An Alien Tree-Hugger Scoffs At Earth’s Governments
Dec 23rd, 2008 | By Byron King | Category: Energy, Featured, Politics
This past weekend saw the debut of a remake of the classic 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still. The original movie was so good that I don’t know why anybody really thought it necessary to make a new version. But much of modern culture has turned into a cheesy imitation of the past. So why should the movie biz be any different?
The story line in both Earth Stood Still movies is pretty straightforward. An alien spaceship comes to Earth and lands in Washington, D.C. in the 1951 movie, and in New York’s Central Park in the current remake. Out pops an alien with a “Take me to your leader” gleam in his eye. But in both movies, some trigger-happy soldier shoots the alien. (Although in the current remake, it could have been accidental — like what happened with New York Giants football player Plaxico Burress.)
After the alien gets shot, a giant robot appears from the spaceship and begins firing death rays at the assembled human greeters. But the wounded alien calls off the robot. Then the alien goes to a hospital, where earthling doctors try to figure out how to patch him up. Turns out that the alien looks a lot like the movie actor Keanu Reeves.
Later, the authorities come in and ask the alien what he wants. “Why did you come to our planet?” they inquire, with a false sense of innocence dripping from their collective lips.
“Your planet?” replies the alien. Uh oh. It’s worse than we thought. The aliens are mad at us. And it doesn’t help that we shot the guy. So it’s time to call Houston and tell them that we have a problem.
Death Ray Gap
Of course, the authorities fear the alien because they know that his death rays are better than our death rays. In true Cold War fashion, we have a “death ray gap” that leads to a chasm of misunderstanding. That, and the unnerving sense of territoriality that the alien seems to exhibit towards our blue orb.
The bottom line is that the alien is visiting Earth to tell mankind to clean up its act, literally and figuratively. In the 1951 movie, the alien wanted to tell mankind not to kill itself off with nuclear warfare. It was an early sop to the anti-nuke movement. In the new release, it’s an environmentalist sequel to Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth. That is, the alien declares, “I’m here to save the planet.”
No kidding. Justice is coming from outer space. The aliens are going to save the planet, and save it good and hard. This particular alien and his kind are ready to out-do even the Earth First! crowd. Tree-spiking? That’s for sissies. Burning down a Hummer dealership? They’ll see that, and raise us by a few orders of magnitude.
“If the earth dies, you die,” says the alien. “If you die, the earth survives.” Whoops. This cannot be good.
On cue, the giant robot — GORT, for genetically organized robotic technology — decomposes into a locust-like blizzard of nanoparticles. These tiny particles take flight like a dark cloud and start devouring all man-made substances (including people) in their path, breaking them down into the constituent elements.
There are some serious special effects involved. How serious? Let’s just say that the New York Giants will need a new stadium in which to play. And Donald Trump will have some new development opportunities in lower Manhattan — if there is anyone still around who wants to live there. Yep, these aliens are going to save the planet by killing off mankind and leaving behind wide swaths of mineral sands. It’s urban renewal on nanotechnology steroids.
Girl Meets Alien
But there’s this good-looking female astrobiologist from Princeton. It’s the ageless and eye-popping pretty Jennifer Connelly who won an academy Award for her 2001 efforts as a Princetonian in A Beautiful Mind. She also appeared in the 2003 movie version of The Incredible Hulk. So I guess she’s into both smart and genetically altered guys.
It seems that astrobiology-girl took a bunch of government grant money for her research. Apparently, she never read the fine print. There’s a clause in the government contract that says, “If aliens show up, we draft you into the service of the nation.”
So our Princeton Tiger gets shanghaied off to help the government people deal with the alien. She shares a tender moment with the alien when he is in the hospital. And guess what? The alien guy kind of likes her, which is not hard to do when someone as hot as Ms. Connelly is holding your hand.
So to make a long story short, there’s this series of exciting chase scenes. Cars careen and crash. Helicopters hover and hit in fiery collisions. Kindred souls bond. Eventually, the Princeton lady uses her feminine charms to convince the alien to call off the nanobugs.
You go, girl. Another Academy Award for Ms. Connelly? She’s good but I don’t think she needs to overspend her budget for the gown she’ll wear to the Kodak Theater. Even though, to Ms. Connelly’s great credit, the Earth is saved while mankind has to promise the aliens that we’ll stop wrecking the environment.
