Ready for Mars attack?

                          

In 1938, mass panic and hysteria hit the United States when Orson Welles’ radio adaptation of H.G. Well’s 1897 novel War of the Worlds was mistaken to be an actual news report of Martians attacking New York City. Frantic calls flooded media and police offices from frazzled people frenetically asking what they should do if and when the green extraterrestrials from Mars came knocking down their doors or when flying saucers buzzed their homes.

Fast-forward to the present (past the first lunar landing by Apollo 11 in 1969 and the fly-by, photo-shoot mission last month to Pluto) and the Albert Einstein of our time, Stephen Hawking, has lent his name to a new search for life from outer space.  Hawking’s 10-year, $100-million search for intelligent extraterrestrial (ET) life would dwarf similar searches in the past like Project SETI or Project Blue Book.

Hawking’s effort would surely fan the flames of ancient astronaut theorists who believe that aliens put man on earth, and that aliens built the megalithic structures on earth like the giant Easter Island heads and the many pyramids on earth.

SETI or the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence used giant radio telescopes to scan the universe for radio waves that could have only been sent by intelligent creatures. Project Blue Book, on the other hand, is a study, or some say a cover-up, by the US government of UFO (unidentified flying object) sightings.

The biggest alleged cover-up, of course, as far as UFOlogists are concerned, is the claimed UFO crash in Roswell, New  Mexico and the alleged reverse-engineering of the US of the saucer, and its alleged autopsy of dead ETs. Seriously, the search for the extraterrestrial origin of life on earth does not involve nutcases or lunatics but well-known scientists who think that life propagated here when some asteroids containing simple cells crashed into Earth.

The problem with Hawking’s project and the similar SETI efforts in the past is that what happens when we find out that indeed there’s life outside of earth. Are we really ready for an “ET phone home” scenario or would there be a repeat of the Orson Welles fiasco but on a global scale and this time around for real, and not just radio drama. –End-

Image by: The Movie Mars Attack