A front row seat for the Fermi paradox!

Well, 'tis the season. Yes, First Contact Day is again upon us and, as always, I am going to pretend that you don't know what I'm talking about, but I mean, you know. We both know you know. You big nerd.

"You have no idea where I'm from or if my people regard physical contact
as a taboo or an unforgivable insult. For all you know, I could have space plague,
or be radioactive, and you just stick out you hand and say put'er there? Really?"

-The first alien off the ship

"Yeah, we're from planet Vulcan.
You probably haven't heard of it."

-Some Vulcan Hipster

Anyway, as of today we are just forty one years away from the human race's first encounter with beings from another planet as predicted by the documentary Star Trek: First Contact. Four decades from now a Vulcan survey ship will detect James Cromwell's warp drive and land in Bozeman, Montana. Why Bozeman? Who can say? Maybe Vulcans are hipsters. Maybe they just love reclaimed barn wood. It doesn't matter. The point is we are--alarmingly--on something of a trajectory towards the post-apocalyptic nightmare as depicted in the film. 

Of course they also predicted the Eugenics Wars
of the 90's and instead we got The Spice Girls and 
ten seasons of Friends, so it could have been worse.

Star Trek's fictional future history as depicted in the film presupposes that the twenty-first century is something of a shit show culminating in a Third World War. Which, for a TV show that's supposed to be about a bright shining utopia probably seems like something of a bummer. And it is, but the idea is that we have to go through some seriously rough times before achieving a better future. This general goat rodeo of a century is also an in-universe explanation as to why the aliens haven't bothered with our backwater planet before.

"Yeah, but curbing emissions would have been like
really hard, and what about the shareholders?"

-Some now extinct alien civilization

Which I totally buy. After all, if there are space faring civilizations aware of our existence, we haven't given them much of a reason to drop by. Unless of course they want a front row seat for our cautionary tale of how not to survive Fermi's Great Filter. But I suppose there's always hope. I mean, that's kind of the point of utopian fiction. It's not impossible that we, as a species might turn things around in time. Not super likely, but not impossible.

Putin's people could oust him, the international community might suddenly come around on climate change, and maybe Ron DeSantis will--I don't know--clear whatever blockage is starving the part of the brain responsible for empathy and he'll start acting like a human being. If these and like, a thousand other things all line up, we might just be around to see if First Contact Day actually pans out. 

"Whoa, whoa--just because I'm incapable of understanding or
sharing the feelings of other doesn't mean I lack empathy."

-The "Don't Say Gay" guy