Stop wrecking the environment? What does that mean? Will the aliens be satisfied now that Carol Browner is going to make energy and environmental policy at the Obama White House? Or do the aliens want something more than that? Is there something more than that? Really, even science fiction has its limits and Carol Browner may well be the one to take it to the edge of physics.
Well, for our purposes it means that the movie is over. That’s all you get for the $9.50 ticket.
After all the action and flying nanobugs, The Day the Earth Stood Still (v. 2.0) does not get to the part about how 6.5 billion people can continue to exist on this planet without using an industrial level of energy supply and industrial levels of agriculture, minerals, water supply, public health and much more. I guess that’s in the next remake, in another 57 years if we’re lucky.
Until we meet again,
Byron W. King
December 23, 2008
Nice writing. You are on my RSS reader now so I can read more from you down the road.
Allen Taylor
Nice commentary in the e-mail Gary Gibson.
Human beings may use technology to increase the odds of their survival.
Human beings may use technology to bring about their extinction.
Human beings may be able to significantly increase food production in small spaces.
Human beings may be able to significantly increase the amount of drinking water in the world.
if Africa is able to solve many of its problems, it may be able to have fewer famines. Many parts of Africa have very rich farm land. Private property and wealth creation needs to be encouraged in Africa if the lives of Africans are going to significantly improve. The United Nations needs to get serious about reducing War in Africa.
I graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 1992 with a BA Degree in Political Science and a minor in Economics. I first started thinking about the creation of a United States of Africa that would have a constitution similar to our own and would maximize Africa’s mineral wealth when I was a student at UNH.
I ran for United States Senate from New Hampshire in 2002.
My website is http://www.myspace.com/kennethstremsky
Want to bet that the feds (in some form) won’t bail out all those idiots who went with Madoff and lost all that money? Too many wealthy , influential, campaign contributors, and investors for it not to happen. Just wait and see.
Some facts for the limousine liberals, and the rest as you are shoveling your driveway buried in “global warming” (liberals just hire Mexicans do to the work, of course):
- Kegwin, wrote in Science, 1996:274:1504-1508, the mean surface temp of the Sargasso Sea (which lies roughly between the West Indies and the Azores), which was obtained by readings of isotope ratios in marine organism remains in sediment, shows we are, today, below the three thousand year average, and far below the Medieval Climactic Optimum.
- William Feldman of the Los Alamos Nat’l Laboratory reported about Mars in Space.com (http://www.space.com/scienceas.....31208.html) “NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter has been surveying the planet for nearly a full Martian year now” and – referring to the warming data on Mars cited in this article – “One explanation could be that Mars is just coming out of an ice age.”
- Sallie Baliunas, chair of the Science Advisory Board at the George C. Marshall Institute, said, “Pluto, like Mars, is also undergoing warming.” Another recent report on Mars global warming was found in Reuters, http://today.reuters.com/news/.....ningdigest.
- If you ever visit Skaftafell Nat’l Park, Iceland, as I have, you will find the museum notes there are around 40 Viking era farm *currently* buried under the Vatnajokull glacier system (third largest in the world); i.e., it was warmer, as all scientists know, during the Medieval climactic optimum than it is today.
- In addition to Mars and Pluto, there is also evidence of warming on Neptune, Jupiter and the Neptune moon Triton.[1] In fact, Jupiter presents a special case in study, relative to the Great Red Spot everyone is familiar with (which is about twice the size of Earth). As seen in the Astronomy Picture of the Day, May 23, 2008, In 2006, another red-coloured storm appeared, formed from several whitish, smaller storms. Now, there is a third red spot, as seen from Hubble telescope’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 pictures taken May 9 and 10, 2008, and this is drifting towards the Great Red Spot. Scientists think this outbreak of new red spots is probably related to – yes, Al, you are correct – climate change, as the planet is getting warmer near the equator. No word from Mr. Gore yet as to whether our SUVs will take out Uranus.
