Last time around, we considered NASA’s recent attempts to build outer space communications systems, and the strange belief of contemporary Left-leaning scientists and academics affiliated with astronomical organisations like SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) that any aliens we did manage one day to contact would inevitably talk in a language every bit as impeccably woke as they themselves do.
A classic illustration of such delusion came in the newly ideologically-captured journal Scientific American in 2022. Under the headline ‘Cultural Bias Distorts the Search for Alien Life’ appeared an interview with Rebecca Charbonneau, a young SETI-linked cultural historian whose paper ‘Imaginative Cosmos: The Impact of Colonial Heritage in Radio Astronomy and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence’ had brought her to the attention of the editors.
According to Charbonneau, within sci-fi shows like Star Trek, space being “the final frontier” demonstrated how space exploration itself was filled with innate colonialist assumptions, with “first contact with aliens [acting] as a stand-in for [Western] first contact with Indigenous peoples”.
Weren’t these ideas just fictional literary metaphors upon behalf of the scriptwriters, though? No, because according to the doctrine of Critical Theory that contemporary young pseuds like Rebecca all slavishly subscribe to, words create reality: “Words and socially constructed things are real because we are a verbal, social species. Things that are socially created still have a real-world impact; they’re not imaginary.”
Two particularly damaging social constructs are the words “intelligence” and “civilisation”, these being mere fictional Western concepts which were “tightly bound with the histories of racism, genocide and colonialism”. When Westerners made contact with metaphorically ‘alien’ beings like Australian Aborigines in the past, they just enslaved or wiped them out, Charbonneau argued. “Intelligence”, she warned, is “certainly a dangerous word”, hence her principled complete lack of any such quality herself.
Hellbound and Down 