Tag Archives: Royal Society

Great Graphic for $5,000 Forum

January 24, 2011 admin

In case you thought about hopping over to Saudi Arabia for the 5th Global Competitiveness Forum that I wrote about in the next to last post, it costs $5,000 to attend!!!!

Look at this wonderful graphic that has been created for the panel Contact: Learning from Outer Space,

Crop Circles, World Press

Coming Out of the Fringes

January 23, 2011 admin 2 Comments

Here’s another sign of our times regarding the other intelligence coming out of science fiction and being declared a reality. Following up on my recent post about England’s Royal Society, we have another “straight” group of prominent world figures taking up the issue:

World business leaders to discuss UFOs & extraterrestrial life

A leading business forum discussing global competitiveness will in its annual conference host a panel discussing UFOs and extraterrestrial life. The Global Competitiveness Forum is hosted by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and discusses business trends and insights essential for future business investment and competitiveness. The panel is titled: “Contact: Learning from Outer Space”, and features famed astrophysicist Dr Michio Kaku and a leading Islamic scholar, together with prominent UFO experts Stanton Friedman and Nick Pope. The Global Competitiveness Forum is poised to introduce, perhaps for the first time, many world business leaders to key issues concerning UFOs and extraterrestrial life, and how these impact on economic competitiveness.The Global Competitiveness Forum (GCF) is hosted by the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority and will be hosted in the capital Riyadh from January 22-25, 2011. The GCF website says:

The Global Competitiveness Forum (GCF), the only event of its kind, is an annual meeting of global business leaders, international political leaders, and selected intellectuals and journalists brought together to create a dialogue with respect to the positive impact organizational and national competitiveness can have on local, regional and global economic and social development. It was founded in 2006 by the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority (SAGIA), and is held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia under the patronage of HM King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques.

The description for the GFC panel:

Psychological and socio-cultural assumptions and preconceptions constrain us to a large extent, and shape our views of the universe so that we are inclined to find what we are looking for, and fail to see what we are not. Using knowledge gained from research in the fields of Ufology and the search for extraterrestrial life, what might we possibly learn about hindrances to innovation in other areas of inquiry?
Read on: http://news.exopoliticsinstitute.org/index.php/archives/850

Crop Circles, World Press

Scientists take ETs seriously – and the media skews their proceedings

January 14, 2011 admin 7 Comments

More and more things in the media have to do with contact with other intelligences. If you’ve seen my movie and you track my posts you’ve been exposed to a lot of it. What is going on? As I ask in my film, “Are we being prepared for contact?”

The latest has to do with the prestigious Royal Society, in England, “a Fellowship of the world’s most eminent scientists that is the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence.”

This is from The Guardian, a mainstream British paper:

Earth must prepare for close encounter with aliens, say scientists

UN should co-ordinate plans for dealing with extraterrestrials – and we can’t guarantee that aliens will be friendly

Evolution on alien worlds is likely to be Darwinian, which may mean extraterrestrials share our tendencies for violence and exploitation. Photograph: Rex

Here’s how the newspaper article starts:

World governments should prepare a co-ordinated action plan in case Earth is contacted by aliens, according to scientists.

They argue that a branch of the UN must be given responsibility for “supra-Earth affairs” and formulate a plan for how to deal with extraterrestrials, should they appear.

The comments are part of an extraterrestrial-themed edition of The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society published today. In it, scientists examine all aspects of the search for extraterrestrial life, from astronomy and biology to the political and religious fallout that would result from alien contact.

This publication is a fascinating compendium of serious papers that were presented at a meeting of the Royal Society in October entitled, “Towards a scientific and societal agenda on extra-terrestrial life.” Here are a few titles:

That they held this meeting is mind-blowing. But also of interest is how the newspaper handled it. You’ve seen the headline about aliens possibly not being friendly. That was the subject of only one of the 17 papers presented at the meeting. The newspaper piece used 4 of its 12 paragraphs to deal with that one: Predicting what extra-terrestrials will be like: and preparing for the worst.

This skew picks up on a thread running through the amped up stream of ET buzzing which most notably includes the scare put out by Stephen Hawking.

From “Don’t talk to aliens, warns Stephen Hawking”:

…a few life forms could be intelligent and pose a threat. Hawking believes that contact with such a species could be devastating for humanity.

He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.”

He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky”. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.

With us knowing nada about “them,” there was lots of flap over Hawking pulling that opinion out of thin air and arbitrarily putting the world on a fear setting. Then again, this is the stuff that appeals to the news media, and thus his opinions got widespread coverage. So, as my colleagues in matters extraterrestrial say, the fact that Hawking was dealing with the possibility of ET life was a step forward — like Signs, the movie, pointing to scary aliens as the source of crop circles, where a lot more people found out from that movie about the very existence of the circles and it also was good in that they weren’t attributing them to hoaxers. Two steps forward, one step back.