Dr. Richard Lindzen of MIT, professor of atmospheric science has stated “Al Gore is wrong. There is no consensus on global warming.” [2] and the frantic alarmism all over the media has, in Dr. Lindzen’s own words, “nothing to do with science.”[3] Meanwhile, Colorado State University meteorology professor emeritus William Gray says about global warming: “It’s a big scam,” [4] Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Inst. has threatened legal action against the IPCC to have his name removed from their global warming document , calling it a sham,[5] and Frederick Seitz Past President of the National Academy of Sciences is sponsoring a petition against the whole global warming façade at http://www.oism.org/pproject/ (over 19,000 scientist have signed this petition [6], as opposed to the 600 the U.N. could scrounge up, and some of these 600 have since reconsidered their past agreement). For a complete list of signees – which includes a simply staggering number of Ph.Ds, – see http://www.oism.org/pproject/., where they are arranged in alphabetical order. Meanwhile a similar petition at http://www.petitionproject – as of Aug., 2008 – had 31,072 scientist signatures, including 9,021 with Ph.Ds disagreeing with anthropogenic global
Some facts as you are shoveling your driveway buried in global warming:
- Kegwin, wrote in Science, 1996:274:1504-1508, the mean surface temp of the Sargasso Sea (which lies roughly between the West Indies and the Azores), which was obtained by readings of isotope ratios in marine organism remains in sediment, shows we are, today, below the three thousand year average, and far below the Medieval Climactic Optimum.
- William Feldman of the Los Alamos Nat’l Laboratory reported about Mars in Space.com (http://www.space.com/scienceas.....31208.html) “NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter has been surveying the planet for nearly a full Martian year now” and – referring to the warming data on Mars cited in this article – “One explanation could be that Mars is just coming out of an ice age.”
- Sallie Baliunas, chair of the Science Advisory Board at the George C. Marshall Institute, said, “Pluto, like Mars, is also undergoing warming.” Another recent report on Mars global warming was found in Reuters, http://today.reuters.com/news/.....ningdigest.
- If you ever visit Skaftafell Nat’l Park, Iceland, as I have, you will find the museum notes there are around 40 Viking era farm *currently* buried under the Vatnajokull glacier system (third largest in the world); i.e., it was warmer, as all scientists know, during the Medieval climactic optimum than it is today.
- In addition to Mars and Pluto, there is also evidence of warming on Neptune, Jupiter and the Neptune moon Triton.[1] In fact, Jupiter presents a special case in study, relative to the Great Red Spot everyone is familiar with (which is about twice the size of Earth). As seen in the Astronomy Picture of the Day, May 23, 2008, In 2006, another red-coloured storm appeared, formed from several whitish, smaller storms. Now, there is a third red spot, as seen from Hubble telescope’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 pictures taken May 9 and 10, 2008, and this is drifting towards the Great Red Spot. Scientists think this outbreak of new red spots is probably related to – yes, Al, you are correct – climate change, as the planet is getting warmer near the equator. No word from Mr. Gore yet as to whether our SUVs will take out Uranus.
Dr. Richard Lindzen of MIT, professor of atmospheric science has stated “Al Gore is wrong. There is no consensus on global warming.” [2] and the frantic alarmism all over the media has, in Dr. Lindzen’s own words, “nothing to do with science.”[3] Meanwhile, Colorado State University meteorology professor emeritus William Gray says about global warming: “It’s a big scam,” [4] Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Inst. has threatened legal action against the IPCC to have his name removed from their global warming document , calling it a sham,[5] and Frederick Seitz Past President of the National Academy of Sciences is sponsoring a petition against the whole global warming façade at http://www.oism.org/pproject/ (over 19,000 scientist have signed this petition [6], as opposed to the 600 the U.N. could scrounge up, and some of these 600 have since reconsidered their past agreement). For a complete list of signees – which includes a simply staggering number of Ph.Ds, – see http://www.oism.org/pproject/., where they are arranged in alphabetical order. Meanwhile a similar petition at http://www.petitionproject – as of Aug., 2008 – had 31,072 scientist signatures, including 9,021 with Ph.Ds disagreeing with anthropogenic global
Dear sir Could tell me if you be interested in a new invention
it save energy it for a electric car , it a generator to charge the battery
this generator have his own energy it not work with a battery
Thank you
Oilheads Unite !! Against the great monsterous environmentalists, out to destroy capitalism!!
Idiots, the lot of ya. All we green men are saying is that we need to hurry up and get installing a whole whack of renewable energy supply, but noooooooo, the oilheads won’t have it. “Stop that, stop it, stop doing that” is the only response we hear from the oilheads when we BEG them to get going on low emissions sources of energy.
Much CAN be done, but you are stopping it by keeping the focus solely on Trans-Canada’s Mackenzie Valley pipeline as the ONLY answer to future energy needs. GFY!!