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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
Looks like Canada's finally doing something about illegal aliens.
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.
Any ET that Bush can shoot down isn't worth knowing anyway.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
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."
Yes, the US government has been in a secret war with the G'ould for around 8 years now, but the SG-1 team is always around to keep the government honest. Well, at least until General O'Neill and Samantha Carter moved on to other jobs...
--Mythos
Note that the source is PRWeb. This isn't news, it's a press release for those organizations listed at the bottom.
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
Im assuming this is a joke...
Proving yet again that former Canadian ministers are no less looney than the former secretaries/administration officials of past American presidencies.
Since my tax dollars are going to be wasted no matter what, I'd prefer they waste them on something more important -- such as money for Quebec ad agencies or corrupt government officials -- then holding parliamentary hearings on ET diplomacy.
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
"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.
Weapons in the hands of people who can use them without asking the people and who can not be held accountable for their actions is always a very bad idea. Does Weapons in Space have anything to do with any kind of alien threat? Could it be that the "war on aliens" is just a step further in the "war on freedom" eh, I mean "war on terrorism"? It may be a good idea to read up on this and related issues.. Oh, btw. Look forward to the fake alien invasion that is planned in a few years... (remember this out when it is presented to you as the real thing on your mainstream TV channels in a few years)
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
I like to think our superior recreational drugs (with the sadly missed exception of peyote) and excellent beer are the drawing cards for aliens throughout the 'verse.
It's good to know one of our retired politicians is projecting our world renowed good Canadian manners outward toward our interglactic neighbours.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Did you not watch that movie?? The aliens would die from all the germs and bacteria that humans are immune to! Simply coughing and sneezing at them will be our ultimate weapon. There is absolutely nothing to worry about!
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.
To be honest I thin this world could use a good "intergalactic war". At worse we all die. At best the World unites and countries gain a sense of brotherhood. Maybe I'm naive but I'd like to think humanity would put aside its differences if there was ever a threat to itself... other than itself.
Bah who am I kidding.
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 f00l StOOpid e4rthLiNgS wilL ReGR6T all THIS BABBlin6!!!
supergalactic.conquerers@tauceti.org
***Game Over***Insert Coin***
Check out TFA and read one of the three "non-government organizations":
http://www.disclosureproject.org/
They're conspiracy theorists, and apparently they have followers around the world.
Let's remember that another UFO-believing group, the Church of Scientology, got famous followers like John Travolta, Tom Cruise, etc.
Cults happen.
...have I been embarassed to be Canadian...until now.
"Anyone that has ever gotten an idea based on any of my work and done something better with it-good for you."--J.Carmack
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
I've been a politico in Canada for nearly 20 years professionally. On and off Parliament Hill - mostly on. Paul Hellyer is a certifiable wacko. Full stop. Anyone who knows anything about Canadian politics knows Hellyer's record. He was first elected in 1949 - around the time Strom Thurmond first became a U.S. Senator. Hellyer is about as swift - even though Senator Thurmond is two years gone. Indeed, the colourful Senator could probably best Hellyer in a debate were they both to square off today - Thurmond in a casket and Hellyer in the flesh.
Pay this man no mind whatsoever. He's an idiot who once had a job with a title. Talent or smarts are not prerequisites in politics, after all.
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.
"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."
The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes
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; }
As for aliens? Do some research on the net. It will become very clear that what we are likely dealing with is a previously emmigrated human species, having left about 10,000 years ago after creating a nuclear winter right here. They come back, and for them it's like planet of the apes - the primitive tribes (sub-humans) of their time have risen up, built an oil-based economy and are in the process of riding the same rail-road of destruction that they did. Sound spectacularly crazy? Heh... Reality has a funny way of doing that sometimes...
Here is a decent place to start to get a taste. From this neutral site, you can google around and go deep into tin-foil-hat territory, or alternatively, you can investigate the real evidence in a scientific manner. There is a lot of both on the net.
I am actually pretty surprised that here on Slashdot, this article recieves such a mocking response. Skeptisism is good, but laughing is simply playing into the black propaganda to keep you from looking there. Looking there is good and healthy, it just may change the way you see things.
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
Deep breath. Sigh.
Here's the thing, for those of you fortunate enough to have not yet had the experience.
Your loved one can be totally sane by all measure of the law and medicine, yet their life can be completely taken over by a delusion. My favorite aunt developed late onset schizophrenia which in her case manifested itself as hearing voices from all around her, a cabal of people out to get her. At first the family thought her stories were real - consistent tales about strange neighbours in her apartment complex and their lives - but after a time there was just too much of it and the stories didn't check out. There was no reclusive girl named Cynthia in the next apartment and her upstairs neighbours weren't putting cameras and speakers in the air vents.
