I am Lin di Ana of Luratia,

a warm and cloudy planet 380 light years from Earth near the beautiful double star Albereo.

I have been granted permission to make communications to the people of Earth in the early 21st century. Using the technique of near-superluminal transport, nanoenergy packets are sent from my holographic videophone to the communication grid known as Earth’s World Wide Web.

The first of these communications began in my late teens, when I first discovered Earth in my Planetary Encyclopedia. Of all the inhabited worlds in this sector of the Milky Way Galaxy, I found Earth the most fascinating — so blue, so beautiful, so young and troubled. Terribly troubled, just like I was.

Why don’t you know about us? That’s the question I would ask. Most of the inhabited worlds know of each other, but a few planets — Earth among them — have not yet evolved the ability to receive, as would a radio, the higher frequencies of universe intelligence that endlessly pervade time and space. This is why you don’t yet know that you are a part of a growing stellar neighborhood of evolving inhabited worlds.

We live in an intelligently populated universe. And, despite your alien myths, it’s a friendly universe — annoyingly imperfect, too-slowly evolving (if you ask me), but friendly.