Global Warming Scare and the Fermi Paradox or Why Liberalism may have Ended Interstellar Civilizations
Timothy Birdnow
There are cycles in life; many of them. We often recognize them, though some seem to elude our minds. Still, there appears to be a cycle of life that works for most things. Birth, childhood, adulthood, and eventual senesence and finally death. These cycles are as true of stars as they are of people, plants, animals. Things have a beginning, they grow, they peak, and then they die. This seems to be an intrinsic feature to our universe.
Recently there was a horrendously stupid comment made by a Nasa official about Global Warming that suggests we may be on the downhill slide of our cycle. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/aug/18/aliens-destroy-humanity-protect-civilisations
Seems a guy named Shawn Domagal-Goldman of Nasa's Planetary Science Division and some of the other best-and-brightest have concluded that aliens may be watching us, and may be prepared to wipe us out if we do not handle the problem of greenhouse warming. He concludes that aliens may want to destroy us for our stupidity in killing ourselves. Brilliant deduction! Of course, it begs the question; why kill a people who are already doing that job to themselves nicely? Interstellar travel will always be a chore, and minimum, and who goes to the trouble of wiping out a species for being stupid when the species is wiping itself away?
I would suspect that it would be the opposite; come up with some test, some sort of cosmic stupidity and see if the race you are testing falls for it. (You could put the idea into some by kidnapping them and inserting the idea with an anal probe. Too many use that particular region for thinking anyway.) If you can get them to follow others off the cliff you either disregard them as too stupid to be threatening or competitive - or you go ahead and exterminate them so you can use the Earth for something more smarter and more useful, like Sirian boll weevils or 61 Signa eggplant.
But, one must listen to Enrico Fermi. Fermi (the fabled nuclear and quantum physicist http://www.lucidcafe.com/library/95sep/fermi.html) ran the numbers and found that there should be other intelligent species in the galaxy, and that of those species some should be advanced enough to get around town a bit. His famous question "where are they?" has yet to be answered. For more information on the Fermi Paradox visit
http://www.fermisparadox.com/Fermi-paradox.htm
Where indeed. Outside of tall tales by backwoods meth lab owners of little green men, rotating dinnerware, and anal probes (what IS it with aliens and anuses?) we have no real evidence of their existence. There should be something; radio waves, for instance. ARECIBO has been scanning the heavens for some time looking for those signals, scanning in vain. The discovery of the pulsars got everyone excited, but it turned out the pulsars were just boring old rotating neutron stars. Quasars did, too. Aliens do not seem to have left any trash or debris on the interplanetary superhighway to be picked up. No Alien Big Gulp cups (full of liquid Methane, perhaps), no Twinkie wrappers (maybe Twinkies themselves are alien artifacts? They certainly seem so.), no treads wearing off the tires of their interstellar El Camino P225/50R16 91S whitewalls. No nothing. They just don't seem to be around anywheres.
Maybe they're hiding. Maybe they're lying low, watching to see just how stupid we are. Maybe they have made Earth a nature preserve, or are conducting some experiment involving us.
Maybe we are the first species to become sentient? Given the relative youth of our species that is doubtful.
Cycles. I wonder...
Take a look at this. http://tbirdnow.mee.nu/sometimes_you_like_have_some_time_on_you_hands_and_then
Alien life would be very different than terrestrial life, yet perhaps there is a natural cycle of stupidity, one that cannot be broken, no matter how much life varies? A species - any species - capable of producing a civilization would be cooperative by it's very nature, or it would never grow beyond the stone age. The first impulse of any cooperative species would be to protect it's members, to coddle the stupid and weak and lazy. You end up with a dichotamous split, as envisioned by H.G. Wells and famously chronicled in The Time Machine; a divergence between the intelligent and industrious and the lazy and stupid. Wells saw the lazy and stupid being the ultimate end for the aristocratic class, but it could just as easily be the end for the lower classes as machines make it easier and easier for them to live as they wish, eating, drinking, engaging in carnal exploits. Eventually they become a kind of pet for the upper classes, or a burden if you will.
And while technology may proceed apace, perhaps the inability of the majority to understand they are being hoodwinked, that they are no longer free but are wards of the State, the loss of independence and self-reliance brings about an eventual end to their civilization? It happened to the Roman Empire, after all.
And it could have happened to countless alien cultures. Something like the Global Warming hysteria could sweep over emerging civilizations, drown them as the elites try to use what they see as a crisis (or think is a handy tool) to control an increasingly large mass of beings who have become incapable of caring for themselves. It could be that alien civilizations eventually de-industrialize themselves over foolish notions. It could be that Liberalism is an universal mental disease, rather like giving a computer an order to calculate pi out to it's final end. It could be the aliens aren't out there because they became too Liberal for their own survival, and dismantled the core of their civilizations in a fit of intellectual madness.
The Universe seems to be full of contradictory information, and the more questions answered leads to far more difficult questions. Rational beings have to be able to juggle these balls and still remain sane. Perhaps the seeming insanity of quantum physics and other imponderables drives all species to madness, where they become so used to holding contradictions in their minds that they do not see that they are tearing out their own prefrontal lobes. Perhaps knowledge holds the seeds to the destruction of the student?
Where are they? Perhaps they are now savages, wondering at the lightening at night. Perhaps they attained heights undreamt of but tossed them away as any good Liberal will do. Perhaps we are just reaching that same point.
Where are they? Where will WE be!
I can't wait for the comic book to come out.
