I was in first grade when Star Wars was released in theaters, and it shaped my life going forward. The whole franchise has had its ups and downs, 1 but the original trilogy was like nothing that had come before and was copied, poorly, so many times after that.
Luke was dreamy and all back then, but Han Solo was definitely the cool one when it came to the guys in the movie. But even better than Han, who, come on, we all know was the coolest, was Chewbacca. Wookiees, for being walking carpets, are badasses, basically the Vikings of Star Wars. He could rip the arms off of anyone he lost to playing Space Chess, he could put C-3PO back together, he carried a gun that no one else had, and he was an amazing pilot. But the best part about Chewbacca was that he was completely different than the Core 3 – hairy, 7 feet tall, he wore no clothes. He was not human, and I loved that.
All of the aliens in Star Wars have their cool factor. Greedo, even though he’s a terrible shot, was interesting looking. Walrus Man, Hammerhead, 2 Yoda, Rancors, Ugnaughts, Nien Nunb, anybody that wasn’t human in Star Wars was cool to me. Even Bib Fortuna, probably the lamest of the Star Wars aliens, probably had his good qualities, even if he did lasciviously, and very sexually, stroke R2D2 3 at Jabba’s palace.
So I religiously watched every one of the movies, TV shows, or comics with aliens in it. I was obsessed. In book form we had the Mysteries of the Unknown Time Life book series. Aliens, the Tunguska Blast, Ancient Astronauts, telekenesis – I ate that shit up as a kid.
But a weird thing happens when you get to be an adult – those things gradually become less cool and, sadly, more scary. It’s probably the child-to-adult ability to lose the wonder of those far fetched things and see that, much like Whitley Strieber sees them, aliens are freaking scary. Just ask Fox Mulder.
Would you want to come face to face with a humanoid-like creature that transported itself across the vast darkness of space and was interested in humans enough that it was willing to abduct them and stick things into their orifices? And the people that this happened to have little to no memory of it happening? Which means that these poor people were in such abject terror that their minds forced them to forget getting probed or injected or whatever someone from Out There finds scientifically interesting. If Communion is real and right, these things came here, and they probably don’t have the best of intentions. More likely, they see us as we see insects, a thing to study, step on, and discard.
The Fermi Paradox calms my pulse a little bit after that paragraph. In a nutshell it states that (thanks to Wikipedia) –
- There are billions of stars in the Milky Way similar to the Sun.
- With high probability, some of these stars have Earth-like planets orbiting in the habitable zone.
- Many of these stars, and hence their planets, are much older than the Sun. If Earth-like planets are typical, some may have developed intelligent life long ago.
- Some of these civilizations may have developed interstellar travel, a step that humans are investigating.
- Even at the slow pace of envisioned interstellar travel, the Milky Way galaxy could be completely traversed in a few million years.
- Since many of the Sun-like stars are billions of years older than the Sun, the Earth should have already been visited by extraterrestrial civilizations, or at least their probes.
So, the conclusion is more than likely either aliens saw us and weren’t interested in us. The other possibility is that our galaxy is so huge (traveling at the speed of light (670.6 million miles per hour), it could take the Millennium Falcon, 105,700 light years, to possibly reach us from a far point in the Outer Rim) that a Type 2 or Type 3 level of technological advancement (humans are about .7 on the scale that measures that, the Kardashev scale) can be blind to our presence. And given that we have been sending signals into space for decades, they could one day receive those (probably 100,000 of our years from now), but it would take an equal amount of time to receive their reply.
So, them knowing we’re here is a possibility, but then again we might be safe, for now.
All of this is leading to…
I saw this story on The Atlantic today. A little from the article, as it is paywalled –
On Monday night, someone placed a peculiar bet on the prediction market Kalshi. At 7:45 p.m. eastern time, a single trader put down nearly $100,000 on the claim that, by the end of December, the Trump administration will confirm that alien life or technology exists elsewhere in our universe. According to The Atlantic’s review of Kalshi’s trading data, about 35 minutes after this bet was executed, it was followed by another that was almost twice as large (possibly from the same person). These were market-moving events: For one brief stretch, the market appeared to think that there was at least a one-in-three chance that the U.S. government will announce the existence of aliens this year. Perhaps this was just some overexcited UFO diehard with a hunch and money to burn. Or maybe, as some observers quickly noted, it was a trader with inside knowledge.
Prediction markets are becoming a thing. The government doesn’t know if it’s illegal betting or a legit way for the public to weigh in on topics of the day that may 4 come to pass. They seem like a shitty way for people in the know to do what is, in effect, insider trading, if you ask me. A bet was placed on Polymarket (which you can google, I will not be linking to their slop) about the capture of Nicolas Maduro mere hours before The Tyrant announced that the US had attacked Venezuela. Whoever it was got a $400,000 payout.
And on these sites you can bet on literally anything. Is JFK still alive? Who will win the 2030 Super Bowl? When will The Tyrant die? You can make thousands of dollars, if you’re willing to put up thousands. And it all is, for now, completely unregulated, which makes it basically insider trading, if you know something that no one else knows.
So, does someone know that the regime is about to make an announcement about our place in the universe? Could it all just be a diversion away from something that The Tyrant might do at that time so we don’t realize what’s going on until it’s too late? It wouldn’t be the first time that this sort of thing has happened. To divert from the Epstein files attention, the administration stoked stories about former president Obama and Russian election interference in 2016.
They do this kind of thing all the time, and it’s all just to rile up people and get them off of what is important.
But the kid in me is curious. Does someone really know something? And is it about to come out in public?
The government has hidden secret technology from the public in the past. Our top secret spy planes, the current Boeing X-37, which can stay in space, unmanned, for years. What is it doing up there? They won’t say.
So if there are aliens out there, and it is revealed that they’re out there, what does that do to humanity? We’re suddenly not alone. Does humanity have a collective freak out and head for the bunkers? What does religion do in this situation? Do we try to communicate with these beings or do we stop all signals to space, hoping to hide from the Type 2 and Type 3 civilizations that may be out there?
If that day is coming, humanity will have to have The Great Reckoning about our place in the universe. Are we going to be bulldozed by the Vogons? Have First Contact with the Vulcans? Or could it be Independence Day?
I would hope that it’s choice #2. I would like my body to remain probe-free.
UPDATE: And now the US government has registered aliens.gov.