:: When broadcast media from Earth reached these aliens, due to their unique psychology, they did not react as we might have anticipated. They failed to understand (they could not imagine) that the strange sounds & images were produced by some other kind of life— some other group of thinking beings like themselves, but different. Another culture that lived in their own way somewhere else. No. The aliens understood our media to be their own. They assumed it was for and about them. 1/

In this way there were like the spiders, who never saw or met a single ant, but who were nonetheless shaped over millennia by the ways & forms of ants. For the better the spiders resembled ants, the safer they were from predators who feared ants.

Earth media would have a similar impact on this alien world— the better the aliens could reshape themselves to fit The Signal (the truth as given by the universe itself) the better they could be a fitting model to produce such reflections. 2/

The problem was that these aliens had no concepts of “others” or of “fiction” or lies. They could only assume that the media represented a future that they would become. And in their tenacious commitment to technology and consistency they created a world where everything shown in our news, petty arguments and fictions had to occur.

This is the planet where every story is real. 3/3

@futurebird Here, have you read Children of Time? This thread seems adjacent to that in some respects. Also spiders.