Greetings, Citizens of Planet Earth,
We are Plafvizjian, Ruler of the Planet you know as Ceres. We have for many of your planetary cycles been waging war on you, a war that will last many, many more of your planetary cycles if you do not surrender immediately. Now that you have discovered our once-secret cache of your most vital tools, we are certain you will want to negotiate for their safe return in exchange for your subjugation.
We are referring of course to what you call the "Bright Spots" on our planet's surface that your annoying little insect of what we can only assume you truly believe is a "space probe" of some sort has discovered. The composition of these spots has baffled you, which in turn has both surprised and greatly amused us.
Do you truly not recognize your own great treasure?
We have for years been teleporting to our planet millions and millions of pieces of precious metal from your planetary surface. These metals have been formed by you into shapes you call forks and knives and spoons and other such implements which appear not only immensely valuable but may even be religious implements. Our best scientific minds remain divided on the latter issue.
You see, we long ago concluded that you must engage in the process you call "eating" by which we mean the ingestion of fuel for your bodily systems, simply to stay alive. We toyed for a while with confiscating the stuff from which you created that fuel but even our harshest famines seemed ineffective. You seemed simply to ignore them.
A few hundred planetary cycles ago one of our great scientists discovered that these eating implements would, if lost, need to be replaced. She further discovered that replacing them required the expenditure of resources which you would ultimately exhaust. You would then starve to death.
Needless to say, these twin discoveries, for which that great scientist is enshrined in one of our most ornate pyramids, led quickly to the strategy we have been employing ever since then to bring your world to its knees. Any time one of you misplaces a valued implement of these precious metals, our invisible satellite observation system notices, locates and transports it to our planet where we bury it in a deep cavern in our rather thin-crusted world.
Our Keepers of the Earthly Treasure tell me that as of today we have made off with 1,397,911,042 separate individual pieces of precious metal by this means. You are able to see the top of this significant mound of treasure as the sun reflects off their surface. Even though you keep replacing them, we calculate that within the span of no more than 32 billion more of your planetary cycles, you will run out of raw materials to make these crucial tools. And then we will simply wait for all of you to die from hunger and take over a planet no longer inhabited by beings capable of resisting us.
You might be wondering why we'd want to attack and occupy Earth in such a vicious and despicable way. Frankly, we wish you wouldn't ask. That's one of what we call the Unanswerable Questions. In our pre-history, one of our widely revered leader-teachers told us that conquering your world is our destiny, that when we fulfill that destiny, we will achieve something or other that, while great, has been long since lost to antiquity.
But we are nothing if not doggedly determined. We will prevail. How do we know? Because we have absolutely nothing you want. You will therefore never invade us, as we have observed over the many planetary cycles that you only attack others to obtain for one of your "countries" what another "country" possesses. (We have a whole sizable team trying to puzzle this out but frankly it hasn't made much progress since its inception. The idea is outside our frame of reference.)
So here's the deal.
You surrender, let us occupy an agreed-upon space on your planet for whatever unfathomable reason we might want to do that. We'll return all of these precious metals which are, frankly, starting to cause us some gravitational spin issues anyway. It's a win-win. You save the need to replace these precious metals from increasingly rare supplies available to you and we get...whatever it is our destiny is supposed to give us.
You may indicate acceptance of these terms by flashing the lights on your cute little space probe (or whatever it is) in a pattern of three short flashes, three long flashes, three short flashes. We will then contact your government (you do have a single government with which we can negotiate, I trust) and begin discussing details.
Sincerely and hopefully peacefully,
Plafvizjian
Supreme Ruler
P.S. Oh, and one last thing. You'll have to start calling us a planet. The translation of the word "asteroid" into our language comes out a rather insulting word that means something we can't even describe in yours but comes close if you combined your English words "ass" and "hemorrhoid". You get the picture.
