The Time Machine and Fate of Humanity Thoughts on The Season Finale of Alien Encounters, (Season 3, Episode 6) The end of this season (probably the series finale, since humanity appeared on the verge of being destroyed) was probably the saddest ending of any television show, ever: just in the last minutes of life on Earth before catastrophe, we discover we had received an invitation to join a galaxy spanning civilization, but the US government destroyed it with a drone strike. Part of what makes me feel sad is that I think I might be to blame (watch it, and tell me what you think), because I told the producers (this part of the interview is in the show) that there isnt defense against everything when they asked about how to respond to various space catastrophes. They also took the title, The Time Machine, and the related use of Virtual Reality for planetary prediction - and escape - from my comments, which were also included in the episode. If they had asked me how to end it, I would have told them to have some humans have gotten away and set up colonies on Mars, Europa, and Triton, which could happen, particularly with half the people connected via a quantum cloud computing network that makes them supersmart, over the next twenty or more years. I hope all my friends will take the time to watch the series. AE3 gives viewers the reasons that going into space and backing up the biosphere are so important, as well as the civilization-changing potential of over 50 different technologies. How can such an amazing show have no marketing, even on social media? I think the show is good enough that it would change the world if enough people saw it, but the title is off-putting for many serious people (it shouldnt be) and the Science Channel and the producers have done virtually nothing to promote the show outside of TV interstitial commercials. They didnt even fix the misspellings in the Amazon Instant Video description (birds should actually be brids, for hybrids), which means not one person from Science Channel or the production company marketing staff (if they have any) even bothered to look at the reviews, much less encouraged people to write one. So perhaps 1/10th of 1% of the people who could and should have seen the show will end up seeing it. Why does this matter? Because Alien Encounters 3 isnt really about aliens. Its about existential threats, and the possibility we will be so aggressive in keeping the status quo that we will miss the opportunity to transform ourselves into the sort of social superorganism and unified entity that could simply swat away anything that could otherwise cause a billion+ casualty catastrophe. I think often of National Security Advisor Condelezza Rice, who completely missed 9/11, and didnt include Al Qaeda in her potential threat briefings. Thats forgivable. Whats no forgivable was her sworn testimony that, NO ONE could have imagined someone flying a plane into the World Trade Center. Whats unforgivable was that 1.5 million people in the US, and perhaps 5x that globally, had seen the pilot of The Lone Gunmen TV series, which had someone remotely controlling a 777 in order to fly it into the WTC. So there were millions of people who were sensitized to a potential problem than the National Security Advisor. I think its a vital responsibility of citizens to imagine potential threats and to think of whether and how to respond to them. AE3 is about the problem of old generals fighting the last war, not the next one, against the wrong enemy, and dooming humanity with their stupidity. AE3 shows scenarios that, while improbable, are all too plausible, yet one that, while I comfortable enough to talk about it at length (well, I gave about 16 hours of interviews to the producers for the series), I dont think enough people, or the right people, can imagine it and use the time we have to prepare and to do what needs to be done, not what people are trained to do.
Posted on: Thu, 03 Jul 2014 02:59:42 +0000
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