against them if they invade Earth? Will we poison the planet with them if they land here and set up shop? Geez, you can only imagine what they’d think of us.”

“They’d think we’re assholes for storing weapons that could, in one hellish hour, annihilate our species and waste the planet,” I interjected.

He shrugged. “No shit. First, you wonder if what you’re hearing has any truth to it. Then you hear enough similar stuff, from enough places, from enough good people in whispered conversations, and you wonder why these beings don’t just accelerate the process. I mean, if we’re so hell bent on defending our countries against each other and so paranoid. Shit, I could go on, but I won’t. Humans generally, excepting this table and a handful of others, are short-sighted imbeciles. If we roast humanity one very bad day in a self-inflicted nuclear oven, it’s because of that innate stupidity.”

“I hope we don’t ‘roast ourselves,’ Thomas,” Luna pleaded. “But we haven’t gotten to the point of your own experience, right? You can’t have described all of this just to say others like you saw these things, and you are only divulging their experiences. I’m guessing you had your own?”

“Oh, I had my own. Sorry to drone on. Just that you needed the background for context. Only a few minutes more. I know some of us need to get going.”

“Everyone okay to stay a few more minutes?” Luna inquired.

We all were drooling for more and nodded our heads in unison.

“So, nothing exciting is happening that morning, then all of a sudden, alarm bells start going off like nobody’s business. You see, we had multiple alarms at every site, and they were set up to independently trip. You might have a movement alarm. An alarm for air pressure changes. One for weight, like a nut or pine cone falling on top or around the perimeter. Another for sound or smoke. In this case, at site zero-thirty-four, those bells and whistles started sounding off simultaneously as if somebody intentionally tripped them all.”

“But didn’t this happen all the time?” Luna wondered. “I mean, if a bear walks over the top, I can imagine most of those alarms being set off.”

“No,” he countered. “Usually one or two might go off together, but never a dozen all at once.”

“Didn’t you have cameras there?” I asked.

“Getting to that, getting to that. So, when shit like this happens, you don’t have much time to act. You can’t tell the recon crew to hold on and give us time to test remotely and see if it’s a technical glitch. You’re under orders to grab your gear, radios, and weapons, then get moving to the site pronto. Let the techs at the control center tell you it’s a system glitch ten minutes later. But if you wait until then, maybe that ten minutes determines whether Billy and friends, or Igor and his Russian comrades, are able to cart off your warhead.”

“It can’t be that easy to grab a warhead,” I observed.

Thomas stared up at me. “Oh, it’s easier than you might imagine, assuming you took the human element out of it. Without us there, it’s only systems and alarms. And I’m not talking just us humans on the ground. Depending on the severity, we might launch helicopters to fully-loaded jets.”

“Did that happen in this instance?”

Thomas ignored me, then continued. “I was on duty and grabbed three of my team members. We jumped in the Jeep and were hightailing it toward site zero-thirty-four within a minute of the first alarm.”

“How far away was that site from your command center?” another at the table asked.

“This happened to be a close one. Twenty-two minutes out. Just a single stretch of paved civilian road to travel before getting up into the trees. I’m riding shotgun. Radio’s in my hand to hear anything from my Commanding Officer. As we’re speeding breakneck toward the site and the Jeep’s knobby tires are screaming at the pavement, the words of my buddy kept swirling through my head. He said that before they had their sightings, and they’d had multiples, the same damn thing happened at their centers. All alarms blaring at once. People checking everything to confirm it wasn’t a power hit or other incidental nuisance that got everything in motion.”

I was still curious about video. “Again, you don’t have cameras at the site?”

“Sorry, forgot to cover that. Look, even the Air Force deals with budget issues. You hate to admit, but budgets impact silos and command centers and everywhere else. You’d like to assume that we have the best of everything considering the risk of something going wrong, but you could have fooled me. So no, we didn’t have video. Do you know what it would cost to run coaxial cable and conduit out to every site? I mean, hell, the cable company has trouble doing that in a city much less some hellhole location in the thicket-thorned and snake-infested backwoods.”

