Alien Collaborator

 

Recently I found myself harboring an idea that is very unsettling, not just because of how strange it is, but also because in spite of its strangeness, it seems perfectly logical – a conclusion with solid premises.  The idea is that maybe the time has finally come to sell out the entire human race.

 

A lot of things led me to that idea.  First there’s the global perspective: our accumulation of plastic and other non-degradable wastes, along with record-breaking levels of greenhouse gas emissions and other toxic gases, along with our conversion of ever-growing tracts of land into concrete jungles and asphalt highways, is driving the world into another “mass extinction” event: the sixth in world history.  And what makes this one unique is that it will not be the result of some astrophysical or geological catastrophe; rather it will be directly attributable to human activity.  According to the United Nations’ 2019 Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, temperature-increasing greenhouse gas emissions have doubled since 1980, one-third of marine fish stocks are already being harvested at unsustainable levels, and urban areas have doubled since 1992.  With regard to waste, plastic pollution has increased by a factor of 10 since 1980, and 300-400 million tons of heavy metals and other toxic substances are dumped by industrial facilities into the world’s waterways each year.  As a consequence, the report estimates that one million plant and animal species are threatened with extinction.

 

Statistics like these are bad enough, but what makes them worse is the reaction that I have seen among so many people, who take an “ostrich head in the sand” approach and simply call things like emissions-induced climate change myths.  They take comfort in refusing to believe unpleasant facts, and live accordingly.  Even worse, people who are aware of facts like these (which are generally available, and often reported in the media) and acknowledge their severity often do little if anything to support remedying the underlying causes.  These people “check all the right boxes” when it comes to liberal sentiments, lamenting unsustainable practices, and decrying other inhumane practices such as factory farming, but make no significant lifestyle changes to counteract them.  Perhaps they vote for political candidates who parrot their views and concerns and provide vague promises of addressing them, or in some cases even make contributions of money and/or time to organizations that are addressing these problems.  But otherwise, they blithely go on living and behaving as they always have, and apathetically hope that whatever terrible consequences are in store for the planet will happen at some comfortably distant future time – ideally after they are dead and gone. 

 

And then there’s the steady stream of crises and tragedies that show up in the daily news, providing constant confirmation that there will always be people ready to provide us with new horrors and acts of depravity to fill up the next news cycle.  I – like many others, I’m sure – had always harbored a hope that while we as a species are less than perfect, we were improving over time.  We could look back at the 20^th century – when supposedly civilized countries invaded others without provocation, and when demagogues and despots were actually voted into office in popular elections – and assure ourselves that such things are behind us in this, the 21^st century, leaving us only to worry about dictators in 3^rd world countries, or religious fanatic terrorists and regimes in the Middle East.  But events in recent years have gone a long way to dispelling that hope.

 

And finally there’s the personal level:  I regularly see human beings at their ugliest: selfish, gluttonous, impatient, discourteous, and this before I even read about the most recent summary of inane and tragic happenings in the daily news.  Just the other day, a driver passed my car, honking and shouting obscenities at me through his open window, because I had committed the unforgivable sin of making a left turn at a busy intersection that did not have a left turn arrow.  But here is where I have to face the ugly truth:  I have had the same reaction, when I was in that driver’s place, although in my case I generally confined my cursing at the left-turning driver to the inside of my car.  At worst, he only saw me mouthing obscenities at him.  Yes, I have often played the cad myself in social situations, but try to conveniently forget it when I am venting my anger at the misbehaving cads who I encounter. 

 

But my sin goes far beyond that.  In moments of personal clarity, I have to admit to myself that I am also one of those “box-checking liberals" who takes pride in believing high-minded things, while doing little if anything of substance to genuinely address what’s wrong with the world.  I lament greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, while continuing to own and drive a gasoline-powered car, I detest factory farming, while regularly eating foods that come out of those places, and I only recycle what is convenient for me, which amounts to probably only half of my weekly trash.  The despair that I feel as I realize that when talking about the irredeemable shortcomings of the human race, I have to say “we” instead of “they”, has led me to ponder a desperate solution:  If we as human beings are constitutionally unfit to be stewards of this planet, then perhaps something else should be.

