If we humans don’t stop spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, little “green” men from outer space might kill us.
Or eat us.
To save the planet.
So say three scientists from NASA and Pennsylvania State University according to a Guardian article posted on the Drudge Report Thursday. (James M. Taylor takes on this story over at the Heartlander.)
If there is extraterrestrial intelligence out there and if they (it?) make contact with humans, the scientists wrote in a recent paper, they (it?) might be “green.” Not in color, but in environmental “concern.”
The scientists are Shawn D. Domagal-Goldman of the NASA Planetary Science Division, Seth D. Baum of Penn State’s Geography Department, and Jacob D. Haqq-Misra of Penn State’s Meteorology Department. Michael Mann, creator of the infamous and now discredited “hockey stick” graph purporting to establish global warming, is also a professor at Penn State.
These “green” aliens “might object to the environmental damage humans have caused on Earth and wipe us out to save the planet,” as the Guardian’s science writer described part of the paper entitled “Would Contact with Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity? A Scenario Analysis.” Baum et al. write:
These scenarios give us reason to limit our growth and reduce our impact on global ecosystems. It would be particularly important for us to limit our emissions of greenhouse gases, since atmospheric composition can be observed from other planets.
ETI could attack and kill us, enslave us, or potentially even eat us. ETI could attack us out of selfishness or out of a more altruistic desire to protect the galaxy from us. We might be a threat to the galaxy just as we are a threat to our home planet.
Just when you thought Al Gore was the only alarmist having an anti-global warming meltdown.
UPDATE:
Celebrated NY Times columnist Paul Krugman said this — no kidding!!!
“If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. And then if we discovered, oops, we made a mistake, there aren’t any aliens, we’d be better … No, there was a ‘Twilight Zone’ episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time, we don’t need it, we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.”
