Alien life exists. Yay.
I don’t mean to diminish the news. It’s interesting. When I was a kid, it would have made my year. I would have plaited my hair into a Princess Leia halo, set out my camping stool and sat staring up into the night, waiting for the chance to say hello. But when astrophysicists told the world about the compounds coming from K2-18b last week, I wasn’t that excited. It was the same in 2023, when U.S. congressional hearings blew a whistle on non-human biologics in crash sites. I watched the testimony. Observed the crazed online speculation. Again, I felt nothing. Or at least: nothing good.
I don’t believe I’m alone in this. Thinking about extra-terrestrials is an at best emotionally ambiguous activity for anyone who cares about our own planet right now. It’s hard to get jazzed about phytoplankton 124 light years away when it feels as though life on Earth is getting actively worse by the hour. We’ll all be long gone by the time K2’s bacterial gloop turns into something humans might meaningfully talk to. If we ever do. We exist in the age of the Fermi Paradox. The discovery of some amino acids doesn’t do much to satisfy the question of why we haven’t met anyone else in the universe yet, and the reason I can’t get excited about meeting E.T. is closely linked to Fermi’s most breathtaking theory: we’re the first ones here. The most evolved life form so far. The actual ancestors of the entire universe. We’re it. Kicking the whole thing off. It’s all on us.
This should not be a scary idea. We actually are alone in the universe could be an inspiring provocation. But like the folk who expend more energy whining about their upbringing than raising their kids, we don’t seem able to conceive of ourselves as exceptional ancestors in a way that leads us to behave like…exceptional ancestors. Of course, I can’t help but wonder how this is connected to the stories we tell. Whether our modern minds have trouble understanding that we might be first, because of all the sci-fi.
Hear me out.
So much mainstream, contemporary science fiction is not only visual. It’s CGI photo-real, allegory-of-the-cave level authentic. It somehow feels so real to us, it defers the primogeniality of our existence to made-up bunk. Don’t get me wrong. Stories that imaginatively depict alien races we might learn from are brilliant - provided you’re reading for metaphor. But it’s disturbing to think how many people take them literally. Same goes for the inversion: evil antagonists the hero inevitably overpowers with red-blooded human violence. Sure, you could argue the tropes are necessary to generate drama. But they reinforce some pretty dodgy ideas about otherness. They propagate the idea we’re not alone. And I suspect that might in turn reinforce the notion that we’re not entirely - responsible. Or in need of simply collaborating with our own species.
Not all sci-fi does this, and all power to the stories that go beyond the rubric. Novels do it well, but special mention to Mars Attacks for yodelling in the face of convention. I love that movie. I wish more science fiction had that levity. But I also wish we were more excited by fact. Scientists are constantly reminding us of how rare we are. A possibly premature, definitively miraculous ball in a lonely chemical eternity, that thanks to six inches of top soil, some sun and rain means we have art, music, food, joy, sex, architecture, history, each other, and a complex, extraordinary, multitude of life forms. We are a living, breathing actual rock star. Everything glorious about our species affirms the story. So it’s a bit of a shame the globally powerful keep failing to narrativise this in a way that is collectively helpful (read: they’re fucking it up). It feels like Darth Vader-ism writ large. A bunch of corrupted Jedis who move fast and break things because - to borrow from Yoda - it’s quicker, easier, more seductive. They can’t be arsed with decency. Sustainability. Planting the proverbial tree you don’t get to sit in the shade of. It takes too long. The results don’t benefit them personally. Better to turn divide-and-conquer sci-fi into dystopian reality.
How do we stop these abhorrent humans? Screaming into the void and wishing them ill sometimes seems like all we have. My own void scream is a wish-fulfilment fantasy where the world’s greatest polluters, wealth-hoarders and warmongers do get what they’re after. All the bunkers and cyborg bits and blood transfusions and compensatory dick rockets work. They buy their immortality. They get to live. Forever. The only catch is there are new laws. And one of them is they have to explain themselves to their better, fairer, more enlightened descendants. It’s the only job they’re allowed to do - and they have to do it every day, until someone believes they did something worthwhile. Which means they might be stuck in a grandiose torture chamber of their own making for eternity because honestly: what story could they possibly tell?
