Detachment from the gold standard is exactly why we aren't going to repay it. We simply don't have to.

:-/ I disagree. He's been a research affiliate of Princeton, which is a "legit position". His key claim to fame is being the director of the Hayden Planetarium. A planetarium is not a research tool -- it's an educational tool. As director, he mostly managed a rebuilding project that involved managing a budget. This is closer to finance than science. By extension, every defense contractor would be a "legit position".

There's remarkably few "jobs" that entitle someone to call themselves "astrophysicist" or "cosmologist". And, frankly, why not add physicist, mathematician, astronomer, etc? Having been through this rodeo a few times, I know that your "title" tends to change with the grant. (To take a personal example, mathematics can be repackaged as "bioinformatics" and "theoretical computer science" -- without changing a damned thing, other than which grant dispersing agency I'm pandering to.)

That's why I asked for actual achievements. His dissertation kind of counts, but the people who care about Black Science Man don't care about his dissertation. I highly doubt they could read it. I'd say that was an achievement. Defining Pluto? Meh. Media management. I have more respect for the guys who back engineered the patch for the error in the Hubble.

Does he have to be smart? Not really. He bombed his first stint at grad school. He got the courtesy MA and a suggestion that he try something else. He was on sports teams as a grad student, for fuck's sake. I'd invite anyone who has played an college sport and gotten a PhD to consider that. This is a real "what the fuck are you thinking?" decision.

It would be insanely easy to determine the "signature" for organic life and immediately identify what exoplanets contain it, like spending 5 minutes writing a definition for a virus scanner. Then to learn the language, a civilization this advanced would have AI that learns the languages the same way a baby learns (with the advantage that it's not scouring the internet but actually observing our interactions). By associative learning it would be very easy to map our brains non-invasively; every time we're touched our somatosensory cortex is activated for the place of touch, every time our motor cortex is activated the associated muscle moves. If the AI is automatically figuring out that every area of our labial premotor cortex is associated with a phoneme then it's trivial to have a read-out of our thoughts.

Someone doesn't write a game like The Sims to look at the pretty swirling scenery. They want to see the thought bubbles, they want to be voyeurs. They may even want insertion hooks to meddle with the reality covertly (e.g. by learning the association of people's emotions with amygdalar activation and messing with their minds). In fact, they're likely to have ethical treatment laws the way we have for animal testing, and they may be obligated to intervene in societies that go to shit.