NOT EVEN THE GODS KNOW: TEN POSSIBLE DESTINIES OF HUMANITY IN THE FACE OF EXTRATERRESTRIAL PRESENCE

Given the premise, supported by recent institutional, scientific and journalistic milestones, that Extraterrestrial Intelligences (ETIs) maintain a current and verifiable presence on Earth, this theoretical-hypothesis paper develops and defends the thesis that the question “what should be done?” admits no single, definitive or conclusive answer. Grounded in established epistemological traditions — situated knowledges, paradigmatic incommensurability and the underdetermination of theory by evidence — the paper argues that each observer’s answer depends on constitutive, experiential and contextual variables that differentially shape diagnosis, prognosis and attitude. The author’s biographical and investigative trajectory — four decades of ufological research documented in earlier peer-reviewed work and in two public pre-tragedy manifestos (2019 and 2022), including the paradigmatic case of Donato Cervantes and the Homeric Theater Hypothesis — centrally marked by the murder of his son by military police officers in November 2024, is explicitly positioned as a legitimate interpretive lens, not as an impossible neutrality. On this basis, ten scenarios for humanity’s destiny are analyzed with deliberately equivalent argumentative weight — inaction; open, massive contact; nuclear war; other human causes (resource depletion, global warming, genetically engineered virus); natural catastrophe; technical preparation for survival; replacement by artificial intelligence; inner transformation toward a “new human”; physical rescue by ETIs; and direct destruction by ETIs — each supported by multidisciplinary evidence (existential-risk literature, the twelve-criteria methodology for assessing contactee authenticity, hermeneutic analysis, and historical-geopolitical precedent). The paper concludes without breaking the tie among the ten alternatives, arguing that genuine uncertainty is intellectually more honest than a premature conclusion, and proposes, as a deliberately declared speculation, that ETIs themselves — if technologically advanced but not omnipotent — may share with humanity the same fundamental uncertainty about the future.