A primal laugh for the aliens

We here on Earth are the laughing stock of the Milky Way.

Imagine an extraterrestrial craft coming from, say, Tau Ceti. A dozen light-years away. They bend the spacetime around the vessel, or something like that, and there they are.

What do they see?

We move across this rock by means of a decently controlled explosion of pressed leftovers of organisms dead for millions of years. And we direct the energy of that explosion into complicated steel, plastic and rubber patterns that is actually in contact with the surface at all times, which is another guarantee of peril. When we fly, we sit in neat rows of tight chairs installed in conveniently shaped cannonballs with perpetuating cannons roaring behind our backs. At the sea, we are actually in both worlds, a constant target of both raging elements from above and below. But the muscle that moves us on the waves does not feed from the raging elements, but from organisms dead for millions of years.

In our homes, the power comes from a cable that can be finger-tracked for thousands of miles, back to where it’s being produced (mainly from organisms dead for millions of years), or actually to any other appliance in the world.

And it’s all controlled by the few, who now, after decades of growth and development, personally have no alternative but to go on controlling it. It’s a tough world and a burden only they themselves understand.

The extraterrestrials must be killing themselves laughing. They come here for therapy. The laugh must be excruciating. Something of a primal laugh. It sets them free, because it’s not their advanced extraterrestrial personalities who are amused, but the leftovers of archetypes their species still carry deep in the pressed leftovers of their millions of years old dead subconscious. Definitely worth spacetime bending.

No wonder they crashed in Roswell. What they saw there was too ridiculously hilarious to remain conscious, as New Mexico is a major crude oil and natural gas producer, sucking on the Permian and San Juan basins like it’s our last. A glimpse at a nuclear fleet parked just out of town was the drop that spilled the cup for them.