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UNIVERSITY PARK, Penn. – We've all heard of the ravaged rain forests and the plight of the polar bear. But as far as reasons for saving the planet go, the one offered by scientists Thursday is truly out of this world.
NASA isn't backing this paper or have anything really to do with it. One of the authors works at NASA and simply listed his department improperly as reference.
So here’s the thing. This isn’t a “NASA report.” It’s not work funded by NASA, nor is it work supported by NASA in other ways. It was just a fun paper written by a few friends, one of whom happens to have a NASA affiliation.
This whole thing is obviously a lame ploy by NASA to try and justify some funding $$ to be funneled their way so they can initiate a SETI-type project to try and determine if aliens have us in their gunsights, so to speak. NASA funding has been ravaged over the years--the demise of the Space Shuttle being the most recent example--so they're desperate for money.
As humans have progressed, our morals and values have progressed as well. There's no reason to assume that an alien culture would somehow decide against Kant's Categorical Imperative or Singer's Utilitarianism and decide they hate other sentient life. Most likely, they would want to show us how to live in harmony with other living things rather than wanting to kill us. Why would we assume they would be less interested in us than we would be in them?
This is from the report from Fox. Providing scientific thought for citizens to evaluate.
Quote:
The thought-provoking scenario is one of many envisaged in a joint study by Penn State and the NASAPlanetary Science Division, entitled "Would Contact with Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity? A Scenario Analysis."
No evidence of any other reporting agency sharing information provided by Penn State and/or the NASA Planetary Science Division.
I'm not defending the decision to complete/fund this research, but there seems to be misunderstanding about what it says. The argument is not that radical environmentalist aliens will attack to save the polar bears (lol).
The authors claim that "Humanity may just now be entering the period in which its rapid civilizational expansion could be detected by an ETI because our expansion is changing the composition of Earth’s atmosphere (e.g. via greenhouse gas emissions), which therefore changes the spectral signature of Earth"
Climate change would just alert hostile ETI to our expansion, potentially causing a preemptive strike.
Serious science, eh?
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