abutilon /əˈbyo͞odlˌän/

It was long ago reported that on one of the Galapagos islands, brimming with life, an Eden of flora and fauna, a great variety of flowering plants were present but all were yellow; every single flower on the island a shade of yellow. Even those species of plant which typically flowered in multiple varieties – only the yellow variety was present. This remained a mystery for years, except to some of devout faith who insisted it was not a mystery at all; that science could never provide an explanation and the only possible explanation was that God had chosen this place to be a yellow place. It was proof of God.

It turns out that there may indeed be a great variety of plant life on this island but there is only one breed of bee. And that breed of bee, by the tinkering of random mutation and evolution, only recognizes yellow flowers. Thus no other would be pollinated.

People have a hard time admitting what they don’t know. We leap swiftly to an answer that pleases us and forever fail to notice all the math we didn’t do.

Crop circle enthusiasts will call that phenomena proof of life on other planets because we can’t explain how they are created by any earthly explanation. But that is in no way proof of alien life. The explanation for crop circles may not have fallen into your little hands or mine, but an explanation exists, and whatever it is, it is massively more likely to come from a source, unknown to you and me, but of this planet rather than of one that is light-years away. We are each intimate with only a minuscule slice of the world of Earth, or Minerva, as I much prefer to call it, as much as it soothes our ego to presume otherwise.