Pop Culture League Challenge:Aliens Among Us

  “If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans.”

     This is a topic that has always interested me. Mr Hawking is a brilliant man, and his quote has a lot of merit, but it's predicated on the assumption that the aliens think like we do. To think like us, they would have had to develop their intelligence overcoming similar challenges to what we faced, and to overcome them in similar ways, or so it seems to me. As an example, our system of Maths is Base 10, because we have ten fingers- How differently would a species think who had eight fingers?

     I have seen a lot of movies about aliens among us. From the guys just trying to get along in  M.I.B. to the horrible sadistic destroyers of Battleship, Independence Day and Mars Attacks, to the secret war of Alien shape-shifting robots among us of the Transformers series. and our imagination conceives of two main possibilities. Examples below.

     If the aliens are hostile, they will destroy us. 

• Independence Day
• Mars Attacks
• Pacific Rim
• Cowboys and Aliens
• Battleship
• Predator
• Super 8
• Signs

     If the aliens are peace loving, we will kill them or Abuse them in some way. 

• Starman
• E.T.
• Paul
• M.I.B.
• K-Pax
• Avatar

     Transformers fits both categories. So does the Jurassic park saga.

     Now here is where I depart...I live with an alien intelligence. He is my pet, or perhaps I am his pet. It all depends on whether you ask me, or ask Tango. Parrots as well as many other bird families, are at least as intelligent as a human child, have been taught the exchange of currency, have developed tool use, and can learn to understand and converse in some English. Parrots have been taught to count and identify shapes and colors. They have deep seated emotions, and empathy. They can understand human emotions well enough to manipulate us into adopting and keeping them.  And they do all that with teeny, tiny brains...

     Avian intelligence developed in a completely different way and in a different part of the brain than ours did. We say that they are about as smart as a human toddler, but we really can't measure them except in human terms, and with human tests. 

     If we have extra-terrestrial visitors, what's to say we would even comprehend their motivations, or even that we are the ones they came to see? They might be checking in with feathery friends who survived the cretaceous mass extinction, and who predate primate ascendancy

     So the aliens are among us. They are among us, and they have air support. Sleep with one eye open...

Others who Prepped for the invasion

• Green Plastic Squirt Gun Kept it sweet and to the point
• the Toy Box looked to the stars and found the Bundys
• Toy Break has pointed out earth's secret master, and will be disappearing soon. 
• GI Jigsaw knows the key to our survival is our action movies
• AEIOU and sometimes Why thinks our pop culture would assimilate the visitors
• Calvin's Canadian Cave of Cool  thinks(among other things) that we would show the aliens the Colonel's sevev herbs and spices
• Super Powered Fiction is fascinated by the aliens walking among us undetected