The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Astropolitics: How Are the Aliens Getting Here? || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: September 5, 2023

All this talk of little green men has both disturbed and intrigued my inner nerd. While I don't know if aliens have actually visited us, talking about the possible tech being used is a fun little distraction for all of us.Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/astropolitics-how-are-the-aliens-getting-here

Everyone, Peter Zine here coming to you from the top of Silver Hales. I'm going to give you the quick run on the land before the wind gets too strong. You've got Silver Hills, Rich there, lost wilderness behind it. Hoosier Ridge, 10-mile range near Bricken Ridge, the mosquito range. Down here, we've got South Park, the old intercalatial. That is Fairplay. Best burritos in the state. I don't know why some ass hat works where he keeps trying to take it off the menu. And then the Southern Front Range,

which Southern Front Range really doesn't have all that many really tall points, except for this guy, which of course is the Mighty Pikes Peak. Okay, now, I'm going to move over here to a shelter so I can talk to you out of the wind about aliens. I have been a little disturbed by how many people have written in asking me for comment about all this new stuff that's going on with UFOs or, I guess the new acronym is UAPs. I'll tell you what I know, which is nothing.

I'll tell you what I think. I have no indication that there are aliens. I have no indication that they've been visiting us. I just know that people are talking about it. So let's talk about the technologies that would be involved in what that would mean in each scenario. How about that? That I can do. As we've seen in the world here, as transport technologies change, it evolves the way we interact, the way we move, the way we deal with one another,

what the economy and the political system looks like. So for example, when deep water navigation was developed by the Iberians in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries, they had the ability to reach out and interact with the rest of the world, and the rest of the world could not really return the favor. And so they were able to build these giant empires. And so if you had some kind of analog for that for space travel, in theory, we could be the ones who were visited as opposed to the ones who were doing the visiting. Now, science fiction is very, very rich with different kinds of technology.

that can be used to do different things. I'm just going to talk about three. It's not that these are the only threes. These are the three that I think is easy kind of wrapped your mind around. So let me do four. First, rings.

Basically, you put rings in space and you put a ship into the ring, and it gets shot to the next ring and the next one, the next one, next one, on and on. Basically think of it like an old style bank service tube, but you put ships in it.

The up and the downside of this, well, the upside is, I'm positive that we're not dealing with this if there's aliens visiting us now because you have to have rings that go to the next solar system. So you will need hundreds of them over light years, and we would see them coming. And if there was ever a problem, you could probably blow up the infrastructure. We're also very glad we don't have that here, because it's not like a road. It's like a single artery.

Everyone has to use it. And so whoever built it and controls it and operates it has an immense amount of political and economic power. It builds a very oligarchic system. We're glad we don't have that. A second one, the one that's probably most problematic would be hyperspace. The idea that you can put a device on any sort of vessel and it can just jump and pop out somewhere else and might have to do multiple jumps to get between star systems. This is what they use in Star Wars.

Now, you've all seen the Millennium Falcon in a hand solo, and if you haven't, I don't even know why I'm speaking to you right now. But his ship was kind of a piece of crap. Poorly maintained, but it had a good hyperdrive. And that was kind of the point. Anyone can have a hyperdrive. So Star Wars, the political system, flips back and forth between periods of centralization

where they try to control everything, and then it all spins apart because they can't because of the technology. Because anyone can, in their family space sedan, can go to a different star system. If this is what is visiting us, we're going to have some problems, because it's either going to be something like the empire

where it can be an invasion, they can bring literally millions, if not billions of troops, or it's going to be dozens of warlords and hundreds of carpetbaggers who can just get a small cargo ship and pop over here and exploit us. Now, I don't think that's what we're dealing with here because, well, it would be obvious. If it was the empire, it'd be a big-ass ship with a lot of troops and they're not going to be subtle. Even if it's a nice empire, they're not going to be subtle. And if it was tens of thousands of small traders,

there's no way they'd be operating in any sort of organized hierarchy. They'd just be coming and going and everyone would know, because they'd like sit down in Chicago Central Park every once in a while. So it's probably not that. The more realistic, just for the information that we're seeing right now, is warp, you know, the Star Trek approach, where it's not all that hard to have warp drive, but if you want one that's fast, it has to be on a pretty big ship, and that means government, and that means you can have a degree of hierarchical control over policy. And if you've got things zipping in and out that we can't really see, the idea that that would be stealth to some degree makes a lot of sense. So of those three technological, tautological pathways, I'd say warp is the one that we're dealing with right now if it is indeed happening. And that's probably the best, because it's kind of a middle grab between the, the chaos slash centralization of Star Wars,

and the ossification and oligarchic of the rings is like cowboy bebop. And if you know, if we're found by the Federation, that would be able to do. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this little diversion. I honestly have not seen any of the information that is circulating out there about whether or not anything is actually going on with UAPs. So take this for what it is and just a little bit of fun. All right, that's it. Bye.