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| A humorous meme I've seen repeated as the apt photo response to ridiculous statements. |
“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
― Arthur C. Clarke
Opening existential essay remark: I am not supporting visitation by "Grey's" nor denigrating anyone's experiences. I simply have no reference to render or posit any statement on it.
The quote by Arthur C. Clarke opened the science fiction movie "Dark Skies," with [spoiler alert] scary music, suicidal birds, bleeding noses, vaudevillian sleep walker trances and baffling plot devices throughout. My usual rejoinder is, what resources does our Earth possess that they can't find elsewhere?
However, the quote intrigued me and placed me in a deep contemplative state on the subject, savoring either possibility in my mind. I began to sketch...
Punnett Square
| SETI? | Search for | Abandon search |
| No | Waste $ Futile No vision | Save $ Infrastructure Address Climate Change |
| Yes | Invest $ Increase knowledge Overlook Effect | Ended investment $ prematurely Others' (aliens) mistakes missed Unprepared for the unknown |
..."we are alone in the universe"...the first row of the Punnett Square.
13.8 billion years has allowed the observable universe to expand to 28 billion light years in diameter according to recent estimates, and that's what is "observable." It's likely larger than we can possibly imagine.
If we're alone in such a vast incomprehensible real estate, there are likely planets the human species could expand to and colonize. As observed by an old book "Migration to the stars: Never again enough people" by Edward S. Gilfillan, the aliens we encounter may very well be our own descendants.
What would such descendants be and act like? Would they any more than us address our crumbling infrastructure, or climate change? The exploitation of resources has made wars and rumors of wars; men millionaires and robber barons; billionaires and oligarchs. How would the resources of an asteroid of almost pure platinum or diamond make the first trillionaire respond to his fellow humans? We currently have exclusive enclaves that require entry codes and appointments: Elysium was just a movie, wasn't it? Without an appreciable societal seismic and psychological shift in our values, we're likely birthing the next generation of selfish and self-absorbed (delicately put) rectum holes...who usually don't share even virtuously limitless resources well. Inequality is the mother of criminal enterprises, freedom fighters and terrorism. Hyper inequality may yet see an invasion by Martians, fed up with making their self-absorbed anal rulers richer still.
If we are truly existentially "it," and as Carl Sagan said, "we are the way for the cosmos to know itself," it will have a profound identity crisis at our possible self-destructed demise and the utter silence of Entropy.
..."or we are not"...the bottom row.
There is a bit of accepted naivete from Star Trek. In light of current histrionics displayed by celebrities, pundits and our so-called leaders, would world peace or worldwide panic break out with the advent of Vulcans? Zefram Cochran - the mythical scientist that creates superluminal travel - is met by benevolent alien representatives of the Vulcan Science Academy. That is both quaint and Deus ex machina convenient. It could easily have been the Klingons, and a different story line. Before we encounter aliens, I'd say we need to drink deep of the "Overlook Effect" and see ourselves in another light than we currently do as warring tribes threatening Armageddon, instead of as a whole species.
"Mistakes are not the best teacher: OTHER peoples' mistakes are." I'm sure I've heard it somewhere else in another form. I like quoting it to people, like my sons, that matter. We could learn a lot out there from a failed civilization. What caused their demise? Was it climate change? Ethnic strife? Nuclear war, or all of the above? How would we see ourselves once we knew that? What decisions would we make differently, or not? The most recent dominant species were the dinosaurs. They were essentially eating vegetation if herbivore; other dinosaurs if carnivore and making baby dinosaurs until an extraterrestrial visitor impacted their lives in the form of the Chicxulub Asteroid in Mexico. We - unlike Dino - have learned to track them for our own continuance as s/he didn't have satellite technology.
This kind of goes back to my first commentary on "Dark Skies": when someone asked what I'd say if I encountered a "Grey," the only question that came to mind: "what do you want?" The how is obviously some propulsion system we haven't invented yet. The question is why? Again, what resource does our planet of diminishing food, fossil fuels, air and water possess they couldn't encounter in 8,588,957,055 parsecs? Surely we're not that special! "Skies" fielded a lot of UFO conspiracy theories and at least one plausible corollary of the Fermi paradox (a play on the "Zoo Hypothesis"): to fairy-like, god-like, imp-like aliens, we're essentially lab rats. Conveniently explaining their alleged baffling behavior, as biologists never ask rodents how their families are, or how said vermin feel before the experiment begins. Then, there's this classic:
That sense of powerlessness in either state, I find equally terrifying, be it boot-to-neck authoritarian-rule to societal oblivion; experimentation or menu entry.
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