As if the UN wasn’t bad enough here on Earth, now it seems they are planning for the future when they’ll speak for humanity to any aliens we encounter:
http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/un-to-appoint-earth-contact-for-aliens/story-e6frfku0-1225929498742
THE United Nations was set today to appoint an obscure Malaysian astrophysicist to act as Earth’s first contact for any aliens that may come visiting. … She is scheduled to tell delegates that the recent discovery of hundreds of planets around other stars has made the detection of extraterrestrial life more likely than ever before – and that means the UN must be ready to coordinate humanity’s response to any “first contact”.
Ugh. The last thing we need is that pack of third world thugs speaking for mankind to the Galactic Federation.
Stupid humans! the first life forms aliens will contact are Dolphins!
that gona be scene
UNOOSA Mazlan Binti Othman goes to landing site of first Alien landing
and is detained by lokal government forces
so much to UN attempt to speak for all mankind….
Now that I have time to think about it, it might be the best way. They’ll land, meet with the official representative, and conclude the planet is too socially fragmented to be of any value. With any luck they’ll then choose to send e-mail to someone like Scott, who can then coordinate the substantive meeting with non-political types.
First: somewhere in the Oort Cloud there must be several thousands of advise panels with written “dangerous species, if you continue it will be at YOUR own risk” (and this explain well why aliens never made to Earth until today…)
Second: today is Sunday
Third: obviously UN has nothing better to do today….
Isn’t it Monday in Oz?
> With any luck they’ll then choose to send e-mail to someone like Scott, who can then coordinate the substantive meeting with non-political types.
That’s me… non-political.
I’ve often wondered who I’d select for a first contact (assuming the usual “flying saucer on the White House lawn” scenario). Given a small-ish group, there would have to be a physicist, a biologist, a military strategist/historian, a linguist, a psychologist… and the Amazing Randi (or Penn & Teller, depending upon availability).
If it had to be boiled down to just one person, it would have to go to the Amazing Randi. Why the magician, and not the scientist? Because scientists are, sad to say, easily misled. In science, chemicals don’t lie to you. Nuclear reactions don’t lie to you. Materials properties don’t suddenly change out of spite. Scientists work in a world where honesty and straightforward facts are assumed as a given. But a good magician lives in a world where everything must be assumed to be a lie. And a good magician must be a good observer. This seems to me to be about the best combo for someone who gets a first look at an alein visitor. We cannot assume that aliens would be either benign or malevolent, or that they’d be ethical or unethical or even “i”-ethical (“i” in the meaning of “i = square root of minus one”). Someone who stands a chance of being able to see things as they *are* and not necessarily just as they’re *presented* would be valuable.
If the galaxy is filled with a plethora of species all doing their thing, and the first race we come across is the equivalent of a race of “Rickshaws,” we’d damned well better be on the ball or their misdirections will get us all killed.
I just did websearch for Othman. She seems to be Muslim (by her name, anyway). The one interview I could find seemed to be written for middle-school kids. Her online CV is unlike any CV I have seen: http://www.pacificscience.org/pdf/OthmanCV.pdf
My guess is that this is just more UN stuff to make the Third World feel good about itself, and in the process suck up to Western guilt over our oppression of women.
I like the idea of a magician meeting them the first time. They might send the same type of person if we’re lucky.
Smokeless cigarettes are those cigarettes which put on some speed on battery and they require no flame. These cigarettes include no tobacco in them and give.
>>Why the magician, and not the scientist? Because scientists are, sad to say, easily misled.
I recall reading something by Richard Feynman, about meeting Uri Geller the spoon bender. Feynman said something like, “I am smart enough to know I am dumb.” He knew that just because he couldn’t explain something didn’t necessarily mean that it was extraordinary.
@Michael – I don’t suppose that the female rocket scientist’s word that Western civilization doesn’t oppress women carries any weight with the third-world types?
Typical American right-winger reaction to anything to do with the UN.
Which UN are we discussing BTW? The UN which is controlled by the US which is the Security Council or the UN which is immaterial to how the world functions which is the General Assembly or the UN which contributes to the well being of so many people outside the US which is the UN’s various organisational and functional bodies?
Show an American right-winger anything to do with a Blue Helmet and they immediately start blathering on about “one world government” and other crap.
> Show an American right-winger anything to do with a Blue Helmet and they immediately start blathering on about “one world government” and other crap.
Actually, my first reaction to a UN Blue Helmet is “lock up your daughters.”
But then I’m an evil “right winger” who isn’t into collectivism.. you know, collectivising financies, rights, rape…
No one is proposing “collectivism” (in fact I suspect you wouldn’t even recognise it when you saw it – afterall, the entire US aerospace industry has been based on “collectivism” in the loose way you delight in misusing the term for many decades).
The UN is an organisation made up of its member states – something right wingers appear to conveniently forget. If there is a problem with the organisation then look to the contribution or rather lack of contribution your own nation has made to it. The sooner Americans realise they are part of, not separate to, the rest of the world and educate themselves to the realities that entails the better off we will ALL be. Most Americans are incredibly parochial in my experience. They don’t travel and it shows.
