Updated On: 18 October, 2022 05:56 AM IST | Mumbai | C Y Gopinath
Here’s the bad news—to an alien sent to survey our planet, human beings would seem to be a minor species that appeared recently but believes it owns everything

Though there are only about 8 billion humans (compared to, say, 20 quadrillion ants) on Earth, they seem capable of and committed to killing off all the remaining species. AI-generated by C Y Gopinath through DALL-E
As tasked, I present below my report on the status of Planet 3, tagged as Rock #1794046 in our records. It is the third celestial object orbiting Sun #8011. The survey has taken a while, close to 87 orbits of this planet around its sun. That’s a long time, spent mainly mastering the languages and cultures of the resident species.
Approaching Planet 3, also known as Earth, I noted that it was surrounded by a dense swarm of orbiting garbage from abandoned spacecraft and space missions. I counted 128 million bits of junk smaller than 1 cm, about 9,00,000 under 10 cm and 34,000 larger than 10 cm. They included dead animals, cans of a drink called Coke, gloves, pieces of Lego and large crystals of what I ascertained was urine.