“Okay, understandable,” I conceded.

“Where was I?”

“You’re in the Jeep with the others, thinking about what your friend told you,” Luna reminded him, at full attentiveness like all others at the table.

“And I swear, I’ve never gotten chills from fear before, but I felt a chill down my spine like someone just doused me with a fire extinguisher. Ever had that happen? Emerges from the canister cold as hell, just like compressed freon in an air conditioner. So, twenty minutes of driving go by, a very long twenty minutes. We’re not saying anything to each other because we’d all heard the stories. You’d have to be willfully deaf to avoid the scuttlebutt that had been spilled about UFOs during the previous six months.”

“Scuttle what?” Luna asked. “Oh, ‘scuttlebutt.’ Your stuff told in backrooms and the like.”

Thomas smiled in acknowledgment. “We’re about a minute away, traveling up this hill. You need to get the picture. We’re pushing up a crappy, pothole filled dirt road in the middle of a thick Alabama forest of tall pines and other trees and shrubs. Even though you know it’s morning, it seems like dusk because you’re dwarfed by them. And we can’t see the silo yet because it’s on the far side of a clearing at the top of the hill we were climbing.”

“Are you going fast? Slow? Do you sneak-up on whatever or announce your presence with guns cocked?” Luna asked. Like Thomas, her hands were spread-eagle and glued to the tabletop.

“Can’t tell you exactly. We have established protocols that would scare a normal person shitless, excuse my French. I will tell you this. We never, ever, arrive straight up onto the site. The roads aren’t designed that way. We have a designated point to stop at and survey the landscape thoroughly before getting closer. If it was a crew of Ruskies aiming to steal a warhead, you wouldn’t drive right up on them. You’d arrive in the most advantaged and least obvious place for you to emerge into the clearing and confront the threat.”

The waitress laid the bill on the table in one hand, while she poured Thomas another glass of water with the other. “I’ll leave this here for you all,” she said. “Sorry to interrupt.”

Still concerned about anyone overhearing the story, Thomas waited until she was out of earshot. “I’d been to site zero-thirty-four a few dozen times by then. Knew exactly where to stop, as did the guy driving. So, he slows down as usual and creeps up the ridge of the hill. We’re coming up through this tunnel of low-hanging growth like a mole emerging cautiously from its hole.”

He stopped talking. I looked at Luna as she peered at me, and we all wondered why the story wasn’t continuing.

“Are you sure you want to go on?” Luna asked. “We didn’t mean to force you or anything.”

Thomas was biting his lip ferociously. “So,” he continued slowly, “we emerge from the tunnel of trees and are immediately on flat ground, no longer climbing. I’m looking to my right to ensure the driver stopped the Jeep at the designated marker, and I hadn’t looked up yet at the site. Then the guy driving says, and excuse my French again, but he says, ‘Holy shit, what the fuck is that?’”

“How far away were you from the silo?” I asked.

His eyes were staring across the table and off into space, as if he was painting a picture in his mind. “What?” he asked.

The others at the table were a bit upset that I interrupted his punchline, so I blurted out, “Like, were you twenty yards away?”

“Oh, no,” Thomas responded, still in a daze. “We’d never stop that close. No, we were a hundred fifty yards off from the site. Just cleared the hill. And there it was.”

He paused again.

“Was what?” Luna cried.

“A fucking disk. Just hanging over the silo like they were having a good old time, eating lunch, shooting the bull, checking things out in that hole beneath them. I honestly don’t think they expected to see us, and we didn’t expect to see them either.”

“What’d they do?” I wondered.

“Understand, this clearing is maybe three hundred acres. Some swampy, mucky stuff with a small lake in the middle. The perimeter was covered with trees. I doubt they even saw us for the first few minutes because we were dead silent. Not moving. My hands were shaking so much, I couldn’t even lift my firearm from its holster. The airman behind me started to pick up his M16 latched-in along the drive shaft hump, but I waved him to put it down. Thank God, man, and maybe that’s the smartest thing I’ve ever done in my life. Can you imagine taking pot shots at some UFO because you’re scared shitless, and they don’t even know you’re there yet?”

