A Benign Invasion Response

Abstract

In response to Richard Momeyer’s fascinating and disturbing story, three thoughts. First, I couldn’t help but wonder, sadly, why human beings would need a “benign invasion” of more advanced aliens to get us to work together to address and reverse global climate change and to transform our global economy in the direction of greater cooperation and justice. Although the Centaurians do contribute some new technologies previously unavailable to humans, everything else that they contribute is available to us already: near-unanimous scientific agreement about the magnitude of the problems we face and near-unanimous scientific agreement on what we need to do to avert disaster. All we lack, as Al Gore points out in An Inconvenient Truth, is the political will to act. What is it about the spectacularly dramatic arrival of the Centaurians that allows the humans in Momeyer’s story to form that hitherto-lacking political will? Is it that the visibly superior intelligence of the Centaurians removes all possible doubt about the scientific facts, which would suggest that we refrain from acting now chiefly because of some lingering epistemological uncertainty? Or is that the sheer drama of their arrival serves as a sufficiently abrupt catalyst to awaken us out of our inertia? Second, the Centaurians’ proposal for how we can reciprocate their planet-saving assistance is of course shocking, and shocking in a way that illustrates the many problematic features of our current treatment of nonhuman animals. I would expect most readers to view the Centaurians’ proposal with moral horror. Yet consider all the ways in which it differs positively from our own current practices of meat-eating and animal experimentation: 1) The Centaurians ask our consent to agree to the practice; they do not simply impose it upon us. 2) The Centaurians propose the practice as a way for us to express gratitude for past benefits received. 3) The Centaurians propose to engage in the practice without subjecting their human food source to any physical or psychological pain. 4) The Centaurians are seeking to engage in the practice only because it is