February 22, 2007

Imponderables! Part 2

Due to popular demand, here's another one of my "Imponderables" from my upcoming book. This came to me as I was chatting with David Geffen at the recent Barack Obama fundraiser at the Beverly Hilton. He had a perplexed look on his face when I asked him if he had a napkin and a pen handy, but he soon understood after I explained to him that I needed to quickly jot my thoughts down before they vanished into the ether:

There's been a lot of talk of space aliens lately, but is calling them "aliens" really the right term? Sure, we don't know where they're coming from, and for all we know - or have been told - they could be from many solar systems, but shouldn't we call them something else? After all, to them they aren't "aliens". I don't know anything about them, but I do know that they don't refer to themselves as aliens. In fact, I'm sure they refer to themselves in the same way that we refer to ourselves: as people, or whatever they are. Since we have that in common, is there really that big of a difference between us and them after all? Shouldn't we instead think of them as part of "we"?

Posted by Ward to Ward Beecher at February 22, 2007 03:22 PM

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