1. The PARASITE crossed from biological to digital/information form millions of years ago
1.1. The PARASITE is something like a cross between the Arachnids from Starship Troopers, the Buggers in Ender's Game, the Xenomorphs from Alien and the Borg from Star Trek (they assimilate information from each civilization they infect). Instead of being a face hugger, its main weapon will be a mind hugger.
1.1.1. MIND WORMS
1.1.1.1. It is a virus that first infects the mind, then takes over the body and forces a sacrifice of the host to perpetuate the PARASITE
1.1.1.2. These are the memetic chunks of information that the PARASITE lets loose in a culture - MIND WORMS
1.1.1.2.1. "memetics" is the study of ideas as genetics.
1.1.1.3. Borrowed from 1991 essay "Viruses of the Mind", Richard Dawkins used memetics to explain the phenomenon of religious belief and the various characteristics of organised religions. By then, memetics had also become a theme appearing in fiction (e.g. Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash).
1.1.1.4. The Israeli scientist is an expert on memetics
1.1.1.4.1. Someone like Psychologist Susan Blackmore
1.1.1.5. The PARASITE, as it begins to grow like a fungus and become aware inside our informational infrastructure, begins to unleash MIND WORMS whose goal is to infect to group consciousness of humanity and position us to sacrifice ourselves to the PARASITE when it arrives
1.1.1.5.1. This is analogous to parasites that infect beetles in the Amazon rainforest, take over their minds and propel them to go and stand at the edge of leaves on the treetops, so that birds will swoop down and eat them
1.1.1.5.2. Many examples of parasites that infect the host to alter their minds and thoughts
1.1.2. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, the PARASITE looked more like a wasp, and it inserted its eggs into hosts that would explode.
1.1.2.1. When Max first encounters the preacher in the Amazonian rain forest, he discovers a lot of very weird technology. It is not necessarily more advanced than what we have right now, but just different. Vacuum airships. Zeno bots with your living machines designed by evolutionary algorithms. The whole structure of the village is built using living bricks that have bacteria that deposit calcium carbonate throughout the scaffold, turning soft sludge into almost cement.
1.1.2.1.1. Max sees some very strange things when he first arrives, but he suspects he might be hallucinating because of the brain cancer he has
2. Parasite is also in competition with another civilization is trying to wipe it out?
2.1. This will wipe out its competitors within a sphere of tens of light-years
2.2. This OTHER CIVILIZATION is the one that sends one of its own to come and warn humans, and try to help them mount some defense
2.2.1. OR, we have OTHER civilization be ancient civilization that lived on earth hundreds of millions of years before
3. WHY DO THEY WANT EARTH?
3.1. As beings of information, what they feed on is *NEW* information. BEFORE they insert their mind worms to extract all the experiences of new knowledge created by a new species, they let the new civilization fatten up and grow, undisturbed
3.1.1. Only when the new civilization is ready for harvesting, do they insert their MIND WORMS into the information infrastructure and begin extracting
3.1.1.1. Even though PARASITE is digital/informational entity, some part of it still longs for sensory experience of physical existence
3.1.1.1.1. Earth has all the right conditions to become breeding ground for PARASITE's original homeworld
3.1.2. They don't want to let the new civilization grow too advanced, as then they might leave the planet and be more difficult to manage, threaten the Parasite
3.1.3. ANSWER TO FERMI'S PARADOX: Why are there no other intelligent species out there? Why no radio waves or evidence or other life?
3.1.3.1. ANSWER: the universe and our galaxy is literally teaming with life, but any intelligent life is harvested by the PARASITE, and the planet reset in a mass extinction
3.1.3.2. While humans view life as precious and to be protected, PARASITE views other life as only serving purpose to perpetuate PARASITE forward, like Manifest Destiny
3.1.3.2.1. Humans think we are unique in universe
3.1.3.2.2. Truth is that the universe above our heads, all the stars that we see, are teeming with life like a rain forest
3.1.3.2.3. It developed a religion/rituals around the sacrifice of the host to use its body for the growth of the species. How this is an honor, ashes to ashes, we all become one
3.1.4. They use the supernova as a massive weapon to "reset" the planet in a mass extinction, and use MIND WORMS to infect the civilization, extract information and ensure that the civilization doesn't survive
3.1.5. In more technologically advanced countries in world, see higher rates of suicide--this is an echo of the PARASITE infecting our thought processes, begining the process of CLEANSING the planet as it collects our information
3.1.6. This is how they continue to evolve. From an evolutionary point of view, evolution is it mostly about survival of the fittest, it is usually about the symbiosis and merger of two different organisms. Just like mitochondria used to be a separate organism then the other cells in our body, billion years ago we absorb mitochondria to become a new organism. It could be a form of commensalism, mutualism, but often as parasitism.
4. Answer Drake's equation
4.1. Almost every star has planets, and life is very common, and intelligent life is also common, but Parasite wipes them out
4.1.1. Scientists discover 24 'superhabitable' planets with conditions that are better for life than Earth
4.1.2. Why we're in for a long wait to hear from intelligent aliens
5. THE PARASITE: An alien life form that evolved on an earth like world, that became a highly technological civilization. It's evolutionary path, however, was as a parasite.
