An Awesome Group discussion

How do you survive the winds on your home planet? I've heard they're the strongest winds in the solar system. I wouldn't want to have to endure prolonged gusts upwards of 1,200 miles per hour, especially not with the cold weather on Neptune!

Yes! If you're genetically programmed to thrive in the extreme winds and sub-freezing temperatures of Neptune, how do you adjust to life in Earth's climate?

But doesn't that mean Josiah is from Neptune and you're not? You're just a composite bot programmed to record transmissions from the outer planets? You could respond that you were manufactured on Neptune, but then the issue of adjusting to Earth's climate would resurface, only more significantly because adapting circuitry and robotics to an extremely inhospitable environment has to be much harder than the adjustment would be on living creatures.

If I said no, wouldn't that be exactly how an alien sent on a covert observational mission of earth and its people would respond?

But what if it's just that the probe got its Josiahs mixed up all along, and you were meant to be the receiver of the research info and home-planet dictation, but I was chosen by accident, because in Neptunian culture only one being ever has any particular name, so they mistakenly assumed the same rule applied here on earth and selected me, since I was the first Josiah they found? You could be wandering around with no solid memory of your true origins in the outer planetary region of our solar system, when the whole time you were designated to be the liaison between Neptune and Earth, the one who would change forever our planet's perception of intelligent extraterrestrial life, not just theoretically in the far corners of the universe, but right here in our own heliocentric neighborhood!

What if that were the case?

Ah, but see, that's exactly what I'm saying! You were the Josiah the Neptunians were trying to find so they could pass on their messages, but they accidentally selected me first, because their planetary tradition dictates no name ever be used more than once; therefore, they assumed the same standard applies on earth, performed a routine scan for a "Josiah" on the planet, assuming it could only turn up one result, so when I popped up first in the scanner, they felt no need to look further. They thought they had found the liaison. So we BOTH are "real Josiahs", but only you are the Neptunian one. In theory, of course. Make sense?

I think she means, Okay, we're back where we started, and you may be from Neptune as you claimed at first, just not aware of it because I unknowingly intercepted the transmission. Right?

Ah, I see. My second theory was that you were thinking, "Tsk-tsk-tsk, boys and their outer space games..."