SETI, UFOs, Nuclear Weapons, Climate Change, and Donald Trump

SETI, UFOs, Nuclear Weapons, Climate Change, and Donald Trump

Even the famous Dennis Overbye of the NY Times has written on SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) and UFO’s, Actually, Overbye’s article was confined to reporting. While I tried hard for a month to stick to science articles, last month I gave in to the sinkhole of confronting Donald Trump with science. So the jump to the imaginary world and Trump is just one more step into the abyss.

The hypothesis is that advanced civilizations communicate by inexpensive, yet far reaching radio waves. There is no instantaneous hyperspace for travel or communication. Even if the Fermi Hypothesis or Paradox is right and there are civilizations that have spread throughout the Galaxy, we are learning that it is a rare planet that can support advanced civilizations without terraforming. If we evolved to our scientific civilization without an exceptionalist event, since brains and cooperation give great evolutionary advantages, we may expect that habitable planets can also self-generate such civilizations.

If there are advanced civilizations out there, having detected our presence by our radio emissions, or our night lighting, or our ozone depletion, or our 40% increase in atmospheric CO2 in a century, or our rapid depletion of forests, they will sense that it is a crucial time to contact us. That is because in the history of civilizations, they know that with these scientific advances, come the dual threats of nuclear annihilation, and disastrous climate change.

It’s not clear what advice they can give us, since we know the solutions to both of these problems, but we just have to carry them out. In fact interstellar neighbors might now just be getting signals from the Obama, or even the Clinton administrations. They would then know that we were decreasing our nuclear weapons. They would also know that we had recognized, solved, and prevented the ozone depletion problems. They wouldn’t have learned yet that we had nuclear disarmed one of the dangerous new nuclear states, namely Iran. They would not know yet that N. Korea has made dramatic progress in advancing nuclear weapons and in missile technology, all in one year. So they would not have found an urgent reason to contact us, and perhaps save us from our destructive fate.

Nearby civilizations would also see that we have analyzed climate change, and under Clinton and Obama, we had been fighting climate change. They wouldn’t know yet that all nations had signed the Paris Climate Agreement. But again, no need to try to contact us to help us solve these problems.

So nearby civilizations won’t learn until the end of a double Trump term (woe is us) at the earliest that we had abandoned our senses and elected a President who’s opinion of nuclear weapons is: what do we have them for if we don’t use them? He also didn’t know what our triad of nuclear deterrence meant. He has been bellicose with North Korea, always implying that he will not use rule out nuclear weapons, He has decried Secretary Tillerson’s attempts at negotiation. Instead of trying to advance nuclear disarmament with Russia, he is continuing a trillion dollar program to upgrade our nuclear weapons to be more useable and to last a long time.

Update and Happy New Year:  January 2, 2018:  Trump has now announced that his nuclear button is bigger than Kim Jong-Un’s button.  This is a day after Kim Jong-Un spoke peacefully toward South Korea.  Trump’s outlook is now sent out to the Galaxy.

On climate change, the simpatico exoplanet civilization would not have known that as the second largest polluting nation, we elected a retrograde President who claims to believe that climate change is a hoax, and is totally backed and run by fossil fuel fossils. Having learned a year earlier of the worldwide Paris Agreement, they would be shocked at President Trump’s (ineffective) withdrawal. They would have to admit that they completely misunderstood human psychology, and be just as puzzled as we are as to Trump’s psychological state. Their rating of our planet as a civilized one would be dropped several covfefes (points) to “precarious emerging civilization”. They will then realize that they must notify us about possible tipping points to try to save us, except they are also now aware that they will be considered a hoax, or a conquering force trying to mislead us, at least in part of the offending US. They also would decide to remove any of their contact craft, out of fear that they might be captured and dissected, instead of listened to.

We hope that contact with an exoplanet civilization will lead us to a a treaty strategy to rid ourselves of nuclear weapons. We also hope that they will warn us of climate tipping points with their fingernail quantum computers.  They also can compare us to the galactic database of millions of civilizations that have reached this essential evolutionary critical point.  But unfortunately, Trump’s anti-scientific and destructive actions will cost us our “emerging, reasoning civilization” status, and prevent other civilizations from contacting us and saving us.

About Dennis SILVERMAN

I am a retired Professor of Physics and Astronomy at U C Irvine. For two decades I have been active in learning about energy and the environment, and in reporting on those topics for a decade. For the last four years I have added science policy. Lately, I have been reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic of our times.
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