No, this isn’t about The X-Files (though I’m eager to see the new episodes, now that you mention it!), but rather the recent reveal that the U.S. Government spent some $22 Million (let’s face it, chump change) to investigate UFOs and other unexplained phenomena.

Which led me to this intriguing article by Jacob Brogan and found on Slate.com…

We Shouldn’t Be Looking For Aliens.  We Should Be Hiding From Them

To be clear, the article does not address anything new and startling regarding arguments among scientists and others about whether we should be trying to find other alien life or not.

Indeed, while one could adopt an optimistic Star Trek-like philosophy regarding alien cultures and the need to find and interact with them, there is a certain dark reality concerning what has happened in Earth’s past when cultures have found themselves.

Within the above linked article is this quote by Chinese science fiction writer Liu Cixin:

No civilization should ever announce its presence to the cosmos, [Liu] says. Any other civilization that learns of its existence will perceive it as a threat to expand—as all civilizations do, eliminating their competitors until they encounter one with superior technology and are themselves eliminated. This grim cosmic outlook is called “dark-forest theory,” because it conceives of every civilization in the universe as a hunter hiding in a moonless woodland, listening for the first rustlings of a rival.

I must admit, while I’d like to think that finding and interacting with other alien cultures sounds incredibly intriguing, there is a part of me -a sizable part, truth be told- that worries about exactly what Liu Cixin states.

As I noted before, when the European explorers met the native Americans in both North and South America, the results were not good, to say the least, for the Native Americans, be they Aztec or American Indians.

What’s to say that meeting up with an alien race capable of bridging the enormous gap between the stars (something we obviously haven’t come close to be able to do), won’t arrive to our planet and look at us much like those European explorers did to the natives way back when?

In which case, we could rapidly be toast.