Originally written in 1992 for the occasion of the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World. Now updated for the 600th in 2092.

On October 12, 2092, a large space ship will appear about seven kilometers offshore Rio de Janeiro. The cone-shaped vessel will be nearly a kilometer across the bottom, tapering upward 1,200 meters to the tip, spinning slowly on its axis, hovering a few hundred meters above the ocean.

While people throng the beaches to gape, and others watch through binoculars from their city high-rises, a water spout forms beneath the ship for about fifteen seconds, then stops. For about half an hour, nothing happens. Then another water spout appears, much bigger this time. The breeze from it can be felt on shore. It looks like the ship is sucking up millions of liters of sea water!

The water spout will stop, and all will be quiet overnight, at least around the space ship. Around the world, at United Nations headquarters, and in capital cities, it will be anything but quiet.

What do we do?

Transmissions from the space ship, evidently meant for us earthlings, will be monitored, but no one will be able to understand them. The U.N. will send an international delegation of diplomats and UFO experts. The next morning, they will be waiting on the beach at Rio.

At 9 A.M., five smaller cones will emerge from the large cone and come to the beach. The beings that disembark will look very much like human beings, about the same size and shape, with similar features, one mouth, one nose, two eyes, two ears, all in the same places. But their skin will be black, jet black, and their eyes will be bright red, like the red eyes that appear in old flash photographs. Their hair comes in all different colors. They will have their own fashion sense: horizontal stripes of several colors and different widths.

They will speak, but not in any language the experts can understand. It takes time to establish communication. Over the next several days their story emerges.

They come from three planets much like earth, but on the other side of the galaxy, some 60,000 light years away, Adred, Morkarra, and Meez. The leader of the expedition, Rayfnor, discovered a way to leap the parsecs.

They have come to see if there are livable planets on this side of the Milky Way. They never expected to find sentient beings like themselves way over here. It never occurred to them that, if they found such beings, communication would be a problem. They only have one language. They assumed there could only be one language.

Now, they will say that they plan to go home, but will return in a few of our years. And after spending a month here, they will depart, leaving us to speculate about what is to come. One thing is certain: our world will never be the same. There are others besides natives interested in the place.

In five years, they will return, this time to establish settlements. Their homes hover in the air like the spaceship. They use sea water and solar energy to power their homes (fresh water doesn’t work). They will settle all along the coastlines, usually just a bit off the coast, up about eighty meters. But when storms come their homes rise above them.

They will build their commercial enterprises on the land. Often, they will negotiate with the locals who claim to own it. But, just as often, they’ll simply build where they see open land. And they won’t see any need to negotiate with the natives for the airspace their homes occupy. None of the earth people live in the sky. We fly through it in our little primitive noisy bird-shaped machines, but no one owns it. It is there for the taking.

For that matter, the whole earth is there for the taking. None of our weapons will stand up to their technological superiority.

Most native peoples will follow the maxim, “You have to go along to get along.” They will accept the settlers with the black skin, red eyes, multicolored hair, and strange yet somehow appealing fashion sense, as the dominant people of Earth, their new world. These natives will learn the settlers’ language. Some will even dye their skin black. Red eye contact lenses will become big business. Education, commerce, and culture will all center on the newcomers. In school, it will be more important to learn the history of the three distant planets than the primitive pre-2092 history of Earth. The literature of Meez, the art of Adred, and the music of Morkarra will supplant Shakespeare, Rembrandt, and Beethoven.

Will there be racial equality? Of course, natives can be considered equal if they do things the settlers’ way: obey the laws, speak the language, follow the customs. But few earthlings will be judged capable of much more than menial labor. Many will be happy to work as migrant harvesters. Just try to get promoted above a Morkarran! Just try to buy one of those hovering homes!

Some natives will resist. This is our home! We were here first! They will struggle to preserve native languages and cultures. The settlers will accommodate some of these efforts; foundations and museums will be established.

And there will be attempts at violent resistance, especially in that part of Earth once known as the United States, the land of the free and the home of the brave. Terrorists will be shown no mercy. Many settlers will come to believe that the only good American is a dead American.

