Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Space, Weird

First Contact

16 Comments

Just for the record, I think that the UN is about the last entity that I’d like to have that job.

And yes, per comments, it is pointless to ask someone how long it would take the Shuttle to get to the nearest star. I would have no idea how to go about answering that question with anything but a “forever.” As other commenters said, it’s like asking how long it would take to get to the moon with a bicycle, or a submarine.

[Via Alan K. Henderson]

[Update a few minutes later]

More thoughts from Kevin Williamson:

I do not propose to test the hypothesis that it would take 5,000 times the recreational dosage to overdose on marijuana, but I would like to know how much bazooka one has to smoke before deciding to appoint a UN representative to alien civilizations. Is there data on that?

I’m not sure I want to know the answer.

[Update mid afternoon]

Even more thoughts from Claudia Rossett:

…if the Malaysian head of OOSA ends up doubling as a UN envoy tasked with crafting a program for representing the “sensitivities” of all mankind to aliens, it would be nothing more than normal UN procedure should she end up huddling with Talebzadeh, head of the Iranian space agency, to draft a plan for the planet. That might be less worrisome were Malaysia and Iran a tad less cozy these days — but as it is, Malaysia was one of the three countries which last November at the UNs International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna voted against rebuking Iran over its sanctions-busting nuclear program.

Just a coinkydinky, I’m sure.

16 thoughts on “First Contact”

  2. I recall reading an amusing short story once, called, IIRC, The Aliens Who Knew, Like, Everything, about the Earth being visited by extra-terrestrials who were less advanced than ourselves. Their mothership was enormous because it still used vacuum tubes, for example.

    When an Earthling expressed surprised that they’d crossed space et cetera, the nuhp (alien) just pointed out that they were persistent, whereas human beings tended to flop around a lot, first in this direction (making the world safe for democracy), then in another (going green), and then still another (Apollo). If we just picked some goal and stuck to it, we might’ve got somewhere.

    There is, of course, some truth to that. If we wanted to have launched a probe to the nearest star, or colonized Mars, then we certainly could have by now. But of course we don’t think like that.

    The other part of this that’s interesting is that the usual assumption is that civilizations even a little bit (centuries or millenia) older than ours will be fantastically more advanced, technologically speaking. I am not sure that follows. Perhaps there is no “Moore’s Law” in the technological acumen of a species — perhaps there is just an early exponential-growth phase, where they rapidly expand to the limits of their abilities. Maybe humans in 10,000 years won’t have much more amazing tech than we have right now.

    I think it’s also worth remembering that the New World societies contacted by the Europeans throught the latter were barbarians — short-lived, unhealthy, personally weak, stupid in the ways of nature and men. They just admired the bang-sticks and the apparently limitless supply of them.

    What if we were contacted by aliens — and they struck us as annoying, stupid, thuggish, inept — but with really amazing bangsticks and better ability to coordinate and persist in large tasks?

  5. Mike, the UN has had lots of those in its history. This is just one of those perfect moments where the UN truly demonstrates its character. The move is incredibly arrogant (really, THEY decide who speaks for Earth?) , caters to the elitist nature of the institution (again, why is an obscure astrophysicist the most qualified human on the planet to make first contact?), and is likely to prove completely irrelevant (as in, the aliens are likely to talk to whoever they want to talk to). The modern UN in action.

  6. If we just picked some goal and stuck to it, we might’ve got somewhere.

    Or we might have just gotten stuck. “Steepest descent” isn’t a great optimization algorithm, but it beats “Don’t change direction”. And a lot of scientific and technological advances seem to come about when a straightforward solution to one problem turns out to provide an unexpectedly good solution to a much different problem.

  7. Blasting the UN is easy – and deserved on most points.

    Something that is much harder is trying to figure which entity exactly *should* do it instead of the UN. Whatever/whomever is chosen will likely not be trusted by the majority of Earths population.

  9. I think the U.N.’s first official communique to an extraterrestrial intelligence would be a demand that said intelligence condemn Israel.

  10. how many U.S. tax dollars the UN plans to lavish on this new arrangement.

    That’s the whole point of the thing. Hopefully the Mars Attacks aliens do their magic with the U.N.

  13. My chief problem with the UN making a move such as this is that it will jeopardize the future business of asteroid mining.

    Let me explain.

    Supposing for a moment that an extraterrestrial contact actually were to happen, the UN would of course be the obvious choice for appointing people to represent Earth collectively in matters of interstellar diplomacy. But in terms of making actual negotiations, the UN does not really have much in the way of assets that would be meaningful to any aliens–

    — unless, however, the UN presumes to control the mineral rights to the other bodies in our solar system. An alien contact would not necessarily need to actually happen before the UN gets the idea that it should be allowed to do this.

  14. The whole point of putting the U.N. in NY was to sucker us into joining it.

    I thought the point was to guarantee that at least one US city is perfectly safe from a nuclear strike. The UN is useful to our enemies – they’d never nuke the Big Apple.

  15. I don’t think so Alan. It’s all about keeping the American in, so we don’t take our ball and go home. Even then, some people are waking up to the fact that the U.N. doesn’t provide much of anything for us, at great expense to us. Walking out on an Iranian speech is the least we should be doing. The very least. The sovereignty of our nation and our people, the only experiment of its kind in existence, is being slowly handed over to our enemies. Even our man Reagan moved us in that direction with the first woman on the supreme court. Not because she was a woman, but because she didn’t really believe in our national sovereignty and wrote opinion in that vein.

  16. I left this snark at VC:

    I wonder if any of those space aliens are looking to exploit cheap labor from Third World planets…I’m sure the extraterrestrial counterparts to Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader will love that.

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