“How big was it? What was it shaped like?” Luna was breathless, her brown face turning red from excitement. Beads of perspiration dropped from her brow, and she started fanning herself with a limp cloth napkin.

Thomas closed his eyes. “I’ll tell you what I remember. But you know, these kinds of things are shocks to your system, and you can’t tell if your mind recalls them properly. Sometimes, I think of it looking just like Gort’s flying saucer. Other times, it seemed like a rotating figure eight, like a Bernoulli shape, but in three dimensions. Hell, maybe more,” he laughed.

“But how big?” she repeated.

“Consider that we were a hundred-fifty yards away. This saucer appears to be rotating. Static in place, but rotating like it was making its own gravity, or at least that’s my assumption. And, I know you guys watch all the movies, but it was not shiny like chrome. Instead, almost white. You ever see something so shiny it appears white? Almost a metallic Bernoulli, but white metal.”

“And it was just hanging over the site? That’s all?” someone asked.

“I’d been on lots of recons by that time. I’d seen all kinds of crazy shit, but always caused by humans. The last thing my team and I expected to see was a UFO casually spinning away, maybe two hundred rotations per minute, roughly twenty feet above the silo. Crap, no wonder all the alarms were going off.”

“How long did it sit there?” I wondered.

Thomas picked his right hand up and stared at his wrist, speaking again as if dazed. “Felt like an hour. Like an hour. We checked the time after it left, and we estimated nineteen minutes. One of my crew had just looked at his watch as we were nearing the tree tunnel’s edge, then he checked right after it disappeared. I put nineteen minutes in my report.”

Luna was desperate to extract the next answer to her questions. “What were you doing during that time? What were you thinking?”

“Huh,” he chuckled. “The main thing I was thinking was that nobody better pick up a firearm. Like, I didn’t want to end up as some organic material intermixed with iron and hydrocarbon elements, fused into the ground by some gamma ray where we were parked. I whispered to my team, without moving my lips, to stay as still as possible. I didn’t want to alarm these things, especially in case they hadn’t seen us. You ever come up on a rattlesnake while running?”

“I have,” I admitted, “and a coiled coral snake as well. Running in the desert. Jesus, nothing gets your heart going faster.”

“And nothing gets you bitten faster, either,” he replied confidently. “A year before all of this, I was out running in those same Alabama woods. Stopped to sit on a log and tie my shoe. Looked down and there’s a coiled rattlesnake staring up at me, two feet away. Eastern diamondback, fully grown and most venomous. I hadn’t noticed him when I sat there, shame on me. Of course, I wasn’t running or might have just given him his space and passed by gingerly. But it was him and me, and I thought I could ignore my training. That I could just slowly get up and walk away. He thought better of it and decided to take a swing at me. A local farmer driving by found me crawling pitifully by the roadside, delirious and calf swollen up as big as my thigh.”

“My God! Were you okay?” Luna exclaimed.

“Yep. A few days in the hospital. The butt of jokes that continued during my tour of duty there. But I learned one special thing from that episode. If you come up on something that looks dangerous, and you’re not sure if it’s seen you or considers your entrance into its domain as a threat, then you don’t start your engine up and back out slowly. You just sit there silently, scared shitless, heart bursting out of your chest and all senses maxed. You sit there, tightly breathing, restricting all movements. Funny, we all had to pee so badly after it left.”

“Oh, I think it’d be more than that after seeing such a thing,” I added.

“Maybe that, too,” he agreed. “So, to conclude this long story, I should tell you how it ended.”

“Uh-huh!” Luna pleaded.

“We sat there in shitless silence watching it spin. It didn’t move over the site. I was honestly afraid my CO would radio us, and I’d have to lift my arm to answer. And if I didn’t respond to his call, you’d see a helicopter or worse descending on our site within minutes. So I was hoping to God neither he nor anyone else would radio to see how we were doing or what we found. He trusted me to take care of these things as I’d done a hundred times before. As far as he knew, this was a routine recon and we’d report back when the area was secured, or maybe even drive back first.”

