Do we need a wall to keep space aliens out?
by Tom Toles
Where are all the aliens from outer space? Maybe they are hiding from us. If they are in fact intelligent, that would be the smart play.
If they are not so intelligent, they would come here and run for president. And we would apparently elect them, as we have just demonstrated. Who among us, after all, seems the most eerily non-human, and speaks our language like he doesn’t really understand what the words mean? And who is a color never seen in our world before, for that matter? That’s right, the guy we elected, which of course raises the question, is there intelligent life here on Earth?
Does intelligent life exist anywhere? Let’s examine that question for a moment. While we persist in assuming that there are lots of intelligent beings out in space, the evidence for that turns out to be extremely flimsy. Will this lack of evidence change our assumptions? Probably not, because we are evolving quickly into a post-evidence species. Our president values assumptions and assertion over evidence, but are we really any different?
One of the fulcrum tests of our own intelligence came with the movie “An Inconvenient Truth.” The title turned out to be our test. Truth vs. convenience. Convenience won. An intelligent people simply would not take the course we have taken. Everybody who examined the evidence knew, from the energy companies to the policymakers, that climate change is a dagger aimed at the heart of humans’ future on earth. But we have kept choosing present convenience over necessary action.
What else? The social destabilizer of income inequality? For that we chose President Trump, and Trump chose MORE income inequality in his tax bill, and sold it by prioritizing assertions over evidence. And we bought it. And day after day, as one outrage is piled on another, making it increasingly apparent what an unstable, unsuitable president we have, an entire political party is hugging him in an embrace that is squeezing the life out of what is left of rational governing.
When eventually we crawl out from the wreckage of our self-inflicted worst-decision-ever of electing Trump president of the United States, and when we look around to assess the damage and its causes, we are eventually going to need to look at ourselves and our society. And ask if we have let rationality slip under the wheels of seductive commercial convenience and its handmaiden of deliberately dishonest messaging.
Smart aliens are not going to come and destroy us, or save us. This is all up to us alone. We have to determine if the number of intelligent species in our galaxy is one or zero.
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OCU
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