Along with the unrelenting summer heat, news stories are often replete with strange tales and even stranger people. This summer is no different as former NASA astronaut and 6th human on the moon, Dr. Edgar Mitchell, claims that extra-terrestrial beings have visited the Earth on several occasions and there is a global cover-up of the situation in progress. Naturally, representatives at NASA were quick to play down the comments saying that they neither track nor communicate with non-human on this planet or anywhere in the universe. However, who are we to believe? A man who holds the (human) record for longest-ever moon walk, or a huge government funded organization that seems to be so cash strapped they can hardly afford to keep their vending machines stocked?
It really depends on whether you believe God stopped making intelligent creatures after Adam and Eve disappointed Him by eating from the Tree of Knowledge or not.
I wrote about this topic back in February when an abnormal number of UFO’s were reported in Japan, so I won’t discuss the same topics as I did then. Instead, it would be much more interesting to look at the types of comments people are leaving on News.com’s Australian website. Of the 104 responses that were recorded at the time, only four types of responses seem to exist for the subject: aliens don’t exist because it’s not in my preferred religious text, aliens have a strong probability of existing, aliens should help us clean up the mess we’ve created in the name of progress and, aliens are here and have been here for quite some time.
Aliens Don’t Exist, Dammit!
Of all the people that wrote comments adamantly refusing to believe that aliens exist, I think I could sit down and have a conversation with only one of them. This isn’t because I strongly believe that alien life exists in some form somewhere in the universe, but because I have a really hard time carrying on a conversation with someone who can believe something so passionately while backing it up with zero information … refutable or not. Don’t get me wrong, I have a lot of respect for people that can take the words contained in a religious text and keep them close to their heart. However, for someone who has “learned” how to read a Bible, Qur’an, Torah or another text in a very particular fashion to glean meaning and insight into how we should treat ourselves and each other, I’m surprised that they cannot see the potential for something a little more fantastic.
Nowhere does it explicitly say in any (respected) religious text that I’ve read that extra-terrestrial life does not exist anywhere. Nowhere does it say that we are the sole intelligent beings in the universe, either. We were given domain over the Earth and all the creatures that swim, crawl, slither, walk or fly on it … but that’s about it. It says nothing (specifically) about other planets, star systems or galaxies. So to think that God was so impressed with His work that he stopped after the “colonization” of Earth would be a little egotistical.
If anyone knows of a religious text that explicitly states otherwise, please enlighten me. I’ve studied religions for years and not found direct evidence against the possibility of extra-terrestrial beings.
Aliens Should Help Us
The next group of people are the ones that I respect the least. They claim that aliens should help us with global warming, wars, famines, disease and just about everything else that has caused a headache or two for the human race. While some non-human entities may be capable of something approaching empathy and performing ideological acts for the betterment of a given species, why should it be the responsibility of another intelligence to correct our own mistakes? Unless they’re responsible for creating disease, floating islands of trash, or depleting the ozone layer, we should not be interfered with. How the heck can we expect to be taken seriously on an inter-planetary level if we’re just seeking bailouts?
The last thing Earth would want to do is become the Zimbabwe of the Milky Way. It’s bad enough we haven’t learned from our own recent past, so why complicate things by inviting non-humans to “guide us towards a higher degree of enlightenment.” While there could be some immediate benefits for the human race, the long term effects of such dependence would be our undoing.
Aliens Have Been Here All Along
Since before the written word, civilizations have claimed to have been visited by strange people who claimed to be from the stars, or would leave behind intriguing items. The Mayans mentioned the Popol Vuh. The Chinese met the Dropa. Other cultures met beings they referred to as giants who would often mate with the locals in exchange for agricultural tools, mathematics or other bits of knowledge. Are aliens truly responsible for the development and advancement of human kind?
Let me bust out my trusty Delorean and find out.
Seriously, though. To think that human advancement is completely dependent on the table scraps of another species would be an insult to every inventor and deep-thinker that has ever lived. While it’s true that some of our discoveries seem to have cropped up all over the world at roughly the same time (within 500 years of each other in most cases), to think that we’d still be living in caves and hunting animals with sharpened sticks without the aid of sexually promiscuous visitors who continue to steal us away to probe the asses of our species’ verbally challenged population is little more than fantasy.
Ah, but that’s just what “they” want us to believe, right?
Aliens Exist, But They’re Not On Earth
This is the camp that I fall into. I strongly believe that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe, but I don’t think there’s a foreign entity on this planet right now. This isn’t because of the technical challenges involved with sending a crewed vehicle through the void of space, or even the logistical challenges involved in dealing with an unfortunate death or discovery. Instead it’s because it wouldn’t make logical sense for any species that has come this far to stay put on our planet. We can be observed from the moon. We can be observed from somewhere beyond that point, too.
There’s plenty of information leaking from our satellite transmissions that, unless they needed a living and breathing sample of our species, they would not need to risk being spotted by our sensitive and oh-so-paranoid detection systems. We have countless examples of what happens when we interfere with another culture … even if it’s with good intentions or in the name of science. Anyone from a species that has conquered interstellar will, hopefully, not want to pollute their research with such a dangerous interaction between the observer and the observed.
The Secret’s In The Pudding, But I’ll Never Tell…
The conversations that often ensue as a result of mentioning UFOs or alien life are often all the same. In each case, you have someone from one of the four categories stating their opinion, followed by very little (if any) fact. The proof is in the pudding. While I believe that aliens exist, not once did I state a fact that proves such a thing. Which leaves us right back at square one.
When we don’t know something, we make something up that fits into our viewpoint of the universe around us. When we do find intelligent life in the depths of space one day, perhaps they can shed some light on our paranoia. Until then, we should focus on fixing our own problems rather than talking down to those who have a different opinion.
What’s your stance on the existence of E.T.s? Do they exist? Have they visited us?
It’s been about half-a-week since my last post was written and, I must admit, that I’ve been slacking off regarding the amount of time dedicated towards this site. But there is a good reason for this!
