‘Holy mackerel! 25 years!? We better start cleaning up before the visitors arrive! Quick! Hide the homeless!’ was the first thought through my mind. Then my head was filled with the voice of my father which temporarily drowned out the other voices. It was a recollection of him giving me advice regarding the news media.
“Follow the money,” he said. “To find out why things are happening, just think of who stands to gain.” I instantly recognized that it was obvious. Of COURSE Mr. Shostak has to deliver an optimistic prognostication for contacting little green men or whatever size and colour they may be. He may even believe it himself, although that may be irrelevant. The point is, as a privately funded institution, according to Wikipedia, anyway (and Wikipedia IS the sum total of the world’s knowledge, and not Ben Stein as reported by his publicist), in order to continue to receive grants and funding, Mr. Shostak must be more optimistic than a teenage boy buying a condom for his wallet. Sure, much of the search for interplanetary neighbours consists of scanning for radio waves and there is only a slight possibility advanced alien cultures might not have some other broadcast medium, cable perhaps, but there’s jobs at stake here, including Senior Astronomer Shostak’s.
Don’t get me wrong, by the way. I am very interested in SETI and even offered up my home computer for a time to the SETI@home research group. This organization has harnessed the down-time of an estimated 290,000 home computers which makes it the 7th most powerful computer system in the world. (The most powerful being, of course, Bill Gates’ home computer followed closely by the one that checks to see if I’ve made a car payment or not.)
In addition to my SETI phase, I’ve always been fascinated with the space sciences. Cupcake likes to say I have space between my ears but I think she means something else. Still, I think it would be great to have friendly foreigners from neighbouring nebula show up to say “Hi!” and be on their way. But what if they like it here so much they want to stay? How would we feel about that? Would they be processed by the immigration department or would they remain illegal aliens? Would they be allowed in Arizona?
Even worse than simply over-friendly, what if they’re hostile, mean and vicious; a planet of divorce attorneys, for example? What if they are like Klingons with no Star Fleet to come to our rescue? I doubt even Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars project could have shot down a Klingon photon torpedo. There’s so much at stake!
On the bright side, there may be helpful aliens out there in the cosmos, committed to helping us achieve an environmentally sustainable planet with fair distribution of food; with peace and harmony in all our lives and tofu burgers for everyone. At least it would shut David “Eeyore” Suzuki up. However, I’m not sure that having some off-worlders telling us what to do would be really popular. We much prefer being bossed around, repressed and manipulated by our own kind.
Another newsy bit to “hit the wire” (actually, the “The Mother Nature Network)” was that when/if aliens ever stopped for gas on their way to visit relatives in the Andromeda galaxy, their interest would not be in any part of the entire body of science from the first head-bashing rock to the IPhone 4. Rather their focus would be on our arts and music. Obviously the “panel of experts” quoted in the article (their names or credentials were not mentioned, probably to protect their professional reputations in other fields) have never watched TV or listened to any of the music coming out of my son’s MP3 player. What if they don’t have fiction? What if they don’t get that TV and movies aren’t real? What would they think of “gangsta rap”? It makes you wonder why they would ever want to meet us. Maybe that’s why we haven’t made contact. They don’t want us to know they’re there. How embarrassing!
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