Terran address to the 3rd Symposium of Intragalactic Cooperation

Address to the 3rd Symposium of Intragalactic Cooperation, Earth Date: October 11, 3020.

Friends, it is a great honor to be addressing this esteemed body on the occasion of the 3rd Symposium of Intragalactic Cooperation. Prior to the beginning of my remarks, your interstellar translators were to set to English, which is one of the classic languages of Earth - the home planet of my species, located in the Terran system.

It thought it fitting to address you in this way, because I will be sharing with you the last 1000 Earth-years of my species’ history. Why? Because the trajectory of my species in this time is a fitting metaphor for the important decisions we are about to make as we sign the accords which outline the principles all our species have agreed to as we engage in trans-galactic exploration for the first time.

1000 years ago was the beginning of our 21st century of demarcated history. My species did not realize it at the time, but we had been deteriorating as a civilization for nearly one thousand years. The 21st century was was when my species finally starting bearing the costs of that millennia, which we now call the age of subjugation.

That millennium of subjugation was when my species came of age. We grew the population of our home planet into the Billions. We made pathbreaking progress in science, physics, philosophy, and art. To terrains living in those times, it seemed like that our species had reached a pinnacle point of thriving.

But it was not necessarily an era of thriving. There were religious wars. And then wars for power, wealth, and planetary domination. Later, we began to subjugate our living environment - our atmospheric gases, our liquids, and our solid naturally occurring elements. We harnessed the power of atoms and made explosive weapons, which are primitive by today’s standards but were capable of destroying our home world when stockpiled.

And then in the late 21st century, the millennium of subjugation pushed our species to the brink of extinction. Our environment, our politics, and our morals were pushing every person on our home planet to the brink of violence, starvation, or both.

But what also started occurring in the middle of the 21st human century was rapid progression in our understanding of information computing. We started to see the beginnings of what our species called “artificial intelligence".

And what saved our species from the brink of extinction was not the computational power we harnessed, but the cultural understanding.

Terrans, as you know, are some of the most emotional and irrational beings in the galaxy. We are messy, volatile, and downright nutty. We do not possess the physical strength, intellect, logic, or discipline of any of the species represented in this chamber today. And I say that as a proud terran myself.

What we are, however, is imaginative. We have tremendous capability to envision what does not yet exist - however illogical it is. In fact, our imaginations are at their best when we are.

Which brings me back to artificial intelligence. It gave us a quantum leap in information computing power, yes, but it’s most transformative effect on our species was to make us understand what made us unique and special in the galaxy. We could not out-reason the computers we built. We could not out-compute it.

But when contrasting ourselves with information computers, we realized what our souls and emotions were capable of. Advancing information computing technology, surprisingly made us understand what it meant to be terran (or “human” as it was said in those days) more than any other development in the history of our species.

When pushed to the brink of extinction in the late 21st century, my species finally realized that we were never good at subjugating, or even built for it - we were made to imagine.

And all across our planet, we started imagining. Our planetary government stopped every new activity for 10 Earth years and spent a decade imagining what the next millennium could look like for our species, so that we would not repeat the mistakes of our history.

And what a millennium it has been, it has exceeded our wildest dreams. In the past millennium we have established peaceful worlds across our stellar system, we have made contact with all of your species, some of which that have been space-faring civilizations for tens of thousands of Earth years.

And now, all our species, together, have explored the galaxy, peacefully for the past five hundred years. We are discovering the origins of the universe itself. We are doing something my species could have never even contemplated 1000 years ago.

And here we are, today, on the eve of the signing of the accords which will govern how we - for the first time - venture outside our galaxy. Even though we now know that those galaxies could be wildly different than our own - down to the very physics that have prevailed as truth in our galaxy for billions of Earth years.

And on the eve of this most remarkable occasion, I share the history of my species with you to illustrate that audacious goals are irrational by their very definition. They are laughable. They are unbelievably scary. But in these times of extraordinary circumstance, the lesson my species has learned - when we were on the brink of inevitable extinction, when we felt most pressured to be practical and modest - is that what we must do, even though it is foolish, irrational, and scary is to imagine.

And I speaking as the representative of of 35 Billion terrans across this galaxy, suggest to you that if we let our imaginations reach far and wide, when it feels most ludicrous, we can explore the next galaxies, together, and discover unimaginable beauty, prosperity, fellowship, and peace with all those we encounter.

As we sign the accords tomorrow, let it be a sign for all of galactic history that it was a day of extraordinary imagination.