EELRIJUE: The Zoo Hypothesis

"You'd think "Super Earth" would be a place where everybody is beautiful. We all drive fancy cars, date super-models and eat like a pig without getting fat."

Source: August 27 2010 -- Scientists Investigate the Possibility of a 'Super Earth'

Super-Earth? I realize that Grant Morrison writes his own reality, but does he get to write the headlines in ours now, too? As it turns out, the 'Super-Earth' is just a vaguely earth-like planet around a very sun-like star. It's not really news, just a sensationalized update to the Kepler Mission, a quest to map other solar systems in the nearby galaxy...a mission that leads to a troubling question.



What happens when we find them? There is no "If" involved here. Human beings are facing population explosion and resource depletion here on Earth and those trends show no signs of reversing for the foreseeable future. In order to continue civilization, we are basically forced into the void in these next few generations.



I would like to suggest that the Invisible College consider the adoption of a "Containment Imperative" -- to suggest that mankind must be prevented from spreading to other solar systems prior to higher evolution. It's not just that "They" aren't ready, it's that none of us are. Individually, humans produce poets, police and professors...but collectively, we function like a cross like between cancer and termites.



John Ball: "Mankind should be able to take over our galaxy in a fairly short time -- say a few hundred-thousand years -- unless somebody else already has. But I think that there are many other civilizations, much older than ours, who might have taken over the galaxy eons ago. Where are they? Where is everybody?"

The Containment Imperative and "The Zoo Hypothesis"

"The apparent size and age of the universe suggest that many echnologically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations ought to exist. However, this hypothesis seems inconsistent with the lack of observational evidence to support it."

The Fermi Paradox is based on a willful and total exclusion of the facts. As long as you're down for ignoring centuries of history and thousands of reported sightings and encounters just in the past 50 years, then yes, there's a "lack of observational evidence" after you've discarded all the...you know, observational evidence.



One response to the Fermi Paradox is the Zoo Hypothesis, variously attributed to Charles Fort, John Ball and John Keel. The argument is simple and compelling: ET civilization has already concluded that humans need to be contained on Earth. It is kind of a slam-dunk tautology: any super-advanced space-faring civilization would view us as violent and superstitious monkeys, largely driven by the fact humanity are violent and superstitious monkeys.



Obscurantist: "As John Ball himself says, the zoo hypothesis is pessimistic and psychologically unpleasant. It would be more pleasant to believe that extraterrestrials want to talk with us if they knew we were here. However, as Ball concludes, the history of science is full of examples of of psychologically unpleasant hypotheses that have turned out to be true."



John Ball: "The history of science contains, one after another, a series of blows to mankind's anthropocentric ego. Egypt does not seem to be the center of the universe, nor Earth, nor our Sun, nor our galaxy. We humans seem to be only intelligent apes. I predict two further blows to our ego in the near future: We shall discover that our mental processes can be modeled, or even duplicated in detail, by a mechanism such as a computer. Thus vitalism, now living only in a few human minds contemplating themselves, will fi nally be dead. And we shall become aware of our relationship with advanced extraterrestrial intelligence. Will we then still believe that we are the chosen people of God?"



John Keel: "I abandoned the extraterrestrial hypothesis in 1967 when my own field investigations disclosed an astonishing overlap between psychic phenomena and UFOs. The objects and apparitions do not necessarily originate on another planet and may not even exist as permanent constructions of matter. It is more likely that we see what we want to see and interpret such visions according to our contemporary beliefs."