It is an understatement to think that humans could have behaved more intelligently over history on this tiny rock we call Earth, especially over the last century.
This thought occurred to me recently after visiting the Armenian quarter of the walled Old City of Jerusalem. Here, along with cultural treasures of ancient Judaism, followed by early Christianity and later by Islam, one finds ample historical evidence for atrocities.
Examples from the last century include the genocide of about a million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during the first World War, followed by the holocaust of six million Jews — the indigenous tribe of Jerusalem, by Germany during the second World War. The “Definitive Solution to the Armenian Question” resembled the “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem,” and concentration camps were used in both. Towards the end of his Obersalzberg Home Speech in the presence of Nazi commanders on the 22nd of August 1939, a week before the German invasion of Poland, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler said: “Our strength consists in our speed and in our brutality. Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter — with premeditation and a happy heart… Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
Each of the 117 billion people who cohabited Earth over the past few million years lived for less than ten billionths of cosmic history. Yet, many political leaders chose to look down and shorten the life of others rather than look up with awe at the cosmos and promote coexistence for as long as possible. This ‘Hitler’s choice’ is a sign of non-intelligence, a ‘Fail’ grade in our cosmic score card. To find extraterrestrial civilizations with a `Hitler-like’ mentality, we must train our telescopes to Search for Extraterrestrial Stupidity (SETS), rather than to Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).
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