 

In a previous blog entry, “Strange Invaders” (March 18, 2018), I remarked upon how it seems that more and more people in high places are acknowledging the possibility that there are intelligent alien species from other worlds who may actually be visiting the Earth.  (Just recently, the U.S. Congress held a public hearing on “unidentified aerial phenomena”.)  I added, however, that if any such species make contact with us in an overt sort of way, even with benign intentions, the general result upon the human population could be disruptive, and even traumatic, as long-held cherished beliefs about our unique and perhaps exclusive existence as intelligent beings in the universe would have to be dispelled.  But I have begun to seriously wonder if such a traumatic contact would actually be the lesser of two evils – the greater evil being that we, the human race, just continue to do what we’re doing now: driving the planet into another mass extinction event, if not the entire destruction of the ecosystem. 

 

As I pondered this, I remembered one of those cheesy science fiction movies from the 1950s that featured invading space aliens.  This one was called It Conquered the World, and the invaders were from the planet Venus.  But what was unique about this movie was that the aliens were getting help, from a human collaborator, who was in secret contact with them through his ham radio set.  (The movie was remade in an even campier form about ten years later in the movie Zontar, the Thing from Venus.)  The collaborator conspired with the aliens because he believed that they were coming with benign intentions, only to eventually discover that he was deceived.  At the time these movies came out, it probably seemed that this otherwise intelligent man had made a recklessly foolish gamble.  But now I wonder:  Could that character have been onto something?  Given what we now know about how wretchedly self-destructive humanity actually is, might it actually be a noble thing to reach out to an extraterrestrial invader and put oneself in its service?

Calling Zontar

 

As in those science fiction movies, a human collaborator would be taking a gamble, of course.  The alien race’s intentions toward us might be less than benevolent.  But assuming that such a race would almost certainly have the capability to destroy all life on the planet if it wanted to, one would also have to assume that it could have easily done so already.  There must be something about the living ecosystem that it cares about, or that at least is valuable to it for pragmatic reasons, so really only humanity is at risk, as a toxic, overly prolific, planet-suffocating pest that must be cleared away or effectively controlled.  I see a range of potential actions that this alien race would take toward us, ranging from sinister to benign:

 

• Completely eradicate the human species, thereby allowing the rest of the ecosystem on planet Earth to restore and heal itself.
• Exterminate all but a remnant of the human race, which is kept small enough so as to pose no real risk to the rest of life on planet earth.  This remnant might also be regulated and controlled or – in the worst case – enslaved by the alien overlords.  Human history offers grisly precedents for such a policy, as when the Spanish Conquistadores made slaves of the native populations of Hispaniola and Cuba in their own homelands, forcing them to work in gold mines rather than their own farms, until more than half of the population died of disease, starvation, and overwork.
• Allow the human race to remain intact in their entirety, but closely controlled and supervised – and again, in the worst case, enslaved – by the alien conquerors.
• Exert only a “light hand” of control over the human population: in the most benign case providing positive guidance and instruction on how to be more responsible caretakers of the planet, and only intervening forcefully in the cases of war, despotism, or flagrant neglect.

 

The hope, of course, is that those of us who have chosen to sell out the human race by being the aliens’ spies and collaborators will be given some sort of reward in any of these scenarios.  In the most sinister case, for example, we might be the last to be exterminated, or even allowed to live out our natural lives after the lives of all of the others have been extinguished.  We might even be given the exciting privilege of witnessing the genetic alteration of some other species on the planet: as the aliens accelerate its evolution, so that it can take over the human beings’ role as stewards of the earth, succeeding where the humans have so abysmally failed.  In the relatively benign scenarios involving simply conquest and oversight (and possible enslavement), it is hoped that we turncoats would be given supervisory duties as proxies for the conquerors in managing the human inhabitants, along with perhaps other material privileges and rewards.

 

But what exactly, would we be expected to do before and during the conquest phase, as collaborators?  I assume that it would be pretty much the same thing that traitors and spies have done throughout human history:  providing potentially useful intelligence to the alien combatants whenever possible, while sowing confusion and disinformation domestically, and, when the battle and invasion commences, endeavoring to demoralize the defenders, and sabotaging their defenses.  We would essentially be part of a “fifth column”: the historical term used to describe a group of people trying to subvert a country from within, usually in favor of a foreign enemy or invader.  Most famously, pro-Nazi fifth column activities were evident in many countries in the years leading up to and during World War II.

