Originally published at: William Shatner blasts "ridiculous" UFO Congressional hearing | Boing Boing
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One of the most ridiculous aspects to me is the idea that the United States government could keep extraterrestrial beings secret if they wanted to.
The government can’t even keep its own activities secret most of the time. Keeping alien intelligences under wraps when those beings’ activities weren’t confined by national borders—or even planetary borders—would be like trying to keep the existence of the planet Mars a national secret.
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I think he’s right, but he could definitely come up with a reason in a half second or so.
Two words: Prime Directive.
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Of course Captain Kirk can’t imagine following the prime directive.
More importantly though… everyone clamoring that they announced aliens… because “non-human biologics” were found seem to be forgetting that the earth is chocked full of “non-human biologics”. Hell the first life we sent into outers space were all “non-human biologics”.
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It is ridiculous. Everyone knows we don’t make first contact with the Vulcans until April 4, 2063.
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That’s really the crux of the problem with all conspiracy theories that involve more than a handful of people needing to keep some big secret. This secret would likely involve thousands of people needing to keep their mouths shut. It’s just nonsensical.
Well…he’s got a point. If a species technologically advanced enough to travel possibly thousands of light years across space came to Earth, we would be to them like ants or mice are to us. If they were here purely on a scientific expedition, maybe they’d try to not disturb the local ecosystem too much, but I doubt they’d go out of their way to hide. The spacefaring sentient species in Star Trek were not so far apart from the pre-spacefaring sentient species, in evolutionary terms. It was a very different situation, and likely not realistic at all.
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The captain is totally correct here and it’s embarrassing that Congress has time for such nonsense.
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Kirk was always breaking the Prime Directive.
How are the odds on handshake vs gunshot?
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The oceans are boiling while Congress is spending its time credulously debriefing UFO cranks and con-men. And people wonder why I have little hope for the future.
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In the fevered imaginations of the conspiracy crowd, the government is both all powerful/all knowing, but also helplessly ineffectual…
That thing that Captain Kirk violated all the freaking time? That directive? Every chance he got… ignored it?
They don’t. This is yet more right wing nonsense to try and make the processes of government appear foolish, and tyrannical. they don’t give two shits about the many crises we face today.
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It’s not entirely inconceivable that they might want to observe us in our natural state. If there did arise incontrovertible evidence of extraterrestrial life, the world would go absolutely apeshit!
That said, this whole thing with Congress talking UFOs is ridiculous for sure!
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Sure, agreed - assuming other cultures value independent uplifting of species, which isn’t a given. Just as likely, they may want to enslave pre-FTL species or to solve some of our more existential problems to help us become FTL species (assumably, these species would have FTL technology; otherwise, their getting here in the first place is unlikely in the first place.)
But if we go with the assumption of a Prime-Directive-like culture - there’s no way they’d leave evidence down here for anyone to find, let alone allow it to remain in a government facility either. If we presume that any culture that has reached FTL status and cares about not polluting the path of Pre-FTLs has, like us, had to deal with misinformation, propaganda, and so on - they should be at least as good at it as we are and be able to bury this information, not have congressional hearings on it!
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The aliens lock their doors (hatches?) when they pass Earth. Then again I suspect some may be posing as urltr-right goofs just to prank us.
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Three men can keep a secret if two of them are dead.
-Ben Franklin
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If I understand correctly, you can, in principle, travel an arbitrarily far distance in an arbitrarily short (from your perspective) period of time, just by going at a high enough percentage of the speed of light, without needing FTL travel. But unless your species is immortal or nearly so, you’d have to resign yourself to everyone you ever knew being long since dead by the time you get home again.
On the other hand, you don’t risk violating causality, so there’s that.
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He’s still on TV every week, on Stars on Mars 
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Well, except for the giant ice wall surrounding the disc of the earth. That’s an awful lot of pilots and sailors that they’ve managed to keep in on the conspiracy for many, many hundreds of years.
But besides that one, a large conspiracy is hard to keep secret, I agree.
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They were living in Carbon Creek since the 1950’s…
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They’re just very shy.
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