If, against all odds, the acronymical SETI Program had produced any tangible results beyond the ungodly amount of dollars squandered in the pursuit of something ridiculously intangible, if intelligent life had been discovered “out there” and contact had been initiated would we, the human race, end up regretting it someday? I suppose if you were an astrophysicist or a cosmologist and it was your fate to live in the house that government and private funding built you’d be, for the sake of pet projects and continuous employment, inclined to paint a rosy picture of the Cosmos and it’s real or imagined inhabitants and you’d tend to steer clear of any messy possibilities that, in theory at least, might constitute a threat, a threat to everyone including the “cash-cow” you’re in the process of milking. In the end though, if one is in possession of a crumb of the intellectual honesty that today’s scientists are always crowing about and if one is willing to apply critical thinking to the question of alien creatures and their possible intentions toward humanity one must admit that they, like the bulk of the observable Universe, may be out to get us: Entropy, hellish levels of radiation, electromagnetism, the vacuum between the stars, extremes of heat and cold, chunks of iron and ice the size of large cities traveling at tremendous speeds through centuries sized orbits that threaten to intersect with our own finely tuned orbit; All these forces, all these conditions seem to be conspiring together to bring about our eventual demise and aliens, if they exist, may share this murderous tendency with the rest of Creation.
Not to speak ill of the dead but despite the late Carl Sagan’s desire to sell books, repave his driveway and pay his medical bills and despite SETI’s pretentious habit of pointing million-dollar-a-day radio-telescopes everywhere but where they need to be pointed there is an objective reality that needs to be addressed and a host of difficulties which need to be discussed before we continue to send out invitations to any (multi-limbed, gelatinous) race of (potential) extraterrestrial (cannibals) that happen to have radio-technology and enough time on their tentacles to arm a fleet of hyperspace-dreadnaughts and launch them towards planet earth. As much as that may sound like bad science-fiction it’s more in keeping with the overall nature of reality and closer to our own experience of history and things-in-general than the representatives of “scientism” are apt to admit. Aliens aside for a moment, ask an African-American or a Native-American, or any citizen of Iraq or Afghanistan or any citizen of any Third-World nation exactly what happens when an aggressive, technologically superior culture comes in contact with an “inferior” (indigenous) culture and they’ll leap up, eager to describe the host of atrocities and injustices that grow out of that kind of encounter. Yes, though Hollywood and UFO enthusiasts portray the humanoid model as something noble and ubiquitous, even as a template of sorts for the evolutionary or, in some opinions, the divine engine that produces intelligent life here and elsewhere the truth is, and I’m supported by the facts of history on this point, humans are little more than restless, two-legged, five-fingered, heavy-handed thugs and given the choice between staying home with the wife and kids or unbridled, unreflective expansion ending in genocide humans choose genocide every time. Why should aliens be any different?
Having forgotten those lessons of history that paint such a grim picture of reality perhaps Sagan and his like-minded cohorts unwittingly managed to send the signal that captured the attention of some interstellar version of Alexander the Great or Ghengis Khan and now mankind as a whole, like the earth cultures before us that we displaced, is in danger of being displaced by an advanced civilization from outer-space. Who knows? Maybe “porous” international borders are the least of our problems, maybe it’s our planet’s porous atmosphere that ought to concern us.
In any case, the signal has been sent and the results of that invitation have yet to present themselves so perhaps there is time to prepare. But how? How do we prepare for an unknown enemy of dubious intent armed with advanced weapons? Firepower and guile, my friend, firepower and guile.
Among my several recommendations I think the most feasible and the easiest to implement is my “Fortress Moon Plan”. This plan is well within the scope of our present level of technology and consists of a concerted effort by all the nations of Earth to build and arm an entrenched and impregnable fighting position on the Moon’s surface capable of avoiding detection by any craft entering our solar-system and proceeding toward our planet. Once an attack upon Earth has begun, and while our enemies back is turned to the seemingly docile Moon, our batteries upon the lunar surface could unleash a withering fire upon the enemies rear. This, and an equally intense barrage from planetside, would catch the enemy in a deadly crossfire, which, with any luck, would effectively nullify his attack and send him fleeing back to whatever backwater planet he came from.
The above plan would profit from the development of more and more powerful weapons although existing nuclear weapons and their delivery systems would work in a pinch. Given time though, particle-beam weapons and anti-matter weaponry which, presumably, are under development as I write, could be added to our arsenal thus raising our available firepower and guaranteeing a quick and lasting victory for the people of Earth.
Another plan, which I refer to as my “Empty Planet Plan”, would call for the immediate evacuation of the entire planet by virtue of an enormous fleet of transport vessels. Once the planet had been evacuated it would be rigged with explosives (nukes) and left to spin along through it’s orbits, a gigantic bluegreen booby-trap waiting for the landing of our enemies…BOOM!
A variation of this plan would be to rig the Moon and all the bodies of our solar-system with explosives and then to just sit back and wait for the enemy to come. Since military operations require a platform from which to launch them we would only have to wait for the enemy to choose his staging-area, whether it be our own Moon or one of the moons of Jupiter or any other body and then, with the push of a button, BOOM! Our enemy is gone, replaced by a fine mist of alien body-parts and fluids circling forever in the cold reaches of space, a warning to any future enemies and a lasting tribute to Earth’s prowess in warfare.
Finally, there is a more abstract approach, I call it my “Masada Plan” or my “Jim Jones Plan” although “Jim Jones Plan” obscures the philosophical aspects of the plan and makes it sound like the last gasp of a people trapped by their own stupidity, nevertheless, whatever label you put on it it would work like this: On a given day, at an appropriate hour, all the inhabitants of Earth would ingest a generous dose of a deadly drug and expire. The Earth itself would have been rigged beforehand with explosives and again, as outlined above, the planet would become, in essence, a slowly turning booby-trap waiting patiently for the hapless aliens unfortunate enough to set her off.
A variation of this plan would call for the salting of the soil and a poisoning of the rivers and oceans of our planet coupled with the extermination of all animal life followed by the mass suicide of all Earth’s people. The motivation would be to present any potential, extraterrestrial invaders with a grim, sterile picture of a people who, because of their integrity, refused defeat in battle and chose death with honor in its stead. Earth would become a gigantic mausoleum circling it’s Sun for eternity: Empty, useless, silent; A dead planet, yes, but a potent symbol of courage, thumbing it’s nose at the perverse universe and its evil denizens…forever.
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Why the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Seti may not be a Good Idea