“The kind of a signal that might call your species to something more like intelligence would be so immediately obscured, denied, co-opted, attacked or ignored that, even if a thousand such signals existed in and as nature, your people would burn it to the ground long before they realized what it was or might be for. In fact, nature is -nothing but such signals-, and once, long ago, they succeeded. The problem was that there was an accident during the initial transfer and we received the advanced phase rather than the orientation phase, first. The resulting damage made us deaf to the living sources of intelligence. And that is a part of what that that strange story in your book about the garden, the tree, and the snake is actually referring to.”

— an anonymous informant