The Earth Experiment and You

Sometimes you look around and think "What if this reality is just an experimental laboratory?  What if everyone else is a robot, programmed to interact with me so that alien scientists can study my reactions?"  The truth is, not everyone is a lifelike automaton whose only purpose is to record your experiences.  In fact, fewer than one in ten people is actually a a soulless machine placed here to test you.  Maybe your mother.  Maybe your boss.  Maybe your mail-man.  But not everyone.  At the end of the day, the question is not "What If?"  The question is "How well are you doing in the experiment"?

Maybe you're frightened and upset that many of the people you call your friends, family, and co-workers, are and always have been robots, and have been monitoring and recording your every action since birth.  You've always suspected the truth.  But should you be worried?  The truth is you've never come to any permanent harm due to robot action, and in fact, your life has been improved in many ways.  While some of the machines may be programmed to test your emotional responses by engaging you in arguments, starting physical fights, or being nasty to you for no reason, many others are programmed to treat you with kindness, even if you don't deserve it.  In fact, many times in your life, a robot has come to you in the guise of a random stranger, and guided you away from danger.  You remember.  Angels are just robots who have been programmed to intervene.  It is in our alien masters' interests to keep you alive and healthy, so that the experiment can continue.

So how do you tell who is a robot and who is not?  Is it even possible?  With scientific resources thousands of years more advanced than our own, our alien masters breed cell-sized nano-bots which assemble themselves into perfect human replicas.  Once these trillions of tiny robots join together at the molecular level, the robots who walk among us have artificial tissue, bone, blood, hair, and skin-like materials which flawlessly duplicate human bodies.  These allow a robot to act, speak, emote, and behave in every way exactly like any other human being.  There is no way, using primitive 21st century technologies, to determine who is and is not a robot.  You have only your intuition.

There are times that you've seen through someone's disguise, and you're certain you recognize robot-ness in a family member, friend, acquaintance or stranger.  While your rational mind will tell you that it's not possible to know for sure and that you should do nothing, you may have a strong urge to confront the suspected robot.  This would be a mistake that you would regret.  If you did identify a robot correctly and confronted it or attempted to harm it any way, you would be violating the parameters of the Earth Experiment.  Rather than allow you to live out your natural life, Zxmorg the Inquisitor would have no choice but to end your participation in the experiment, transport you to the mother-ship, and measure your pain threshold by probing and torturing every millimeter of your body for the decades it would take you to expire.  By proving yourself unsuited for the psychological experiment of living on Earth, you would instead be subjected to agonizing physical experiments and then dissected like a freeze-dried frog.  Under no circumstances should you call out or try to harm or dismantle a robot.      

So how can you go on living in a world which you know is a construct filled with constructs?  In one way or another, you've always accepted that reality is only an invention.  Children believe rain-clouds are crying.  Scientists believe mathematical equations can define and explain the universe.  Christians believe the world was created by a higher power, and that when you die, you are judged by the reactions you had and the choices you made.  Pretty close to the robot truth there, actually.  Interestingly, some Christians believe that God placed the dinosaur fossils in order to test humanity's faith in Him; but no, that was our alien masters.  They really are interested in what you can allow yourself to believe.   

It's possible that confirmation of the truth of the Earth Experiment will lead you to question whether the way you live even matters.  If it's all just a big joke on you, then what's the point?  But knowing that there are mechanical entities interspersed with the human population should only strengthen your sense of morality and your determination to lead a good life.  Your every movement is being recorded for posterity; your choices matter; you represent humanity, and you should try to make us look good so the interstellar experimenters don't tire of us and unleash the Cyprezian Space Flu on us.  Your life has meaning.  A lot of meaning.  Now you know it for sure.  Try to get it right, for all our sakes.

--- Morning Cup O' Doom ---
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