What is UMMO?

According to the letters, UMMO is a planet similar to our Earth, though somewhat larger, orbiting a star slightly smaller and cooler than our Sun, which they call IUMMA and which lies some 14.4 light-years from our solar system.

Their civilization is older than ours, and their biological and social evolution is also further advanced.

The Ummites (or Oomen, as they prefer to be called) form a single planetary society governed by a balanced system of checks and balances. They select their leaders through two parallel processes that complement each other dialectically. On the one hand, a tiered system of democratic election chooses what we might call the planet's House of Representatives, the equivalent of what our cultures call the Legislature. On the other hand, over millennia they have developed a technology for assessing personality that distinguishes and evaluates intellectual and emotional traits as well as physiological and psychic capacities, in order to select the most suitable people for each task we might call "professional". By means of this technology they select the leaders who make up the equivalent of the Government or Executive of UMMO, and also its Judiciary: at regular intervals, and from among the new generations, they choose from all the inhabitants of the planet those most suited to these posts of the highest social importance. These are the people who prove to be the most balanced, self-sacrificing and emotionally empathetic, and at the same time the most intelligent and the most capable of leadership. These two spheres of power, Legislative and Executive, then maintain, with the help of the Judiciary, a relationship of mutual vigilance and complicity, so as to generate a positive synergy while preventing any totalitarian drift by the Government. The Government (a group of three or four people) can, for example, be removed and replaced at once if it is seen that one of its personalities is so strong that it dominates the others.

Their economic system rests on the collective ownership of the whole productive system and of all the goods they describe as "volume", such as land, water and air. Private property does not exist, but everyday items such as a house or a car are enjoyed in usufruct throughout each person's life.

Their high technological level allows them to produce all the consumer goods they need in exactly the right quantities, without pollution or any other social cost. Yet the society they describe, although it enjoys an extremely high quality of life, does not measure that quality by the mass possession of consumer goods; it opts instead for a life in contact with nature. In their daily life, highly miniaturized and compact technology often remains "hidden", accompanying them and making every daily task easier, but its reach is deliberately limited so that their life may be as simple and as close to nature as possible. Over the last few thousand years of their history they have made a great effort to enhance the "wild" character of their landscapes, and even their "mushroom"-shaped houses can rise from the ground at night or sink into it (normally during the day) at will, so as to bring out the "natural" look of the landscape and make it less urbanized.

During their day, which lasts some 30 hours, they work between an hour and a half and two and a half hours. They devote the rest of the day to training and study, to social interaction, to eating, to hygiene and, above all, to a therapy they consider essential for their psychological balance and development and which, for want of a better word, they call "play". This "play", to which they devote several hours every day, is a mixture of very intense physical exercise, intellectual challenge, strategy, decision-making and so on.

They regard themselves as a very religious people, or rather, more than religious, a transcendent one, which holds that the main task of the human being, the OEMMII as they call it, is to contribute to the evolution of the Universe. In their letters they say that in the past of their planet, several thousand years ago, there lived a sublime human being, UMMOWOA, who, they tell us, is the equivalent of our Jesus Christ and on whose teachings much of their moral system is based.

They do not, however, believe in an anthropomorphic and capricious God who takes delight in watching his creatures, his puppets, struggle to find meaning in a creation full of suffering, crime and misery. Seen in that way, creation would be utterly absurd and meaningless, a realm of pain and arbitrariness. For them creation is not a stage on which God makes us evolve through trials in order to judge us afterwards, but a great system of which we are part, and in which pain and suffering are warnings, alarm signals telling us, among other things, that we are structuring and organizing ourselves socially in the wrong way.

The Oomen see the conscious being, the OEMMI, as a collaborator in creation. For them the multiverse in which we evolve, and which we help to evolve, is a great work of WOA (God) that allows its "creatures" to shape and define that "creation", of which we are, in some way, co-generators.

In some of their main letters (D357-2 and D731) they explain their view of what this multiverse is like and how it evolves, which they call the "generation of WOA".

Their view of our society is bleak. Although we are aware of the crazed drift of our social evolution, it is hard and humiliating to hear from the lips of a foreign race the diagnosis that we are a sick planet heading "singing, playing instruments and amusing yourselves like heedless children" towards the abyss.

They do not mince their words when they judge us, and yet their diagnosis still leaves a glimmer of hope.

Many people on our planet have long denounced, with great insight, the ills that afflict us, and have proposed solutions so that our society may stop being tortured by a social and economic structure that makes us unhappy, degrades or destroys the environment and causes pain and suffering to a large part of the population. As the Oomen say in one of their letters: why would you listen to us if we proposed solutions equivalent to the ones you already know?

And what have you done with the teachings of Jesus?, they ask us again and again. All that remains in the end is an empty rhetoric, which their supposed defenders use to maintain the unjust status quo.

They insist on making us understand that an intervention on their part to correct this drift would be an intolerable interference that would destroy us as a culture and as a society, and would cause us a frustration and a humiliation from which we would find it hard to recover.

Like it or not, our problems are our own, and it would be shameful for a people from a foreign planet to come and show us the way, especially when we already know what we must do.

This rule of not intervening in the affairs of another planet that has not yet consolidated its culture, which we ought to see so clearly, is an unwritten law, but one strictly observed by most of the civilizations that have reached and passed the point of social evolution we are now approaching. We should consolidate that point over the next tens or hundreds of years, if we do not destroy ourselves first, and it normally goes hand in hand with the technological development that makes interplanetary travel possible. Only the certainty that our race and our planet might disappear in an imminent planetary conflict would entitle them, and other travelling peoples who also visit us, to intervene to prevent that greater evil.

The advanced state of their science has erased not only the artificial boundaries between the various scientific disciplines (physics, chemistry, biology and so on), which overlap like layers of a single paradigm, but has also made it possible to treat, from that same holistic paradigm, branches of knowledge such as psychology and sociology, which have become scientific knowledge as well. Philosophy itself, and logic within it, are fully integrated into that global body of knowledge.

Their technology reaches a level of miniaturization that allows them to design devices in which several basic elements often have a molecular or even atomic structure.

If you read the texts of the letters patiently, setting aside the prejudices that so often assail us, hypercritical, as we read the first sentences of any document (I believe the introductions are deliberately heavy and repetitive, as if they wanted to turn that first page into a filter that keeps away the impatient, those whose prejudices are already set, and the superficial), you will find a fascinating view of things: a view that coherently integrates and explains the Universe and ourselves.

As we suggested on the home page: come in, read the texts, and judge for yourselves.