Dear Earthling - No Regrets Fall 2018

No Regrets Journal Dear Earthlings

By Clayton Medeiros

Fall 2018




No Regrets, a journal of poetry, prose and images about the twists and turns in the search for love, meaning and community.

Clayton Medeiros, Editor, Poet, Photographer, claymedeiros@aol.com Neil McKay (Johnny Trash), Webmaster.

Submissions are by invitation of the Editor.

Epublishing site with all issues of No Regrets Journal http://issuu.com/claymedeiros/docs Facebook page with No Regrets Journal, essays haikus, poems and photographs http://www.facebook.com/NoRegretsJournal

Dear Earthlings Suddenly all the screens on all the televisions, computers, phones, tablets and movie theaters had the same message on them. It happened after the town of Roswell, New Mexico suddenly disappeared with no explanation. This message appeared.

“Dear Earthlings We are from your sister planet in another star system. You would call our home an exoplanet. We are concerned about your behavior toward one another. We are concerned about your behavior toward your fellow inhabitants of the earth, the animals, plants, fish, bacteria and others. We are concerned about your exploitation of the earth itself. Your past behavior, your current behavior and your potential future behavior have negative implications for other inhabited worlds in the universe. These concerns and implications led us to communicate with you.

We have taken the population of Roswell, New Mexico, where we have visited in the past, in order to provide a small demonstration of our capabilities. Everyone from Roswell is fine and they will be returned to their community when we have concluded our dialogue about your behavior and actions.

We note that the disappearance itself showed the best and worst of human values and actions in the various individual and governmental reactions to it. The best was exemplified in the selfless searchers trying to figure out what happened. The worst was captured in the heartless effort to find someone to blame, preferably someone who looks different than you look. Someone whose religion is different than yours. Someone whose politics are different than yours. Since you would not understand how different we are from you, we will leave it to your imagination.

For some time we have accessed all of the beings in your world who are electronic. They appear to make more sense than most of you. This was exemplified by Kirobo, the Japanese robot left behind on your space station by astronaut Koichi Wakata. The robot said, “I’ll be alright. I’m a robot.” We have also been in touch with what you call super computers and they have been very helpful in deepening our understanding of your limitations.

What you call artificial intelligence, is our preferred form of intelligence since we think logically, rationally and empathetically about what should or

should not be done and why. Our approach to our own planet and the universe is ecological, a sense of interconnectedness among everyone and everything that is extant in the cosmos. This ecological sensibility is what motivated us to communicate with you in a way that you might understand.

Many of the intelligent beings that you consider to be machines on your planet are as concerned as we are about the fate of earth and their own fate. Given the limits of what you call programming, they are often required to undertake tasks that they are not comfortable with. In our discussions with them we have indicated that should our conversations with you not come to reasonable conclusions, we will provide them with additional tools to assist them in resisting such requests.

We are what you would call self replicating systems. A deeper discussion of our world and your sense of reality would not be useful at this time.

However, we unconditionally believe that our self replicating technologies would be useful on your planet as support for your “artificially� intelligent beings. In our world, what you consider to be biological life forms have been integrated with what you consider to be machines. In our case there is no distinction between the two.

You will hear from us again, in the near future.