Barack Obama.Photo: Ron Sachs-Pool/Getty
Asked how the existence of aliens would impact his politics, Obama said, rather simply: It would not.
“It wouldn’t change my politics at all. Because my entire politics is premised on the fact that we are these tiny organisms on this little speck floating in the middle of space,” Obama said onTuesday’s episode ofThe Ezra Klein Showpodcast.
“When we were going through tough political times and I’d try to cheer my staff up, I’d tell them a statistic that John Holdren, my science adviser, told me, which was that there are more stars in the known universe than there are grains of sand on the planet Earth,” he said.
Noting that the number had mixed reviews, Obama told Klein that his politics is founded on the knowledge that the differences between those living on Earth are “profound.”
“Well, sometimes it cheered them up; sometimes they’d just roll their eyes and say, ‘Oh, there he goes again,’ " Obama said. “But the point is, I guess, that my politics has always been premised on the notion that the differences we have on this planet are real. They’re profound. And they cause enormous tragedy as well as joy.”
He continued: “We’re just a bunch of humans with doubts and confusion. We do the best we can. And the best thing we can do is treat each other better because we’re all we’ve got. And so I would hope that the knowledge that there were aliens out there would solidify people’s sense that what we have in common is a little more important.”
Obama added that, were aliens to be proven real, he has no doubt that it would impact the political and social climate on Earth, saying “there would be immediate arguments about like, well, we need to spend a lot more money on weapons systems to defend ourselves. New religions would pop up. And who knows what kind of arguments we get into. We’re good at manufacturing arguments for each other.”
While Congress is expected to be briefed on that report, it’sunclear whether the information therein will become public, due to the amount of classified information on U.S. defense systems it will contain.
Now count the former president amongst the list of those curious about what that and other videos depict.
In a recent appearance onThe Late Late Show with James Corden, Obama joked that one of the first things he did upon taking office was ask about aliens.
“The truth is, that when I came into office, I asked, ‘Is there the lab somewhere where we’re keeping the alien specimens and spaceship?’ And they did a little bit of research, and the answer is no,” he said.
Though poking fun at his own curiosity, Obama acknowledged that clips of UFOs soaring through the sky are indeed real if inexplicable — for now.
“But what is true, and I’m actually being serious here, is there are, there’s footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are,” Obama said. “We can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern.”
source: people.com
