Predator: Science Fiction or Likely Scenario?
Last night and this morning, I’ve had a hankering for some older science fiction movies, and decided that I wanted to watch Predator and Predator 2. I stuck the first one in, and after remembering that the new rising star in the Conspiracy Theory field, Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura was in it, I thought to myself that I might write an article about Jesse’s Conspiracy Theory series, that aired last season on TruTV. I began thinking up an outline for it, until something else struck me; I remembered reading an article by Micah A. Hanks over at the Gralien Report about a month ago, that left me thinking about our little slice of the galaxy and the role that we (humans) play in it. His article is about Cambridge University Professor Simon Conway Morris, and his assertion that alien life would likely be very similar to humans, psychologically speaking. Namely, greed and exploitation.
Naturally, what got me thinking about this was when the antagonist in the Predator movies, that frighteningly toothy hunter of an unnamed alien species, began picking apart Arnold Schwarzenegger’s team of commandos in a Central American jungle. If aliens would indeed be similar to humans, which group of humans would they most likely fit in best with? Watching this movie and the second one gave me pause, and I began to consider not the most popular ideas about alien interaction with Earth–such as abducting us for science experiments, taking resources from deep under our feet, or even living among us without us being wise to their shenanigans–but perhaps one that is not as widely known, except for those familiar with aspects of John Lear’s ‘Dark Side Hypothesis,’ that they are indeed here, but they’re instead using us for a whole different game.
The earth has about 57,506,055 square miles of land surface, which contains an estimated 6.7 billion people. I can’t even begin to comprehend these large numbers, so to put it in perspective for what I’m going to be talking about, as of January, 2008, there were some 96 million heads of cattle in the United States, of which 34.4 million were commercially slaughtered. We then produced 26.56 billion pounds of beef, and consumed 27.3 billion pounds (imports from Canada and South America taking up most of the excess). Simply put, we love to eat our livestock.
In our modern world, most of us don’t need to hunt anymore; We have more than 2 million farms in the United States, with almost three quarters containing cows numbering from single digits to the thousands. These farms are dedicated to feeding us, so that we don’t necessarily need to get our long guns (or bows) and go out in the woods to bag ourselves dinner. However, if you look at it from the standpoint of someone who wants to eat a specific kind of meat that isn’t raised on farms, the individual usually has to go out and get it themselves, or hire someone else to do it for them.
Humans, for the most part, are not raised on farms. We are a free range species in most of the world, and that requires a bit of work to get us on the dinner table. Is it entirely impossible that an alien race just sees Earth as one big hunting ground? Every year, large numbers of Americans and Europeans go on hunting expeditions in the jungles of Asia and the plains of Africa, seeking a variety of elusive prey. They will hunt, they will kill, and they will take a trophy; A head to mount on the wall, or maybe the fur to make a rug out of. This is more akin to what the Predator does in the movies, as he hunts the most dangerous game around: Humans.
So, perhaps we are an alien delicacy, or perhaps we are no more sophisticated or useful than the big game in Africa. It is a daunting thought, and one that I’m not thrilled to consider a possibility, but nonetheless. unlike some alien themed movies, it doesn’t seem very far beyond the realm of possibility, if we accept the idea that there is indeed alien life out there. Of course, all of this hinges on aliens existing, and having similar personality traits to the more hunting-minded people in our society. It could be that they do not exist, and it could also be that they do exist, and share personality traits with a… different group of people. For example, hippies. Take a roaming band of yesteryear’s flower children, stick them in a VW Bus, and send them from Washington D.C. to San Francisco, and there you have the same mindset of the traveling aliens.
Take me to your leader, dude.
