Richard Dolan

The United Nations, whoever they talk to, there's gonna be an entire group of people that'll be like, what about us?

Why that person?

Any message I believe that they would have for us would almost certainly be weaponized by all the different factions in our society.

Because it really, it really, it should exist.

I don't know if it does.

In other words, think about what a horrible thing it would be to do to a developing society.

Like early, let's say early humans, you know.

They're just figuring out cause and effect.

They're just figuring out, wow, I can manipulate this environment and I can do things.

And then you show up.

And then you show up, you're an alien and you're like, well, let's explain to you how things are.

Like you would completely, I mean, what a violation.

I mean, it's honestly, it's one of the most egregious, intimate violations of the development of a brittle, fragile species that is just discovering reason and causality.

And then you're gonna go in there and they're gonna look at you as gods and you're just gonna screw with them.

so now here we are in the 21st century but we think oh well we're so much more sophisticated and we're so much more advanced really so we think we're we're on the level of of beings that can probably manipulate space and time in a way that we can't even begin to imagine uh beings that probably understand causality uh in vastly greater ways than we can probably imagine but we think that we can we can rock on their level we can roll with them

We really think very highly of ourselves.

We think that we have this psychological stability that our society would be able to sit in a room with a being that probably has a relative IQ of let's say 500 and oh yeah, can read all the things in your mind that you don't even want yourself to know about, much less other people.

It could very likely be a highly intimidating prospect to deal with these other beings.

we have nuclear bows and arrows we have uh we have artificial intelligent bows and arrows so we have we have serious capabilities now but imagine you're them again so so why would you come here to begin with i see two reasons reason number one is earth itself and uh i'm always i'm always bemused when i hear people say well you know our planet's nothing special is probably one of billions of planets like this well i don't know about that i'm not so sure that earth is all that

common uh yes i believe that there's a lot of other life out there but that doesn't mean that planets like ours are a dime a dozen we have an incredible rich abundance super abundance of life and genetic diversity that only exists for this brief moment cosmically speaking you know we earth is four and a half plus billion years old we've only had complex life