As Allahpundit says, "It's come to this." I'm not sure what's worse, taxpayers funding a CDC warning and emergency preparedness plan for a zombie apocolyse, or this:
A team of American researchers have produced a range of scenarios in which aliens could attack the earth, and curiously, one revolves around climate change.
They speculate that extraterrestrial environmentalists could be so appalled by our planet-polluting ways that they view us as a threat to the intergalactic ecosystem and decide to destroy us.
The thought-provoking scenario is one of many envisaged in a joint study by Penn State and the NASA Planetary Science Division, entitled "Would Contact with Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity? A Scenario Analysis."
It divides projected close encounters into "neutral," those that cause mankind "unintentional harm" and, more worryingly, those in which aliens do us "intentional harm."
Extraterrestrial intelligence (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," it warns.
One such scenario is the stuff of many a Hollywood blockbuster, a "standard fight-to-win conflict: a war of the worlds." But another might resonate more with fans of Al Gore's documentary film "An Inconvenient truth."
It speculates that aliens, worried we might inflict the damage done to our own planet on others, might "seek to preemptively destroy our civilization in order to protect other civilizations from us."
Apparently, the study was conducted with a scientist affiliated with NASA, but is not sponsored or produced by NASA itself.
Happy Friday everyone.
