Magic
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke
It would have seemed like magic to the native, so-called intelligent species of the planet. A deer approaches a lake for a drink of water in the utter wilderness of Alaska, and the lake suddenly disappears. It would only seem like magic because it was a trivial matter of creating our earth research base in a giant crater that we could completely submerge with water. Suck the water into the storage tanks, and voila! There's your research base! Too easy. Disguising as a deer seemed just as easy or difficult as any other organic material on this planet. Well, not all - the slime mold continues to be a bit of a mystery and seems to have a deceptively advanced intelligence (it's my side project, as you can probably tell). For some reason, you humans, never explored the world hiding under water. It is astounding that you didn't develop any decent technology to navigate the water terrain. Instead, you were fascinated with exploring the outer reaches of space while not having checked if somebody was under your bed. Intelligent!? Yeah, right!
Anyway, the point of creating this research base was to observe and make careful readings on the evolution of your species. It is my doctoral project, after all. I arrived around 100,000 years ago, which I know seems like a lot on your human-age scale. But it isn't when you compare it to how long the universe has existed - which is infinitely long. I am sure you are confused since you probably think of the Big Bang around 14 Billion years as the start of time. Pffftt! No! The universe is simply the ultimate perpetual motion machine expanding for roughly 100B years and then contracting into a dense fireball for another 100B years. Rinse and repeat!
My research has, unfortunately, been incredibly dull. Your species turned out to be very uninteresting, to put it bluntly. All you had was an organ, the brain, which had grown profusely in size. The side effect of that seemed to go to your head. For some weird reason, you thought this makes you "special" without realizing how you are no different than the elephant with its "special" nose or the slugs with their "special" hermaphroditism. Each fascinating for sure, but nothing to write home about (literally in my case!).
I mean, look at how prepared we came. Weapons to vaporize a few galaxies. Data storage the size of a hill! A hill! You don't think that's a lot? Well, think again cause we are storing a billion yottabytes on a grain of sand. When put together, all the information ever created by humans (which I have done!) is still not even close to the size of a grain of sand. Do you know how frustrating that is for an engineer in my galaxy? I'd be laughed out of my school if I went back with this. I can't wait for you all to develop crazy stuff that generates many, many, many magnitudes of order more data that I can then slice and dice for an excellent thesis. Then, finally, I'll be done with my doctorate program and get started doing meaningful stuff, like trying to figure out why the vast majority of equations in the world have the same answer: 42!
So do me a favor, please, and get to work!
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