Oh, thank goodness. I was afraid I'd have to deal with them myself, and I'm not quite sure they'd listen to a "Get off my lawn!" command:
THE United Nations was set today to appoint an obscure Malaysian astrophysicist to act as Earth?s first contact for any aliens that may come visiting.
Mazlan Othman, the head of the UN's little-known Office for Outer Space Affairs (Unoosa), is to describe her potential new role next week at a scientific conference at the Royal Society's Kavli conference centre in Buckinghamshire.
She is scheduled to tell delegates that the recent discovery of hundreds of planets around other stars has made the detection of extraterrestrial life more likely than ever before - and that means the UN must be ready to coordinate humanity's response to any “first contact."
Having taken my first-contact wisdom from "The Day the Earth Stood Still" -- the brilliant original, not the execrable remake -- I doubt that a race capable of making it the vast distances from its home world would tolerate being greeted by the representative of a body of tinpot dictators, but, hey, that's just me. Given how little the UN tries to disguise its enthusiasm for One World Government, I can't wait to hear it plans for interplanetary redistribution of wealth. Certainly there will be a Federation People's Republic of Planets, with Uganda and North Korea in charge of Starfleet Academy.
