What's up with all the Alien stuff lately?

[Bryar]

As a species and as a culture, we are a cusp of major socio-political upheaval as we transition ourselves from a culture based on concepts like religion, patriotism and personal greed into something more advanced like a cohesive Planetary civilization (also known by Michio Kaku as a Type 1 civilization). The threats we faced back during the Cold War and before are no longer really viable as we are now seeing the final integration of all nations into a geo-political hegemony and the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction by thermo-nuclear war vanishes completely. But being the fighting race that we are, there has to be a common enemy for us to rally against and since we are starting to no longer see our fellow man as an enemy, there is only one other focus for our collective animosity other than the threat of ecological disaster and that is the "Alien" threat. We are still centuries at least from being able to draw the attention of an alien menace and in reality it would be our attitudes towards xenos that would get us into trouble with them but we are still primitive creatures and require the focusing point to drive us a s a species.