Hat tip; Dana Mathewson
There are cycles in life; many of them. We often recognize them, though some seem to elude our minds. Still, there appears to be a cycle of life that works for most things. Birth, childhood, adulthood, and eventual senesence and finally death. These cycles are as true of stars as they are of people, plants, animals. Things have a beginning, they grow, they peak, and then they die. This seems to be an intrinsic feature to our universe.
Recently there was a horrendously stupid comment made by a Nasa official about Global Warming that suggests we may be on the downhill slide of our cycle. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/aug/18/aliens-destroy-humanity-protect-civilisations
Seems a guy named Shawn Domagal-Goldman of Nasa's Planetary Science Division and some of the other best-and-brightest have concluded that aliens may be watching us, and may be prepared to wipe us out if we do not handle the problem of greenhouse warming. He concludes that aliens may want to destroy us for our stupidity in killing ourselves. Brilliant deduction! Of course, it begs the question; why kill a people who are already doing that job to themselves nicely? Interstellar travel will always be a chore, and minimum, and who goes to the trouble of wiping out a species for being stupid when the species is wiping itself away?
I would suspect that it would be the opposite; come up with some test, some sort of cosmic stupidity and see if the race you are testing falls for it. (You could put the idea into some by kidnapping them and inserting the idea with an anal probe. Too many use that particular region for thinking anyway.) If you can get them to follow others off the cliff you either disregard them as too stupid to be threatening or competitive - or you go ahead and exterminate them so you can use the Earth for something more smarter and more useful, like Sirian boll weevils or 61 Signa eggplant.
But, one must listen to Enrico Fermi. Fermi (the fabled nuclear and quantum physicist http://www.lucidcafe.com/library/95sep/fermi.html) ran the numbers and found that there should be other intelligent species in the galaxy, and that of those species some should be advanced enough to get around town a bit. His famous question "where are they?" has yet to be answered. For more information on the Fermi Paradox visit
http://www.fermisparadox.com/Fermi-paradox.htm
Where indeed. Outside of tall tales by backwoods meth lab owners of little green men, rotating dinnerware, and anal probes (what IS it with aliens and anuses?) we have no real evidence of their existence. There should be something; radio waves, for instance. ARECIBO has been scanning the heavens for some time looking for those signals, scanning in vain. The discovery of the pulsars got everyone excited, but it turned out the pulsars were just boring old rotating neutron stars. Quasars did, too. Aliens do not seem to have left any trash or debris on the interplanetary superhighway to be picked up. No Alien Big Gulp cups (full of liquid Methane, perhaps), no Twinkie wrappers (maybe Twinkies themselves are alien artifacts? They certainly seem so.), no treads wearing off the tires of their interstellar El Camino P225/50R16 91S whitewalls. No nothing. They just don't seem to be around anywheres.
Maybe they're hiding. Maybe they're lying low, watching to see just how stupid we are. Maybe they have made Earth a nature preserve, or are conducting some experiment involving us.
Maybe we are the first species to become sentient? Given the relative youth of our species that is doubtful.
Cycles. I wonder...
Take a look at this. http://tbirdnow.mee.nu/sometimes_you_like_have_some_time_on_you_hands_and_then
Alien life would be very different than terrestrial life, yet perhaps there is a natural cycle of stupidity, one that cannot be broken, no matter how much life varies? A species - any species - capable of producing a civilization would be cooperative by it's very nature, or it would never grow beyond the stone age. The first impulse of any cooperative species would be to protect it's members, to coddle the stupid and weak and lazy. You end up with a dichotamous split, as envisioned by H.G. Wells and famously chronicled in The Time Machine; a divergence between the intelligent and industrious and the lazy and stupid. Wells saw the lazy and stupid being the ultimate end for the aristocratic class, but it could just as easily be the end for the lower classes as machines make it easier and easier for them to live as they wish, eating, drinking, engaging in carnal exploits. Eventually they become a kind of pet for the upper classes, or a burden if you will.
And while technology may proceed apace, perhaps the inability of the majority to understand they are being hoodwinked, that they are no longer free but are wards of the State, the loss of independence and self-reliance brings about an eventual end to their civilization? It happened to the Roman Empire, after all.
And it could have happened to countless alien cultures. Something like the Global Warming hysteria could sweep over emerging civilizations, drown them as the elites try to use what they see as a crisis (or think is a handy tool) to control an increasingly large mass of beings who have become incapable of caring for themselves. It could be that alien civilizations eventually de-industrialize themselves over foolish notions. It could be that Liberalism is an universal mental disease, rather like giving a computer an order to calculate pi out to it's final end. It could be the aliens aren't out there because they became too Liberal for their own survival, and dismantled the core of their civilizations in a fit of intellectual madness.
The Universe seems to be full of contradictory information, and the more questions answered leads to far more difficult questions. Rational beings have to be able to juggle these balls and still remain sane. Perhaps the seeming insanity of quantum physics and other imponderables drives all species to madness, where they become so used to holding contradictions in their minds that they do not see that they are tearing out their own prefrontal lobes. Perhaps knowledge holds the seeds to the destruction of the student?
Where are they? Perhaps they are now savages, wondering at the lightening at night. Perhaps they attained heights undreamt of but tossed them away as any good Liberal will do. Perhaps we are just reaching that same point.
Where are they? Where will WE be!
I can't wait for the comic book to come out.
Hat tip; Dana Mathewson
posted by Timothy Birdnow | 6:21 AM
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