Science Fantasy
Source: Why Stephen Hawking is Right to Urge Caution Before Contacting Alien Civilizations
Someone’s been watching too many movies from the ’50’s; reading too much science fiction or just plain removed from reality.
Imagine the scenario of an Alien civilization coming into contact with Earth and invoking that famous line, “take me to your leader!”. Who would that be? What if the craft landed in Arghistan and the spokesman for the planet wound up being the local head yak herder? What if they landed in the deep Amazon jungle and their odd appearance and strange language caused them to be ushered into a large soup pot? What if they landed on Chicago’s south side and after being shot, led to the crib of a Snoop Dog gangsta twin?
All of these are less scary than if the Aliens were to land at UN headquarters and exposed to that body of idiots. Is it really in the realm of possibility that someone, some body of people would speak on behalf of all Earthlings? You can’t even get people to agree on how weather happens.
There are likely 2 scenarios under which an Alien lifeforce would make contact with our planet. One scenario would be under the general realm of discovery. They figured out how to get here and they’re curious to have a look. We’d be a curiosity to them as an ant farm would be to a 9 year old. Another possibility is that they have some reason to exploit whatever resources we may have. In that case, the human population are just nuisances like noseeums at a beach.
Either way, the advice of anyone as to how to deal with this is as useful as an inflatable dart board. Yet, someone has funded some society named Breakthrough Message, that wants to design a message to be transmitted to the galaxies in order to contact Alien civilizations. The program pledges to: not transmit any message until there has been a global debate at high levels of science and politics on the risks and rewards of contacting advanced civilizations. I wonder if Christopher Columbus was given similar guidelines when Queen Isabella sent him off.
It’s laughable that this policy statement includes high levels of politics as a requisite for contact. To imagine that there would ever be a spokesman for the planet is science fiction. To require that such a person would be chosen with political consideration is outright fantasy.