Now The Aliens Are Out To Get Us

August 19, 2011 at 8:52 am (Greenhouse THIS, Red Shirt on the Away Team, Village Idiots)

After a hectic week of post-RedState decompression and moving the Wee Highlander back up to college, this is what greets my bleary eyes this morning:

Aliens may destroy humanity to protect other civilisations, say scientists

It may not rank as the most compelling reason to curb greenhouse gases, but reducing our emissions might just save humanity from a pre-emptive alien attack, scientists claim.

Watching from afar, extraterrestrial beings might view changes in Earth’s atmosphere as symptomatic of a civilisation growing out of control – and take drastic action to keep us from becoming a more serious threat, the researchers explain.

This highly speculative scenario is one of several described by a Nasa-affiliated scientist and colleagues at Pennsylvania State University that, while considered unlikely, they say could play out were humans and alien life to make contact at some point in the future.

Shawn Domagal-Goldman of Nasa’s Planetary Science Division and his colleagues compiled a list of plausible outcomes that could unfold in the aftermath of a close encounter, to help humanity “prepare for actual contact”.

Really? Oh, it gets better.

“Green” aliens might object to the environmental damage humans have caused on Earth and wipe us out to save the planet. “These scenarios give us reason to limit our growth and reduce our impact on global ecosystems. It would be particularly important for us to limit our emissions of greenhouse gases, since atmospheric composition can be observed from other planets,” the authors write.

“Green” aliens? Really? I always thought they were green. Or greyish-green. And short. Unless they had white hair, blue-ears and tin-foil bikinis especially designed to lure James T. Kirk to the surface. Or do they mean “green” as in forcing humans to use light bulbs that will kill them, eschewing modern hygiene products such as toilet-paper and deodorant, and limiting our diet to steak-flavored tofu to reduce the bovine population because they fart too much?

In fact, I wonder how much was spent on this ground-breaking report. Did they come up with this one on their own with banks of computers and reams of research data, or did they have this delusional vision after a marathon week of Battlestar Gallactica? After all the Cylons wanted to kill all the humans, too. And they almost succeeded. In reality, my bet is that if ET does make a stop here, it’s only for a shopping spree. They’d wipe out every breathing life form, strip the planet bare of resources, leave it a dead rock, and send a postcard back home outlining all the goodies they’d picked up. Just like all the planets before other vacation spots they’d visited in their travels.

That chip in Al Gore’s neck must be beaconing. Heh.

P.S. On the bright side, Allahpundit has the exit question:

Exit question: Wouldn’t solving our climate-change problem freak out E.T. even more than the problem itself? If the atmosphere’s changing in a way that endangers human life, that suggests we either haven’t figured out how to fix it or are too divided to do so. That makes us weak. Good news for E.T.! But once we band together and figure out how to control our climate, that makes us much more of a threat. In which case, it’s Alderaan time. For the sake of the children, then, we’d better keep those emissions coming. See how fun and easy it is to import an agenda into dopey pie-in-the-sky hypotheticals?