I read with interest an article in which Stephen Hawking expressed concern that any visit from an Alien race may not have peaceful intentions, likening any visitation with the impact that humans have inflicted on each other when colonizing other countries.
Though I hate to disagree, I feel that he may be incorrect in his assumption that any alien race would want to conquer the planet, they may want to ‘show us the way’, which to us, the comparatively primitive race may feel a lot like the North American Indians felt when we educated them regarding Christianity.
However I hope that any advanced race has already gone through a logical next step in terms of evolution and would be a lot more understanding of us than we were when we forced our religion and our culture onto what we considered the ‘savages’.
The logical step that I am talking about is not physical, but mental.
If we are to reach for the stars, as the alien race that Hawking is considering, then we, humanity, needs to work together.
The current ‘mess’ that we are in proves that we are not very good at that. The rich are rich and the poor, well, the poor do not matter.
If we are going to reach for the stars, or just really get much further along as a society, then we need to work as a single population towards those common goals.
This means that we need to look beyond political and religious divisions and do the ‘right thing’, rather than the thing that inconvenience us personally the least.
The state that I live in is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, during the housing boom and the associated spending frenzy the state committed to improving roads, building new buildings and vast amounts of pet projects. This spending is mostly spent now and the state is in a huge budget crisis.
The solution to the crisis is simple, we, as a state, need to balance the expenditure with the income available, plus we need to ensure that we have adequate reserves.
This is incredibly obvious.
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