Should it bother us how much our official comment-on-aliens guy does to normalize war? Is it overly nostalgic to suggest that I wouldn't have so much minded aliens encountering Carl Sagan when he was that guy?
The latest from Neil deGrasse Tyson in the New York Times, suggests that aliens might show up on Earth without having observed it, choosing as their point of arrival of course the capital of make-believe in a particular country where 4% of humanity lives but which nonetheless deems itself in charge of the planet -- and those aliens would be extremely unintelligent despite having, you know, shown up from a distance no human has any notion of how to travel:
"We care a lot about what aliens look like, but we don't pay nearly enough attention to what we might look like to them. If an alien emissary landed in Los Angeles, for example, its first impression might be that Earth's dominant life-form is the automobile. The city is heavily crisscrossed by major freeways, many of them 12 lanes wide. People line up in their cars on slow lines to obtain fast food handed through a window. They consume the food while still seated, never exiting their vehicles. Some of the larger life-forms on the freeway carry multiple automobiles within them. To the aliens, these car haulers are surely pregnant."
Surely! Let's also assume that these aliens have achieved their technological prowess (if observational idiocy) through a political system resembling fascism or at least good ol' Murican Capitalism. I mean, how else could they have managed it?
"Assuming on arrival that the alien knew we were human, it would probably want to meet the person in charge. Who exactly would that be? The president? The prime minister? The pope? Or would it be a multibillionaire or captain of industry? Not knowing anything in advance about human civilization, but picking up clues from our cultural norms before arrival from leaked radio waves, an alien might instead expect to meet Ryan Gosling, Taylor Swift or Oprah Winfrey."
The person in charge? Is deGrasse Tyson's failure to question such an assumption based on a powerful motivation, namely his belief that really -- if we were being sensible -- he should be that person?
"If we look more deeply into our own alien stories, there's a persistent plotline that aliens are evil and want to kill us all. I suspect those fears are based not on what we believe about aliens but on what we know about humans. In the history of our species, there's no shortage of technologically advanced cultures that commit rampant violence against less-advanced ones. Within what we call civilization, humans oppress -- or kill -- one another over which creator of the universe they worship, or who they sleep with, or what side of an arbitrary line on Earth's land masses they're born, or how absorptive their skin is to sunlight, or what set of sounds comes out of their mouths."
There is no such persistent plotline in the stories of human cultures. There are and have always been human societies that never engaged in war. The 4% living in the U.S. often find it convenient to label the behavior of the U.S. government "human nature" through lumping the other 96% in. It's the greatest excuse for horrible actions ever invented. But an observer of this planet from the outside might not base their observations on U.S. television programming, but on simply observing the planet -- where most places do not have wars, and where most places that have wars see most people do everything they can not to participate in those wars.
The myth that engulfs science fiction, the myth that you could last long enough to develop the magical technologies of space travel while maintaining the social relations of thin-skinned bar-brawling knuckleheads, would most likely not be a myth shared by aliens arriving on Earth. It is far more likely -- which is to say, just barely conceivable -- that such aliens would arrive with proposals to protect this planet from nukes, fossil fuels, agriculture, and New York Times columns. It wouldn't be out of line with that scenario to imagine their first step being the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
