That’s right. It’s completely insane and nutso. Nothing to see here. Carry on citizens.
You are smart.
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It’s not completely insane to believe there are probably extraterrestrial civilizations in the universe.
It’s not even necessarily nutso to believe it’s possible such civilizations are observing humanity or even covertly visiting our planet.
Believing that any single government—let alone multiple governments—would have both knowledge of such visitors and the ability to keep it hidden from the public indefinitely? Yeah, that’s pretty nuts. Governments usually can’t even keep their own activities secret from the public, let alone the activities of a Galactic Federation that didn’t even answer to any authority on Earth.
How long do you think a global conspiracy known to thousands, including such people as Donald Freaking Trump, would stay secret before someone spilled the beans along with the evidence to back it up?
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I mean, we study flatworms, but we don’t make treaties with flatworms. If something we’d categorize as extra-terrestrial intelligence did have the extremely unlikely ability to traverse the mind-boggling void of interstellar space in time to visit a species that’s been broadcasting radio pollution for about a hundred Earth years, the likelihood that it would be anywhere close enough to us for meaningful communication is infinitesimal. Gubments in cahoots with aliens is just the icing on the ridiculousness cake.
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I’m not entirely convinced he’s willing to blow up his credibility for a few book sales - even assuming he’s counting on potential future book sales, and perhaps anticipating fees for appearances and videos, etc. Nor even that he believes it, necessarily. It wouldn’t be the first time that someone did this for the LOLs, though.
I’m greatly amused by the idea that a Galactic Federation would approach only the US and Israel. Presumably he only included the US to make it more believable. And of all the people involved in this scheme (even going to Mars!), no one but himself has ever revealed the truth. (Had any other countries been involved, the number of people keeping the secret multiplies, of course.) Perhaps most amusingly, he refers to these extraterrestrials as “The Unidentified Flying Objects.” Super-legit!
Yet apparently,with this most secret of secret conspiracies, there’s absolutely no penalty for having spilled the beans - he’s concerned only with his credibility, not any sort of death squad sent to silence him, or penalties from the government. The keeping of the secret was on the honor system, apparently.
Although they could easily keep Donnie from revealing all - just give him the information in a briefing. He’d never read it.
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There it is!
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You just inspired a moment of profound dread. Wouldn’t it be just like 2020 to introduce some incredibly advanced civilization, only to reveal that these hyper intelligent beings are less Vulcan and more Borg? That they picked the US and Israel because they like our authoritarian moxie and want to teach us how to REALLY abuse power?
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The original version of the story in the Jerusalem Post had the best last line ever
The Jerusalem Post was unable to reach out to this supposed Galactic Federation for comment."
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This. Very much this. I would be quicker to buy into the zoo hypothesis, where there is a galactic civilization, and they have put a restriction zone around us to allow the primitives to mature to an appropriate level. (Not sure about the flatworm analogy, maybe more along the lines of lemurs or such. Recognizable potential, but prone to flinging poo at this stage.)
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That’s like supposed deities. Humans may be as far superior to ants as deities are to humans, but have humans created any ants lately? Even in labs? Humans don’t negotiate treaties with ants. Any aliens arriving in Terran vicinity would likely see humanity as ants.
Or recall John Varley’s solar system, where mysterious seemingly-aquatic aliens eliminated humans from Earth so we would no longer bother their friends / soul mates the cetaceans and other oceanic megafauna.
Any aliens reaching our solar systems are likely either incomprehensible, genocidally ferocious, or a plague of microbes. None are good news for we naked-ape Earthlings. At best, we might be a sustainable food source. Or maybe they’ll just devour us all.
UFOlogists are like Mormons and Scientologists – they’ll believe any crazy shit. Sales opportunities arise. Hey pal, have I got a bridge for you!
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Okay fine, but if they could pass along this note to GSV Think Of It As A Learning Experience, that’d be great, thanks!
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Given that we have a sample size of zero, I’m going to go with almost totally incomprehensible, not only due to a removal in time of having creative adaptive intelligence, but in in simply being unknowably different. In the extraordinarily unlikely event of any kind of direct contact they’d be, to us and to borrow a term from Iain M. Banks, an outside context problem.
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Scientologists are UFOlogists, just not as open about it as some groups. They only learn about it on the higher levels, and they’re not supposed to talk about it (unless they want to be superior and smug).
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FTFY
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Try “sadly, but superciliously watch the flatworms annihilate all other species in the planet, then themselves.”
There’s a joke about how most Star Trek episodes involve the captain invoking the Prime Directive at the beginning of the episode, followed at the end by nuking everything from orbit and then wandering off. But when you realize that every writer sees the planet, not Starfleet, as “us”, it starts making a lot more sense.
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“We came to Earth to make contact with South Africa, but our planet is 40 light years away, and by the time we got here…”
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If there are intergallactic species, earth is totally under quarantine to prevent a virulent galatic outbreak of stupidity.
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The worst case for an alien encounter is that they are exactly like us.
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BTW, if the aliens read this - the offer still stands. Give us your technology, and you can have all the cow lips you want.
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Even If there were aliens that have actually come to earth, the chances are they would be so different from us that they could not survive on our planet. Much like we would have great difficulty on the surface of Venus, or within the atmosphere of Neptune.
The idea that they would come to earth to harvest resources from our planet is ludicrous. In much the same way no one considers mining the methane of Titan is a reasonable solution to our energy problems.
The most likely scenario would be they might send down some probes to study us, out of scientific curiosity, in the same way we have scientists who put out cameras in the forest to study the animals there.
Granted, beaming up the occasional rural inhabitant from a cow pasture to dissect, or implant with a tracking device would be totally in line with that line of reasoning though.
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