"Well, Gnork, we've been traveling for 18 generations but we've finally crossed the 4.3 light years from Alpha Centauri to Sol. Are you ready to commence our civilization's finest work?" "Indubitably, Glork. Let us find some extremely low-resolution imaging equipment to fly in front of briefly!" I'm about to give up on Westworld, for the third or fourth time, at S01E03. Not just because it's a Nolan, and all-things-Nolan suck balls, but because it follows the Standard Android Trope: - All humans are fundamentally mean and utterly without empathy - So they create sentient robots to exercise their cruelty on - Who feel some sort of pain or remorse so that humans can get their jollies on - So the sentient robots develop the concept of vengeance - The end, which shall be dragged out for as many minutes, hours or days as the author can get paid for. HBO's Westworld, Ex Machina, Raised By Wolves, the Terminator movies, I Robot, fuckin' every robot you've ever seen in the movies is a stand-in for Christ so that we have empathy and a stand-in for Charles Bronson so we can have vengeance. Of course the narrative is always broken because it has to become "every human on earth lacks empathy EXCEPT YOU" which means the story is actually "every character in the movie lacks empathy EXCEPT THE PROTAGONIST" which means these things are always tragedies because they have to be morality plays about how humanity fucking sucks and since the protagonist is human they suck too the end." I bring this up because we fuckin' personify everything. People feel bad about getting rid of a blender that's worked for them. We don't throw away clothing unless we can transfer our emotional attachment onto "the needy" who will properly appreciate our anchored trash. Sentient fucking androids? Gimme a break. The Bay Area would give them passports and rent control before their operating systems were on 1.02. Emotional intelligence is a better predictor of success than IQ. Those who can empathize with their fellow man get further in life (those who do not understand what 'fellow men' are get the furthest but that's another story). So you have to understand that the people writing about UFOs aren't the idiots. They think you're the idiot. They think YOU are the one who doesn't understand the way other people think. And based on evidence, they're right. 'cuz apparently the number of people capable of going If I were capable of crossing the gulfs of space in a Tic Tac that does Mach 30, what would I do? is smaller than the people who default to "mars needs women."