Personally, I fear extraterrestrials. If you listen to people like Carl Sagan or Frank Drake, whom I met recently, you’ll get the impression that extraterrestrials are peace-loving tree-huggers who wouldn’t think of harming anyone.
Who is Frank Drake? He is the originator of the famous Drake equation, which estimates the number of advanced alien civilizations there are in the galaxy. (Answer: many more than I am comfortable with.) Dr. Drake also was one of the founding leaders of SETI – the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.
Dr. Drake’s a smart guy. And a nice guy, too. He came to our campus to deliver a speech about his passionate work attempting to get in touch with ETs.
I’m not so excited about contacting advanced civilizations. For me, the possibility of aliens being out there is a strong argument for gun rights. Do I believe I can beat back the alien hordes with a Glock 9? No. But if I could shoot off a tentacle or two before they suck my brains out, I’d be pleased.
Now, according to the SETI crowd, there’s no reason to fear that the galaxy’s advanced civilizations would be hostile.
Oh yeah? The way I see it, we only have first-hand knowledge of one advanced civilization. Us. And what we’ve learned so far isn’t all that promising.
I think back to my sixth-grade class. We had a month-long creative-writing unit on poetry. We wrote a limerick, a haiku, a sonnet, rhyming couplets, etc. We had to write one poem of each format. This one kid, Sean, wrote every single poem about killing ants.
Families of ants
Trying to get back to home
Black Flag. Raid. THEY DIE!!!!
How do we know that aliens are not like Sean? Come to think of it, how do we know Sean himself wasn’t an alien?
Okay, let me give SETI folks the benefit of the doubt. Let’s say most aliens are rational and normal, and not at all like Sean, but they have a president with pudding for brains who just goes off an invades another planet even though it WAS NOT stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, and it DID NOT actually have anything to do with Al Qaeda. For instance.
Well, Dr. Drake explains that because no one – aliens included – can travel faster than the speed of light (an unproven theory, I would note), it is not plausible that aliens could reach Earth. We could, however, communicate with them, he says.
In wrapping up his speech, Dr. Drake asked the audience to envision an interconnected network of alien civilizations, who are, right now, busily communicating with one another, exchanging ideas and information. He opined that when we first establish contact with just one extraterrestrial civilization, we might thereby be able to plug into this “intergalactic internet” and establish contact with multitudes of them.
“Imagine what we could learn,” he exhorted the audience.
Actually, I tried to imagine it, and I’ve got to say, logging on to the intergalactic internet sounds like about the worst idea ever. Considering that most of our own internet is composed of utter filth – namely pornography and fan-written sports blogs – who knows what kind of unimaginable smut could come pouring down off the intergalactic internet. Count me as decidedly uninterested.
But wait a minute, you might say, what if aliens could offer us new cures for diseases? Hello?!? Think, for a moment, about what that would actually be like. Do you really want America’s pharmaceutical industry teaming up with the aliens to bring us a new round of television-advertising campaigns trying to convince us to treat diseases such as Restless Tentacle Syndrome or Frequent-Urge-to-Ooze-Green-Slime Disorder?
And who’s to assume the intergalactic internet would even work most of the time? If my crappy sporadic broadband connection is any indication, the human race could be spending more than half of every day hitting refresh just to try to see the how much alien spam has accumulated on John McCain’s MySpace page.
Even more frightening – how would we pay for it? Earthly telecom companies are bad enough. You should see the ginormous wads of cash that the cable company sucks out of my wallet each month for the bent-over-wheezing broadband I have.
One can barely fathom what the connection fees would be for the intergalactic internet. It would likely bankrupt us in a matter of minutes. The entire human race could be forced to service the debt by taking telephone-representative customer-service jobs.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Xurxuthurshpanaghtth, our records show that we disconnected your cable service last week at your request. We would be pleased to start up service again for a re-initiation fee of three quintillion galactos. What’s that? You’ll destroy my home planet with laser beams? I’m sorry you feel that way Mr. Xurxuthurshpanaghtth. Uh huh. You say you’re going to hang up right now and initiate the firing sequence? We value your business, Mr. Xurxuthurshpanaghtth. Is there anything else GalactoCast Cable can do for you today?”
Wow!!! That is some funny stuff. Not to mention that I agree with you. I have never liked the idea of alien contact. Let them stay where they are and we will stay here. We can barely maintain peace when going over oceans, imagine going through space, even if it is just to communicate. And I believe you about the cost. Wow!!! This one was funny but I agree!
Posted by: noname emanon | April 16, 2008 at 09:09 AM
I really liked this!!! Funny!!
Does Dr. Drake teach anywhere? Interesting!
Posted by: Nana | April 08, 2008 at 06:33 PM