My punitive, warped little Promethean fantasy is, I admit, a little on the mean side. It’s also never going to come true, much less help. But I turn the story over in my mind quite often, because I want to do more than just imagine the future. I want to explain us to it. It’s hard. Consider the debates Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan had over what to put on the Voyager golden records, to tell alien life who we are. Sagan ruled out any mention of human atrocity. He fought and lost on rock ’n’ roll. Druyan put Chuck Berry on the record, but she didn’t think inviting aliens to visit Earth was such a hot idea. The sounds and images they ultimately did send into space were pretty good, and if aliens ever do find them and deduce that a Guatamalan man, some people licking things, a breastfeeding mother, Beethoven and the U.N. building at night are all part of one story, it will be immediate proof they really are a lot smarter than most of us. But almost fifty years after Voyager, if alien life has just been signposted as a definite, how will we account for what we’ve been up to? What’s the story? Should we tell them about Gaza? Microplastics? Russell Brand? Or do we just go full Sagan, and never talk about the war?
Of course context is everything. I do grasp why Sagan didn’t think putting the holocaust on NASA’s greeting rocket was the right move. But I also believe we need to start talking to who or whatever is in our future, and here’s the story that always convinces me. It’s about a group of people trying to figure out how to prevent future generations from going near nuclear waste. The volume and danger of the waste these people have to manage is terrifying. So they decide to lock it under the earth in a network of tunnels the size of Manhattan. It’s an impressive solution. But they know that if a descendent finds the opening to the tunnel and decides to go in, it’s game over. Death and destruction. They discuss what to do. Should they put a sign up? Someone points out that written language has only existed for around 6000 years. The pyramids, 5000. Nuclear waste has a half-life of 100,000 years. Language and symbols might change so much over this time, any explanation could be misinterpreted. DO NOT DISTURB won’t cut it. Even a circle with a line through it could be catastrophic; descendants might mistake it for entry to an underground temple. In the end the project managers contemplate having no sign at all. Saying nothing. They keep constructing tunnels. Burying danger. Plot twist: this story is in a documentary called Into Eternity. The facility exists in Finland. It being used in our lifetime, in our name. To protect us from ourselves.
If you feel as I do that saying nothing may not future-proof us, and you haven’t given up on humanity (or this post) just yet, allow me to offer a final thought: there is one language we can all speak. That we’ve arguably always spoken in an unbroken chain back to the dawn of our time: the language of care. If we hadn’t been speaking it, we would not exist. We haven’t lasted this long because we hate each other and destroy things. If that were our overwhelming nature, we’d have thrown all our babies off cliffs and razed everything to the ground millennia ago. Some of us have done that. Some are doing it right now. But a lot more of us repudiate hate and aggression. Most of us just want to love and be loved and not hurt anyone in the process. Our gestures of care might seem futile, especially at the moment. But a drop of rain becomes a mighty river. Show you care in whatever infinitesimally tiny way you can - through the generosity in your relationships, your art, your work, the way you drive or cross the road or even just conduct a conversation and for every miscreant who takes advantage of your generosity, there are many more you stand to inspire. You won’t know who they are. That’s how it works. You also need to fight like buggery for justice and run a mile from loveless arseholes but in general, when you can: show you care, and in a few millennia maybe our descendants will have inherited enough of the decent stuff to collectively avoid destruction. Or a scary, unmarked tunnel. Maybe they’ll even be nice to aliens, if they ever do show up. At very least, you’ll have contributed to one magnificent, bizarre, complicated love story, authored by billions, instead of billionaires. I can’t think of anything more rock star than that.
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