They won’t be back

Stephen Hawking: Earth could be at risk of an invasion by aliens living in ‘massive ships’.

Daily Mail, UK

CPM’s new rectification document said that “alien values” are affecting leaders and cadres more than before.

Economic Times, India

Stephen Hawking is probably the brainiest guy on the planet, but is he right about aliens? His visions about aliens terrorising us puny earthlings from great big ships is obviously the result of seeing too many movies like Independence Day. The huge alien ships hovering over our cities must have been at the back of Hawking’s mind when he made that rash comment. Or possibly, he might be thinking of Mars Attacks.

But while I’m sure that Hawking knows far more about physics than I do, I’m not so sure about his grasp of the movies. In fact, I think his notion of how aliens are going to take us over is rather outdated, a bit like Newtonian mechanics in the age of string theory. Consider, for instance, how you would go about world domination if you were an alien. That’s not as difficult as it seems. The CPI(M)’s new rectification document clearly states that its leaders are being affected by “alien values”. Which means all you have to do is think like Prakash Karat and you have a pretty good grasp of how aliens will operate.

Does Karat go around the world in massive ships, threatening all and sundry? No way. He operates from the backroom, trying to spread his insidious ideas and get cosy with leaders of the big parties and using them. That’s the way the aliens will work. All they have to do is take over our minds and we’ll do their bidding. The process has been well-documented. Take, for instance, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where aliens replace people when they fall asleep. Or watch The Invasion, which shouldn’t be too difficult because it has Nicole Kidman in it — it’s all about an alien fungus taking over people when they fall asleep. What about Village of the Damned, where the kids are taken over? And if you are still not convinced, go take a look at The Thing, which proves that aliens can steal the identities of people they’ve killed. To cut a long story short, you don’t really need great big ships if you want to take over the world.

It’s not just the CPI(M) through which they’ve been trying to take us over. They were, for a time, able to snare far bigger fish than Karat. Take, for example, George W. Bush. Why on Betelgeuse do you think he talked so funnily? Or take a look at the Chinese leaders, with their careful, deadpan faces and their matching smiles. Reminds me of the scene in school in Body Snatchers where child actor Reilly Murphy’s crayon drawing is the only one that is not identical to all the other children’s.

Of course, it may so happen that aliens are not the ghouls we think they are, but cute guys like ET or Jar Jar Binks. But that’s unlikely, almost everybody takes a dim view of aliens, except perhaps the khap panchayats, who don’t mind marrying them because they have a different gotra. It’s far more likely the aliens have already come here, looked at our wars, our nuclear arsenals, our pollution, our economic crises, our reckless plunder of the world’s resources, our TV serials, Mayawati and scooted off pretty fast, realising that this planet is doomed anyway.

Manas Chakravarty is Consulting Editor, Mint The views expressed by the author are personal.