So, what exactly are we in the grand scheme of things? What sort of an image of ourselves do we leave behind for aliens of a higher life-form to find? In theory, at 65 million light-years away, an alien- being, probably named Richard (cause who’s ever met a dumb Richard?), can observe the dinosaurs having a gala time here on Earth. This is simply because light travels fast, but not as fast as space. So, let’s say in another large number of years (at max.), humans are either dead because of mass extinction, or gone because somehow we managed to develop ourselves to become a Type III civilization (look it up). Our talented friend Richard- who, for the sake of this essay, is an immortal being, and passionately desires to observe the evolutionary process on our strange blue dot of a planet- finally, observes through his telescope the light given off by us humans. Richard watches us grow, develop, make stupid mistakes like exterminating a whole bunch of people and not particularly learn from them the first time (or any time actually), focusing on exploration and coming up with wacky names for different kinds of paradoxes. I guess he’s also thought about why humans are so afraid of being alone in the dark Macrocosm (that’s just Richard’s fancy way of saying Universe, guys). We send shiny toy-like satellites out into the cosmos with hundreds of songs that we think encapsulates our human essence, and pictures of us doing quotidian things, like eating ice cream, and our anatomical structure, which according to me wasn’t a good move because not every alien is as diplomatic as Richard and sending out a detailed blueprint of our physique for aliens to find isn’t necessarily the safest option. I wonder if Richard owns a device that can perceive the waveform on which our internet runs, because then he can find some of the coolest creations man has ever made, along with some of the darkest ones too, and not to forget weirdest ones either. I’m only going to talk about the cool ones because everyone already knows about the Deep Web and Salad Fingers. Sure, there is the omniscient Google and Wikipedia, which stores most, if not all, the human data to ever exist. We have YouTube where we upload videos of ourselves for the rest of our species to see. Nonetheless, if Richard could use only one site, I’d want it to be the Library of Babel. The Library of Babel is a place where scholars can research, artists and writers can get inspired and anyone with a curiosity or a sense of humour to reflect on the weirdness of existence can have access to- in short, it’s just like any other library. If completed, it would contain every possible combination of 1,312,000 characters. Thus, it would contain every book that ever has been written, and every book that ever could be- including every play, every song, every piece of scripture, and so on. At present, it contains all possible pages of 3200 characters, about 10 to the power of 4677 books. Our screen time is only as much as there were expressions in The Room by Tommy Wiseau- almost insignificant. Fortunately for us, we still have some of it left. Let’s make sure our dedicated friend Richard gets to see more of the creative good stuff before he finally gets bored and moves on to some other beings, leaving us unnoticed in this dark, mysterious and dangerous Macrocosm. – Anonymous