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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.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Looks like Canada's finally doing something about illegal aliens.
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
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...
"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.
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!
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
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 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
"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
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
I checked wikipedia. The guy is 83 years oldhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Hellyer. Maybe he is just not all here anymore...
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)