Date: Thu, 10 May 2007 11:59:16 -0400
From: "Mike B." <omni at omniphile.com>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Homeland Security
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>
At 5/9/2007 11:33 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
>It's good that *somebody* is thinking about it:
>
><http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Planetary-Defense-Extra-Terrestrial-Invasion/dp/1581124473/ref=sr_1_1/103-7012553-1875823?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1177664178&sr=8-1>
>
>Whatever we're doing, it must be working ....
Yeah...I just wonder how they employ the first rule: know thy enemy.
I doubt that anything that could get here would attack us in any way
we are expecting...assuming they'd want to attack us at all. They
might well not notice us, or want to leave us alone to develop or
exterminate ourselves (they might well, given physics, have a *lot*
of patience), or they might just wipe is out very casually using
techniques we won't understand, or that we would...such as dropping
large rocks on us. I suspect that "warfare" is an unlikely part of
the proceedings.
Just for amusement, I wrote this while working at Goddard many years ago:
ARE SPACE ALIENS RESPONSIBLE FOR NASA PROBLEMS?
Back in the sixties it seemed that NASA could do no wrong. Of all the
many organizations that make up our government only NASA seemed able to
consistently meet deadlines, stay near budget, and accomplish enormous
tasks with insufficient funds, time and personnel. In just ten short
years NASA went from a standing start to a man on the moon. In only a
few more it had an orbiting space station, a joint mission with a Soviet
spacecraft, and a grand tour of the planets with landings on Mars. Since
then we have had enormous cost overruns on the shuttle, heat-resistant
tiles that refuse to stay were they are put (at enormous expense),
mis-firing boosters, and the Challenger disaster. What has changed?
It may just be a coincidence, but at nearly the same time that NASA
efficiency took a nosedive the number of "UFO" sightings was hitting an
all-time high. There were more sightings of UFOs in the first few years
of the seventies than ever before, or since. Could it be that these two
phenomena are connected?
Just think, for a moment, what you would do if you were a highly
civilized, technologically advanced race, capable of interstellar
travel, and you noticed that some brash upstart of a species was about
to leave its home planet and burst into space for the first time. A
species which had not yet reached a level of maturity which would allow
it to live peacefully with others (or even itself), but was clever
enough to have invented numerous methods of mass destruction and was
busily going about using them to destroy its own home. I know that if I
were that advanced race I would want nothing more than to put an
immediate stop to it!
The problem would be how to go about it. For a civilized race of
advanced beings just nuking us back to the stone age would not be a
tasteful alternative. Showing up in ten-mile-long spaceships and saying,
"THOU SHALT NOT!!", would not be much better. It would either make us
feel inferior and retard our development, or angry and make us try
harder to get into space in spite of the order. What to do?
It is obvious that a more subtle approach would be needed. How about
landing some agents, have them blend into the population, get jobs in
NASA, and sabotage the space program from the inside? It wouldn't take
much, nothing so crude as explosives or loose bolts. Just institute
enough bureaucracy to slow things down; promote the idea that politics
has a place in a technical organization to create an environment where
bad decisions can proliferate. That ought to do it! When it starts
taking four months to purchase a blackboard eraser, and over a year to
buy a computer system, and everything has to be signed by thirty people
before it can be processed you can forget innovation! When projects are
started, or canceled, or reassigned "for political reasons" you can be
sure to have enough disasters to halt all progress. If you are really
lucky the "politics" will percolate all the way through the organization
and everyone will be convinced that it is normal to have a good idea go
to waste for "political reasons" (meaning that someone "higher up" would
be embarrassed if it were implemented).
If you could manage to get something like this going your problems would
be solved. You could stop worrying about that race of noisy upstarts
bothering your nice quiet galaxy for a long time. You would have solved
your problem, not fired a shot, and helped to employ thousands of
paper-shuffling bureaucrats. Not a bad solution, huh? I wonder if this
is what happened to NASA? All those UFO sightings COULD have just been a
coincidence, but then again...
-- MIke B.
--
"Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must be
first overcome."
-- Dr. Samuel Johnson