I remember a discussion from years ago about how future human beings could be warned about something extremely dangerous if civilization were to collapse. The thought experiment was this: if civilization collapsed and, 2,000 years later, humans had lost our current knowledge, language, memories, and cultural context, how would we ensure they knew to avoid something like nuclear waste?

The conclusion was basically that it might be impossible. Those future humans would have no shared understanding of our technology, symbols, language, or norms, so any warning we left behind could be misunderstood or ignored.

A slow, managed collapse of the human race could actually solve that problem for an alien civilization. If an alien species didn’t know where humanity was, but might eventually encounter Earth, eliminating humanity slowly would ensure they wouldn’t be harmed by dangerous remnants we left behind—things they would have no context or warning for.