This is a commentary on our time. Nancy Mace, when she wasn’t busy talking about her sex life, was hot on the trail of ET this past week. So were many of the other members of the House.
Why wasn’t this a startling episode in our history? Why didn’t the headlines scream when it was revealed that alien craft have been recovered by the government and there was dialogue of “biologic remains?” Two reasons, possibly more: We’ve more or less known this for many years, it’s just now being confirmed and we’re up to our eyeballs in trying to solve worldly issues, not the least of which is the growing inhabitability of our own (and only) planet, that we can’t really wrap our heads around the enormity of what was revealed.
And, there’s the GOP. Here’s Lincoln Project’s usual astute and spot on take.
Aliens,
Looking for intelligent life in the GOP? Keep looking.
xoxo, LP pic.twitter.com/NKBEfidBk1— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) July 28, 2023
Now here’s a show stopper, but alas, it’s the truth. Here’s a human who’s making sense and yes, it’s Chris Christie.
Chris Christie on Donald Trump:
"He lies to those people. He tells them, 'I'm getting indicted for you.' What the hell is that? He did this stuff. He got himself in trouble, and now he wants to have the American people pay for it." pic.twitter.com/kj4czpjjLJ
— Republican Accountability (@AccountableGOP) July 28, 2023
What must they think, if they’re watching from out there? Seriously, what must they think of us? All I know is that if I was them, and I flew my UFO through this neighborhood, I’d lock the portholes and the ramps.
Enrico Fermi, the genius physicist who was instrumental in the development of the atomic bomb, was of the opinion that this planet was in quarantine and that’s why our space neighbors didn’t visit us. I believe the man was right. And I certainly know why.
South Park has an awesome episode on this. It end with humanity failing the “Space Cash Test” and being judged by the intergalactic Ambassador to new civilizations to be unworthy of being admitted into the Federation forever being blocked off. As their spaceship departs they deploy a grid around our planet.
An alien civilization advanced enough to master travel to our little blue ball HAS to see what goes on here and when it comes to the human species think WTF is WRONG with these idiots? Unless they have biochemistries that would allow them to live here I doubt we have anything they want. Maybe we are a “tour stop” for aliens – rich alien a-holes who want to have a good laugh.
How can I find that episode? Any ideas?
Check here Ursula:
https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Intergalactic_Police
The episode is titled Pinewood Derby and it’s episode 6 from season 13. I checked Comedy Central’s website and it’s not among the free to watch episodes. I checked in some other places and it’s currently unavailable. I think you’d need a paid subscription to CC or any other site to view it. However, on the same theme there’s another episode of aliens and earth titled Cancelled from season 7 (espisode 1). It’s a follow on to another hilarious one from where Cartman was abducted by aliens and had an anal probe inserted – which would sometimes emerge (after firey farts) and it was clearly a satelite transmitter of some sort. Because our scientists became award of it and started checking out what was going on the aliens realized we’d learned about them and it turned out earth was the most popular TV “reality” series in the universe because of all the crazy sh*t aliens saw going on here. They’d taken a bunch of weird species and put them on our planet just to see what happened and WE (humans) turned out to be so f**ked up we became the universe’s biggest hit for being so f**king crazy/stupid! But since we’d discovered the existence of aliens earth was going to be “cancelled” as in all life here being destroyed. The boys saved the day though, in part by convincing the network bosses we could be even more f**ked up, and also with a little blackmail in the form of a compromising photo they got. This one you can watch for free at this link:
https://southpark.cc.com/episodes/sa19zy/south-park-cancelled-season-7-ep-1
We are the intergalactic Kardashians. Or maybe Real.Housewives of Terra.
I haven’t read the article yet, but I have to say: if aliens have been watching us, they already know there is not intelligent life in the modern-day Repugnican party….
Yup…. I and almost everyone not a Repugnican was right (see above)….
I have said for years that if aliens were monitoring our radio and TV broadcasts , that they would stay well away from us!
People lie. Math does not. Most of us don’t even have a clue on the scale of the universe…God’s creation right? If you don’t know where you are, or your place in this reality, then don’t bother trying to convince me of your ‘expertise’ on God.
A few facts to help: the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. In a second it can circle the earth 7x. The closest star, we call the sun, sends us light that takes 8 minutes to reach us at that speed. The next closest star requires 4 years at that speed to reach us. We are in the Milky way galaxy, with an estimated 100 billion stars, the distance between them measured by light years. With the Webb telescope a million miles out in space, orbiting the sun, the scientists keep finding more galaxies, now estimated at a trillion, each with hundreds of billions of stars. There are literally more stars than there are grains of sand on every shore on planet earth. The distance between them measured in light years. Light has been captured that traveled 13.8 billion years. The universe is too vast for our little brains to comprehend. The very idea we have a clue about much of anything is a joke. As a Religion major, I didn’t bother to go to Duke Divinity, because I didn’t want to spend my short ministry arguing with idiots of certainty. As a species, we really have no respect for where we are, the systems that sustain us, and how short our time is. There’s no aliens who will show up to save us, and we are never going anywhere. Of course, the facts can make us feel insignificant in the face of certain death. I guess that’s why most of us prefer to live in, what the Hindus call a ‘waking dream’. The truth? Ha. Not popular in any culture I know of, and I minored in Anthropology, studying cultures. This one has embraced ignorance and comfort as it’s religion. That’s a death sentence for all of us. Fact.