“Did you radio him after it left?” I asked.

“Wait!” Luna complained. “He hasn’t told us where it went or anything. Let’s let him finish.”

“It continued the slow spinning until about fifteen minutes in. I’m not sure if it saw us or if it was finished doing its survey work or whatever the hell it was doing. Then it started spinning faster and faster, creating a hum. A little like the sound of a jet engine, or a prop engine, when it gets going. But this was super high-pitched. And I hate to tell you, but as it began to rise, like from twenty feet to forty, then a hundred, above the trees, the damn thing looked twice or three times the size versus when it was close to the ground. I’d say, if you could think of an equivalent, it was about the size of an indoor arena of maybe five thousand seats by the time it ascended. Pretty damn substantial. Then again, maybe the spinning and sound distorted things, but my team confirmed what I saw as well.”

“And?” Luna kept leading him. “And?”

“And then, when it had just cleared the tree line, it bulleted off to our left. Disappeared in three seconds, I’d say. No ship like that exists in the Air Force today or for the next hundred years. And though a rocket might reach that speed, it takes a good long time and no atmosphere to achieve that kind of acceleration. I can’t imagine the g-forces they undergo inside that. Makes you think the occupants must be either machine or biologically crafted to withstand those forces.”

“What did you do then?” I asked.

“Geez, what can you do? You stare dumbfounded at each other. You say everything you wanted to say during the scariest twenty minutes of your life. Then you confirm each other’s accounting of what just happened, or at least it was my job to do that.”

“Did you check the site afterwards?” I queried.

“Would you? Honestly? I’d heard stories of radioactivity after these visits, and I wasn’t about to risk my crew or me to check it out. No. Maybe I took the chicken shit way out. But after it left, I ordered the airman to slowly back the Jeep up, to get us under the protection of that tunnel of trees, so I could radio the base.”

“What’d they say?” Luna asked.

“Now that part, I can’t tell you. I’ve divulged probably too much already. I can say we were ordered not to investigate, that we weren’t the right guys to do this and they’d send a crew out.”

I was curious about what the protocol was in such an unusual circumstance. “So, what were you told to say about what you saw? I mean, it’s not like it was one of you having a psychotic episode. Four of you were there to confirm the experience.”

Thomas’ eyes rolled up at the ceiling. “I can tell you this much. We were debriefed, told we’d stay there another few days, then take a week’s leave, which is what we did. Of course, part of the debriefing included the usual secrecy, the standard Air Force operations lines you’d heard before. As far as I knew, it might have been the Air Force testing out new technology. But hey, aviation technology doesn’t move that fast, not unless they found a way to get something to go faster than a Saturn rocket with an instant maximum speed button. And so, the story may be anticlimactic. I’m still alive. I didn’t get whisked up and abused by aliens, though I sure as hell believe in them.”

“But what about other sightings?” Luna asked.

“They continued. Similar experiences to ours, I understand. To this day, I couldn’t tell you if they still get reports. Maybe it’s old hat by now to the alien types. When you’ve seen one missile silo, you pretty much have seen them all. I suppose they’d want to stop by on occasion, just to get a sense of system upgrades and the like. I did hear something later on that the Air Force further hardened the silos, maybe in response to these weird sightings and hoverings. But when you’re that advanced, you’ve got x-ray crap to see anything through anything, though maybe not. Maybe they’re encasing the silos in lead or something to keep the Martians from snooping. Who knows?”

Thomas rubbed his face with both hands as we all stared at each other.

“Feel better, Thomas?” Luna joked. “It usually helps to get thoughts like this off your chest.”

“Weird thing is,” he concluded, “they didn’t do anything about it. At least not yet, right? We don’t have a swarm of Gort robots arriving to shut down our sites. If they’re out there, and I’m sure they are, I’m one hundred percent sure they are, they’re just letting us move on with our lives. For them, it might be like having one of those plastic ant farms from a catalog and watching what happens when you combine black ants with red.”

