You might call us energy-based life forms — at least, if you’ve seen too much sci-fi. More accurately, you could say that we are complex interference patterns between lepton fields and pentaquark condensates, based on the electroweak force.

You have to understand that we only did what we did to protect our own existence. These simple chemical replicators; these things that became you; they were our grey goo scenario. We may be made from vastly different things but in the end we all need Joules. In innumerable molecular dust clouds, we found twisting strands of amino acids that were making copies of themselves, and we nudged them into a deep gravity well. There they might compete and adapt but they would be stuck on a single tiny rock.

Evolution worked too well (from our perspective, if perhaps not yours), and now here you are. You’re launching yourselves off that planet in ships that we might call laughably primitive if we weren’t — what’s the term? — “scared shitless” of your potential.

So, um… truce?