Everything in Pluribus happened because a scientist dismissed a lab procedure, got careless, and let the virus loose. The same scene replays in Alien Earth, and the loop never stops. Humanity ends because someone ignored the safety protocols.
We're too unreliable, too easily hijacked by emotion. Off days, mood swings, microsleeps, office politics, "I'll do it after lunch", one sloppy moment and the system collapses. Even when the stakes are high, we grow complacent, we acclimate, we tune out, we lose the edge.
Watching Alien Earth, I couldn't stop thinking: "If you staff the most important mission in history with underpaid, sleep deprived, emotionally messy primates, you get exactly what you pay for."
Earth's brightest minds refused to spend sixty years in cryo, so the company filled the seats with anyone who wouldn't say no. That's why helmets come off "because it's hard to breathe."
Every franchise, Alien, Resident Evil, The Thing, Contagion, starts the same way: "Human has off day, civilization falls apart." We are the single point of failure baked into every system we build.
Hot take: Alien wouldn't have happened if the first crew had been all advanced robotics or AI. Humans never stick to the plan. In most stories, the aliens don't even visit Earth at first, they send probes. They know better than to trust fallible, emotional beings. (Yes, in Prometheus the Engineers hauled the black goo themselves and screwed up, more proof: use robots for anything that matters.)
If first contact ever happens, the safest crew is zero humans. Send an all robot crew. Let the meat stay home.