In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

This is a third in a series of posts on Fermi's Paradox, which started here . My thinking in recent years is driven by a remark from the then-vocation director of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, who posed this question to a discussion group of seminarians: If aliens arrive from outer space, should we offer them baptism? I don't think he had a single right or wrong answer in mind, but I find the overall direction of his thinking compelling. It's actually in full conformity with the views of pop cosmologist Carl Sagan, the author of the Voyager Disk illustrated above, as well as the late 20th century science fiction universe exemplified by the Star Trek-Star Wars franchises -- except that I think it subverts them via a reductio ad absurdum . Let's start with the assumption behind the Voyager Disk, which is clearly that it's intended to be found someday, even eons and light years distant, by an alien civilization that has the rational resources to decrypt it. I...