Further to “The hidden benefits of the pursuit of ET. And the hidden costs.”, 1960s-era Canadian defense minister Paul Hellyer aptly demonstrates one of the latter, as the National Post tells it: “Paul Hellyer: Aliens would share technology if earth stopped wars.”
Notice how conventional moralizing (“war is bad”) hits the world headlines if space aliens can be linked to it, with no evidence whatsoever and no expectation of any.
Like:
Prez sez: “War is bad.”
Pope sez: “War is bad.”
Crickets say nothing intelligible.
The zoid from planet Zongo sez “War is bad.”
World hedders chime in.
Whaa?! The up side to all this is the coffee break. The down side is, war really is bad, and nonexistent alien opinion is a waste of bandwidth even on a slow news day:
Hellyer, 90, told Russia Today last week that he believes there are 80 different species of extraterrestrials, some of whom “look just like us and they could walk down the street and you wouldn’t know if you walked past one.
Happily, very few of them are dangerous; in fact, the universe is just like downtown Toronto, where your UD news writer and Paul Hellyer both lived for decades. Amazing coincidence.
Hellyer described a cosmos similar to that of Star Trek and says that there is a “federation” of aliens that has a rule to not interfere in our affairs — the same as Trek’s “prime directive.”
The aliens got that idea from Star Trek, actually. They concluded that it was a safer policy for them than suicide bombing, which they had formerly espoused.
Note: The comment at the National Post are hilarious; many relate to Hellyer outfitting all the armed services in identical green garbage-bag uniforms, a morale-busting move.
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