ET’s still home! Non-existent close encounters of the deadly dull kind
The most revealing moment in a long, dreary fantasy about life on other planets came when a scientist said: ‘I’d say there’s decades of work to be done.’
That sums up the whole extraterrestrial scam, the billions spent on telescopes in space and radio receiver dishes on mountaintops.
What the astrophysicists are really searching for is not some nonhuman civilisation on a distant planet, but a guarantee of lifelong funding for their labs.
The whole business, from the $10 billion (£8,700 million) James Webb space telescope built by Nasa and the european Space Agency, to elon Musk’s grandiose obsession with colonising Mars, is an insane waste of resources.
Scientists disguise this by pretending their research is glamorous and even dangerous. First Contact: An Alien Encounter (BBC2), a fictional documentary by writer and director Nic Stacey, imagined the consequences if we spotted an interstellar object zooming through our solar system.
Social media erupts in blind panic, rioters and looters take to the streets, the world’s supermarkets run out of toilet paper all over again and only the fearless datacrunching of the professional spacewatchers can save humanity from implosion.
If you were kept from viewing this
90minute film by more important commitments, such as an urgent need to comb the hamster or dust the lightbulbs, here’s a summary: the object turned out to be billionyearold debris from a dead planet.
The looters all calmed down and gathered in harmony to wave candles at the sky. everyone was very happy, especially the presenters in a Japanese TV studio who kept popping up to beam with joy about how wonderful science is.
The story, if you could call it that, was told with ‘dramatised scenes and repurposed archival footage’. This made it impossible to tell whether we were watching actors, news footage of other events, computergenerated video of stars, or real images from space.
To give credence to the idea that extraterrestrial intelligence is out there, various professors filled us in about all the times in the past that they thought they’d discovered aliens (but hadn’t).
These included an observatory in Ohio that detected the socalled ‘Wow Signal’ in 1979, a burst of noise that amounted to a deep space belch. And in the 1990s, telescopes identified the existence of other solar systems, dubbed ‘exoplanets’ — presumably because this makes them sound thrilling, like something out of a superhero movie.
That’s apt, since intergalactic science is like a superhero movie. It costs a ridiculous amount of money, it’s bonenumbingly boring and most of its fans are desperate to believe it’s real.
On the edge of the Pennines, builder Paul and wife Carol were shovelling their retirement savings into a project big enough to be seen across the galaxy, in Grand Designs (C4). ‘I feel I’m pouring money down a hole in the ground,’ fretted Paul, as his colossal, upsidedown house, with five bedrooms on the ground floor, failed to take shape.
Kevin McCloud first visited the site in 2015 and, when we saw it last, the project was not completed. This report, really an updated repeat, revealed that the house was now finished but at a cost of more than half a million — and a heart attack.
Paul is back to full health, working out in the indoor swimming pool. Perhaps out of tact, or because he’s not really interested in anything but the architecture, Kevin didn’t clear up the outstanding questions from 2015 . . . such as, did they ever manage to sell their old house?
And why did they need five huge bedrooms anyway?