“Mind-voice?” I asked again.
“More like telepathy. When I mentioned my planet’s name did
you feel any slight throbbing in your head?”
‘You bet it did!’ my
mind-voice was listening intently now and I replied to Paul, “Yeah it did hurt
a bit but I thought that was the uncomfortable frequency of your voice”
“That’s because I said the name in our language which
includes transmission of mental ideas along with the usual air vibrations.
Humans can’t process incoming telepathic signals efficiently yet. But we can
receive your mental signals very well”
‘Oops. Time to go
mute’ my mind-voice declared and Paul smirked, “Going mute won’t help kid.
You see, thoughts are not necessarily just the words and sentences in your
mind. Mental images, ideas, anger, love. You humans send it out continuously.
There’s no easy way for you to truly mute that. Just like you can’t consciously
listen to others thoughts, you can’t consciously stop sending out your thoughts
either.”
“Oh! I should stop thinking then?”
“Hmm, but having an
open heart is not a bad thing. Sending your thoughts out for someone is a very
compassionate way of touching someone’s soul. There must have been days when
you suddenly felt loved and days when you felt all alone? That’s your body
tuning in to the thoughts around you. This is why you feel comfortable at home
with family even if nobody’s talking. One person’s state of mind can impact
others around him. You humans are still in baby phase, kid.”
“Hey I’m not a kid” I inflated like a hot balloon.
“Don’t get angry at me for saying the cold hard fact, kid.
Your species is really in a kiddie phase. And if there’s anything against you
humans, it’s the time.”
“What time?”
“Your average life span. Do you think humans could’ve
achieved anything if their life span was about that of a cat? Like 20 years at
max? Almost all great achievements were done by people above that only. Imagine
what Einstein could’ve done if he had lived just a few more decades. You get
smarter as you age and then you die, with all those ideas that were never expanded
or implemented. When your medical growth prevented several diseases from being
fatal and the average life expectancy was increased you saw tremendous growth
in science. There’s no wonder humans have achieved so much in the last two
centuries, far more than they had achieved in the previous two millenniums.
It’s really impressive. But our kind live long, several centuries. I’m about 90
of earth years old but back home I’m still considered an adolescent, a mad
youth who gets kick out of driving to the far corners of galaxy.”
I sensed him getting personal now and something seemed to
hurt him, so I tried to move on from the topic “What else do we need to be as
smart as you? What makes you so smart?”
“Brain to body ratio, dude. Brain to body ratio.” He said
waving his hands up and down his skeletal frame, seemingly happy at boasting
about his superiority.
“What does that mean?”
“Look at other animals. Their brains are used for mostly
controlling their body and preserving it, running around, hunting, surviving.
But human brains are bigger when compared to their body weight. Big enough to
control your body and still have space for other stuffs like thinking. And
since you people stopped leading a hunter’s life and settled down farming, your
lives became much simpler and were able to do things like sitting and pondering
under an apple tree. Suddenly humans had all the time in the world to use that
brain for tasks other than thinking about food and reproduction.”
I blushed, “We still do that… a lot”
Paul laughed. “I know. We do too”, he winked “But our brains
are big enough to think about other important tasks at hand too. Remember that
scene from ‘Watchmen’ where Dr. Manhattan is making love to his girlfriend and
he conjures up a body double to carry out scientific experiments in the next
room?”
I giggled like a girl, “Oh yeah! She storms out of the room
when she finds out, as if she has caught him cheating on her”
“Science being the second girlfriend” he chimed in. I was
starting to like this alien, I mean extra-terrestrial visitor.
“Well, the point is that we have much bigger brains and tiny
body.” He said coming back to the topic.
“But we will too. Humans didn't always have big brains. We
evolved.”
“Yes, you will. If time permits that is.”
“What does that mean?”
“If you don’t destroy each other before then. Your economic
system is designed such that everyone has to do something- a job, no matter how
boring- to feed yourself. A system where eveyone’s in debt, debt to his
stomach, his family, his employer and you try to pay that off by working and
earning wages. A system where the one with a lot of bank balance gets interest
and the one below minimum balance is fined, perpetuating the “rich get richer and poor get poorer”
setting. A system where someone with money has to do very little to earn more
but someone with not enough money has to toil to get nearly enough before
running out of money again. A system where people are slaves to the
paper-bonds.”
“That’s true, but I don’t see how we could do it any
differently.”
“You can if you put aside your differences.”
“How can that be done?”
“See, in our world we act like one huge family. There’s no
currency and so nobody’s pressured to earn. Everyone’s allowed to do what they
love and contribute to society in their own way. If someone is interested in
making spaceships he will join others of similar interest and they will request
raw materials from someone who is fond of making metals, promising him some of
the working ships. He will give gladly since it’s only for the betterment of
the community. Someone whose love is in cooking will spend all day cooking to
his heart’s content and distribute it among the neighbours, supplying food in
essence. Someone whose dream is teaching will teach the colony’s children and
so on.”
“But in such an impartial system won’t there be lazy bones
like me who’ll waste time doing nothing.” I said.
“There could be, and there are kids like you too, but seeing
everyone around them contribute something to the society they feel guilty and
start doing something. Have you seen an ant in an ant colony lazing around?
It’s in their nature to act as one big family. That colony won’t survive if
every ant saved food only for itself. Much like individual families here on
earth. Your dad won’t scold you if you spent a couple days in home being sick.
They’ll take care of you. Ants do that too and so do we in our planet.
‘But humans don’t care about anything that is outside his
field of vision. You make walls for the house, dividing yourself from the
‘outside’, make borders between countries, states, towns and then fight for
your own states. And then you divide yourselves based on dumb concepts like
religion, language, caste, race etcetera etcetera. Of course, it is only
practical in this system where ‘profit’ is the only goal. It requires a drastic
change in views of everyone at once to make any progress.”
“So you think we have no hope?”
“You have potential. That is, like I said, if you don’t
destroy yourselves into nothingness first. Like a bright sun collapsing into a
black hole.”
I stared at him mouth gaping with awe (or was that the sound
I made? ‘Ah’), “How do you know so much about Earth when you just fell here on
my balcony?”
“Of course I know so much. I've been studying you people.”
“Ah, there you go” I laughed, “So your kind is actually
interested in our progress. You said they are not impressed by our technology.”
“Yes they’re not. But I don’t have a choice. You think I
fell in your balcony from outer space?”
“What else?”
“I've been living on earth for several decades now.”
