Gentlemen, I'm standing here before you because I need to tell all you you something very important.
It is time.
It is finally time.
It is finally time for us to make a difference. It is finally time for us to put to use everything we have. It is finally time for us to advance.
For thousands and thousands of years we have been securing, containing and protecting anomalous objects, people, locations, everything that confounded our understanding. But now, things have changed. Everything has changed.
When humanity was confined onto a single planet we thought that we knew everything. Then we started to expand, we started to develop, we started to disprove so many things that we knew were true only ten years ago. All this disproving has only continued since then, and hasn't solely been confined to the rest of humanity, those ignorant of the eldritch abominations we have contained. We ourselves have been learning about those very abominations.
As is always the case, we knew nothing back then. But after countless tests, countless years, countless experiments. We finally understand so much. Even the simplest of SCPs confounded our understanding, they all behaved against at least one law of physics, mathematics, pshychology, anything!
But now…
Now we understand so much. We understand almost everything we have contained. We finally understood so many of them that we had to change their object classification from Safe, Euclid or Keter to just that, 'Understood'. Naturally, there are still quite a number of SCPs that we don't fully understand. But those are in the minor.
And just what have we done with our understanding of them? Nothing.
Well, not completly nothing. After we finally cracked SCP-055's anti-meme effects we instantly went into attempting to reverse-engineer it so it would be easier for us to remain and unknown.
But that process took us thousands of years of constant testing. We were still too preoccupied with the containment of other SCPs to throw many resources at it.
Now, I'm not doubting just how useful our reverse-engineering of SCP-055's abilities has been, it allowed us to work in full view of millions of people and none of them have any recollection of us.
But that's all we've done.
Times have changed, we no longer need to protect humanity from what it doesn't understand, because humanity can and will understand. Us protecting humanity from these anomalies should still be our first priority. But we need to start doing so much more.
We have the potential to successfully and properly advance human progress by so much in so little time, simply from reverse-engineering the effects of all the anomalies we understand. Just imagine, in one thousand years humanity could have made the progress of fifty thousand. Humanity will be more technologically advanced and more pshychologically advanced. In every definition of the term; better.
However, while it is possible for humanity to advance like this, it isn't possible with the current state of affairs that humanity is under, with all of the political troubles, the internal power struggles, the ego trips, everything. And possibly most of all, the peace.
It is a well-known fact that the greatest advancements that humanity has made were during, and because of war. Even when logic states that during times of peace, more advancements should be made due to the fact that resources are not going towards a war effort. But humanity is hardly what you would call logical.
For humanity to advance, changes must be made. For humanity to advance, anarchy must be achieved. For humanity to advance, The Empire must fall and the galaxy must be plunged into chaos.
I know what you're all thinking, and I'm not suggesting we just let humanity work it's problems out without help. We need to 'encourage' humanity to develop.
The galaxy would be in total chaos, and as neccessity is the mother of invention, it would be the perfect opportunity for humanity to advance. We just need to help it…
Indirectly of course, it would be for the best if the rest of humanity not know of our existence. We just need to poke here, prod there, and more importantly, we need to set up the structure of the Second Empire.
I propse that we establish two groups. One that focuses on the physical sciences and the other that focuses on the phychological sciences. We will need to visit occasionally with various Understood SCPs, and once they manage to reverse-engineer something from them, we alter their memories and leave. It's as simple as that.
The chaos of the galaxy will keep them advancing, their physical or psychological strength will keep them from being destroyed. But of course, this isn't enough. We will need to fabricate a guide, a Plan, for each of them, to ensure that they keep advancing, both will be utterly sure that together they will rule the galaxy as new Empire. This, of course, isn't far from the truth, but that's not why we're doing this.
Of course, we will be safe here on Earth. The entirety of humanity has forgotten their homeworld because, as you all know, we made that so. We've build up our precious homeworld into a massive fortress. The Empire with all it's might wouldn't be able to conquor us, I think we'll be able to handle a few warlords with rusting ships and stupid soldiers, even if we didn't use the our SCP-055 effect devices.
The intricacies of this entire plan have been worked out in detail, and will be available for you to view, but what I have stated is the truth.
That is all.
Audio Log.
"Initial meeting for Advancement Protocol"
Speaker: Director Hari Seldon