NPR poses the question: Why are we so bad at dealing with space aliens?

Reading the daily NPR news articles online when I came upon probably the most important piece of advice I think humanity has ever been given.  And I was gracious enough to share with you all because let's face it: I'm just that kind of person. Following the movie release of  District 9, I think they just felt inspired to release this for all of us to benefit from.  Because let's be honest with each other here, friends, we are never too prepared for alien invasions or attacks.

So here for you is NPR's "5 ways Movie Governments could respond more effectively to alien invasions" :



1. Do not try to evict giant spidery creatures that can fly and/or eat you. In the trailer above, the bureaucrat who's serving the "eviction notice" comes up to the armpit of the "tenant," and the "tenant" appears to be a lizard with a metal exoskeleton, or thereabouts. If you have convinced a bunch of super-powerful lizard-people who can leap from one building to another to live peacefully in what certainly looks to be the poor part of town, leave them alone.

2. Don't be unduly nasty, even to the ones that look like wingless, hairless, giant-eyed penguins with loaves of bread for heads. You know the one I mean. I mean this one.



The thing is, if you see one, he probably has a mom and a dad, and maybe some brothers and sisters, and quite possibly a large social network of sympathizers who will eventually come looking for him. So maybe don't go at him with the spacesuits and the probes and all that, because even a potato-headed friendly alien might have powerful friends. Be polite.

3. Make sure you employ enough nerds. Sure, fighter pilots are great. Can't have enough fighter pilots when invaders from the Pluto are trying to melt the Statue Of Liberty. But as we learned in Independence Day, it's really not about that. It's about nerds, like the one Jeff Goldblum played. A guy with missiles is just a guy with missiles, but a guy with missiles and a computer virus? That is the guy who will be successful. Hey, is there already a "come work for the government repelling aliens" booth at Comic-Con? There should be.

4. Be open to new public-policy ideas, like swimming pools full of lifeforce. There are no easy solutions when it comes to health care, unless you're talking about the movie Cocoon, where it turned out that a dip in the magic swimming pool could make people young again. Granted, implementing this plan on a large scale would require locating the lost city of Atlantis, but given what they're doing with GPS these days, it seems like a goal that's well within reach.

5. Ensure access to free credit reports for consumers, in the event they are replaced by aliens with exact replicas of themselves grown in pods, who might then go out and apply for credit cards. We all know identity theft is a problem. And we know that, in Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, the people whose bodies were snatched didn't have too much to worry about after they were replaced with pod people, because it was pretty much over for them anyway.

But the implications of pod-person technology go far beyond being killed and/or devoured by your replacement. What if you were left alive? This would ruin your credit. Who's going to pay for all the coffee mugs your pod person bought at Spencer Gifts? You are, that's who.

so my question for you fellow geeks is this:  what piece of advice would you offer the movie governments (or even our government) in order to prevent such catastrophic events from happening?

Lola

source: NPR