Can we please stop sending RSVPs to extraterrestrials?
Hasn’t the top brass at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory ever seen the “Twilight Zone” episode where millions of Earthlings cheerfully board alien spaceships brought here by statesman-like starmen who seem to be good-hearted liberals who want nothing more than “To Serve Man?” They find out too late that these are actually carnivorous conservatives, and that their holy book of the same name is a cookbook.
To keep this science fiction from becoming fact, here’s a New Year’s resolution for NASA: Stop powering spacecraft past our Solar System in the myopic hope that they’ll be intercepted by enlightened explorers wishing to share their clean energy technologies and their hunger for interplanetary camaraderie.
Oh, they’ll be hungry, all right. And there’s at least a 50-50 chance they’ll be 100 percent hostile and will make mincemeat of all of us without needing to resort to “Independence Day” clashes or aliens-as-humans infiltrations. They’ll probably just descend suddenly like a swarm of bikers roaring into Sturgis, S.D., in August and start the Earth-ending keg party that will enslave us, or worse, in a matter of days.
The gold plaques aboard two Pioneer spacecraft, launched in 1972 and 1973, began this Woodstock-inspired lunacy of reaching out across the universe in the spirit of peace and love. They featured drawings of naked male and female homo sapiens and a map using radial lines marked with the pulsating intervals of 14 neutron stars to help aliens pinpoint the exact location of our air-, water-, animal-, mineral-, vegetation-, and rare element-rich planet.
NASA followed up in 1977 with the launch of two Voyager interstellar probes. They featured the detailed road map once again, but also sent our prospective landlords two large gold-coated laser discs with the sights and sounds of Earth — from a written message by President Jimmy Carter to selections of Azerbaijani folk music — neither of which is likely to strike fear into the hearts of would-be invaders any more than they did the Soviet politburo.
Now, NASA is heading to Pluto and beyond with the “New Frontiers” program, the first launch of which, in 2006, contains an urn with the clearly labeled ashes of Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombough on board. This is sure to be a head-scratcher for aliens who intercept it, and certainly intriguing enough to make them want to analyze the probe’s hard drives and trace a path back to our fascinating planet.
Okay, maybe these particular aliens won’t want to eat us — maybe they’ll just want the cheap labor. But we can’t build a wall high enough to keep them out, and we won’t be able to surround our planet with a “Star Wars” force field any time soon.
One thing we can do, however, is go to the International Court of Justice in the Hague and initiate a worldwide class action suit against METI, or Messaging ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence. This nonprofit group of maverick scientists based in San Francisco, routinely invites aliens from all over the Milky Way to an interstellar love-in here on Earth, using radio telescopes around the world to beam their RSVPs. Unfortunately, these delusional do-gooders probably won’t be here to experience the Area 51 Burning Man conflagration ignited by their naivete.
But even if we can’t stop METI’s irresponsible behavior, we can at least insist that the Congress stop funding our potential destruction by alien intelligences by demanding that all NASA probes self-destruct when exiting the Kuiper Belt. It’s one New Year’s resolution that NASA and all of us need to keep.
Timothy Philen is an opinion writer and author of Harper & Row/Lippincott’s You can Run Away From It!, a satirical indictment of American pop psychology.
