Excerpt: I don't know

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you propaganda. I want you to consider our place in the cosmos as a very fragile, precarious thing. I don’t care if you believe in God or not – I want you to believe in the stars. I want you to understand that the Galaxy as more stars than the Earth as people, and that many of the nearby stars are known to have large planets in orbit around them. It is possible – perhaps even likely – that these stars also have small planets like the Earth in orbit around them. And it is likewise also possible that these planets harbor life, and that this life evolves in the same way that life evolves on Earth. You can – and should – look up the numbers on this. We are building our internet startups and following our housing market and watching the economy decline, but Mars sits barren. Mercury is a ball of ore waiting to be mined. The asteroid belt has many times the surface area of the Earth – plenty of nooks and crannies for sustained guerilla warfare within our own solar system.

Maybe you’re laughing. Maybe you think I am nuts. But I am thinking about dinosaurs, felled by asteroid. The dinosaurs have been extinct for sixty-five million years – scientists say it took primates a mere hundred thousand years to become human. Our glorious notion of civilization dates back to the Egyptians and Mesopotamians – or about six thousand years. America the beautiful is not even three hundred years old. We are nothing. We are a speck of dust on the tip of Everest awaiting the next gust of wind. The way I figure it, that big asteroid gave the aliens a sixty-five million year head start.