RICK WAS FEELING ESPECIALLY rushed and knew his haste would result in confusion for the recipient beings.

“They’ll have to tolerate it,” he concluded as he readied his recording equipment. “They can’t possibly understand the pressure I’m under, the need for speed, and my excuse for these repetitive thoughts and un-edited, oft-erred prose. In the past, I always took the time to do a quality job. The engineer within. But in this case, I must achieve the right quantity and screw the quality. However, I must stop fretting about my unordered and unordained delivery of this material and its repetition. They’ll figure it out. Have faith, buddy.”

“I’m back at it, my friends. Yes, humans are flawed,” he began, “and a key flaw was our insistence on assumed primacy. This tentacled belief system encompasses multiple aspects, so I’ll describe what it means.”

“We assumed that we were the prime species – certainly on our planet as well as solar system, likely in our galaxy, and probably in the entire universe. Placed upon our own pedestal of dominion, we looked around and saw nothing else. At least until a few months before the Great Debacle.”

“There was a seminal event in August 2037. Until that time, we had no credible evidence that sentient life existed elsewhere in the galaxy or universe. We only had very spotty things like suspected Dyson spheres and planetary bodies of other stars providing certain indications of advanced life through their atmospheric gasses and spectrometry.”

“We also captured occasional, repeated signals. These were celestial oddities like short radio bursts that were nonsensical to us. Nothing we could do allowed us to interpret what these were or why they existed. In fact, nothing since the Debacle has convinced us otherwise.”

“In addition to these celestial oddities, we had earthly oddities. Images captured on radar from credible sources. Photographic and personal evidence of flying objects of unusual speed or capabilities. However, nothing ever came from these. It was like obtaining evidence of a killing with blood, guns, and witnesses, yet neither a victim nor a murderer.”

“In our haste to recover from the devastating aftereffects of the Debacle, we quickly abandoned all space development efforts. Too focused on preventing the next cataclysm, our governments stopped supporting extraterrestrial research from organizations like SETI and its partners around the globe, among other projects.”

“It was rotten luck that many of the world’s best astronomers were not in isolated, safe places like observatories on mountain peaks during the Debacle. They were in their research institutions, universities, homes, or elsewhere in the cities, and most of them died. Another large segment of human brilliance and hopefulness forever wasted in less than a week.”

“Apologies for continuing to digress to this catastrophe. It’s so defining to who I am any longer, or to who any of us are. It is the only pole around which humans are equally tethered, longing to be freed from its hideous grasp. However, I can’t lose track on the concept of assumed primacy.”

“Perhaps it began in our early days as thinking, pondering beings looking up to the sky and assuming a great god or gods enabled it, the seasons, and the magic of nature to exist. From that start, we told stories, we wrote books, and we envisioned gods who said we were created in their images. We could not fathom that a god might be any different than us, save for its omniscient godlike qualities. Oh, and we wrote stories about how segments of us, the true believers, were the chosen ones, in the early days of our collective illnesses.”

“This assumed primacy percolated throughout our societies. As we became more science-oriented, however, some began to wonder how we could be the only sentient beings in the universe. This idea grew roots within the last few centuries, but that tiny seedling of curiosity was already overshadowed by the massive forest of long-established primacy.”

“Our assumed primacy was an outgrowth of the belief that we were uniquely special in God’s eyes. Interestingly, we wrote our religious texts such that they would not allow other societies to exist in other places in God’s universe. We believed God was unique to us, that we held a special position above all creatures in the vastness of infinity. To consider otherwise would have extricated us from our prime position as an entitled collection of beings guided by the invisible hands of God.”

“As we advanced to the stage of radio technology early in the last century, we were not considering that our speed of light signals might reach other civilizations someday. We were so enamored with our tech that any paranoia we might have had about setting-out a lights-flashing, horns-blaring welcome mat to any marauding species – well, it was just ignored, if it ever existed at all.”

“Long before that, though, the Earth had already broadcast its own self-created signals. The complex molecules of life on our planet were capable of being spotted by any advanced society, millions of years prior to our radio and TV transmissions. And our own recent activities were bull-horning our existence and brashness, openly inviting any aliens in proximity to join in our fun.”

“We were naive. Had we thought for two minutes, had we planned and discussed, had we considered the risk, I’m not sure we’d ever have exposed ourselves above the plane of the ground. But our existence likely became very apparent so long ago.”

“In fact, the signs of our sentient activities on Earth, which began at least ten thousand years ago, were likely available for viewing by anyone at an intermediate galactic distance. That light from Earth has had those millennia to reach any species with advanced telescopes. Ten thousand light years. They may well be on their way here now to pay us a visit, for better or worse.”

Rick fretted into the microphone. “Not thinking about it, not planning for it, we just assumed it was too late to do anything, and not to worry. It may not happen anyway, they’d possibly even be nice, and we’d welcome them. And they wouldn’t dare arrive on Earth as marauders or super-advanced robots searching for useful surroundings and raw materials, right?”