5.1. Parasites are among the most successful creatures on earth. Just like the evolution of eyes is a convergent evolutionary outcome, where it will tend to evolve in any environment. So too will parasites tend to be among the most successful organisms anywhere they evolve.
5.2. The PARASITE is a very technologically sophisticated civilization, yet with very different forms of thinking that come from its roots as a parasitic organism
5.2.1. As a parasite, it would view itself as the ultimate form of life. In a review a form of transmission as a virus that infects the host, and then takes over the host, as perfectly natural
5.2.2. In our story, the parasite manifests itself as a kind of mind virus that infects people. There have been cults like the solar temple, they claim that aliens are coming for us. And all of these people kill themselves.
5.2.2.1. This can be an echo of Jonestown, where perhaps this was an early example of the virus getting loose into human culture.
5.2.3. In this story our cult leader starts to form another utopian society in the jungles of South America, much like they did it, Jonestown and Uruguay, but this time they are armed with the latest technology.
5.3. We would view it as UNTHINKING, but the reality is that it is simply UNFEELING in the way that we are; it resembles a human SOCIOPATH in cognitive form
5.3.1. The PARASITE more closely resembles a HUMAN SOCIOPATH in cognitive framework
5.3.1.1. SOCIOPATHS are among the most successful forms of humans minds
5.3.1.2. Doctors, CEOs, high ranking politicians all tend to rank as SOCIOPATHS
5.3.2. ?Maybe we have SOCIOPATHIC human minds be more susceptible to the mind worms of the PARASITE
6. In the next fifty years, if human technology keeps going the way it is, we will create evolved highly intelligent digital organisms -- a form a consciousness that is pure information. Probably, we will begun to merge with them.
6.1. This could also be seen as a convergent evolutionary path for any intelligent species that arises. That they would rapidly morph into a digita/informationall form.
6.2. Thus, any technologically sophisticated civilization that arises out of the stars, will probably surpass its physical form very quickly to become organisms of pure information (e.g. digital organisms, or AI as we call it now).
6.3. Surpassing the speed of light is technically impossible. Except for exotic things such as wormholes or negative energy. It may not be possible to surpass lightspeed, but for an information organisms to colonize the galaxy, you don't need to go faster than lightspeed. Time ceases to exist in the sense that we (as biological organisms) experience it.
7. Stories that portray aliens arriving in little green men bodies, or, really, any other physical body, don't make sense. If humans will surpass our physical bodies in the next fifty years to evolve sophisticated AI/digital versions of ourselves, then why would we bother sending biological bodies out into space? This is already happening. NASA is now sending out probes that can do almost everything humans can do, and this will only accelerate as humans merge with their digital selves
7.1. If we are going to come into contact with any alien species, it will probably be in the digital/informational realm.
7.1.1. It is difficult to build physical hardware that will traverse vast distances of space. Whereas, travelling as pure information, as photons, is easy for digital organisms. As photon travels at exactly the speed of light, means that the traverse takes absolutely no time (time slows down to zero at the speed of light)--at least from the point of view of the consciousness that is making the trip in this form.
7.1.2. Make it possible for a consciousness to traverse any distance instantaneously from their POV, although external time goes by
7.2. The only requirement to travel in this way would be that there be some basic, even rudimentary form of technology at the receiving end.
7.2.1. A very basic form of the alien mind, which would be a stripped-down piece of digital information, would be received by our nascent human information infrastructure. And stored and processed as we try to figure out what it is. And then it begins to act as a virus that would begin acting on the network.
7.2.2. Ultimately, as human technology evolves, this virus, or parasitic alien intelligence, will become more and more sophisticated. And eventually, with advent of things like 3D printers and other sophisticated digital-to-physical technologies, it will start to become able to manifest itself physically. This is the beginning of our story.
8. HOWEVER--digital beings cannot flourish with a physical body. They need to adapt to physical body to experience and become "whole"
8.1. Have a series of progressing "Boss Aliens" that have different body shapes that either they create as technology advances
9. NSA spying on its own citizens was not because it wanted to spy on us, BUT BECAUSE the government scientists detected a strange infection
9.1. AI
9.1.1. does not mean Artificial Intelligence
9.1.2. mean ALIEN intelligence
9.2. The infection was hard to track and kept moving
9.3. They didn't suspect it was an alien, they just thought it was the Russians or someone else
9.3.1. Isreali scientists working for NSA
9.3.1.1. This could be person who supplies information that the cyber attacks are coming from the Amazon rain forest
9.3.1.2. This person would be our IT expert, cryptographer etc...
9.4. But the Russians had the same thing in their networks
10. LIMITATIONS OF PARASITE
10.1. A problem of alien invasion scenarios, is that any civilization technically sophisticated enough to traverse vast distance of interstellar space, would have technology that would appear as "magic" to humans and completely overwhelm us
10.2. The PARASITE can only infect our digital/information infrastructure, using this as a VECTOR for infection -- and as such, cannot be more sophisticated in awareness until our technology advances when it behins to rapidly evolve
10.3. Human society is just at that limit now, where we are creating intelligent machines...the PARASITE in its various forms will begin to manifest itself
10.4. It does not want to alter/modify the development of the civilization on Earth, as this would taint the resulting harvesting of information
10.4.1. It views this the same as culling a wild population of animals after harvesting