paolo freire - prose fragment

“Please tell me you didn’t park on the deck Miranda.”
“I didn’t.....I didn’t, baby. And you know why I didn’t?” Their voices fade as they pass by me. I hear their footsteps passing too, in that narrow walkway which exists as a secret path from street to parking lot between my apartment complex and the next. I’d just taken a shit and was enjoying myself, reading Paulo Freire on the toilet. There was the mild odor of my excrement in the air, and sun shone through my tiny bathroom window onto the pink bathroom tiles. I wondered if they could hear me, if they could smell me through that small, high window. How would they feel if they knew I was there? What would they think of the slim, red volume I was holding between my hands?

Inspired by dogs

Aliens aren't really such a big deal. Humanity only has to worry about encountering 'less intelligent' (let us say, really a stand-in for 'less powerful') aliens than ourselves, and then the concern is ethical - what harm would we do to ourselves in their exploitation?

What I'm taking as a cue here is the symbiotic relationship between humanity and dogs.

'More intelligent' aliens, well, we'll be the dogs - we will be at their mercy. That after all, is the ultimate implication buried within 'more intelligent'. Yet, dogs are not entirely at the mercy of man - the relationship is too deep, too broad, and holds too entirely different points of view (dog and man) for such a pithy summation to be inadequate. Aliens of 'equal intelligence' (equal power) can't be a greater risk than ourselves - humanity is already at risk of wiping itself out of existence, I don't see how a coequal alien race could really create a scenario that much more terrifying than the Cuban Missile Crisis. If nothing else, maybe by then humanity would have world leaders who stayed clean. And like with dogs or the many other less-powerful species we've eradicated, the only risk a 'less-intelligent' alien species poses is a moral one. Would humanity add xenocide to its list of confirmed crimes?