> No one is proposing “collectivism”…
… says the retard who has repeatedly suggested that wealth is a zero-sum game and “to each according to his need.”
> The UN is an organisation made up of its member states – something right wingers appear to conveniently forget.
No, right wingers (i.e. “sane people”) are well aware that the UN is composed of it’s nation states. Such glittering success stories as Iran, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Libya and so on.
> Most Americans are incredibly parochial in my experience. They don’t travel and it shows.
Hogwash. Americans travel rather a lot. The problem you have is that America is a big damn place, and Americans are free to travel from state to state, and do so. The fact that they might not choose to frequent your little hole hardly backs up your goofball notions.
If you believe that right-wingers are “sane” then you really are the one in need of help.
Iran, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Libya are balanced by the US, UK, Australia, Canada and Japan. Instead of blaming the ills of the UN on other nations, I’d suggest you should be looking at what your nation is failing at doing. Of course, I suppose you could just run around and say, “the world hates us!” That’d be par for the course. You want to be the world’s leaders, then show some leadership. In reality, what you want the UN to do is roll over and let the US do what it likes. Its inconvenient that other nations might just be able to have a voice in the UN and call a spade a spade.
As for the parochial ignorance of many Americans – how many Americans currently hold passports and how many have recently used them to travel outside of the US? America may be a “big damn place” but its essentially all the same society. Until you actually get outside of your own society and look inwards, you’re never going to see how parochial your viewpoint really is.
> If you believe that right-wingers are “sane” then you really are the one in need of help.
Oh, I need help, ’tis true. I need help to counter the lies and insanity of collectivists like yourself, who would bury mankind under a permanent shroud of slavery and shame.
> Iran, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Libya are balanced by the US, UK, Australia, Canada and Japan.
The problem being that countries like the US, UK, Australia, Canada and Japan even let countries like Iran, Zimbabwe, Cuba and Libya into the same club. It’s *nuts.* What the world needs is not a debating society open to all like the UN, but a “league of non-nuts nations” more like NATO.
> how many Americans currently hold passports and how many have recently used them to travel outside of the US?
Who cares? Only the congenitally anti-American actually believe that the US is a monolithic society, and that we’d somehow be all better off if we travelled to other, lesser societies on vacation now and then.
One thing that does interest me: you have expressed disdain for pretty much everything I support. You’re opposed to space travel (nicely parochial of you). You support the enslavement of Man under Marxist totalitarianism. Elsewhere, you have promoted the lies that Kaiser Wilhem II was somehow “civiized” and the US “uncivilized” and that the US was in violation of war crime laws by allowing the use of shotguns in wartime. I suspect if pressed and dosed with truth serum you’d admit that you love to kick kittens. So why hang around here?
The US is more monolithic than you appear to believe. Afterall, the voters kept voting Doubya into the White House while they could simply because they feared someone was going to fly an aeroplane into their house. I suspect you’ve rarely if ever travelled outside the US (and then more than likely to only the UK).
Those countries you name are allowed into the UN because the UN has rules which state they have to be accepted and guess what, they were? Everything you criticise those nations for, the US has done itself. It has utilised torture, murdered dissenters, funded and encouraged terrorism, broken international laws, broken treaties it has signed, you name it. So, perhaps you should remember Matthew 7:3? Or does your hubris prevent you?
> Those countries you name are allowed into the UN because the UN has rules which state they have to be accepted
Reason enough to hold the UN at arms length.
When deciding what to do with your houshold income, do you give the crack whore down the street a vote? How about the local rapists and murderers? How about the neighbors three doors down who you know nothing about? The UN would be a moderately good idea if all the member states had the same principals… but they don’t. The NATO models is far better.
> perhaps you should remember Matthew 7:3
Coming from a communist, that’s an entertaining notion.
In America you may have “crack whores” or “murderers and rapists” living down the street from you but I’ve never had any living down the streets that I’ve lived in. As I believe that taxes are paid to maintain society and its social infrastructure I have no problems with the concept. I’d rather have the government collect it and redistribute it so that we can all live similar lifestyles rather seeing someone poor because you believe we should all be greedy.
As I’ve said before, you really, really, deep down just want everybody to be the same as you. You cannot it seems accept that other nations just might do things differently to you. Such a naive viewpoint.
And if you believe I’m a Communist, you’ve obviously never really met one. Would you like me to introduce you to one? I know several. They tend to find my ideas rather at odds to theirs so its obviously I’m not a Communist. Perhaps in reality I’m in the centre? You know that place you’ve lost sight of way out there in Right Field?
> if you believe I’m a Communist, you’ve obviously never really met one.
Hmm. Really?
> I’d rather have the government collect it and redistribute it so that we can all live similar lifestyles …
Coupled with…
>Time for the rich piggies to pay.
>“To each according to his need”.
And then for maximum hypocrisy, you added this:
> As I’ve said before, you really, really, deep down just want everybody to be the same as you.
THis from the man who wants to steal from the productive to amke sure people live “similar lifestyles.”
You bore me.