Re: Aliens

[Gary Kern <gkern@alumni.Princeton.EDU>]

Gerd Groenewold wrote:
> 
> Hello all,
> 
> I have come to see the whole UFO/ET mythology as exactly that, a
> mythology, a religious phenomenon, however it is one that has been given
> a technological twist, which explains its endurance in a titanic age.
> Instead of Angels and gods, we instead have beings who are thought to be
> like ourselves, only "more advanced," either intellectually or
> technologically or both.  In popular culture we see it in both positive
> and negative reflections, for example the movie _Close Encounters of the
> Third Kind_, which ends with a giant UFO descending from the heavens
> like the New Jerusalem, or, on the negative side, every week we can see
> another episode of _The X-Files_ on TV, where there is a secret
> conspiracy in league with aliens in a way reminiscent of medieval
> European ideas of a secret witch cult in league with the devil.
> 
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It is not usually noticed, but the intelligent aliens often serve a
political purpose.  I recall Carl Sagan, guru of popular science in
America, speculating that it would be foolish to imagine that human
beings are the only intelligent life in the universe and equally foolish
to imagine that they (we) are the most intelligent.  This point
demonstrated, he went on to imagine what a super-intelligent alien would
say if he came to earth and saw how we did things.  Now the door was
open for Sagan's view of the world and Sagan's solutions, all projected
onto a fictional visitor from outer space.  Sagan, so sharp in debunking
astrology, didn't bother to deal with the distances the alien would have
to travel, cultural estrangement and other difficulties, because he was
on a political correctness roll.

I have seen television programs, especially Babylon Five, where the
alien, even before his qualities are known, is accorded equality with
human beings and equal rights.  Those who question it are treated as
racists.  It's a good moral lesson hammered into our skulls.  The alien
as superior being actually = the author of the alien as superior being.
It's a nice trick, very much like what the Communists did with the
proletariat.

More and more I am noticing that scientists are not scientific, prone to
prejudice and cliche-ridden.  The alien is only one example of their
failure to remain impartial, critically minded and dedicated to the
scientific method.  The dinosaur is another.

GK