It seems noteworthy that both Matty Roberts and Greta Thunberg, whose 2015 protest outside the Swedish Parliament led to the first round of climate strikes, belong to Generation Z. The cohort has shown itself to be remarkably adept at harnessing the power of the internet to attract attention and build social movements, whether giddily reckless (eating Tide Pods) or gravely earnest (March for Our Lives). While Roberts has been fielding media interviews, Thunberg spent the last few weeks crossing the Atlantic by boat, a zero-emissions journey to New York, where she’ll address the UN’s Climate Action Summit on September 23.

The two young trailblazers make for an odd pairing — Thunberg with her unwavering seriousness of purpose and Heidi-esque pigtails, and Roberts with his goofy Wayne’s World affability and Fred Durstian chin beard. But maybe they’re more similar than they first appear. Born into a world steeped in absurdity and teetering on the brink of apocalypse, they each identified a conundrum that has bedeviled previous generations and fearlessly set out to solve it. In both cases, their pluck and initiative have left their elders dumbstruck.

Roberts’ eventual misgivings notwithstanding, he’s certainly proven one thing, as a look at Google Trends makes painfully clear: The vast majority of Americans would much rather talk about a wacky event based on a threadbare conspiracy theory than take on the grave responsibility of addressing a looming disaster that imperils all life on earth.

And really, why wouldn’t we? Storming Area 51 is a “short-term, easy activity with fun and excitement included,” notes Christian Russ, a lecturer at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences and author of the paper “Online Crowds — Extraordinary Mass Behavior on the Internet.” The climate emergency, by contrast, is a huge and overwhelming bummer, requiring sustained action guaranteed to inconvenience us now in return for a shot at future salvation. “This psychological and mental conflict paralyzes us,” Russ explains.

Despite the bravado and arms-back stride, deep down, many of us are plainly terrified.

For Jodi Dean, a professor of political science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and the author of Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outer Space to Cyberspace, the Area 51 gambit represents a welcome distraction with genuine mass appeal. “The world is total shit right now, and UFOs are this other thing to get excited about,” she observes. “Area 51 lets people express skepticism and mistrust about the government, and even express political outrage, in a way that cuts across left-right valences, and doesn’t seem too serious. And the Naruto run […] that’s just hilarious.”

Despite the bravado and arms-back stride, deep down, many of us are plainly terrified. Distractions like the Nevada raid, or a new chicken sandwich, or the vacuum challenge (please don’t), are all but a thumb swipe away. Each in its own way hints at a yearning for collective action — a desire to come together on the thinnest of pretexts and commune with one another in a shared experience. One interpretation of the recent Area 51 craze is that we’re really just practicing, stretching our muscles for when we’re ready to really put them to meaningful use, say, in an American version of the Arab Spring or the Hong Kong protests or Gilets Jaunes movement, the kind of revolution you might engage in if you were facing a monumental threat.

Another is that we’re a bunch of idiots fidget-spinning our way to oblivion.

“Look, at any given moment far more people are playing World of Warcraft than worrying about climate change,” acknowledges Bill McKibben, who wrote the first landmark book on global warming, The End of Nature (published in that pivotal year of 1989, as it happens) and went on to found 350.org, the international environmental group spearheading the protest. “That’s just how the world works. But we don’t need absolutely everyone engaged in this fight. If we can get 4% or 5% of Americans truly active in the political battle for a working climate, we will win.”

It’s certainly possible, as Bob Lazar seems to believe, that we’re not alone, and that the bug-eyed “greys” of Zeta Reticuli have been visiting Earth for decades. Perhaps they’ve snatched up a few unlucky people, as the abductees claim, probing them, extracting their sperm and eggs, and using this genetic material to create a lab-grown interplanetary half-human, half-alien species. Maybe a generation of our alien kin is racing here as we speak, traversing the inky void, bringing an armada of escape vessels large enough to comfortably whisk every man, woman, and child on Earth — pets, too — away to a pristine new interstellar home.

Then again, what if they aren’t?

We might want to hedge our bets. Maybe Matty Roberts and some of the 2 million other people who’d like to bum-rush Area 51 on the 20th could devote a fraction of that go-for-broke audacity to the fate of our own planet — the only one we know of that actually supports life. Maybe, like more than 1,000 Amazon workers, they can help make September 20 into a worldwide day of action rather than of distraction.

In the end, I think Mickey Rourke said it best. “Maybe every single sighting of things in the sky is a product of our collective consciousness, a false hope [for] intervention by external powers,” he theorizes in Bob Lazar, his ravaged voice evoking the sound of a cobblestone gently making love to an electric juicer.

“We’ve always looked to the skies for answers,” he added, “instead of looking into ourselves.”