By: David Seddon
June 12th, 2023
This article is part of our satire series.
Aliens are a popular subject with many different people, and people seem to be seeing more Unidentified Flying Objects every year. To many it seems that the signs of alien contact with earth are growing larger than they ever were before. So, with this supposed mounting body of evidence it seems like we should have had first official contact with aliens by now.
Now some people might suggest that given the distance between earth and the nearest star system, and the overall size of the universe, that we would be unlikely to actually have aliens notice us at this point. According to these people, the universe is too vast for us to ever expect to see aliens. However Enrico Fermi, who was a world famous astrophysicist, thought we should have seen signs of alien life at this point, and he was really smart. So the question remains open.
To those who are in the know, the odds that alien life exists, and is already at or around earth, seems too large for it not to be true. Certainly, if they weren’t, then there shouldn’t be so many UFO videos that are popular right now. It’s not like there are very accessible video editing programs which could be used to fake this evidence. Nor is it true that a truly unidentified flying object is just that, unidentified and not necessarily of extraterrestrial origin.
It is time that we accept the undeniable truth: aliens are on earth, and they just don’t like us.
There are many people who might balk at that claim, and mention that if aliens didn’t like us, they would probably declare war on earth. However, there’s a big difference between dislike and hate. Besides, if aliens did like us, why wouldn’t they have revealed themselves more openly yet? There’d be nothing stopping them from doing so.
There’s lots of good evidence that might cause aliens to have a healthy distaste of us. For example, movies are really popular on earth. So an alien might decide to check one out. Perhaps it watches the movie “Alien” to see a movie that will feature something like it, and then it sees a film where the aliens are the bad guys, and evil, mindless monsters to boot. Obviously they’d hate us after that.
Or perhaps, aliens decide to play videogames, another popular form of human entertainment. Perhaps they pick up the “Fallout” series. And while they might have fun exploring this huge, post-apocalyptic world, they would also find more evil aliens. Perhaps smarter than the ones in the movies, but no less evil.
Even earth’s highest form of artistic achievement, the Young Adult Fiction novel, is not above reducing its depictions of aliens to pure evil creatures. In the book “Sanctuary”, the obviously realistic plot about a teenager trapped in a space prison of superpowered teenagers is brought down into the unreasonable when evil aliens show up to attack the ship. It would be at this point when I, too, would give up on hope for our species if I was an alien.
The picture becomes even more bleak when the lens expands to look beyond fiction. In 2019 more than one million people said they were going to storm Area 51. Area 51 is a United States Governmental base which definitely holds aliens captive inside. But, on the day of the storming barely a fraction of that showed up, some numbers indicate a number as low as 40 people. The selfish desire to not be thrown in prison, or shot, overwrote a prime chance for millions to demonstrate our friendship to aliens.
However, we’re not totally hopeless yet. The previously mentioned rise in the rate of UFO sightings proves that aliens are still here. Which means that we still have many chances to try and win them back to our side. And the way to do so is obvious.
We must show the aliens that we’re willing to listen to them, and produce far more stories where aliens are unambiguous heroes. We need to make sure that every time an alien shows up in fiction, they are cool and solve all of humanity’s problems. If we do this then they might very well come around to liking us, and letting us go on tours across the galaxy, or even the universe.
Now, there are probably those who read these words and think that we have far more pressing issues to deal with than pander to, apparently petty, extraterrestrials. They might say that we’re potentially on the border of a climate catastrophe, and that we’re facing an increasing number of human rights abuses coming up all over the world. Surely, these people might say, we should be focusing on those problems first.
However, those people fail to consider that aliens are cool, and I really want to live in “Star Wars”, so there is no other path forward.
David Seddon is a senior undergraduate student with a major in professional and public writing and a minor in Chinese. A big fan of fantasy and sci-fi, David can often be found playing games, reading books or working on his own self-published books in his free time.