09 May 2019
Culture Clash (Part II)
Global cooling.
By Neil Tidmarsh
Good news for Planet Earth (bad news for homo sapiens?) – aliens from outer space are among us, after all!
Barely two months after French scientist Jean-Pierre Rospars declared that intelligent life-forms from other solar systems are deliberately avoiding us (because they don’t want to inflict the kind of damage and destruction on mankind which contact with a highly advanced civilisation inevitably inflicts on a less advanced civilisation – see Culture Clash, Shaw Sheet issue 195, 28/03/2019), two items in the news this week contradicted him.
First, the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007). Ever wondered why the music of this “leader of the electronic avant-garde” (The Oxford Dictionary of Music) always sounds as if it had been composed for other than human ears, why “the majority of audiences find it beyond their ken”? Well, now we know. Stockhausen was an alien from a planet in Sirius’s solar system. He was convinced of it by dreams and visions of the far-off galaxy where he’d learnt to compose music. In an interview in The Times this week, his wife said “People thought he was cuckoo”. But if you know a tree by its fruit, then the guy who composed a string quartet to be performed inside four airborne helicopters (got that one on your play-list, have you? No, me neither) has to belong to another world, doesn’t he?
Second, Dr Young-hae Chi, instructor in Korean at Oxford University’s Oriental Institute. His lecture Alien abduction and the environmental crisis (rejected by the Oxford Union – I wonder why) and his Korean-language book Alien visitations and the end of humanity (not published in English – I wonder why not) claim that aliens are living among us, sharing our biosphere and colonising our planet. He describes four types: small; tall and bold; scaly with snake eyes; and insect-like (who seem to be the bosses). We can’t see them (though I’ve met plenty of human beings matching those descriptions – and who hasn’t had a boss who resembled a cockroach or a blood-sucking tic?) because, although they live among us, they inhabit a bio-system imperceptible to our puny organs.
Dr Chi insists that there’s a connection between alien abductions and climate change – he reckons that the aliens are here to create human / alien hybrids which will be able to survive and thrive on earth even after environmental collapse, and so preserve human DNA and alien DNA (or whatever the building-block of alien life might be) from destruction by the armageddon of climate change which we’re bringing down on ourselves.
Now, Dr Chi seems to think that this is good news for us human beings – he reckons that the aliens are just as concerned about climate change as we are and are here to help us as much as to help themselves. But I wonder, has he ever asked himself these few simple questions: why are aliens bothering to colonise a planet which is on its last legs? And don’t they have a planet of their own? And wouldn’t it be simpler for super-intelligent and advanced aliens to invent and implement a solution to climate change rather than breed a super-race of hybrids to survive it?
Another report this week – and Jean-Pierre Rospars’ theory about the potentially disastrous consequences for us of contact with more highly-developed beings – might help to provide the answers. Researchers at UCL investigating climate change have estimated that the wars, diseases, slavery and famines which followed the arrival of Europeans in the Americas at the end of the fifteenth century reduced the indigenous population by a shocking 90% – from 60 million to a mere 6 million. They suggest that such a drastic de-population resulted in the abandoning and re-foresting of cleared land so massive that the consequent drop in CO2 levels caused the ‘mini-ice age’ of the seventeenth century (think of the Thames freezing over, the failed harvests which helped to kick-off the civil war in England and the Thirty Years War on the Continent, the freak weather conditions echoed by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Nights Dream). Global cooling with a vengeance.
Last month it was suggested that a billion new trees should be planted in the UK to combat man-made global warming. A billion sounds like a lot, but would it be enough? Surely, global cooling on a level sufficient to save the planet could only be achieved by a 21st century global scenario to match the 15th century American one – ie by an invasion of the whole planet, not just one or two continents of it, by an advanced and alien civilisation? A 90% reduction in the indigenous population, 90% of cultivated and built-up land returning to the wild. That would save the planet, wouldn’t it? I’m surprised that Dr Chi and others haven’t suggested that climate change is being caused by aliens; that they’ve covertly slipped us the advanced technologies which have been slowly poisoning the planet for the last hundred years, so they can take over when we’ve gone; that they’re here because they’ve destroyed their own planet – advanced civilisations tend to exhaust their environment, as our species is learning now, at the height of its cultural and technological development, and as the Mayans and the Romans learned before us.
Scary stuff. But not half as scary as the possibility that there are no aliens (benevolent, malevolent or merely neutral), that we’re all alone in the solar system, in the universe, in the whole of space, alone on a stricken planet with no one else to save us, no one but ourselves to help us. That, of course, is the scariest possibility of all. Dr Chi could well be right in one respect. Perhaps there is indeed a connection between climate change and reports of alien abductions; perhaps the increase in stories about aliens is a way of avoiding the facts and the truth – that there’s no one else to blame for the damage we’re doing to our own planet or to save us from the consequences of it.
