An Alien’s Advice For Humans’ Evolutionary Defects
I am a diplomat from the Galactic Federation, and your planetary species has finally reached a point where extra-terrestrial contact is appropriate.
Hello, Earthlings. I am a diplomat from the Galactic Federation, and your planetary species has finally reached a point where extra-terrestrial contact is appropriate.
First off, we apologize that some of our more, how you colloquially call “asshole,” galactic associates have been less than responsible and mature in terms of their sociological studying of your planet. We apologize for all the abductions, literal pyramid schemes, and agricultural graffiti. If you’re curious, these crop circles were not coded messages, but rather depictions of our various alien species’ genitalia, making them our equivalent of drawing dicks. They’re obscene, but, like all higher intelligence organisms, we can’t resist the occasional juvenile joke.
Most of all, we apologize for the unfortunate and scientifically unnecessary anal probings. Our federation has agreed to limit excretory probing from now on to just the human entity called Rudy Giuliani. He appears to enjoy it, so we can assure you it’s very consensual.
We’ve been monitoring your species since you were mere primordial single cells, and watched as you’ve developed into your charming present form as peculiarly big-headed, birth-canal-crowding, spinally-inefficient bipeds. It was a great relief to see your brains in response evolve the folding necessary to support a complex cerebral cortex capable of sophisticated social culture and intellectual creativity in service of the industrial-scale environmental manipulation needed to protect and preserve the future of your species despite your infantile disadvantages. Well done!
Though we regret to inform you that, while our arrival has alerted you to our advanced mechanics and scientific prowess, we are nonetheless sworn to a code of conduct for Type-2 civilizations that forbids us to aid you technologically. However, we would like to offer you the following suggestions on how to genetically improve your most curious evolutionary progression in preparation for future membership in the Galactic Federation:
— Take those exposed testicles and evolve them back up in the abdominal cavity to keep your male gametes safe! We love a “guy-getting-hit-in-the-nuts” video just as much as the next sentient organism, but talk about vulnerable from a procreation standpoint! If you can cool down your body temperature a few degrees, your spermatozoa will be safe inside, and your testes will not be uncomfortably compressed in the skin-tight clothing most appropriate for advanced space travel. Though aesthetically unfortunate on your male body forms, we do appreciate the visual comedy of artificial “truck nuts” you put on your energy-inefficient land vehicles, and have adopted the trend by putting “space scrotums” on the backs of our spaceships.
— Nix the tailbones. In galactic society, it’s considered very low-class and embarrassing to have such obvious vestigial body structures. Dozens of galactic nations have already converted their consciousnesses into pure energy, and here you humans are, barely removed genetically from your cousin apes who hang from trees by their tails and fling their feces at each other. And, frankly, your unfinished spines causing pervasive lower back pain are crude and cringey enough, even without your conspicuous coccyx.
— Definitely keep your elaborate mating rituals. They’re quite entertaining with all the mammary ornamentalism, the penile cellular transmissions, and the copious fermentation consumption that appears to be an integral part of your contemporary procreative courtship. Your so-called nature documentaries may wax poetically about the exotic dances of your planet’s birds of paradise, but the Galactic Federation finds the spectacle of your ornery bachelors, bachelorettes, and housewives’ excessive pageantry and combative antagonism much more entertaining. It’s degrading and, how you call “trashy,” but it makes for quite compelling holovision that earns admirable ratings throughout the universe.
— Ditch the wisdom teeth ASAP. They grow in late, and cram your mouth full of dental superfluities that push your other teeth into crooked, ugly formations. And to add insult to cosmetic injury, your ubiquitous need of dental braces is the most lame form of bionic technology in, literally, the entire universe. And that includes the Zenoquologarians who have twenty short-sighted eyes, and need to wear glasses over all of them. Behind their backs we call them “Forty Eyes.”
— Replace your shockingly weak and immobile knee joints with a ball and socket joint as featured in your hips and shoulders. Nothing appears to age more dreadfully than your tibiofemoral joint, and if you think Earthling sports like rugby and American football are rough on your knees, you’d be terrified to watch a game of fusionball as played throughout the Circinus Galaxy. It’s past time you humans begin changing the body parts that frequently give you pain and inevitable mobility problems! More adaptable knees would limit your ability to run long distances, of course, but spacefaring civilizations don’t run. That’s like the most single-planet thing a species could do.
— Evolve your appendix. Don’t throw it out like most backseat-evolver biologists propose, but expand it to go back to your cellulose digesting days. Your factory farming of animal meat is a most unwise use of your kinetic energy that, besides offending our advanced morality, is sabotaging your own immune systems with antibiotic-resistant pathogens. And your appetite for beef is also filling your sky with methane while necessitating the conversion of oxygen-rich rainforest into atmospherically unprofitable pastures. We recommend that you cease ruining your planet immediately.
…Actually, on second brain wave, you humans are too self-destructive and regressive to admit into the Galactic Federation any time soon. We will return when either you’ve decided not to greenhouse-gas yourselves into planetary ruin, or raccoons supplant you as the dominant species on Earth. They’re cuter, and much more sensible about resource sustainability.
So goodbye, Earthlings.
P.S. Have you ever noticed that your, how you call “American” citizens’ Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell uncannily resembles your planet’s shelled aquatic reptiles?
Dash MacIntyre is a comedian and satirist from St. Louis. He founded the political satire site The Halfway Post in the summer of 2017 to craft little doses of comedic catharsis throughout the presidency of Donald Trump. Check out his book “Satire In The Trump Years: The Best Of The Halfway Post” available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. He has also been published by Points In Case, Little Old Lady Comedy, The Daily Drunk, The Lark, and been featured in a collection of Missouri’s Best Emerging Poets
