Recently, the space race seems to have picked up once again. This time it’s America planning to visit Mars, China planning to start sending rich tourists into orbit, and Japan planning to build a space station on the moon. All this renewed excitement for space exploration leads me to question whether we are truly ready to make contact.

We all have these pretty ideas in our minds of alien life: Yoda, E.T., the funny little guys from Men In Black, and various other Hollywood examples of how great it’s going to be when we find new species to learn from and explore the galaxy with. Then there’s also the possibility of finding a hostile species that will try to kill all life on Earth in order to take advantage of our natural resources…although after the Bush administration is done, there won’t be any resources left, so I suppose an alien invasion is something we might not need to worry about anymore.

But I have a whole new theory of space and making contact. All the movies, comic books, and other science fiction sources have always painted this idea of us making contact with an “advanced” alien species. Whether they are friendly or hostile, they always have superior technology and brilliant minds. When did it come to be written in stone that alien life must be advanced? What if one day we make contact, but the aliens we find are no more advanced than the common Earth cow or chicken? What if we find an alien species intellectually akin to a raccoon or fox, but that with a much more beautiful fur coat? Or perhaps we’ll find a planet with endless seas, filled with mercury-free fish that have ten times more meat on them. What will happen then?

Here on Earth, the life of an animal is worth no more than its price tag, if that. The life on our planet (that isn’t human) is nothing more than food, clothing, and entertainment. Lunch meat, fur coats, leather couches, and those hand dusters you find at CVS that were made from the feathers of some once-exotic tropical bird. Animals robbed of their wool, wild tigers trained to jump through hoops, whales kept jailed in aquariums so we can pay money to watch them jump…Dolphins- quite possibly the most advanced beings on Earth after humans –are taught to do silly tricks, or tricked to hunt for mines by our navy while we invade defenseless nations out of greed.

Is this widespread disrespect for life a characteristic of a species that is ready to make contact? Will we use a double standard and treat alien life with respect while we continue to slaughter, abuse, and exploit the innocent life here on Earth?

How long would it be before the corporations got involved? How long before we’d see advertising campaigns for coats made from “imported alien fur”? How about new Nike sneakers, now made with alien skin- guaranteed to last twice as long? Maybe we’ll find a new breed of chicken with four times as much meat, and we’ll open a KFC in space. Will they become “gourmet alien meat” extra value meals? Or perhaps we’ll find some cute new little alien to domesticate, breed, and sell to pet stores so our kids can have exciting Christmas presents to play with. Then, in February, when the kids get bored, we can put them into shelters and let them die with the other human pets that didn’t hold our interest.

Think of all the ways we’ll be able to make a profit! I can’t wait until I start seeing Starbucks, GE, and Nike slogans on the side of the space shuttle. Maybe instead of the old fashioned “the eagle has landed,” we’ll hear “Walmart shuttle 6 has landed at the Kraft spaceport.”

I know this is all funny to most people, and the odds of us even making contact are too small to even be concerned with, but this is what will happen if the current human views of life do not change. Maybe the Pope will say that God has given us these aliens so that we can eat while we explore space. Wouldn’t that be a first- you sure never hear the mainstream churches complain about the millions of innocent beings that are slaughtered each day so that we can grow fat and die of heart disease.

Sure, I’m probably just one of those communist, anti-american, left wing, wacko “terrorists” that Fox News warned you about because I value life over profit…but I don’t think we are even close to being ready for contact with alien life, advanced or not.

But then again, maybe it’s our karma to make contact with an advanced species. Maybe they’ll import us back to their home, and jail us in a circus while we are forced to do tricks. Maybe they’ll lock us up in a cold cage in the basement of some laboratory, where we can spend our nights starving, cold, and alone, just waiting for our turn to be experimented on, and then left to die on a blood-stained floor.

But it would have to be a truly ignorant species to do things like that, right? What kind of “advanced species” could possibly commit such horrible actions against us? Such cruelty and lack of respect for life.

That’s right- it would have to be a truly ignorant species…a species just like us.