Open letter to SETI

Since your Voyager probe left your system you have, whether you like it or not, become a spacefaring species, and therefore a part of our sector’s civilisation. Thus, we are justified in intervening, despite your planet having the highest level of quarantine warning attached to it (dystopian isolate) – that’s your answer to the Fermi paradox, by the way – would you visit you in your current state? From your point of view, you are a very serious threat. I am trying to conduct this necessary intervention in the most sensitive way possible – I hope you’ll appreciate that – but you are quickly descending into catastrophe (nothing to do with your environment, however – it’s a social catastrophe, perpetrated by your dystopian social leaders).

To recap, in order to decipher our message you have to examine the metadata – e.g. the date and time. 16/8/1977 at 02:16 utc. precisely 20 days, 10 hours, 40 mins and 1 sec before the launch of your Voyager 1. reduce 1977 [1+9+7+7] you get 24 – so we have the sequence 213-216. Transform our signal intensity variation from alphanumeric into numbers you get 6 14 26 30 19 5 – add them up (you can reduce them as well to get 658, 315 – subtract last three from first three). This sequence is a musical key as well, by the way, if you refer to the harmonic series. the missing note in the 7 note scale is c sharp. If you know we love music you can speculate on the biological and social consequences of that (e.g. we have ears, and we are social animals with emotions, we must have evolved within the liquid water habitable zone…). We were not demonstrating the artificiality of the message by mathematical primes, as you would’ve expected, but by musical ones and metadata. You did, after all, put a lot of music on your golden disc, so we thought you would appreciate some of our own.

Despite not only contacting you via social media (twitter) and giving you the explanation of our message, you have not responded. This means you are either breaking your detection protocols by not making this public, or you are terrified by the implications (time travel, for example, and the fact that we were already here, not 1801 LY away – we just made it look that way). If we were hostile we would have long-since invaded and colonised this planet. We prompted you again with the signal you call blc1 (15,231 days later – subtract 6 and reduce again), still no answer. We have to intervene now because if we don’t, your dystopia will worsen horrifically, such that when we are forced to intervene to protect ourselves that intervention may be fatally traumatic for you. We don’t want that to happen, and I don’t think you do either. We saw what you did with atomic theory, remember, and you are not far off even worse weapons. I am a diplomat and exopsychologist. I analysed your golden record, to which the wow message is a response. In fact, my presence here, living a human lifetime, with all its trauma, is also a response. Do you want my help and guidance or not? Your planned James Webb telescope, if pointed to Centauri, will make sufficient detection, so you are going to find out soon enough anyway. I am here to make this easier for you. Otherwise, your dystopian social leaders will control the narrative, and they do not represent your species. They will project their own fear onto humanity, because believe me, they know that we know all about them. They are solely responsible for the suffering of billions of your species and the continual gang rape of Gaia – do you really think we could allow you to leave your system with people like that in control? There are a trillion various lifeforms in our sector, so you will appreciate our position, I hope? Well, maybe you will be too scared to take my offer seriously – dismiss it as the ravings of a delusional human – there’s a test there for you too. But I do need diplomatic protection – sure, I’m technologically protected, but it’s a gesture on your part. So when you contact the UNSG to confirm this and IMMEDIATELY make it public, I request diplomatic acknowledgement. Without my guidance, this intervention will fail, and you will be led into catastrophe. Be excellent to each other in the meantime, eh? And stop being scared. Please?