“God,” Luna exhorted, “I hope they’re not that sadistic!”

***

That’s the extent of my best UFO stories after six decades of living. A few observations, however.

Humans are terminally ethnocentric. Not having perfect, verifiable evidence of other intelligent life in the universe, we make a default presumption that we are ‘special,’ as if space and time and Big Bangs or a chosen deity created this amazing miracle of life for us only.

On the contrary for the few who even ponder such things, I believe we are boringly average, especially in our penchant for self-absorbed hubris. As you age, you will conclude that virtually everything eventually reverts to the mean, implying that most things fall within a few standard deviations of the average. When it comes to life elsewhere, I place us in the first standard deviation on either side of that curve. For God’s sake, in a universe of infinity, how unique can we really be?

Why haven’t we heard anything from space that is knock-your-socks-off astounding? There’s an obvious answer we don’t want to confront. Most civilizations never move beyond the greatest filter of all, beyond the ones we thought were so impossibly difficult, like multicellular organisms. Those previous filters compare not to the concluding filter for nearly all sentient societies – where their technological advances rapidly outpace their ethical systems. These two get severely out of balance, which is happening right now, in my time, and the species encounters a terminus, and end-point. I find myself screaming out, silently, from the dark forest to almost eight billion others. I hope they are not as deaf as I believe.

Because the relative time interval this filter occurs within is so short, just decades perhaps, it is exceedingly difficult for us to capture radio transmissions or other evidence of such civilizations. Those fewer, rarer species successful enough to pass this same filter are also intelligent enough to cease blaring their presence into places and spaces unknown. Spaces most certainly populated with a plethora of organic or robotic marauders.

Consider this corollary. You’re naked in a grassland on a strange planet, and it’s a dark night. The only item you possess is a bullhorn. Now, you have no idea what might be roaming around in that grassland or how close it might be to where you are located. Harmless bunnies? Good. Lions? Bears? Velociraptors? Bad.

You get the picture. If you can move beyond your innate human primacy, the last thing you’d do is put your lips to that bullhorn. So what are the odds that when you blow the bullhorn, a friendly resident alien comes to rescue you from your predicament versus a velociraptor to shred you?

I’ll go with the Bell Curve distribution again. Friendly aliens are probably fairly far out on that fifth standard deviation. Unfriendly, survivor, predator species like lions and velociraptors are probably within the first two.

Most don’t want to think about it, but maybe many species meet their Great Filter end because they’re terminally embedded in their primacy. Perhaps the bullhorn we’ve been blowing, increasingly louder lately, is the Great Filter itself. Maybe our inauspicious fate arrives in the form of an unfriendly species holding little value in humanity per se, other than to study it a short while before scraping it from the planet to repopulate its species of choice.

And I use the term ‘species’ very broadly there. We humans are far too constricted by our concepts of how things must follow natural systems. When a species can readily modify such systems, great variations are bound to occur. Plant, animal, virus, machine. Natural, synthetic. Sentient, non-aware, or super-aware. And all combinations thereof. Despite today’s somewhat limited technological expertise, such creations are quite probable for us within the next few decades.

So we should not think in such restricted constructs. It is highly likely life has existed elsewhere for eons, and only a small portion of species have passed the filters. Once they move beyond their ancestral home worlds, the life forms they create and populate in other locations in space, including planets like Earth, is probably far outside the bounds of our limited imaginations.

I mentioned technology outpacing ethical systems. This is a favorite theme of mine, obviously, but I won’t detail it here. Assuming you, my descendant, have read thus far, I am glad to find this Great Filter did not entirely wipe us out as yet. A hopeful sign.

***

I’ll now conclude on this topic of aliens and UFOs.

In the last few years, science has proven what discerning people inherently assumed anyway. Planets are everywhere, likely occurring in most solar systems across the few hundred billion stars in our galaxy and the few trillion anticipated galaxies.

