I really don’t think that ‘aliens’ would want to go through all the trouble to come to earth and then do a bunch of weird, cruel, painful ‘tests’ on humans with mechanical technologies. To be frank, what this looks like to me is something more like this: our own activities here on Earth are recursive, which is to say that Earth as a unified intelligence is affected by them… and these effects recurse… which is to say that they fold back on us (since our cognition is a subset of the terrestrial web) and thus extend directly into our own experience (I will have more to say about this in an upcoming note).

Since -=we=- are constantly torturing and murdering and ‘conducting painful mechanical tests’ on animals all over the world, every day… what happens when the collective intelligence of Earth recurses is that these experiences take on the shadow of our own shadow… and that is painful, mechanical, and it terrifies us.

I’m not saying this is what’s happening. What’s actually happening is profoundly more astonishing than this. But it’s a useful model that implies the depth of effect and interrelation which our own activities -must have- upon our own experience, relation, and intelligence.

Aliens are not likely to be interested in sticking primitive metallic needles into actual human flesh. If they can fold space, the chances of them using crudely invasive human-order technologies are functionally nil. Almost laughable, actually. But we use these technologies 24/7. And we’re suffering the consequences.