Scifi artist and novelist Jonathon Keats ’ new book , Virtual Words , is an facile exploration of wrangle and phrases that we ’re using to describe our future - skill world . In this excerption , he explains the word “ exopolitics . ”
At the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library , an archivist named Herb Pankratz specializes in queries about the thirty - 4th president ’s exopolitics . Pankratz assumed this responsibility because of his expertise in transportation . Since exopolitics involves diplomacy with visitors from other planets , his fellow worker take for him the ripe qualified individual on stave to field questions , of which there are many , since Ike is alleged to be the first president to have negotiated directly with aliens .
Neither Pankratz nor anyone else at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library is able to substantiate these historic events . They severalise researchers that the president ’s dare first meeting with extraterrestrials , on the eve of February 20 , 1954 , was in fact a dental fitting . They inform people that Eisenhower ’s emergency leaving from the Smoking Tree Ranch , where he was vacationing , was on story of a chipped porcelain cap on his upper proper incisor , give when he bite down on a crybaby bone , not a secret meeting at Edwards Air Force Base with aliens requesting that he end America ’s atomic weapons computer program so as to protect the space - time continuum . The archivist have no record of the words with which Ike rebuff his celestial guest without causing an intergalactic diplomatical rift , nor of the accord he allegedly reached with a different alien race later that class , allowing them to borrow cows and humans for purposes of aesculapian examen , provided that they return the specimens unhurt .
The lack of documentation has not been taken as deficiency of evidence by system such as the Exopolitics Institute . On the contrary the information spread has only further convinced them of a governmental cover - up , offer to the present solar day , a “ truth embargo ” take not only Secretary of State Hillary Clinton but also the United Nations .
As a conspiracy hypothesis exopolitics is barely worthy of a B movie . Even without ask how these extraterrestrial ambassadors have avoid public exposure for over half a one C , one might legitimately enquire why the human race ’s administration have so persistently cover them , and why existence of allegedly superior intelligence have proven so complacent . The most popular explanation for this “ cosmic Watergate ” is that the alien possess valuable technology , generally involving energy , which governments want to hoard for purpose of humankind mastery . If so , one might legitimately ask , more than fifty days after Ike chipped his tooth on a chicken pearl , what on the dot his successors are await for .
Yet exopolitics has expand as a nexus for conspiracy theories since the term was popularized in an tocopherol - book write by the “ space militant ” Alfred Webre in the year 2000 . The Exopolitics Institute , a “ 501(c)(3 ) non - profit educational organisation dedicated to consider the key actors , establishment and political unconscious process affiliate with extraterrestrial life sentence , ” publishes the online Exopolitics Journal , featuring article such as “ Deep Politics , End - Games and Agendas : How Exopolitics Can Offer Avenues to Resolve Population Reduction and Other Eco - Conundrums . ” The Exopolitics Institute also provide education for would - be exopoliticians . For $ 1,200 tuition one can discover “ the conceptual acquisition and diplomatic education ” needed to practice “ citizen diplomacy in extraterrestrial affairs , ” realize a Galactic Diplomacy Certificate . A few material politician , such as former Canadian defense force minister Paul Hellyer , have even been enlisted to contribute credibility to exopolitical conventionalism , get the attention of mainstream periodicals , include the Washington Post . But the best explanation for the perseverance of exopolitics may be the name itself .
The term exopolitics , an extension of geopolitics , is built on the same lingual pattern as exoplanet and exobiology . Even casual readers of skill will be familiar with the former since planets orbiting remote stars have been detected by space telescope , making newspaper headline tidings . Some of these exoplanets are bumpy like Earth , giving impulse to exobiology , the study of nonterrestrial life or , more incisively , what forms such life might hypothetically take . At least superficially , particularly in our search railway locomotive culture , exopolitics looks like just another of these exotic expanse of enquiry . For representative , Yahoo ! Search Assist suggests exopolitics just a few items below exoplanets when one enters their shared initial letters .
Of naturally no scientist will be convinced by the lingual camouflage , and most layman will also be skeptical after abbreviated perusal of the supposed the true trade stoppage on diplomatic relations with aliens . The bother for skill is that the association also run in the other instruction : just as the perfectly plausible idea that there might be life sentence elsewhere in the universe has been made ridiculous by the democratic paradigm of niggling gullible men , exopolitics makes exobiology seem precariously fringy .
In fact exobiology is about as fringy ( or alien ) as a dental appointment . Much of it imply the examination of extremophile bacteria see in place such as the Arctic and Death Valley or in nuclear permissive waste wasteyard in gild to map out out the full gamut of life on Earth and the environment that can sustain it . Such entropy may serve to narrow down where we might productively look for extraterrestrial life history , and evenly important , how we might detect it with a space investigation or inside a meteorite .
However , there is another side to exobiology , more philosophic . Recognizing extraterrestrial microbe may reckon on a full notion of life than comes naturally to us , even as we extend our realm of written report to the utmost stretch of Earth . Independently evolved , extraterrestrial life-time might not be ground on DNA or amino group acids or even carbon . Embedded in routine diagnostics for testing Martian rock’n’roll is a profound question : What is life-time ?
For all its fringiness exopolitics is every bit , likewise provocative . We do n’t know whether there are level-headed beings elsewhere or whether we ’ll ever communicate with them , let alone need to launch intergalactic diplomatical ties . But simply to wonder - without the conspiracy possibility - what kinship we might have with independently develop minds is a basis for asking a question as unsounded as the foundational interrogative of space biology : What is mankind ?
you’re able to get your written matter of Virtual Words viaOxford University Pressor the bookstore of your choice .
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