Infinity Curve - Lamentations to Unseen Friends Across the Vastness of Space

EP. 63 - ON ASSUMED PRIMACY

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."