There’s an interesting article in Newsweek on how to find aliens.
We’ve been looking for them for most of my life and with little success. Make that no success.
Until recently we sent out signals to reach out and touch someone or something.
This seems to me to be a little dangerous. Kind of the like Bambi mailing Mapquest directions of his home to the Big Bad Wolf.
It’s lucky the Klingons didn’t get the message because they might come here and steal all of our earth women or maybe strawberry plants. Or maybe they would take what’s left of our oil reserves.
Actually, this is fairly far-fetched since it would probably take something like a million times as much fuel to get here as our planet has.
If we were dealing with such a technically advanced civilization then we could assume that it has long ago mastered a method of making fuel out of pixie dust.
Or the odd hydrogen atom which I understand is one of the most common elements that exists in the universe.
Our sun is mostly hydrogen. Hey, maybe they would steal our sun.
That would be inconvenient.
And silly because there are something like 200 billion suns in the Milky Way galaxy. Some of them way bigger than ours.
How much bigger? I’m not sure, at least 100 times. Those clever Canadians did the math.
Anyway why go to another city for a gallon of milk when you have an swimming pool full of it in your backyard pool?
So our sun is safe for awhile. Awhile is a scientific term – it means a couple of billion years.
Getting back to the Newsweek article, the really smart scientist who search for other civilizations figures half of the suns in the Milky Way galaxy could support life because there is water on their planets.
To which I say, so what?
Who says you have to have water to support life?
If the machines have taken over in those faraway planets and contain intelligent life, then the first thing they would do would be get rid of water.
Water causes rust. Not good if your foot is made out of pig iron or whatever kind of material your robot body is made from.
The essence of the Newsweek article is that instead of telling the Klingons where we are, we are going to find out where they are.
Then when we find out where they are we can go there and take all their oil.
This is what humans do. They did it with every indigenous civilization that existed on earth.
Did it make any sense?
Of course not.
We stole the mineral rights from the Indians and forced them onto reservations – and they put up casinos and turned many of their conquerors into a bunch of degenerate gamblers.
We are now taxing the casinos on land that we don’t own so that we can put money into a program to send probes to the far corners of the universe(s) so that we can eventually go to those distant places and steal their suns.
While we are there we will probably sample their women.
Except they may be made of pig iron.
Ouch.