For a little while this week, we seemed to be closer than ever to discovering the existence of extraterrestrial life. Astronomers Chandra Wickramasinghe and Max Willis from the University of Cardiff claimed that the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which is being occupied by the Philae lander, could potentially hold alien life based on data from the Rosetta probe orbiting the comet.
To them, there was potential evidence for microbial life beneath the comet’s black crust. But other scientists have swooped in to dismiss those claims, saying it’s impossible to tell at this point and the “evidence” cited by Wickramasinghe and Willis is extremely flimsy.
So for now, we’re right back to where we started, nowhere closer to discovering other life forms out in the universe.
Good.
There could be nothing worse for humanity than the discovery of alien life, because it’s not hard to see that our interaction with extraterrestrials is only going to end in our ultimate destruction. Sure, we might just be one day discovering microbes, but pretty soon, we’ll come across actual living, breathing aliens. We’ll make contact with them and they’ll visit Earth on a peace mission because they’ll think they just came across another friendly planet. Then we are going to royally fuck it up.
Throughout history, we’ve never even had a tolerance for other humans who were even the slightest bit different. There have been millions of attempts to wipe out entire groups of people. Whatever religion you practice, that’s considered a death sentence to someone out there. And don’t even think about having a different skin color than someone else. It doesn’t matter why you’re different; it’s just that you are, and someone hates it enough to want you out of the picture.
So what do you think is going to happen when aliens make a pit stop here, or if they come here out of necessity because their planet is no longer hospitable?
These aliens being peaceful will have nothing to do with it (if they come with the intent to destroy us right off the bat, we’re doomed anyway). There’s no reason to believe that humanity will be accepting of its guests; people will want these things dead even if they don’t plan on staying forever. And if they are asking for a place to live on Earth, humans will do everything to make the aliens wish they had just died along with their planet. We will attempt to scare and intimidate them and, eventually, we’ll probably kill some of them before it escalates into veiled calls for mass genocide from our politicians.
Of course, the aliens might even be able to tolerate all of that suffering, because they’ll probably be so mentally advanced that they’ve made accounted for the years of growing pains as we attempt to share the planet. But there are definitely going to be freaks out there who want to get sexual with the aliens, and this is where things will really get bad for us. Either the aliens will like it and both races will start mating, producing an elite hybrid being that effectively eliminates the stupider and weaker human race over time or the aliens will deem the sexual advances of our planet’s sickos as an egregious affront that must be severely punished.
There are really only a few ways all of this abuse can end:
- This alien race that came to Earth won’t be stupid, so it will come prepared with weaponry so advanced we can’t even comprehend it. They tried it our way, but since we were just a bunch of assholes, they’ll just understandably take the planet for themselves.
- Maybe it won’t even be the first aliens we come across that bring our doom. Let’s just say that the alien race we’re torturing really is too weak to fight back. Word likely travels pretty fast in the universe, and it won’t be long before other planets start finding out what goes on over on Earth. If we’re busy torturing another alien race, some other extraterrestrial races will steer clear of us, sure, but the war mongers, an alien race that is looking for a fight, will deem us to be a worthy adversary. Then it’s most certainly game over for us.
Even if a Superman-like savior comes to Earth, we’ll want to kill it. This thing could guarantee world peace and ensure that all of our dreams will come true and we’d still spit on it, write horrible things about it and genuinely wish for it to be dead. This potential savior will also see the futility of humanity’s existence and promptly end us. There is no scenario where our fate looks favorable.
It’s not a matter of if an alien race will one day destroy us, it’s a matter of when and what we will do to bring it upon ourselves. We could no doubt share the planet with an alien race, but that doesn’t mean we ever would. Humanity doesn’t play well with itself, so why should we ever believe it would play well with others?
