 Okay, let's talk about this for a second. Today, a headline caught my eye and I couldn't let it go by without putting something out there before all the other talking heads and pundits. I felt like as an astronomer who cares about these things, I should say something. The article said that a security expert from Israel is reporting that there is indeed a galactic federation of planets. Earth is not a member, but we've been aware of them for decades. We've worked together and it's this incredibly well-kept secret. I have a few questions and most of them can just be stated as why? Why contact us at all if we're not ready for this information? Why the US and Israel and no one else or maybe other people? Why build this interplanetary embassy on Mars apparently? There's plenty of remote places on this planet. I guess you don't want to put it in a swing state, but the moon is like an order of magnitude easier to get to. There's so many questions about why you would build something on Mars and not the moon. Why is this guy telling us this and why now? I mean, he's got a book coming out, so I guess that's why. Why doesn't he have any more information or proof? Okay, I haven't read his book, but this seems really thin on evidence. The biggest why from this whole article, if this was such a huge secret, why tell the Trump administration at all, who are famously disorganized, can't keep secrets? Can you imagine Donald Trump having lost this election while sitting on the biggest news story of all time? Can you imagine him not bragging over a round of golf? There's just no way 100 wealthy people in Florida don't already know this, then. And I guess why if the Galactic Federation was able to keep Trump from spilling the beans? Why they were unable to keep this guy from writing a book and doing interviews and letting that be on Twitter? So my hot take is even in 2020, no. As somebody who spends a little bit of their professional time thinking about SETI and the search for life in the universe, I so desperately want to believe that there are other intelligent creatures out there that would care about us, that would want to help us from blowing ourselves to smithereens with nuclear weapons. There must be many very profound state secrets, international secrets, perhaps even amazing technology that is not publicly known, maybe even human space flight out of low earth orbit that has not been publicly released. I would be willing to buy any of that, but even in 2020, I'm not buying that the biggest news that has ever come to humanity was just spilled on like a below the fold headline that barely made it into my newsfeed.