We are not alone.
But, we’ve been looking into the heart of the universe to seek out new life. We’ve been looking in the wrong place. We should have been looking closer to home.
As our own branch of intelligent and reasoning sentient life evolved we instinctively looked for others. It is in humanity’s nature to so do.
At first we searched the seas, boldly going to new lands to satisfy our needs. It wasn’t long before all but a few tiny tribes had reached out and made contact across the different forms of the human race. Indeed, ‘reaching out’ included making some of them slaves, slaughtering others, imposing our will and rule over others, and generally not being nice. All this as our immature traits of bullying and spiteful disrespect took control. All of this just part of the natural way we evolve.
Unknown to us all, we were being watched. Not from distant planets, but from within our own planet.
An earlier generation of intelligent life to evolve, depleted in numbers as it struggled over billions of years to adapt and survive the natural cyclic ice ages that force land species to suddenly pause, adapt or die, has continued existing undiscovered by homosapiens.
However, there comes a time when it is right and ripe for ‘first contact’.
These original earthlings have resisted this for so long, fearing the human knee-jerk reaction to kill that which is outside of their understanding.
They have considered, not rudely, that we are still at quite a primitive stage in our evolution. We wouldn’t be able to responsibly share their technologies and understanding.
We would be a danger to them. This is why they have largely remained hidden from us.
They speculatively call themselves the ‘Seventh’, calculating that they were the seventh attempt at life evolving to a highly intelligent form since our planet was formed. Whilst in hiding they have observed the eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth intelligent life developments. None of which survived the natural changes in the earth or the few unexpected major extinction events, meaning apparent land-based life ‘dropped back’ to have to evolve all over again. All this happening over the billions of years that they’ve been watching and waiting.
What I wonder is at which point we will have evolved enough for them to be safely able to make contact without us plotting to kill them? Will we actually reach whatever criteria in our evolution is needed before the next ice age or mass extinction event wipes humanity out? Or will we be lucky, in foreseeable generations from now to make contact with the oldest surviving earthlings, and maybe join them to shelter from what will inevitably be the end of life as we know it?
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