Let's say a strange message appeared on my monitor a few days ago. Let's suppose it came from The Galactic Confederation and went something like this...
"We have received some primitive signals from you. We assumed they were some sort of sign of intelligent life or maybe a request for membership. So we investigated. After all, we have a few picobots around every planet that develops so much as pond scum...
Your application to join us is denied.
We consider you all to be blarts. You lay waste to your planet, you are all divisive and warlike, and you eat each other. WE do not approve. We note that you are attempting local spaceflight (and badly, we will say). We will make sure you do not succeed at that until you get yourselves united, organize your resources better, and learn to get your individual energy from non-living renewable sources.
And BTW, we have detected your attempts to discover us. Your efforts are both puerile and easily thwarted. We have a whole world dedicated to presenting you images that look very nice and are meaningless.
If and when you "get your act together" in the picobots judgement, WE will contact YOU. Meanwhile, we would appreciate it if you would stop trying to galacticAI.univ us. It's just static and goes straight to the junk balik. We have one poor Scopinea who spends all day deleting your nonsense and while we give him that function, he is a sad case by our standards though we suppose hesheit would seem like a genius to you.
So fix your own problems before you try to leave your planet. If you do, we will know."
Ack Thbbft!
Mark
Fix it before you leave it...