52 Walks Among Us

52 walks among us.

52, of course, is not its name but rather its designation. The phonetic representation of his "name" is inexpressible in Earth nomenclature, but it doesn't mind being addressed as, "52." It keeps things simple and that's in his nature.

Also, for the sake of convenience, 52 is assigned the pronoun, "it," because there are five of what we would call genders on its planet. Two of the five are very similar to our male and female but 52 is neither of these. Please don't ask me to detail the complexities of their sexual interactions - such things are private even on a galactic scale.

52 finds it odd that any sort of fiction that has a creature from outer space as a character is defined as "science fiction", almost by default. It sees this act as myopic and reeks of speciesism. But at the same time, it understands that humans have not had much contact with those from other worlds so it cuts us a great deal of slack - he refuses to label the planet as terra-centric since they have no first-hand knowledge of other inhabited planets. Some of his peers criticize the way that we view the other planets on our solar system as mere objects of exploration (and some predict exploitation as soon as the technology makes it feasible), but 52 chooses to remain charitably agnostic in the matter.

However, 52 does find our mythical fear of non-earthlings, as expressed in our literature and made particularly evident in our cinematic works, strangely symptomatic of our species and views that as an indicator that goes a long way towards explaining human violence on and to our planet.

52 is one of a number (no pun) of visitors from across the universe, most of whom are here for what we would call anthropological studies. Rest assured, none are here for purposes that are other than benign - that is, so long as you don't classify voyeuristic curiosity as malicious.

On a universal scale, many of 52's peers place our planet on the peaceable side of the Universe. We are certainly nowhere near civilizations classified as docile and harmonious, but we are also nowhere near the extreme, violence end of the spectrum. 52 would place us somewhere pretty high up along the ascending portion of the universal bell curve - slightly more peaceful than average, but not by much.

On the other hand, our intellectual standing leaves much to be desired. For all of our (understandable, from 52's point of view) pride in our intellectual achievements, we are shamefully outgunned by the rest of the universe. Using our educational structure for purposes of scale, our planet's academic achievement (adjusted for specie evolution rates and average life-spans) would rank somewhere between fourth and fifth grade. 52 likes to joke that we're in summer school. In contrast, 52's kind might be thought of as being in the second year of graduate school.

52's motivation for being on Earth? Initially, he arrived on a study to document and report on geo-political movements, but these days he hangs around just because he's grown fond of us. He is especially fond of what we've learned to do with salads, particularly in the Pacific Northwest with its fusion-style mixed greens. He enjoys meats as well (oddly, the ratio of species who choose an herbivore diet to an omnivore one is remarkably constant throughout the universe). He doesn't care for bovine-based meat products but he does enjoy wild venison and he is not alone in the opinion that pate de foie gras is one of the great unknown delicacies of the universe.