“Our position in the universe was stable. We were comfortable. And you know what? If it turned out the alien visitors weren’t so amicable, it would be such a distant time from now that it wouldn’t matter. By the time they arrived, we’d be amazingly advanced, and we could take care of ourselves.”

“That’s how we handled things generally as a species. Lazily. It’s not a problem right now. We don’t see evidence of any other sentient species elsewhere in the universe, and we’re probably the only sentient beings in the universe. If aliens ever do arrive, however, they’ll either be peaceful or we’ll have advanced technologies to defend ourselves.”

“But we failed in our assumptions about how to look for other life. We failed because our first premise was that any other species would be as stupidly presumptuous as us. We assumed the other species would willingly broadcast out to the universe that it was welcoming all visitors, just like we were doing. We placed a big, white spotlight on this solar system. This planet.”

“Did we consider there might be a good reason we weren’t hearing or seeing anything from intelligent life elsewhere? Did we ever assume that the countless other sentient species might be less presumptive than us and fully understand the negative consequences of broadcasting their presence to the universe? No. Our assumed primacy wouldn’t let us take that path of reason.”

“Had we considered that no sensible, forward-thinking species would invite the vast unknown universe of possible robotic or biological plagues into their house, we might have looked differently for signs of life elsewhere. But our indignant righteousness disengaged us from that thought. We ‘punted,’ as they say. We wanted to avoid the unpleasant idea that we had already started out on the wrong track via our own carelessness. We assumed it was now too late to undo the deed, so we will just continue escalating the risk.”

“Assumed primacy was the unstated philosophy embedded in every aspect of our lives. We couldn’t extricate ourselves from it. Then the little event of August 2037 occurred. Indeed, perhaps something similar has occurred for you by the time you get my message. In brief, I’ll tell you what we learned.”

“It was late summer 2037 in the Saskatchewan province of Canada. An object fell from the sky, skid along the ground, and landed in a muddy farm field. Some kids found it. The object or obelisk was made of hardy platinum-gold alloy; about eighty tons.”

“The obelisk was covered in icons or hieroglyphs depicting a civilization being attacked by marauders from space via nanobots, or so we assessed. It was a simple storybook, from our perspective. Their planet was attacked. The attacked civilization was nice enough to alert others. It then sent out a warning signal in the form of an obelisk comprised of exceedingly rare metals.”

“To this day, a large minority on the planet believe that such an invasion is imminent. They let the obelisk control their lives as a result. Many millions perceive this object, now missing, as the new golden calf, the Baal, around which they must worry or worship or prepare for the end of days.”

“That event is regularly recast and reworked in our media to their benefit. As you might expect in the mess of the planet that is ours, nobody knows what the real story is. No definitive conclusions were ever provided to convince me or many others that the obelisk was a result of anything beyond human manufacture. One can deduce many reasons why certain groups would have wanted this event to happen, to ignite the M-80 that set off mountains of societal dynamite that existed at the time, much less now.”

“Earth was a clusterfuck back then, to use a term. Genetic engineering was creating so many new variants of humanity so rapidly. Very quickly we saw hybrids with new modes of thought, integration with machines, cloud computing, artificial intelligence.”

“Not to belabor the obelisk topic, but it was exactly the right time for some deviant to toss in a threatening object from space and further disturb the teetering balance of society. Once off-balance, the Great Debacle occurred within a few months thereafter.”

“The obelisk and alleged alien plague of the Debacle became the scapegoat for all that transpired afterwards. In my mind, the platinum-gold omen was a thing of human origin. A ruse. But I digress again.”

“I know this, however. We did not substantially alter our knowledge of science by its arrival. Immediately after its debut, crazy things started happening. In fact, a friend of mine from long ago, named Peter, was a Boston podcaster back then. As he described it, people were coming out of the woodwork to be on his show to explain how our species should respond to the impending alien threat. Most of their ideas would result in the dissolution or destruction of humanity, by definition and intent.”

“Be aware the humanity’s mental energy was rarely to push forward constructive things. Instead, our vision was too often focused on defensive and destructive things. Too late we learned that such focus leads to very bad results.”

“Can you imagine? Here we were, out on the fifth standard deviation of assumed primacy. Suddenly, an object falls from the sky to inform us that we were actually on the other end of the Bell curve; the ignorant and unprepared end of that primacy scale. Death would be riding close behind.”

“Had we not been so presumptuous in the first place, had we been more subtle as a species, a little more paranoid, a little less trusting of the unknown, and less confident in our God-granted primacy, we might have written a different ending to our story. But we let our emotions grab our gonads and lead us around by every jester politician with a microphone up his ass and camera in his face, or do I have that backwards?”

“Anyway, please forgive the anger. We were stupid, terminally stupid, and things have only grown worse since then. God knows, our species has been on borrowed time for decades. The card dealer is calling all bets on the table, and our poker hand shows five worthless jokers."