If you’re a ‘God-believer,’ you must ask yourself: ‘Why make such a vast creation if all but one planet goes unused?’ What a waste of creative effort!

And if you’re scientifically inclined and uncertain about an observant God, you should also understand that human primacy is an archaic but presumptive human trait. We think we’re special, and we pathetically lounge on that smug pedestal of primacy arrogance, draping it like a lead harness across our shoulders.

So, we have two reasons why we’ve not found evidence of other intelligent life. In one case, it’s because God created us uniquely for one planet while concurrently creating an infinite universe we’ll never access except nominally through telescopes. In the other case, humans are so special, unique, and talented, we’ve passed through all the prior filters to reach where we are today – and good old human ingenuity will get us through the next ones.

I call it all out as bullshit. As indicated, we are average. Terribly average. Average planet, average intelligence, average filter passage, average species lifespan. Countless millions of similarly sentient civilizations have come before us, and many have reached where we are. But the duration of this last filter is so short and tenuous that it is rarely captured from our celestial peers. A hundred year span of RF transmissions is no time at all. The voices of the millions of civilizations prior to us have already passed our planet or have not yet arrived. Our telescopes may never find those haystack needles.

Then again, it’s quite probable we have not heard from any others yet because humanity’s primacy is so very presumptive, arrogant, and terminally ethnocentric. Sure, we can broadcast our presence to the universe because we believe nobody else is there.

So don’t worry about it. If we’re wrong about that, they will be so far away and it will take so much time for our messages to reach them and for them to visit us, we needn’t worry. Besides, they’re probably friendly, right? As observed on Earth, nature is generally friendly, right?

Wrong. Surely, dead wrong. Nature is generally vicious at all levels of complexity, and there’s always another being at the top of the food chain or planetary acquisition chain.

I fear the fate of an average species like humans is almost always the same. We reach the Great Infinity Curve filter, and we stop there. We’re just now approaching the next filter’s perimeter in these early twenty-first century decades, and our tech is accelerating far faster than our ability to control it.

Technology enables networks. Networks enable concentration. Concentration enables convergence of power and wealth to the top of uber-controlling pyramids. It’s already happening in some countries, but I see a future of tech-controlled autocracies existing in tandem until they annihilate each other in some intentional or accidental nuclear, genetic, or AI-induced debacle.

In the thirteen-plus billion years of this universe, no doubt many civilizations have come and gone as brief flashes in the pan of space and time. As well, in an infinite universe, one can argue that a smaller but still infinite number of intra or intergalactic species should have made it past the Infinity Curve filter – likely in machine form, if nothing else.

Recently, our military released a video of a UFO as taken from a jet’s radar, among other releases. This was surprising and almost an admission that there is more to come. Perhaps it was an initial attempt at testing our adaptation and acceptability of such a thing, and we better get used to it now that so many recording devices exist on Earth.

We don’t hear from the other civilizations because they’re not so ignorant and presumptive as to bullhorn their presence. Or they’re here already. Perhaps the stories I retold have some truth in them. Maybe they’re studying us and waiting for us to fail, and if so, that must be a pretty boring wait. When you’ve seen one civilization self-annihilate at our incipient Infinity Curve filter, you’ve probably seen one too many and care not to witness such destruction again.

All these hypotheticals don’t matter, anyway, since our fate rests in our hands, as much as we’d like to assume something or someone else is responsible. Humanity has hard choices to make as these critical days pass, choices we collectively fail to recognize that we even need to make.

Lastly on this topic, maybe they are already here and haven’t exposed themselves in any grand or obvious way because our hubris doesn’t allow us to request their help. It could well be they are out there, watching and waiting for that day when we make a plea to them in a form something like this: ‘We’re failing badly and need your help. But we’re proud, so we don’t want too much help. Our hope is that you will assist in preventing us from annihilating our species. Help us leap over this next Great Filter.’

‘Indeed, we have some good points among all the negatives. We’ve made it this far and have shown some nominal potential. That’s something we’d like to work on. When it appears our species is about to crash and burn, please intercede at least by that time, if not sooner."