This story first appeared in Trying!, a thoughtful, funny, wide-ranging daily newsletter featuring essays from the mind of Matt Gross. You can sign up for them here.
Once upon a time, aliens were easy. They wanted to kill us. Okay, kill us and take over our awesome, green, water-filled planet. (Think Independence Day or War of the Worlds.) Occasionally, as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, they hijacked our minds and bodies instead of murdering us. Still, we humans were only ever a minor impediment — in many of the movies a wild, germ-ridden, victorious one. To the aliens, we didn’t really matter as a species. We were small, weak, easily slaughtered, impractical to enslave. Their goal was the Earth, whose resources they would presumably extract for their own selfish use, either carting everything away into space or sticking around and using them up until the next Earth-like orb beckoned. It was just dumb luck that we evolved into intelligence now, in time to resist them, instead of 10,000 years too late.