 

Nazi Supporters in Britain

Assuming that I am not alone in my planned treason, or that my idea catches on, my fellow conspirators and I could even form a secret social network, where we could swap ideas on how specifically to spread misinformation, confuse and demoralize the human population, commit more effective acts of sabotage, and provide more direct assistance to the invaders.  For any who are contending with occasional feelings of remorse, or even self-loathing, for what we are doing, the rest of us can serve as a support group, lifting their spirits and reinvigorating their enthusiasm for our project.  Our social network could even include a dating app, since it is very possible that after the successful invasion and occupation, we will be the sole progenitors of any human remnant that is allowed to survive.

French Female Collaborators with Shaven Heads

 

Becoming a traitor, or one of a group of traitors, is always a risky business of course.  If the other side loses, or is eventually repelled after an attempted conquest or invasion, then there are always violent reprisals against those who have been exposed as secret collaborators, or who openly supported the enemy.  After the liberation of France from the Nazis in World War II for example, women who had cavorted with the German invaders had their heads publicly shaven.  And those men and women who did more than cavort with the occupiers, and actually colluded with them, were put on trial for treason, and thousands were executed.  But in a war against an extraterrestrial species that is technologically advanced enough to reach the Earth in the first place, it seems that any conflict with them would be extremely one-sided in favor of the aliens.  It is a common plot device in many science fiction books, movies, and television programs (e.g., War of the Worlds, Independence Day, Mars Attacks, Falling Skies) that after a long and seemingly hopeless struggle against extraterrestrial invaders, some 11^th-hour solution pops up that saves humanity in the end.  Realistically, however, I think it’s safe to say that any struggle against such invaders would be hopeless from beginning to end, and ultimately futile, leaving us traitors with little or nothing to worry about in the way of reprisals from our fellow human beings.  Our only concern would be that the conquerors who we conspired with stay true to their word and give us whatever we had been promised for betraying our species.

 

Having excited myself with the thought of being able to bail out of this train wreck called human civilization and even get some special bonuses for doing so, the only remaining question for me had become how to reach out to the prospective invaders.  I don’t think it will require anything as quaint as a ham radio set, hidden away in some shack, as in those science fiction movies.  If there really are extraterrestrials visiting the earth, then all of our communications are probably already being monitored and analyzed, so perhaps even just writing this blog will be enough to get me an invitation to become a traitor (if they're looking for one). 

 

But in the midst of my excitement, I had one of those nasty, jarring thoughts (an “epiphany”, you might call it) that often sucks the life and enthusiasm out of a pet project right when it is about to get off the ground:  If these aliens have some sort of a moral compass, as apparently they would have if they were interested in saving the earth’s ecosystem, would they really want to ally themselves with those rats who were willing to sell out their fellow humans at the drop of a hat – even if this meant condemning them to mass extermination – just for a few personal perquisites and advantages?  Or instead would the extraterrestrials want to make common cause with those human beings who resolutely have refused to throw in the towel, and continue to do whatever they can to reverse the trajectory we have been on toward general destruction?  I can’t say that I personally have much hope for saving the world around me, but should I at least make a more concerted attempt at becoming someone worthy of saving?  (As in the words of the 13^th-century Persian poet Rumi, “Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world.  Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”) 

 

There is always the risk, of course, that if I hold off from my treasonous plan, I will someday watch the Great Invasion in progress anyway, and, while observing the invaders’ human collaborators enjoying their leadership roles or other rewards, bitterly remembering that I had thought of it first – of throwing my lot in early with the aliens, to win their favor.  It will be very painful to helplessly watch as others enjoy my rewards – the ones that should have come to me, if only I’d stuck to my plan of early betrayal.

 

Nevertheless – for the time being, anyway – I have decided to put that plan on hold.  I just can’t shake the nagging idea that – whether there are really aliens or not – it’s better in the long run to stick to the high road, even if that road doesn’t seem to be getting high enough . . . fast enough.