Slashdot Mirror
Canadian Ex-Minister Calls For Serious ET Study
Nom du Keyboard writes "A former Canadian Minister of Defense and Deputy Prime Minister wants Canada to hold public hearings on Exopolitics - relations with Extraterrestrials - to avoid the possibility of intergalactic war. Unfortunately he also proposes starting a 'Decade of Contact', which seems to mean spending a whole lot of public money on UFO education. Is he on the right track here, that we can't afford to ignore the rest of the Universe any longer?" From the article: "The United States military are preparing weapons which could be used against the aliens, and they could get us into an intergalactic war without us ever having any warning ... The Bush administration has finally agreed to let the military build a forward base on the moon, which will put them in a better position to keep track of the goings and comings of the visitors from space, and to shoot at them, if they so decide."
Wow... a new low. The aliens must be laughing themselves sick at our hubris. The possibility that our weapons might prove a threat to a culture capable of mere interstellar travel (let alone "intergalactic") is about the same as an ant colony against the U.S. Army.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Yes, this is a much better way of spending money, then seriously studying the DMCA before you copy it from the US.
For the perfect anti-Unix, write an OS that thinks it knows what you're doing better than you do and let it be wrong.
How sad that a simple case of senile dementia gets publicized like this. The media should leave him alone.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The US government cant fight off a bunch of dude with AKs and home made bombs, and this guy from Canada thinks we are building a moon base?
"UFOs, are as real as the airplanes that fly over your head."
Mr. Hellyer went on to say, "I'm so concerned about what the
consequences might be of starting an intergalactic war, that I just
think I had to say something."
Let me get this straight:
Among the things this guy is persuaded of then is that aliens walk
among us already, that the US government knows about it and has
apparently enough alien technology in its possession to be able to
wage war between galaxies (a pretty amazing feat for one little
planet, wouldn't you say? Even with a base on our moon!), while still
being able to keep the general population persuaded that we have not
made contact.
Wasn't Will Smith in that movie? And here I was under the impression that
the US was no longer even capable of manned spaceflight (other than
hitch-hiking with the Russians).
All chuckling aside, even though according to his Wikipedia
biography the man has a long history of UFO advocacy, he's also 82
years old and I am inclined to think that despite a distinguished
career the question of senility has to be raised. Still, anyone
should count themselves lucky to be giving public speaches at 82 in
the first place.
By his own admission, this guy was "not in the loop". Take with a pound of salt (since it's obvious he took many grains of Crack).
Paul Hellyer was born in 1923 and has a history of jumping parties and even forming breakaway splinter parties when the mood took him.
The "article" -- which as others have pointed out, is really a press release -- seems to deliberately muddle some mainstream speechs about the weaponization of space and the ballistic missile defense shield with some cockamamy stuff about aliens and moonbases.
I bet the UFO nuts are delighted that the mainstream media bit on this one.
No. Well...maybe. Actually, yes. It really just depends.
So just because they might have "figured out simple fission/fusion weapons" doesn't mean they can deal with a few gazillion joules of energy suddenly appearing 50 meters off the port quarter of their space ship.
"Suddenly appearing", huh? Exactly when did we develop teleportation technology? Oh, that's right...we haven't.
Any culture capable of interstellar travel should be more than capable of detecting and either sidestepping or shooting down whatever we lob at them with our pathetic chemical rockets.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
You can't plan for something you know nothing about. Anyone speculating about whether ET will be war-like, peaceful, care about us, or not care about us is engaging in the art of "making shit up". Our basis for understanding intelligence is almost entirely based on ourselves and how we think, act, behave, and look at the world. Much of this is based on our underlying brain structure and not on culture. We all have emotions and much of our being is based on that.
But yet when we even look at a Jellyfish it's extremely different from us (and even so, very similar in terms of underlying biology). Will ET have better technology (tools) than us? Well, based on our own experience with technology you'd think that anyone capable of solving the problem of inter-stellar travel certainly would have a far better understanding of physics than us. But I fear when I even say that I'm also probbably practicing the art of "making shit up".
The point is that planning for any of this is just absurd, and that's ignoring the fact that we have no idea if there even IS intelligent life elsewhere, much less life that's interested in coming here. I don't believe this kind of question is one of science, but of philosophy. That doesn't mean it's not an interesting or important question, but just one we can't find an actual answer to. Devoting money to it makes about as much sense as to devoting money to trying to find god.
I think a more sane approach would be trying to find out if there IS intelligence life elsewhere. That means putting more money into SETI searches for instance. I personally doubt whether UFOs (the alien spacecraft type) exist, but you'll never find them if you don't look. Because of this I think it's important for such a survey to have a dual purpose. Put money into mapping asteroids (and as a side effect maybe you can look for UFOs, or maybe other purely astronomical phenomenon).
AccountKiller
He also stated flat out that we are already being visited. This isn't prudency about considering how we might react and what we should do if we make contact; this is pure crackpottery.
Perhaps we should refine meaningful and tactful relations with different cultures on our own planet before taking on the extraterrestrial ones?
#roses { color: #ff0000; } #violets { color: #0000ff; }
"I am actually pretty surprised that here on Slashdot, this article recieves such a mocking response."
Uh.. yeah.. well, just because I read on average something like 5 books a month, and just because they're mostly science fiction, doesn't mean I actually think there's any other intelligent life out there - except for the slight possibility of other human life out there.
I am not an evolutionist. I believe the earth is only about 6,000 years old. Now, it's possible that people made space ships and travelled to other planets or maybe even galaxies in that time, but, well, the lack of archeological evidence is interesting. Not enough, I think, to entirely disprove any ideas of past space flight ability.. but certainly enough to throw shadows of doubt.
Secondly, like has already been mentioned, I don't see any reason for any kind of society that can attain interstellar space flight to be afrai of us - whether you're talking black projects or not is irrelevant. The only reason they might have to be afraid of us is if they came down on the ground; space flight capabilities wouldn't mean ground combat capabilities, necessarily.
But, furthermore, I don't understand how the Canadian government (and btw, I am Canadian and also singularly unimpressed by a lot of the government we've had for the last.. oh.. 100 years or so) or, actualy, I suppose, one particular member of it, thinks that preparing to defend ourselves if necessary is likely to provoke a war.
Umm, does the fact that there are guys patrolling in armed boats around the oceans surrounding the US make France more likely to get into a war with the US? No. Why not? well because, France knows those boats are there primarily for defense, not offense.
Anyone intelligent enough to have developed space flight is bound to be intelligent enough to know that weapons aren't necessarily there because the owners *want* to use them. Don't go trying to feed me any balogny about super intelligent and highly advanced races being completely peaceful; that's laughably unlikely (and besides, there being any aliens is pretty unlikely already).
Finally, even if they did decide to just bomb us instead of saying "hi, what are the guns for?" first, that would probably mean that they wouldn't have been particularly averse to the idea of bombing us even if we hadn't had the guns. And who knows, maybe the guns actually would come in handy.
Anyway, my major point is, try to keep the line between purely wild conjecture, possibilities, and probablities, a little more visibly drawn.
Early bird may get the worm.. but the second mouse gets the cheese.