Two blockbuster stories broke at nearly the same time: The US Air Force confirmed that UFOs are real and released official video proving it. And a report came out indicating that humans might go extinct by the year 2050 unless something dramatic happens. Weirdly, no one is talking about either story.
The Day the Earthlings’ Brains Stood Still
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
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Links would be very very useful here, Ted.
UFOs are a great instance of how science fails. The word UFO conjures up extraterrestrials. The term, more precisely, is used to describe an object, seen flying, that cannot be identified. (Science does the same thing with its use of “theory” which goes completely against common parlance and allows people who aren’t informed to think that Darwin’s “theory” resulted from him just sitting around drinking coffee and musing with friends, rather than as the result of a huge amount of mental and physical work.)
Carl Sagan mentions in “The Demon-Haunted World” a cab ride in which the cabbie, realizing he was driving “that scientist guy” around, quizzed him on Atlantis and other woo-woo. What makes the anecdote really interesting is that Sagan doesn’t criticize the cabdriver. He points out that this was someone who was interested in things but who had access to terrible source material, and that science (which gets almost all its funding from taxpayers and needs their support to carry out the big-ticket items) needed to do a better job of explaining discoveries to the public.
As to the 2050 deadline. I think the articles were about how “civilization” could collapse by 2050. Civilizations have collapsed in the past. The idea that the entire human race will wink out (in 31 years) has all the sounds of woo-woo pseudoscience. Even if all the ice melts, even if the planet heats up several degrees, there are several isolated locations (New Zealand and Mongolia come to mind) where the effects will probably be minimalized. Additionally, other places now inaccessible to humans as living space will become available (northern Canada, the Russian tundra, etc.) Yes, there will be a huge die-off of people as the planet’s climate change increases, but extinction? Not in 31 years.
The U.S. is in for some surprising problems I suspect. As the tropical storms increase in severity, various East Coast metropolises will start getting inundated on a once-every-few-years pace which will make those cities uninhabitable purely on a monetary footing (you can’t get flood insurance, you can’t keep repairing your house, the subways keep flooding, etc.). New Orleans, again, got flooded by a weak-ass Cat 1 Hurricane. I expect another Superstorm Sandy for New York this year or the next. Ditto D.C. and Boston. These are millions and millions of people who will have to accept that they can’t keep living right at the water’s edge anymore, and the relocation will be, what, a trillions-of-dollars event? Get that beachfront property in Memphis now. Your great-grandchildren will thank you!
Husband, Paul Shuch, the director of the SETI League, always says, “I have things in my refrigerator I can’t identify. Does that mean they are of ‘alien’ origin? They are merely unidentified food objects.”
Klaatu barada nikto! (rough translation: “meh, don’t bother, they’ll destroy themselves soon enough any way”)
I dunno whether UFOs are Visitors, but I do know that one of those recent videos shows the HUD *tracking* the anomaly. So, that’s not just a reflection in the window … hmmm.
Full disclosure: I’d love to find we have interstellar neighbors, but I’m not holding my breath. I do suspect that there’s a different explanation for why Bubba Joe-Bob woke up with a sore butt and no recollection of the night before.