COMMENTARY | Articles and reports concerning extraterrestrial intelligence are written and published all the time. Speculation as to what might occur if humanity were to one day encounter a sentient alien species is also a common theme. Some are based on hard science; some on purely imaginative suppositions and situations.
Like the report written by Penn State scholars Seth D. Baum, Jacob Haqq-Misra, and Shawn Domagal-Goldman , a few of those papers and reports are written by scientists. And at times, those papers cross into politically sensitive areas, like greenhouse gas emissions. And when they do, humans do not wait for aliens to attack humans.
In the paper "Would Contact With Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity? A Scenario Analysis," several first contact situations and their circumstances are posited and categorized as beneficial, neutral, or harmful to humanity. But it is in the harmful category wherein conservative writers have taken exception. In one particular scenario, the authors contend that humanity may be deemed a threat due to population expansion, which can be detected by the rise in greenhouse gas emissions.
Greenhouse gas emissions have become a hot-button topic among conservatives, especially those refusing to believe that global warming actually exists and, even if it might, the extent to which greenhouse gases contribute, especially man-made emissions, is considered to be questionable at best.
Current legislation regarding carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases, not to mention the Environmental Protection Agency's pro-global warming stance and the conservative movement to dismantle the government department, has become the target of considerable conservative ire, which labels controls and regulations based on global warming ideas as industry-crippling, cost ineffective, punitive and burdensome, and, by extension, detrimental to job growth (which can become a convincing argument in tough economic times). It is the opinion of many conservatives that man-made emissions are negligible and global warming is a liberal myth.
And a report that takes on scenarios of extraterrestrial invasions only lends itself to conservative derision of the greenhouse gas position -- even though the authors only use the example as a factor in how the alien species might detect humanity's existence.
The authors wrote: " A preemptive strike would be particularly likely in the early phases of our expansion because a civilization may become increasingly difficult to destroy as it continues to expand. Humanity may just now be entering the period in which its rapid civilizational expansion could be detected by an ETI because our expansion is changing the composition of Earth's atmosphere (e.g. via greenhouse gas emissions), which therefore changes the spectral signature of Earth. While it is difficult to estimate the likelihood of this scenario, it should at a minimum give us pause as we evaluate our expansive tendencies."
Conservative website Republican Redefined used the report to not only deride the global warming issue ("Al Gore's got to be loving this...") but to take a shot at NASA's wasteful spending (which, as it turns out was passed on information from the source article from The Guardian, which had initially erroneously reported that the paper was of NASA origin). The Drudge Report linked to the same article.
Fox News also falsely attributed the report as having originated with Penn State (which was factual; all three researchers were indeed from Penn State) and the NASA Planetary Division (one of the researchers is actually employed by NASA but maintained that the paper was not connected to NASA, which was corroborated by the space agency ).
The greenhouse gas factor is only an aside in one scenario of alien first contact in a 33-page report dealing in a variety of possible first contacts. Yet, it has been and will continue to be used as an example of the contended frivolousness of the global warming position and the science upon which it is based.
It is rather doubtful that the authors intended for their work to be dismissed over a few lines when they decided to analyze whether or not first contact with an intelligent extraterrestrial species would be harmful or beneficial. But the authors were dealing with a concept that aliens could conceivably -- in addition to being harmless or neutral with regard to humans -- be a hostile force against human expansion and survival in the universe. Perhaps they should have been looking closer to home.
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