Alien Technology and Government Conspiracies

I read a conspiracy theory years ago that said the US government was slowly introducing advanced technology gleaned from alien spacecraft to get the world population accustomed to the idea of fantastic technology so we'd be more receptive to the fact that there are aliens among us.

They start with something simple, like television, and then move to big computers, but steadily make them smaller so we can all have them. Finally they get us wired into the Internet. They speed up the rate of change so we're used to the fact that things that we knew last week are laughable this Tuesday.

Any day now, Zarquon can show up on our screens and tell us about the mysteries of the galaxy.

With the rate of technological change the past couple decades, it's starting to seem a little more possible that we are, indeed, being primed for some kind of Matrix-like revelation. The world we know today, through entertainment and the Internet, is filled with ideas and questions that nobody ever asked or explored before (other than my geeky friends in high-school, that is).

And the rate we accept new developments is alarming, not just to paranoid schizophrenics. For example, in October of 2009, or just a little over a year ago, I wrote a blog about a guy questioning the value of putting GPS into a laptop (see 'GPS in a Laptop computer'). Today, with the iPad leading the way for a new generation of tablets, people ask, 'Why ISN'T there GPS in my mobile computing device?'

So, if we accept the premise that our technology advances are from aliens, and that the iPhone/iPad revolution has changed the way we think, then, obviously, Steve Jobs is an alien. But that's too obvious.

More intriguing to my amateur cultural anthropologist hobby is how incredibly malleable human beings are. We ratchet up the rate of change, and we complain that things haven't changed fast enough. And, I think, we're getting to that breaking point. There is a growing segment of the population that, while not overtly tech-hostile, is overtly anti-intellectual. They don't want to accept new ideas, and they don't trust the government to make decisions for them.

But, again, if the premise is right, then the Tea Partiers might actually be on the right track -- reject logical thought and technical progress and fight the aliens!

Now… how to convince them that Sarah Palin and Steve Jobs came in on the same saucer…