Genesis makes a pretty clear statement that we are God’s best idea. Ironically, the idea that we are is largely based on the Bible. The wise choice, it seems to me, is to take seriously what is almost a dead certainty-we are not the only life in the universe. I’m sure it has impacted his career somewhat. Hart, whose book is subtitled Aliens in Avatar and the Americas, takes the possibility of visitation at face value. The point that Hart makes is well taken-if we ridicule so automatically, will we be prepared when they arrive? Shouldn’t we be thinking about this now that scientists are discovering there are likely billions of planets in the Goldilocks Zone (capable of supporting life)? Ah, but it is so hard to let go of racial superiority! Homo sapiens sapiens are pretty impressed with themselves. France, Argentina, and Russia, for example, have opened the files to some extent. Thus it has been since the 1950s, despite foreign (!) governments and their militaries admitting that yes, we see things and we don’t know what they are. Those who’ve seen what may be non-terrestrial flying machines are automatically classed with the mentally unstable and ridiculed into silence. But we all really know what I’m talking about. UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object, and many people can’t identify what they see in the sky. Part of the problem is that we, as a society, have been taught to laugh at those who’ve seen UFOs. Hart takes a much more balanced look at the question. Scientists such as Stephen Hawking even apply that to us, saying that if ETI arrives we will be exterminated. History has repeated the story far too many times.
Natives (or TI, terrestrial intelligence, if you will) at the hands of newcomers with the Discovery Doctrine, are soon wiped out. The point of the book is much more an ethical than a speculative one since human history has pretty much documented what happens when the Discovery Doctrine is applied. What happens, in order words, when we meet extra-terrestrial intelligence? I very much admire academics such as Hart who are willing to ask what is such a necessary question. ETI is a bit more precise than the more familiar ET, whom everyone knows, is an extra-terrestrial. “What if?” kept coming to me as I read John Hart’s book Encountering ETI. It was an imagination game played by parents with their children to teach them about “stranger danger” in a way that wasn’t too scary. A game that parenting books used to recommend was called “What if?”.
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