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Nobody cared about the aliens because we've seen them before. We've already seen the inside of their spaceships and shot them with sniper rifles in video games. We cycled through the sky with one in the basket of our BMX, and then we escaped the authorities to help the little fellow get home. We've watched them nuke the Empire State Building and in return, we hacked the computers of their mothership. We saw them place electrodes in our heads, we were entertained by seeing them skinned alive by Feds in hazmat suits.
That was all decades ago. Decades before that, Orson Welles terrified radio listeners by depicting them invading the earth. It's all an old hackneyed plot that we've seen too many times, and now nobody cares about the aliens.
Another reason nobody cares about the aliens is that nobody believes there are aliens. We've seen that story too. We've seen series about the Government faking aliens, and we've seen series about the Government hiding aliens. We were bored with black-goo plots and human/alien hybrids before the millennium, and we watched every conceivable story arc and documentary featuring pyramids and downed UFOs locked in Arctic ice fields.
We are more familiar with those curiously expressionless and somewhat child-like visages than we are with the features of the goblin shark or platypus. The aliens are not actually alien, because they've been an embedded part of our cultural psyche for at least a century and nobody now cares that they pop up on our screen interfaces once again like Charles Manson, Optimus Prime, or Kylie Minogue.
Aliens are entertainment, they were always entertainment. They were always us — a space-fetus reflecting back to ourselves our own anxieties and existential dreads. They were the Russians during the Cold War, the manifestation of cosmic consciousness when we dreamed of the stars and the unifying hand of God when we entered Globalization. They were always part psy-op, part accurate reflection.
After the millennium, we stopped dreaming or believing because we consumed images instead. Jumbo jets penetrated skyscrapers, which crumpled, withered, and collapsed like paper cups. Naturally, the Government did that too, and suddenly Area 51 seemed quaint and distant, and merely in black and white — it was imagery and narrative from a different time. We were locked in our homes and our families were forcibly vaccinated. That didn't make sense either, and we still don't know why so many people are dying. But there's no time to worry about that now because the planet is dying, and we're killing it. We are the alien plague upon this rock orbiting the sun, and now the sun is going to immunize the planet with its cleansing heat. At least it will try to do so before the nuclear war arrives.
Sagan's Lament
Public intellectuals once lamented that the chances are an advanced alien civilization would destroy itself upon acquiring the technology needed to reach us. Goldilocks had many zones and some of the inhabitants of those zones would come and see us. The assumption is, tragically, that squid creatures from Aarii 7 might possess the same metaphysical wanderlust as European Man. Alas, even European Man is hardly European Man now, a mere four decades after such thought was en vogue. Aliens may be real, but they're not hyper-real, they never voted for Trump and they didn't pick a side in the culture wars.
UFOs and aliens offer us cheap weed in an age of readily available crack cocaine, they're Baywatch trying to compete with PornHub. The synapses and nerve endings the aliens once stimulated are merely dead tendrils of an exhausted psyche that doesn't dream of the stars but consumes in the gutter. It once was said that in space nobody can hear you scream, we now know that in space nobody can hear you meme.
The threshold for any would-be space-faring civilization to cross is not that they may destroy themselves before they reach escape velocity, but that they don't over-stimulate themselves into terminal boredom. The universe became boring, as boring as the rusting cans of Pepsi on the side of Mount Everest and the Whitney Houston CDs on the floor of the Mariana Trench.
The only thing that doesn't bore us to death is ourselves. Nothing terrifies us more or haunts our dreams like other humans, evil humans, scheming humans, and sick humans. More unknowable, inscrutable, and darker than anything that does or possibly can exist in the cosmos. We've stared deep into those eyes that resemble black puddles on that expressionless face, we have gazed long enough to know the truth, as horrible as that might be.
We have seen the face of the alien, and he is us.
Reader Comments
This does not mean ETs don't exist or have not visited the earth in earth's history. The original narrative was we were unique, the Goldilocks zone, and we were the perfect situation to bring forth by accident evolution of the human being. This is also a joke. There are billions of earth-like planets with water; that appears to be the design. It is only human arrogance that can think we are unique or the top of the consciousness hierarchy.
the us fleet has exact the same pics, but its altered a bit.. same old same old..
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And there's no reason for that other than they're saving the big reveal for when the focus groups of public/sheeple sentiment is right.
But when they do go full bluebeam, I'm expecting a stellar show that will absolutely snooker most masked sheep. Remember just how bad the coof narrative actually was, and that worked better than anyone would have guessed.
On the matter of intergalactic travel, I urge the reading of Ben Bova's book, Writer's Guide to Creating a Science Fiction Universe . Used at Abe or Thrift books.
While there are a number of erroneous academic ideas presented there (Ben sticks to the ivory tower propaganda), the chapters that present the matter of scale, velocity, environment, and energy should capture the critical thinking mind. One tenth C velocity, 18,600 miles/second, is still > 3 orders of magnitude in velocity faster than anything we can produce. Sirius is estimated to be roughly 8 LYs away, meaning it would take >80 years at 0.1C to get there--longer by far than anyone has been known to live in space, much less be alive upon arrival. AND, that implies instantaneous acceleration and deceleration. The notions of Worm holes, FTL, Black holes, Neutron stars, Magnetars, and curved space are all in the category of Science Fiction, a source of great entertainment for the credulous or daydreamer. (Einstein's mathematics were known to be faulty from inception, and while he had a terrific imagination, he was also witless, known by his youthful instructors to be the village idiot.) One of the most fundamental problems in astrophysics has never been resolved: Whether Redshift (an elemental frequency comparison against the spectrum of a laboratory electric arc) is a product of Dopplering, or a product of thermal radiation, i.e. color temperature. Since the findings of Halton Arp with quasars, the current cosmology is a house of cards in the wind.
So, has Earth been visited by celestial travelers? Highly improbable when the basics of physics are applied. Not even within our solar system. I've performed my own study and analysis on this topic, and the conclusions in every detail point away from intelligent life similar in form and function to us arising outside of Earth in this system.
But it ain't "tic tacs" on Navy radar....