Remember the revelatory scene in "The Matrix Reloaded" where the Architect tells Neo that the Matrix (i.e., reality as we know it) has been repeatedly allowed to fail so that the AI in charge of the world as it really is can anticipate and thwart any glitches? It's tempting to consider the possibility that the increasingly fast-paced and forbidding geopolitical milieu is somehow engineered . . . that consensus reality is destined to split noisily at the seams because, as the great Charles Fort speculated, "we are property."
Perhaps our unseen overseers -- call them "aliens" -- are deliberately allowing terrestrial civilization to fail so they can take preventive steps to ensure their own immortality. It might not even be the first time this has been enacted; scattered evidence of previous technological civilizations on Earth may indicate a grisly succession of self-destructive global societies. Perhaps we're merely the latest permutation, destined to fail in the service of an intelligence we'll never meet.
An arbitrarily advanced space-faring (or transdimensional) culture could have every reason to experiment with a hapless backwater civilizations like our own. For an industrious alien scientist, creating a new version of humanity might be as simple as a conjuring an experimental regime with NationStates. Adjust the parameters, sit back and enjoy the humans' apocalyptic antics until the final credits roll. Rewind, make a few changes, and repeat . . .
A psychology professor, using the pseudonym John Norman, once wrote a fairly exasperating series of novels in which god-like aliens periodically transplant Earth civilizations to a world of their own devising. Technologically omniscient, they subject entire populations to what author Brian Stableford correctly identifies as a long-term existential experiment. (To the delight of many male readers, Norman's recipe for utopia requires that most women function as eager sex slaves.) Ken MacLeod's Engines of Light trilogy provides a very similar (if substantially brainier) version. But the aliens of Norman and MacLeod act out of various altruistic (or at least politically merciful) motives; while they might be interested in keeping humanity in its place -- at least for the time-being -- they have no plans to see their "pet" species render itself extinct.
Right now, religion seems to be the most obvious precursor to our own planetary destruction; we wade through a thicket of theologically entrenched doomsday memes. What if geneticists discover that our capacity for belief is an artificially encoded trait? What if humanity has been altered to conform to some long-term experiment? What if religion has been "implanted" as a means of hastening our own demise? Imagine an oncologist grafting cancerous tissue into the body of a lab animal and dispassionately watching it grow.
The UFO phenomenon appears to have roots in prehistory. If, as argued by Jacques Vallee and John Keel, UFOs and "aliens" represent a form of psychological warfare, then the long list of reality-transforming events chronicled by theologians and neurologists may signal nonhuman manipulation. Our defining mythologies, so often based on "divine" messages, may be no more than experiments enacted to test our psychosocial endurance in the face of steadily escalating absurdity.
In a few thousand years of "progress," our inherent flaws will rise boiling to the surface for casual inspection. There's no need to terminate the experiment, since the experiment will effectively terminate itself. And within "mere" millennia, a new, amnesiac society will have spilled itself across the planet, perhaps endowed with a slightly different cerebral architecture. And, as always, the Others wait to see what mistakes will be made, cataloguing every atrocity with the cool reserve of clipboard-wielding lab technicians. It's the ultimate diabolical expression of Nietzsche's Eternal Return.
In the words of The Cure: "Over and over we die, one after the other."
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