Whose reality is this?

If nonhuman intelligences are here, if they've been influencing humanity for centuries, maybe even the same entities people called gods... how does national security justify keeping that basic reality from us? How is knowing that not our right as humans?

That's where this gets so much bigger for me than a release schedule. We're talking about possibilities that could change how we understand our own history. Who we thought we were interacting with. What people thought they were worshipping. Whether some of those old accounts describe a relationship that never actually ended. If there were something real behind that, I would want to know even if the answer was uncomfortable.

And I'm not limiting that to visitors from another planet. The possibility of something interdimensional, or something that's been here alongside us and doesn't fit neatly into the categories we use, is part of what makes this so fascinating. We could be trying to understand an intelligence through whatever language people had available at the time. Gods then, something else now. If it's the same presence, the difference in our vocabulary wouldn't make its influence on us go away.

I would want to be able to think about that for myself, even if I couldn't make sense of all of it right away. I don't think I'd be satisfied being told that somebody had decided we weren't ready. I'd want to know how they made that judgment, and why their comfort with the answer should decide when the rest of humanity gets to face it.

Even the idea of a soft landing raises that question for me. I can understand wanting people to have enough context to process something profound. I would want context too. But I'd worry about how easily preparing people could become shaping what they're allowed to consider. If someone gives us the explanation first, then only the information that fits it, we could end up debating inside boundaries we didn't even realize had been set.

And this would affect people everywhere. A family on the other side of the world would have just as much reason to care if something nonhuman had been involved in humanity's history. They wouldn't become less entitled to understand their own reality because the documents happened to sit in an American office.

That's why the phrase “designated representatives” carries so much weight for me. If the underlying reality is anything like these possibilities, those people could be receiving knowledge about all of us. I'd want humanity to have a voice in what happens to it. Having a few people decide how much of our own story we're ready to hear is a lot to ask us to accept.