Tell them, my song.

Elon Musk was interviewed by Tucker Carlson a few days ago, and here are my immediate thoughts on his statements about aliens and his thought that we need more children to uphold our civilization.

He’s only talking about Western civilization, of course — because India, China and the entire African continent certainly do not have the problem of shrinking populations.

My take on this is very simple: Resources are limited, so the solution to most of this planet’s problems would be to passively shrink the human population, not increase it. China has done it for decades (rather ruthlessly, but also brutally efficiently), it was the only way for China to defeat famine.

We need to face and accept the fact that our numbers are not sustainable. The one thing this planet does not need is more humans consuming and destroying it. You want a prosper future on this planet? Make sure that there are not more of us than this planet can feed and support.
Now as for his statements on aliens and that he has not seen any evidence for them, yet. I think this is also rather straight forward:

If a race had the technology to travel through space fast enough to reach distant places in their own lifetime, their technology and civilization would be so advanced that – at best – they would only be interested in us as research subjects to be studied, just as H.G. Wells has written in his novel The War Of The Worlds over a century ago: “No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”

If those aliens are out there and aware of us, we should be grateful that they do not behave as humans would: If it were the other way around, we would already have invaded their home world, taken their wealth and their resources and enslaved or possible destroyed them. Just what the technologically more powerful nations did when they set foot on North and South America and found humans there that could easily be conquered. Remember that the Spanish Conquestadores literally depicted the people of South America as animals, they even painted pictures of them in which the natives had tails, so the invaders could morally justify their horrible deeds in their home country. Do not believe for one second that we would act any differently if we found a world inhabited by an alien species that could not defend itself against our weapons.

We might know how to build rockets and nuclear weapons, but at our core we are still wild primitives. If we were as advanced as we love to tell ourselves, we would have long ago abolished nation states, would have formed an actual world government and live together in peace, we would willingly share our wealth and we would use all our scientific knowledge to make this world a better place for everybody – including all animal and plant life. But the facts are that we are still killing each other, we destroy everything that we touch on this planet and even in space and we are still waging a holocaust on all animal and plant life.

So be grateful if alien visitors of our solar system are more advanced than mankind and choose to either only study us from a distance or to ignore us completely.

I have given up on social media quite a while ago and deleted the accounts that I could delete, the rest I “retired” one way or the other. I never was active on Facebook, Twitter or any other big social network, so I’m mostly talking about some (mainstream) discussion forums; and by that I mean forums that are quite popular in Germany.

The reason is simple: People believe what they want to believe and objectively measurable and quantifiable facts have become completely irrelevant. People no longer want to discuss, they justs want to hate everything and everybody and the Internet has become the most toxic communication tool on our planet. It’s utterly useless to engage in a thread on the Internet.

Since the Ukraine war started, something else has become extremely obvious: Journalism, as it was meant to be, no longer exists. Journalism was designed to be the fourth force in a democracy that is supposed to keep the other three forces legislature, judiciary and executive in check. This is no longer the case, simply because journalism is don’t its job anymore: It’s become a propaganda tool that only publishes what is supposed to be the mainstream opinion.

Germany has always had a problem with that: In the 1980s, over 80% of the printed press were owned by one single person, Axel Springer. So it is easy to imagine that none of those publications would dare to print something that did not sit well with their owner. Already in the 1980s the reported news was very one-sided in Germany – and even back then it never really reflected what people were saying in conversations or “in the streets”. One could always feel that there was agenda, but back in those years we all just shrugged it off.

What has changed since the war in the Ukraine war is more alarming: We are openly and bluntly being lied to and opinions that do not agree with the governmental direction are being discredeted or “cancelled” as it is called these days. When you read news reports published in other countries – including the United States, Australia or even Great Britain – you read different news and facts and reports than those that are being published in Germany. You will also find some very different analytical reports from military officials than you will hear in Germany – especially when you listen to what certain active, still in duty Austrian and US-American Colonels and Generals have to say. When you compare all those sources, the war obviously is not going as it is being depicted by the German government or by the mainstream German press. The reason is obvious, of course: The facts do not fit in he official agenda and the official narrative, so the facts are either ignored or, well, faked. And that, in a functioning democracy with a functioning press, just should not happen.

But journalists have not been doing what their job is for a very long time. There are a few actual journalists left in our country, and one of them put it quite nicely: “When one party says the sun is shining and another says it is raining, then you do not just quote both of them. You look outside the window and check the weather yourself.” This, however, is not being done anymore. You only read phrases like “according to…” or “…as sources claimed…” and other similar expressions. The press, in general, is not fact-checking their own publications anymore – which would be their responsibility. By just printing what they are being told, they have become an instrument of political agendas and thus, propaganda and mass manipulation. And that is one of the greatest threats to democracy and freedom that we are currently facing.