Anyway, to make a long story short, my aunt is still in charge of her own affairs, not in a hospital or care setting and by my non-professional lights mad as a hatter. She's moving for the third time in a year because the evil (imaginary) neighbours keep following her from building to building and never turns on lights or makes a sound because the evil neighbours start shrieking at her about it if she does. Her entire existence is one of fear and the only medical solution is some anti-psychotic pills that don't seem to do anything and a monthly geriatric worker visit.
Now if I were to have told this story a different way, focussing on the kookiness rather than the human tragedy, you'd have all laughed. It would have been a comedy bit - the crazy cat lady or Mr Magoo's misinterpretations of his surroundings.
With so many baby boomers getting older and from my personal first hand experience the medical field is pissing in the dark with regard to effective treatments, there are going to be a lot more news stories like this.
The real bitch of it all is, you often cannot easily tell from listening to such a person what is real and what is not. Trip to Mars, delusion. Trip to pharmacy to pick up prescription, real or not?
I checked wikipedia. The guy is 83 years oldhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Hellyer. Maybe he is just not all here anymore...
*cough*religion*cough*
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Actually, this last one is significant even if there are no aliens within contactable distance of Earth. There are extremely few positive cases of advanced human societies mixing with less advanced societies. The response has ranged from "cargo cults" to extermination campaigns to the utter collapse of native culture, followed by extreme chemical dependencies and other addictions. More than a few of the troubles in the Middle East, for example, have been due to extreme, prolonged culture shock. Many of the islands visited by Captain Cook, described as paradise at the time, are now little more than brothels with an ocean-front view for the rich.
So, whilst I don't regard the call for an Interstellar protocol to be particularly useful in and of itself, IF we take this opportunity to look at how to communicate with others without causing damage, I would consider it a worthy investment of time and effort. If it leads to the undoing of the mindless destruction inflicted in the past, so this world can be the richer for the cultures that still exist, then it will have paid for itself many times over.
If all it does is deter people from questioning how they treat others, then we'll keep paying an absurdly high price from something only a tiny handful will ever get anything from.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
To advance as far as they have, the species in question probably had to exterminate all competitors, just as our species out-performed, out-fought, and out-bred all the other competing hominids in our race's infancy. We're bloodthirsty and competitive because these traits enabled us to win the evolutionary race, and there is no reason to suppose that alien species didn't have to undergo a similar 'baptism-by-fire'.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
It doesn't matter, because this story is fake. Notice it was put out by PRWeb, an open-access news publishing service that just happens their articles are also published on Yahoo -- you may have seen them in the news a year or two ago when a rumor about Andy Kaufman still being alive was taken seriously by many people, a rumor that was given credence just because Yahoo! had mirrored it.
What's sad is, I've only seen at most three or four other posts in this entire story pointing out the fakeness and past history of PRWeb, out of over 300 posts. No, no... what's sad is, Slashdot actually posting this story, as if the story had any credibility in the first place.
Slashdot requires you to wait longer between hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment.
Canadians are completely off their rockers.
Close... the truth is that many of us Canadians actually are Extraterrestrials. You just named a few examples yourself. "Men In Black" is based on a true story, from little-known Canadian history.
You may have heard of the Avro Arrow. In actuality, the Arrow was one of the first landing craft to arrive here, and the Avro Arrow "project" was started as a cover story. When it was determined to be too dangerous to have the craft still around and intact, the "project" was "scrapped" and all the craft were destroyed, and the general public was none the wiser.
Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
The Europeans prevailed in many smaller conflicts in the Americas in a similar way. The native Americans did not maximize their own natural advatages...often because they lacked the proper advantage.
What they lacked was unity. If all native american tribes worked together against European invaders, the settlers would have been kicked off the continent. However, the Europeans were able to take the country piece by piece. Now of course modern mankind is all united and could never be susceptible to one faction (let's hypothetically call this entity a "nation") forming alliances, accepting bribes or declaring a neutrality, so aliens couldn't possibly pick and choose their battles at a time scale to suit them.
Aliens trying to take advantage of us and our resources seems much more likely than simple trying to wipe us out.
Interesting question - would a race of beings / being capable of interstellar travel have anything to learn from us as a species? It's hard to imagine us having an edge in Physics. Just about concievable we had some minor insights into Chemistry they could borrow (note I'm basing this on the lowest levels of technology a race would require for interstellar travel). Our biology is the only thing that I can concieve of even being of remotely possible interest to them. More abstract things could be of interest, though. Maybe they're interested in our philosophies and cultural values. Imagine the irritation to the World's rich and powerful, when the super advanced aliens arrive and say "Take us to your musicians."
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.