Geologic time is impossible to wrap one’s head around. Even time, when considered in human evolutionary terms is something most people can’t grasp, or at least just don’t want to think about. A typical human life span is 70-80 years. Few people live to be a hundred, or even well into their eighties but for the sake of this discussion let’s keep it in terms of a nice round number of a human life being a hundred years even though very few of us will make it to that point. But at least we think we might be one of the very few who do so let’s stick with 100 years.
That isn’t jack sh*t in time. Oh sure, it SEEMS like a long time to us and for us it is. But in the passage of time on our little planet, an small planet out towards the edge of a small galaxy a hundred years amounts to jack. There are any number of measuring points in human evollution to use as a starting point for when human beings emerged. By some measures, Neanderthal might qualify although homo sapiens developed a different genome. Still, there is evidence later variations of Neanderthals which had a notable resemblance to homo sapiens co-existed as recently as ten thousand years ago. But let’s be conservative in our thinking here, and go with early humans, beings that were at least cruder looking versions of us and that had language, culture and used tools (although it should be noted contrary to popular belief other animal species besides us have for hundreds of thousands of years fashioned and used tools – another instance of us not being as “special” as we think!) by 50,000 years ago. A little arithmetic shows that a hundred years out of 50,000 years works out to two-tenths of a second. About the time it takes for a blink of the eye!
Kinda puts our notion of looking back even the time frame you and I have been alive (you’re four years older than me) in perspective doesn’t it?
And we aren’t even talking geologic time, which as I said is on a scale that just is too vast for people to want to think about, much less gain an understanding of. A hundred years, even a thousand, then thousand or a hundred thousand is NOTHING in geologic time. Hell, a million years barely registers! Our little planet has existed for 4.5 billion years give or take a few hundred million years. Our universe is several times (at least) older. We are quite literally made out of stardust, itty bitty bits of matter that landed on our planet billions of years ago and evolved – little bits that flew out into space from far older suns that ran out of fuel and blew up, and along with elements in them matter from planets near them that were destroyed got flung out into space! Some of the ones that wound up here created the conditions where biology on planet Earth could form.
No doubt (at least to me) it’s happened countless different times, sometimes in similar ways and sometimes in greatly different ones – instead of carbon based, life being based on another element(s) but there’s all kinds of life all over our universe. Including intelligent life and far older civilizations. Some less advanced than we are and some more so. In countless cases far more so.
That life and human civilization exists here is a miracle, and special. Yet it’s hardly unique or even rare in our universe. Like (including intelligent life) exists throughout our universe and in numbers we can’t comprehend. And most people don’t have the humility to even try. Like the paradoxical question (even for religious people who believe “got created it”) of “Well, there’s our universe and somewhere there’s a border – what’d beyond that?” just f**ks us up to think about. Religion has in their various ways stepped in to sooth people’s minds when such mind-bending questions pop up, and given them a form of “therapy”, a crutch to lean on. From where I sit it’s been mostly an exploitive process. But clinging to it is much easier for people than either conteomplating some of what I’ve gone into, or just accepting our lives are a helluva ride – both the good and the bad and that there’s a ton of stuff we’ll never know before we die.
I used to teach elementary science Denis, and I used reams of paper still in in their bags to explain time. I’d show kids the thickness of a piece of paper and say “imagine this thickness represents a thousand years, so two of these thinknesses would go back to when Jesus was alive. Then I’d put two packages of reams together and explain how that thickness represented a million years. And then we’d figure out how far past the classroom it was to have 65 TIMES that distance of a few inches to get an idea of how far back the dinosaurs last lived. And THEN I would ask them how far back we had to go for a BILLION years and their minds would start to be blown when (if I was teaching say in Rochester) they would realize that if Jesus lived “half a millimeter ago, the birth of our planet would stretch all the way to Buffalo, and the birth of the Universe would be in like, Nebraska!” As you say Denis, the universe is so VAST and unfathomable, it is truly UNfathomable!!! And those who think they understand it only show their deep and complete ignorance. And it is only because I am very good at math that I truly realize how much I simply do not, and NEVER WILL, truly comprehend!
I’ve argued with you before Scott, but this comment is truly bang on. The Universe is so monumentally vast, there truly is no way we teensy little humans can possibly comprehend it and its vastness. You speak truth, my brother.
Hey that’s what free speech is about…I never forget we’re brothers in arms…against the Stupid storm troopers. Hell I argue with myself.
Personally I can’t see an ETs deciding to land in the US.
The reason is simple – with the sheer number of right wing, NRA card carrying gun nutcases running around with the firm belief that they can blast just about anything in the woods, they would be sensible enough to stay the heck away