Advanced technology from across the galaxy will revolutionize life on earth. Within ten years, solar-sea water power will have replaced fossil fuel power systems, eliminating the production of greenhouse gases. A byproduct of solar-sea water power will be desalinization, providing more fresh pure water than Earth will ever need. But the massive use of sea water will disrupt the climate even more than global warming’s worst-case forecast scenario. Damage to the ocean’s ecological systems will develop more slowly.

Native diseases will be new to the settlers, and theirs will be new to the natives. They will conquer the native diseases with some difficulty, and even some natives will benefit from settler-developed cures for cancer, AIDS, Ebola. But “minor” infections carried in by the settlers, for which they have eons of developed resistance, will roar through native populations like wildfire.

The coastlines will become increasingly inhospitable for natives as settlers acquire more land for their enterprises and more air space for their homes, and roil the water with constant intake and discharge. The shrinking populations of natives will live inland near the industrial centers on the coast, or farther inland in agricultural communities and reservations.

Settlers will also bring their religion. It is a religion, they claim, of spiritual wisdom for all peoples on all planets. According to their sacred book, The Guide, this spiritual wisdom is “pure, peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.” Some natives will notice, with chagrin, that this description is found nearly word for word in the native religious compendium known as the Bible, in the book of James, chapter 3, verse 17.

The first Rayfnor Day will be celebrated on October 13, 2192, the 100th anniversary of the day Rayfnor first set foot on Earth. Here is an excerpt from the lead editorial in that day’s Rio Record.

“It is also important on this day to draw attention to the work of earth anthropologists. These scholars have devoted their lives to understanding the history and culture of the people who had this planet to themselves before our grandparents arrived one hundred years ago.

“So-called ‘natives’ now comprise about 10% of the Earth’s ten billion people. But in 2092 they numbered over nine billion. They had developed not just one but multiple civilizations, cultures, religions, even languages, with complex interconnections. The astounding diversity of their cultures is totally alien to our experience, and, it turns out, was incomprehensible to most of them even before Rayfnor arrived.

“Increasing awareness about native life has led to increasing misgivings about celebrating Rayfnor’s arrival. And it is true that several times natives have been exploited, treated unfairly, discriminated against, by our people.

“It is not fair, however, to blame Rayfnor for everything bad that has happened here. Rayfnor was a daring explorer. His pioneering adventure merits celebration. Rayfnor deserves his Day.

“But Rayfnor Day is more than the celebration of one man’s daring. It marks the arrival of the people from Adred, Morkarra, and Meez on Earth.

“Some who feel particularly conscience-stricken over the treatment of native peoples have sought to exaggerate our guilt by describing pre-Rayfnor Earth as an unspoiled paradise. Earth, they say, was an idyllic planet where several streams of culture and civilization developed, first in blissful ignorance of each other, then in peaceful coexistence with each other. Earth anthropologists have debunked this myth. Some of the accounts of native peoples enslaving, torturing, and exterminating each other are truly horrifying.

“This is not to say that native atrocities provide a basis for excusing our own misconduct.

“Rayfnor Day should be not only a celebration of Rayfnor’s ‘discovery’ of Earth, but also a day to reflect on the histories of all the people who live on Earth.”

“Rayfnor Day” was originally written for a message presented on Sunday, October 11, 1992. It began: “Tomorrow, about three in the afternoon Brazil time, a large space ship will appear …”. Here is how it ended:

Here is the anguish of Columbus Day for Christians. In 1492, the way was prepared to bring the gospel of Jesus Christ to the western hemisphere. Many of those who brought the gospel, who served as missionaries to natives from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Hudson Bay to Cape Horn, were genuine examples of heavenly wisdom.

But many more came to exploit the land, enslave its people, and enrich themselves. And they saw no conflict between their ambition and their profession of Christianity.

And so the words of the gospel message came to the so-called Americas. But too often they were empty words, faith without deeds. There was love in word and speech but not in deed and in truth. The prevailing culture became one described by these words: bitter envy and selfish ambition. “Such ‘wisdom’ does not come down from heaven but is earthly, unspiritual, of the devil. For where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice” (James 3:15-16).

Columbus, and those who followed him, brought to these shores the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and the wisdom of the devil.

Father, fill the living of our lives with heavenly wisdom.  “But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure, peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. Peacemakers who sow in peace reap a harvest of righteousness” (James 3:17-18).