Hello Star Friends

This is my first time writing to you. I thought about how to greet you. Do I call you “aliens”? That word has been used for so much evil in my country. I toyed with alliterative titles in my greetings, such as “Dear Amiable Aliens”, etc. I chose “Star Friends” for you come from the stars, and I hope you are friends. I hope this name suits you well.

I am afraid of the trajectory my planet appears to be on. It is not a positive trajectory. For every victory by think tanks and non-profits and random citizens of the planet, even our children, there are so many experiences of extreme pain, hardship, and catastrophe.

I was watching a video of a group of citizens of the country, Spain, fighting wildfires. They were using blankets and jackets and water bottles to extinguish the fires. There was no structural support, nothing systemic to help them. They fought with their own clothing, their sweat, their desperation to stop the fires from taking their lives and their home. It should be that with all of my species’s, human, technological advancement, with our great minds and our riches, we would have the infrastructure to address and prevent these wildfires. But the wildfires continue all over our planet. My planet has gotten too warm, and too many people, especially those with great wealth, have turned this crisis into a political performance. My species and many species suffer because of this.

So, I hope I am wrong. I hope we figure it out, we save our planet, and we save each other. But it appears so bleak that, as an amateur anthropologist and writer, I felt compelled to document what I am calling “death of a species”. Whether this is my species or the many species we share my planet with remains to be seen.

Maybe this will be the story of our rebirth as a species. Maybe we will transcend our greed as a species and our love and kindness will win and we will save everything. Or, maybe, we will die. Either way, maybe you will learn and do better from our mistakes. If it can’t be Earth and humans, I hope your worlds are safe and stable for all, and that you never see the days we are seeing here.