Tag: aliens

Somewhere Out There

Shannon

On the chance that anyone is not finding current events sufficiently bizarre, the Pentagon released UFO videos. Some people concluded from the imagery that aliens have already surreptitiously visited Earth and are probably planning an invasion that will end life as we know it. Pessimists, though, suggested that the so-called UFOs are really just afterimages. One thing is clear: What we are, as society, going to do with this revelation is first of all create memes, and second talk about aliens. I’m not much skilled with the former, so let’s go on to the latter. 

Some people consider aliens probable based on the science. (Others consider aliens certain based on the math, but I suspect their equations are missing some variables.) The perception of aliens as a scientific idea is widespread; the genesis of that perception is less clear. It’s not as if the existence of aliens can be deduced from observable phenomena, or proven from it. You can’t say, An apple falls from a tree and hits a man on the head, so aliens are real, or The Sun deflects light, therefore aliens live in Andromeda. And although some people swear that aliens explain unidentified flying objects, crop circles, and the pyramids, there is no phenomenon for which aliens are a necessary or even likely explanation.

Astronomy provides a different sort of rationale for the existence of aliens. The staggering number of stars and planets suggests a calculation, whether mathematical or gambler’s odds: With so many galaxies, so many solar systems, so many planets, there must be aliens somewhere out there. There is some emotion in this. The only thing more appalling than vast, unfathomable spaces is vast, unfathomable emptiness. We can’t imagine that all those galaxies are empty. And by empty, we mean empty of beings like us.

The argument is not all emotion. It has some math. But I don’t believe that anyone has written out the equations, or even can. What is the real chance of intelligent life, and how much is it increased by the sheer size of the universe? Consider that one of the patterns of scientific discovery is the great complexity of life and the specificity of the conditions necessary to it. The fine-tuning required for life is so great that some scientists posit it as evidence for the multiverse. The discoveries of astronomy gave some grounding to the idea of aliens. They did not establish it scientifically.

To trace the idea of aliens to its first proposition is not possible. Yet I doubt that it was from science, or even scientists. For all the trimmings of steel and stars, aliens have always struck me as the stepchildren of a million folk tales and fairy stories. On the surface they may be different from the extravagant denizens and ragged strays of Faerie, but in their essence, they’re the same. The world used to be huge, with unclimbed mountains and forests older than civilization and oceans that, for all anyone could dream, might pour out onto the stars. But the world grew small. We learned – we proved it to ourselves – that the mountains and forests and oceans are empty, empty of beings like us.

But our horizons expanded with science, and our dreams wandered. Maybe they were somewhere else – the moon, the center of the earth, Venus, Mars. We ruled that out, too. Now it’s the stars – somewhere, on some planet spinning around some sun, there is life like us.

We are, I sometimes think, lonely.

Show Your Hand

Shannon

When I first heard of Triplanetary, recommended as one of science fiction’s great space operas, I caught the copyright year 1997. When I actually got the book in my hands, I realized 1997 was the copyright renewal, 1948 was the original copyright, and much of the book had run as a serial in 1934. Triplanetary is, in a word, old. Old books are often the best to analyze; they come unhindered by current debates, unfiltered by current assumptions.

Triplanetary, an epic clash of four intelligent species framed as an even more epic struggle for galactic destiny, presents an excellent case-study of how a creator’s stories reveal his beliefs. In the first place, it has actual ideas; in the second, it is not a book with a message, so what comments it makes on philosophy or religion are subtle and, perhaps, unconscious. The novel opens with the chance meeting of two alien races hundreds of millions of years ago. The races, super-intelligent and practically immortal, are about equal in ability but polar opposites in nature. Multiple galaxies are not big enough for the both of them, and the benevolent aliens, thinking long-term, hatch a plan: They will find some promising planet and, over the course of thousands of generations, “develop” a new race to outstrip their rivals and finally take the place of Guardians of Civilization.

Not that I imagine it’s a spoiler, but that race is us.

With this idea, the author tips his hand regarding his essential worldview. A Christian author could easily write a secular book, but even there – even in a sci-fi novel nobody believes anyway – he’s unlikely to portray humanity as the product of aliens monkeying with the evolutionary process. The aliens’ “program of genetics” – managing blood lines and human mating, through means that are never described – hints at eugenics; it’s ambiguous, however, whether the aliens’ genetic program advanced the evolution of humanity or created a master race within it.

The most important idea in the novel is Civilization (capitalization from the original). It’s curious that Civilization is never defined; perhaps the author assumed that people would know what he meant by it, and perhaps, back in 1948, he was right. Probably what he meant was Progress, in every way the word can be understood. Triplanetary presents a long history of malignant aliens engineering the destruction of civilizations, from Atlantis to Rome to the United States, and an equally long history of benevolent aliens raising up newer, better civilizations in their place. One sees, in the long panorama, a climb out of chaos and violence, a march toward science and technology. You might even call it the long arc of history, bending toward justice. This unexamined optimism, with its touching idealism and materialistic faith, is old and widespread.

The ethic of Triplanetary is not our modern ethic. It’s too archaic in its reverence for womanhood, its definition of manhood by courage, resolve, and physical heroism; its casual assertion of moral principle above love is bracing. At the same time, it is not a Christian ethic. The sense, felt sometimes in the pages of the book, that Civilization matters more than the millions lost along the way is cold and foreign. The ethic of Triplanetary is, moreover, divorced from God – amicably divorced, to be sure, but divorced all the same.

Triplanetary is revealing of its time and its author. Beliefs about God, the universe, and right and wrong have a way of becoming apparent, even when left unspoken. We all show our hands in the end. It’s only a matter of how.