The Intervention

This is my further report on problems unfolding on the Earth and the ethical issues it has raised for our universal community. Divergent opinions have arisen over whether we should intervene in the development of humans to prevent their extinction, and if so, to what extent. Or should we leave them to continue down their chosen path to their inevitable extinction?

Our existing policy of non-intervention until a primitive species is on the cusp of taking their place amongst the cosmic communities, both technologically and ethically, has generally worked. However, there have been some failures leading to the extinction of some species that had enormous potential. We have asked ourselves, "What if we had intervened in some small but significant way to save these species? What have we all lost in the loss of each of these species?"

We were confronted with this same choice with the pending extinction of humans on the Earth. Humans have both good and bad qualities. Their technological development had progressed in an expected manner, but their ethical evolution was retarded. They retained the same primitive survival instincts and behaviours that they developed from the time they first walked erect and formed social structures. They have retained the same primitive psychological drivers that first motived their urges for sexual reproduction. They compete with each other for irrational reasons when cooperation would advance them all. They deceive and kill each other in the pursuit of social status and the accumulation of resources when there is ample for all.

In the face of the certain annihilation of the Earth and all upon it by the approaching black hole in only 300 Earth years, we decided on a limited intervention in which, for the short period of 30 Earth years, we actively intervene to suppress their capacity, but not their motivation, for violence. We engineered a temporary model social structure and governance for them which would benefit all humans, and gave them a chance to develop the capacity to move humans and other species to a new Earth.

In those 30 years, humans made rapid progress and there was hope for their future. But at the end of that period, when we lifted the suppression on violent behaviour, humans equally rapidly regressed to their former violent and primitive ethical and social regimes.

Our intervention had two goals. We were hoping that our limited intervention would allow humanity to save itself, and that it would also inform our views about the extent that we should intervene in other species' development. We hoped this experiment might assist us in assessing when a species' evolutionary path might be altered, and which species we should leave to their own chosen fate. Our intervention failed on both goals.

Albert is an alien of no fixed address in the universe. He has no physical characteristics or history that would be meaningful to the human reader. He has been observing and reporting on the Earth for a long time now.