Katie Bar the Door

Stephen Hawking has just done the world a great favor. With his comments published today in the London Times the so-called smartest man on earth has just made it so of official that aliens exist and are lurking somewhere nearby. OK, he claims this on the basis of math and probability, but this is his area and he seems quite confident in his statement.

Which means we can now get down to the real issue: Do we greet them as space brothers or Help! Murder! Police! and Katie bar the door and tell grandpa to get out the shotgun!!!!!

These have always been the two main schools of thought on the matter. Kind of limited and certainly very simplistic, but this is about the best anyone has ever come up with concerning the issue. Each view is driven by obvious human needs. The aliens must be feared school is obviously rooted in human fear of the unknown. Well that, and our own long history of treating other cultures in various nasty and brutal manners. Gee whiz, why wouldn't an alien race do to us what we did to the American Indians (and the Africans and the Asians and on and on).

Likewise, the Space Brothers school is a strong extension of the I-Love-You-And-You-Love-Me childlike need for "adult" approval. We want them to be space brothers because we need their acceptance in order to bolster our own sense of low self-esteem.

Either way, we are hopelessly focused upon our own nightmares and dreams and want to project that upon the alien "other." Too bad. Since they are aliens, they may not be all that incline toward either enslaving us or patting our heads. Most likely, they will be rooted in their own psychology and social values and we can only hope to figure out what any of that means. They will operate according to their own needs, social values, and cultural traditions. It may or may not be good from our viewpoint. It will be up to us, as humans, to try and figure that out as fast as possible.

We will have no reasons to believe that any alien visitors love us. Nor do we have any reasons to believe that they are here to enslave us. The truth will be somewhere in the murky middle. It will be up to us to establish the means of handling contact and analyzing the intent of any such visitors. Each case will be different and every instance must be approached in a manner that is neither friendly nor hostile.

Hawking seems to suggest that we should turn off the lights, bolt the door, and not answer the phone. Tempting thought. Too bad this is a completely pointless notion. They already know that we are here and if any body out there is interested, they will find us quite quickly. So we need to be dealing with the best ways to prepare for global contact. The hiding option is no good.

And by the way, so is the hostile option. It's a safe bet that any alien race that is capable of getting here (and undoubtedly, there are some) will also be advance enough to blow our butts off if they are so inclined. No matter how advance some of our weapons may be, we will still end up looking like a pack of cave dwelling nitwits waving some sticks in their face (if they have one).

So what we need is less hardware and more rational, clear-headed thinking. I suspect we need to do this now. Actually, we should have been doing this many years ago.