September 26, 2010

Mazlan Othman: United Nations ambassador to extraterrestrials

ADDENDUM: This story is bullshit. Dammit, I had I feeling....

Breaking news in the fast-paced world of exopolitics: The United Nations has appointed an obscure Malaysian astrophysicist, Mazlan Othman, to act as Earth's primary-point-of-contact for visiting extraterrestrials. Othman will head the UN's little-known Office for Outer Space Affairs (Unoosa).

The recent discovery of hundreds of planets around other stars has made the detection of alien life more likely than ever before; the UN feels that it must be ready to coordinate humanity’s response to any first contact. During a recent talk, Othman noted, "The continued search for extraterrestrial communication, by several entities, sustains the hope that some day humankind will receive signals from extraterrestrials. When we do, we should have in place a coordinated response that takes into account all the sensitivities related to the subject. The UN is a ready-made mechanism for such coordination."

Professor Richard Crowther, an expert in space law and governance at the UK Space Agency and who leads British delegations to the UN on such matters, noted that Othman is now the nearest thing we have to a 'take me to your leader' person.

In my opinion, the first order of business for Othman should be a screening of Mars Attacks to learn what not to do during first contact:




Source.

3 comments:

Hiro said...

This isn't a joke?
I mean, I'm all for it but what will he do during his downtime (I'll assume there'll be a lot of that)?

Also why now? Even 20 years ago if you had asked any scientist if there were lots and lots of planets in our galaxy I'm sure they'd say yes.

But hey, who am I to complain about Earth's first exoplanetary ambassador? The more SF things that happen within my lifetime the happier I'll be.

Unknown said...

They have commitees, subcommitees, programmes, centers, sessions, reports, events, conferences, etc., etc., bla, bla, bla. So Mazlan Othman has a lot to do, and we, the taxpayers all over the world, pay for it. Sorry, Hiro, does not sound like SF.

Jeff said...

Extraterrestials that contact us can not be below us in intelligence or they wouldn't know how to use radio. They are very likely to be millions or billions of years ahead of us technologically and far superior to us in intelligence. So we would be animals compaired to them.
If we appoint a human ambassador to aliens then maybe monkeys should appoint an ape ambassabor to our United Nations.
Both ambassadors are equally silly.