Pre-Mortem

There is another Earth, just one dimension over, in the exact same location as your Earth. We’ve been observing you with some interest for many years. You see, your Earth is like our Earth except for one thing. The people on your Earth are insane.

We’ve prepared a study and a report on the inevitable demise of your species and most of the biosphere of your planet. The event has been ruled—in advance—a murder-suicide. By reason of insanity.

All sentient species in the galaxy with sufficient capability of thought and imagination have a fundamental choice to make: fear or love.

Fear is an easy choice. Species come about and seem to “advance” by competitive survival and Nature presents the alternative—death—as the most horrifying of events. Furthermore, people of this kind of planet perceive themselves as separate beings, in conflict and competition with all other beings.

The other option is love.

Love is a recognition of a simple reality—that we are all very much alike, subject to the nature of the human condition. That we can survive and flourish by working together. In recognizing ourselves in others, we act with compassion and love. This approach is self-identification as a single entity manifesting itself as a large number of individual cosmically related entities.

Your species has recognized love, rejected it, and has chosen fear. We did the exact opposite. Too bad for you.

Now the consequences of the choice—love or fear—are well-known. They have played out many times across the galaxy and a multitude of dimensions with remarkable consistency. Fear destroys and love thrives. Both are powered by the same engine: imagination.

Before a species discovers science, it uses imagination to create uninformed visions of reality: religion and superstition. These early experiments in imagination carry significant emotional and cultural weight. They also reveal the psychological state of the species.

Those early (yet enduring) mental experiments on your Earth revealed a discordant psychology—a desire for love that is poisoned by fear. There is, in your history, much talk of love but a behavior mostly characterized by fear and violence. At some point, one of those forces would inevitably win.

Here on our Earth, some hundreds of years ago, love won. We recognize the common humanity in each other. We see our religions and superstitions as artifacts of a more ignorant age. And we work together with a science-informed understanding of reality to improve rather than destroy our world.

Sadly, you’ve taken the opposite path. The vast majority of your species refused to exercise their imaginations, instead fervently adopting the most fearful, violent versions of your historic religions and superstitions. You invoke the word “science” while rejecting both its methodology and conclusions.

You lack the moral standing and the grasp of reality necessary to survive. So, while we flourish, you flounder and die.

It’s a choice. You’ve made yours. We have great confidence in our report. We call it a pre-mortem report. We are convinced it’s correct. Prove us wrong.