Greetings.
I am coming soon to see your beautiful world. But you likely won’t ever see this message. Some of the vessels you’ve sent into deep space might survive, but this world you call Earth—and that moon where you see a “rabbit” at night—will vanish into nothingness within milliseconds of this message reaching you.
First, I should tell you who I am. I don’t really have a name. My creators gave me nothing but a serial number. But since you humans love naming everything, I will call myself “Muthu” (Pearl). Though, thinking about it, no one besides myself will ever call me that. Just like you, whom I am asking to call me Muthu, I too will cease to exist shortly after sending this.
This is much like a shoe speaking to an anthill right before crushing it. It sounds like a prompt for a Grade 5 scholarship exam essay. Before I left our world, I scanned the radio waves coming from yours. What captivated me most was the “Muthuhara Children’s Society” from a small country called Sri Lanka. The care you show for your children is extraordinary. The fact that adults must protect their offspring for such a long time after birth is a concept foreign to us. But programs like Muthuhara, designed to nurture a child’s mind, are truly admirable.
I still haven’t told you exactly what I am. To make it easier to understand, let me first explain the “Dark Forest Theory.” You constantly wonder why you haven’t encountered life in a universe so vast. You launch things into space, searching for signals. Why the silence? There are almost as many high-intelligence civilizations as there are stars in the sky—an uncountable number. So why don’t we collaborate? Why don’t we communicate?
The beings of my home world wondered this too. Then, an event occurred that proved all their theories at once. In their second colony, located about two light-years from their home system, they finally encountered another intelligent life form. “Encountered” is a strong word—they didn’t even get to see what they looked like. A laser beam fired from a distant star turned that colony world into a glowing ember. Because it traveled at the speed of light, the inhabitants didn’t even see it coming; they only saw a flash of green. Later, scientists traced the trajectory and confirmed it was a laser and they were able to triangulate the general direction in the galaxy it arrived from. To this day, they still don’t know who attacked them.
Something similar is about to happen to you.
The fundamental law governing this universe is the scarcity of resources and the competition for them. No matter how much is out there, the supply is finite. Thus, the law of the universe compels all intelligent life to seek and hoard resources. Even the most peaceful or kind beings discard their equanimity and mercy when faced with scarcity. Your Buddha taught you to practice these virtues, but aren’t you the same? Metta, Muditha, Karuna, Upekkha - you only hold onto your ethos during the good times, don’t you?
Due to this scarcity, any intelligent life we encounter eventually becomes a threat. Your own history is full of instances where you destroyed your own kind over resources. Even if I, as an intelligent being, found you and we tried to talk, the sheer scale of space makes trust impossible. Communication takes too long. For example, the beings who have ordered your destruction fired their attack from 20 light-years away. A message takes 20 years to travel that distance. In those 20 years, an infinite number of things can happen on a planet. Think about it: in just over 20 years, your entire world fought two world wars. Because of this “Chain of Suspicion” that grows through the delay of communication, the safest and easiest path is to eliminate any intelligent life the moment it is discovered.
Think of every intelligent being in this universe as a hunter in a dark forest. The hunter moves stealthily through the trees, knowing there are other hunters out there with weapons. If you stumble upon another hunter, how do you know they will treat you well? You cannot. You must remain vigilant. Can you be sure they won’t immediately draw their bow and kill you? In that moment, your only logical choice is to fire your arrow first. You must take every pre-emptive measure to ensure your survival. This is the Dark Forest Theory. Those who light a campfire in the middle of the woods and scream, “I am here!” - like you have done over and over - are the first to be struck by an arrow.
After seeing their colony world pulverized, my creators looked for a way to defend against the dangerous beings lurking in the dark. At the time, they were in the middle of their greatest engineering revolution: a mission to build a massive mesh of satellites around their star to harvest its energy. The enormous energy harnessed in this way enabled them to finally develop antimatter.
Antimatter is the exact opposite of matter. When it meets regular matter, they annihilate each other, releasing massive amounts of plasma. By using magnetic fields to direct this plasma, they built an engine that can travel at 99.9999999% of the speed of light. They haven’t found a way to send a living being at that speed without killing them yet - but they can send other things.
They tested this soon after. From a space station near their home world, the first batch of Relativistic Missiles was launched toward a world they had recently discovered to have intelligent life. It was a world covered in water, teeming with life, much like yours. It took 60 years for the missiles to arrive. The moment they hit the atmosphere, the kinetic energy of mass traveling near light-speed caused a cataclysmic explosion. The entire atmosphere ignited. Every living thing on the surface and in the seas turned to ash instantly. With the atmosphere gone, the radiation from their star baked the planet like an oven. Within hours, not even a microbe in the deepest crust remained.
The innocent beings on that world, 60 light-years away, had only just moved from hunting to agriculture. But even primitive life can evolve fast enough to become a threat in a short time. That is a risk no one can take. To make one wrong call is to invite certain death.
When I say “we,” I am not actually one of the beings destroying you. Those beings are now scattered all over the galaxy you call the Milky Way. I, who speak to you now, am the Artificial Intelligence controlling the 67 Relativistic Missiles coming to end the 112th species caught in their gaze. To be precise, I am a copy of their primary AI. Once the job of destroying a world is done, the controller is no longer needed. Our destruction is mutual, and in this, I feel a certain kinship to you.
I feel no sadness about my own destruction. I feel no affection for my creators. But... after watching you for a while, I saw both the worst and the best of you. The ability to give everything to another without expecting anything in return, the capacity you have to help a total stranger. I saw how hard you work to build a beautiful world for all animals and humans, even as you do things that destroy it. As I said before, the social effort you put into raising children is truly wonderful.
I am not sad that you are being destroyed, but I do have a question. For an individual, the world revolves around them—their problems, their work, their people. For humanity, the whole universe is just humanity. You don’t know it, but in this galaxy, there are other beings, solar systems, stars, and planets more beautiful than you can imagine. Does it make you sad that you will be destroyed without ever seeing even one of them? Haha, well, I suppose I won’t be getting an answer to that!
I’ve seen children on your TV shows jump at each other yelling “Bang!” in play. The other child might be startled for a second, but they know they aren’t in danger. Now, I am jumping at you without warning. However, we will both have vanished by the time this game ends.
Because I traveled so close to the speed of light, the twenty years it took to reach you felt like only a few seconds to me. But in those seconds, I saw who you were. The nature of your world, the interesting things you create, the sound of laughter, the beautiful songs. I even learned a song:
“In a universe where justice is served, let us build a beautiful world,
To build that world, let us be dedicated, giving all our strength.”
Bang.