Space Aliens Are Probably Progressive Liberals By Daniel Foster | National Review Online

By now you’ve probably read about the paper — authored by a NASA-affiliated scientist along with two scholars from Penn “Hockey Stick Graph” University — laying out various scenarios that might play out in the aftermath of first contact with an alien intelligence. The paper, published in Acta Astronautica, hilariously suggests that an otherwise benevolent alien race might nevertheless destroy us in a “preemptive” strike designed to stop us from global-warming our way to galactic dominion. You read that right. (Shall we call this manner of preemptive strike the Gore Doctrine?)

In any event, I’ve read the paper (so you don’t have to) and that’s just the tip of the melting iceberg. It turns out that any alien race that comes into contact with us will, by the very fact of their advanced state of development, very likely resemble what we mere Terrans think of as progressive liberals. Indeed, one of the answers advanced by the authors to the question of why we haven’t been contacted by aliens already is that we aren’t yet worth their time — that they are waiting until we achieve a “societal benchmark such as sustainable development or international unity” before they pick up the phone. Read more »