Cliff+D's+Final+AmEx+2015+Speech


 * Title of Speech **

** It's the End of the World as We Know It **

 * Text of Speech **

 Colleagues, I stand here before you to regretfully inform of an impending global crisis. Never before has the existence of the entirety of the human race been in jeopardy (barring maybe the Cold War, the Bubonic Plague and Noah’s Ark). Humanity itself may stand on the brink of collapse, and yet there may not be anyone in this room who takes the issue seriously. That’s right; we’re talkin’ about alien invasion.

 Who knows how it will start? Maybe one day we’ll receive a radio signal from above. Maybe they will send an exploration force, to scout our military preparedness and gauge their chances of success. Maybe they’ll jump right in and use blitzkrieg tactics to eliminate our resistance immediately. Or yet maybe we make the initial contact and screw ourselves over. Or, it’s possible they are a peaceful society, and we must prevent war from breaking out. The specifics are just speculation, but it is imperative to be prepared for all possible scenarios.

 And contact will happen eventually. It’s honestly just a matter of time. Could be tomorrow. Could be next year. Could be thousands of years. But at some point it is likely that either we will discover intelligent life, or they will discover us.

 But, let’s think about it seriously for a minute; if contact were to be made tomorrow, the world would erupt into chaos. Earth does not have any kind of International Committee in place to represent human interests in potential correspondence. Nations would fall into the pit of pointless squabble while the apocalypse approaches in plain sight. Who should we even trust to represent the human race? Should it be a single person? Should it be a council? How does everyone get equally represented? I mean on one hand you might have blind patriots like Sarah Palin who advocate for launching a foolhardy offensive attack. Or on the other hand you have pacifists who might demand nonviolence to the point in dooming us all. These are all issues that need to be addressed on the world stage while we still have ample time to discuss them.

I think we can all agree, if possible, diplomacy would be our best bet at coexisting (or at the very least surviving). I mean if it came to the point of them launching an offensive on Earth, you can bet we would get our asses whooped. Sure, movies always portray the humans as courageous fighters who use ingenuity to beat the ugly, hive-mind aliens in one last all-out dicey gamble.

 But to a civilization that could cross the galaxy with relative ease, defeating one primitive planet that could only make it 240,000 miles to the moon wouldn’t be challenging in the slightest. If we want the human race to survive it would be in our best interest to form some sort of universal plan. The first step would be to get everyone to take the issue seriously. This is a real crisis that humans may have to face, so producing possible realistic solutions to fall back on would be light-years better than only producing Hollywood action movies about the topic.

 Getting the world into a spirit of cooperation is also a vital part of the agenda. Having every country form their own little task force would be detrimental, to say the slightest. If Vladimir Putin is over there secretly talking to the alien overlord and America is still in the waiting room, you can bet we Americans would be wary of potential conflicts-of-interest Russia may harbor. If any one group had exclusive access to the extraterrestrials, they would wield an unprecedented amount of power over the fate of everyone. To prevent that, we need to open this discussion here and now, before the situation arises.

 The next step would be to formulate a plan. This is where the wheels may fall off the rails. Having some sort of international committee draw up an official plan of action could take months or years. And since alien contact may not happen for centuries or millennia into the future, it would need periodic updating to adapt to world events. It must be fluid and open to change, but still stay true to the goals it seeks to achieve.

 But even if it may be difficult to get the ball rolling, or even if it may be difficult to come to a consensus on the proper theoretical course of action post-contact, it must be done. Alien contact is something too important not to have a plan for. In the America I want to grow old in, I want there to be a strategy for handling other-worldly beings.

 And I hope you do too. Preparing for this situation won’t be easy, but when we’re 10 minutes from having the most important video conference in human history, everyone’s going to be saying “Why didn’t we do something about this before it was too late?” So write to your congressman, bring it up with your friends, watch Independence Day again; do whatever it takes to preserve our future. Thank you.


 * Cite your sources **

I believe this is all my own intellectual property. (Except the title is a reference to the REM song "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I feel fine)")