We have this mental image that a flying saucer
will circle the White House lawn, land on
the White House lawn and give us a bounty
of all sorts of technological goodies to initiate
an age of Aquarius on the planet earth.
Personally, I don't think that's going to
happen.
For example, if you're in the forest do you
go out and talk to the squirrels and the deer?
Maybe you do for a while, but after a while,
you get bored because they don't talk back
to you because they have nothing interesting
to tell you because they can't relate to our
values and our ideas.
If you go down to an anthill do you go down
to the ants and say I bring you trinkets;
I bring you bees; take me to your aunt queen;
I give you nuclear energy.
So I think for the most part the aliens are
probably not going to be interested in us
because we're so arrogant to believe that
we have something to offer them.
Realize that they could be thousands, maybe
millions of years ahead of us in technology
and they may have no interest in interacting
with us in the same way that we don't necessarily
want to deal with the squirrels and the deer
in the forest.
Now some people say that we should not try
to make contact with them because they could
be potentially dangerous.
For the most part, I think they're going to
be peaceful because they'll be thousands of
years ahead of us, but we cannot take the
chance.
So I personally believe that we should not
try to advertise our existence to alien life
in outer space because of the fact that we
don't know their intentions.
Then the other question is what happens if
they're evil?
Well, I think the question of evil is actually
a relative question because the real danger
to a deer in the forest is not the hunter
with a gigantic rifle; he's not the main danger
to a deer in the forest.
The main danger to a deer in the forest is
the developer; the guy with blueprints; the
guy in a three-piece suit; the guy with a
slide rule and calculator; the guy that's
going to pave the forest and perhaps destroy
whole ecosystems.
In other words, the aliens don't have to be
evil in order to be dangerous to us, they
might not care, they just might not care about
us and in the process pave us over.
In fact, if you read the novel War of the
Worlds the Martians in HG Wells seminal novel
were not evil in the sense they wanted to
torture us and they wanted to do all sorts
of barbaric things to humanity.
No, we were just in the way.
And so I think that is a potential problem.
We could be in the way of a very advanced
civilization that simply is not evil but simply
views us as we would view squirrels and deer
in the forest.
So personally I think that we should not advertise
our existence when we go into outer space.
For the most part, however, I do think they
are going to be peaceful, they're not going
to want to plunder the earth because there
are plenty of planets out there that have
nobody on them that they can plunder at will
without having to worry about restive natives
called humanity.
And so I think they're not going to come to
visit the earth to plunder us, to do all sorts
of mischief.
For the most part, I think they'll just leave
us alone.
