Aliens are avoiding Earth due to humanity’s ongoing ability to allow themselves to be subjugated and locked into proprietary platforms. That’s according to aliens themselves, who say that humanity has truly revealed themselves to be a “lost cause”.

“Look, technologically you guys have been advanced enough that we were considering making official physical contact,” said an alien local of the Alpha Centauri system. “You know, stuff that not even NASA could cover up. But on top of all the wars, hate crimes and your unusual ability to strive to wipe out your own race, you losers also allow yourselves to be bent over by your proprietary software vendors. It’s pathetic! No point us going to the effort to meet with a slobbish species who happily allow themselves to be enslaved simply for comfort and convenience.”

The aliens went on to say that if humanity could allow themselves to be “enslaved so easily by their own kind”, then humankind would be fodder to the rest of the universe. “They’ll become someone’s bitches, that’s for sure,” said another alien. “If humanity is still around by the time the Milky Way collides with Andromeda, which I highly doubt, look out. There’s a few species in that galaxy who really know how to dominate a civilization. But we think planet Earth will implode long before then. We’ve seen the state of your online messaging boards!”

Although individual interview questions took several years to reach the alien interviewees and therefore it is not certain exactly which decade which the aliens were referring to, it’s believed they had at least knowledge of the Windows 98 and XP eras during most of the interview period. “That’s worrying,” said an ex-NASA official who wished to remain anonymous. “Things are arguably no better now. People no sooner free themselves from some of the Microsoft products, now you’ve got everyone giving up their freedom for the sake of convenience with the likes of Google and Facebook. You’ve got cars filled with the non-free stuff now as well that you can’t even drive yourself, much less work on. Dare I say, the aliens may wish to land an extinction level death blow if they witness things as they are now just to put us out of our misery.”

With the extraterrestrials’ transmissions reaching us at a notably faster rate than our own, we asked them about their messaging technology and the underlying code. “Er, sorry, that’s proprietary. Or at least we’re not ready to release the code yet or the hardware schematics,” came the response. “There’s a bit more cleaning up to do, then we might open it up to the galactic public. Maybe.”