Excerpt:
The renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, dealing with the subject of possible extraterrestrial life, warns that contact with an alien civilization could spell disaster for the human race. "If aliens ever visit us," he said, "I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the American Indians." Pajamas Media editor Rick Moran concludes an article on this question with a misplaced aspiration: "we can only hope that any intelligent life that becomes aware of us will share at least some of the values and morals our species holds dear." Pace Moran, but I wonder about these "values and morals" in so intrinsically competitive and violent a species as ours and shudder to think that a highly evolved extraterrestrial race of beings may share them with us.
The situation of late, however, is somewhat different in the West, where a certain "transvaluation" has occurred. The "values and morals" increasingly prevalent among us are those of "moral equivalence," pacifism, diffidence, "compassion," self-abasement and pride masking as false humility. In the current context, such ostensible virtues turn out to be vices, which we would be foolish to expect a maniple of alien intruders to share with us. It would be more prudent to anticipate the opposite.