MAY 27, 2022 – (Cont.) “In short, if you think each of the 7.8 billion galaxies is always in perfect balance, steady harmony with itself 24/7, you’re mistaken.”
“What’s ‘24/7’?”
“Sorry. It’s a reference to time, as in constant. ‘Twenty-four-seven’ is a relatively recent linguistical development. Twenty years ago no human would’ve understood it—mostly because people didn’t have smartphones.”
“What are smartphones?”
“Later. Meanwhile . . . ahem! . . . Our language is dynamic—the version you downloaded recently will require frequent updates if you want to stay current.”
I felt a disturbance inside my cranial galaxy. I needed a moment for it to pass. “Excuse me,” I said to the alien. “I wanna refill the lemonade pitcher. Are you sure you don’t want some?”
“Sure,” said the visitor.
“‘Sure’ you want some or sure you don’t?”
“I’m—we’re—sure we don’t.” The alien’s shift from the singular pronoun to the plural reminded me of my mother and uncle, who habitually used the ‘royal we.’ It bugged my sisters and me to no end, until I asked my mother for an explanation, and she said ‘That’s the way we were taught in school—to be proper, shifting the focus from the egotistical ‘I’ to the more community minded ‘we.’ I think my mother was making up that up. Or, as I’d often suspected, she and my uncle truly were from another galaxy.
As I left the porch for the kitchen, I pondered the challenge of explaining things to a visitor in possession of a clean slate, as it were. It also occurred to me how difficult the same exercise would be if the audience were a human from the past. Every era produces its own frame of reference. This thought revealed a problem with the study of history: through what temporal lens is the past to be assessed? And how reliable is our current frame of reference for predicting the future?
After the short break, I returned to the porch and my intended discourse on mental disorders among humans—myself excluded, of course.
“As I mentioned, we humans are susceptible to all kinds of mental and personality disorders that make us troublesome, except to psychologists and behavioral scientists, who find such disorders fascinating and a rewarding area of study. Much of the human condition—and history—can be better evaluated by understanding, for example, the manifestations of trauma, sociopathy, narcissism, paranoia, sexual and psychological abuse, and extreme mental and emotional stress.
“So far, what do you think about humans? Anything like us wherever else you’ve been? Given your superior knowledge of the laws of physics and your jaw-smacking ability to travel across vast reaches of the cosmos, surely you’ve encountered other forms of so-called intelligent life.”
“My detailed response is for later,” the alien said, “though the short answer is that by comparison, your apparent combination of intelligence and primitivity is potentially . . . earth-shattering. For now, I want to hear more about you humans.”
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© 2022 by Eric Nilsson
