When Stephen Colbert riffed on astrophysicist and friend of the show Neil deGrasse Tyson the other night, it was concerning a recent interview wherein Neil quipped something like: if aliens were watching our planet for signs of intelligence, they might be still looking. Nyuk Nyuk. They might view us as lowly as we view the worm, he said, which we don't try to communicate with, but step on. Therefore aliens should be feared.
Ah, but, reasons the grand vizier Colbert: that worm you stepped on was an alien ambassador! You just started a war! No wonder you're so paranoid.
This is so similar to my own analogy of America sending bug ambassadors to Mars that I had to dredge it back up.
For your agape bewonderment:
(portions originally from Manifestation and Materializaton - UFO Drag Queen :: Delirium - Lulu Publishing, 2012)
Here's some things science admits are real:
1. A perception of solid matter as unmoving density or permanence or stillness is an illusion. The nature of the cosmos as always in flux. Nothing ever stands still, ever.
2. The universe is vast enough that it's likely we're not alone.
3. The telegraph vine and the cell phones exist. AND recently we've been able to 'print' crude 3-D objects.
4. IF aliens were contacted or discovered, via SETI, it would likely be kept from the general public, if possible.
5. We are limited by our own perceptions of time, space, and distance (relative to our own earthbound perspective) in judging how far away stars and planets are from each other.
6. The earth is old enough and the universe older even than that, relative to our own recorded time, that some highly advanced version of ourselves, a few million years more technologically advanced than us, could easily have come and gone a dozen times already before we even got here.
7. As Arthur C. Clarke wrote, "any highly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
However, put all of them together and it equals this formula: aliens can beam themselves anywhere in any dimension, backwards in time, and across the universe, like a fax. Even we can do that, shamen in the rainforest can, Zen Buddhists can. Maybe.
During WW2 there were some remote Pacific islands (such as Tanna and Vanatu) where the natives had never seen a white man, or an airplane, or a car. Such technology made us gods, especially as crates full of weird goodies would drop out of our birds in parachutes, and land all over the island, sometimes right into their tribal council ceremonial fires. Would these tribes have scientists there to decry our planes as mass hallucinations? Or priests to decry our planes as devil manifestations? Probably not. Both tend to bow to inarguable power, to incorporate what they can't discredit or destroy. So when the war ends and the Marines pull out, the witch doctors make ceremonial fires to lure the magic silver birds back to them. Maybe some marines promised to return, like MacArthur, just as the visitants did with the Maya, Inca, and Hopi peoples.
But if in a few thousand years the Marines don't return, perhaps the future generation (no longer witch but medical) doctors will examine the tradition of making ritual airplanes from straw, and drawing parachutes that look like saucers (or weather balloons!) on cave walls, and regard it all as superstitious nonsense. There's no such thing as white people or cans of things called "peaches." By then any still existing wreckage left behind will be buried, perhaps, and only the drawings and passed-down memory will survive. Since there hasn't been a non-tribal person there for so many generations, anyone who says there ever was is now considered a kook, an ostracized by conventional wisdom.
Then, maybe on some other island, the Japanese came instead of the Americans, and enslaved and brutalized the indigenous population (they took rather than gave). It's just possible that island would breed future scientists like deGrassi and Hawking, for whom visitants are automatically hostile BECAUSE they are more advanced. When the Japanese left they left a stain in the collective soul of that island, so that they hate and fear the return. They make human sacrifices to keep the Japanese Gods appeased so they don't descend once more. Eventually they don't return long enough that the sacrifice stops, and it's regarded as a dark blot on the island's history - when their ancestors were fearful savages who killed in fear of the dark, and some made-up blood god called "Jappa Nisee"
Evidence of both types of alien incursion--beneficial and destructive-- is all around us, but broach the topic and watch mainstream archaeology fall into panicked joking, dismissively ready to hoot at any ancient historian who dares break from tradition. But it's not hard to recognize desperation in their denial. Their scientific laws are bound up in the limited known, made to fit the where and the how but not the why or from whence... anyone who looks at science's half-finished puzzle and suggests a few pieces may be missing is laughed out of the room.
In each case the need to suppress 'magical thinking' is a means to an end - the mainstream belittles the unknown if it has any 'fantastic' element the same way a Mayan witch doctor might belittle a visiting Catholic missionary, or the Catholic in turn might burn the astronomer who first declares the earth revolves around the sun; now the astronomers burn through ridicule the neo-pagan astrologer-psychic who declares the Mayans were right all along.
I say this, because I learned to recognize this hostile ridicule in myself when it used to flare up during therapy, and having my writing edited. If what my editor/s or shrink said stung me like a slap, I knew they must be right. And thus when fiction provokes a negative enough response, it is the truth. On the other hand, the great pyramid at Giza was built with slaves and imported logs over several centuries and that's it! End of discussion! Never you mind how 100 ton slabs of rock were carried hundreds of miles and lifted so high in the air in the Temple statuary, and when we move them we have to cut them into slices and move them piece by piece, reassembling them above the flood zone or wherever (which is why some statues have all these lines so they look they're made of bricks.
The idea that generations of slaves over centuries could create something that cohesive, something we wouldn't be able to do today no matter how many machines we used, is the true absurdity. The vehemence with which mainstream science resists alternate interpretations just because they sound flakey borders on the pathological.
 |
| You kids did this all yourselves? |
It's not alien presences, unknown visitors, that are comforting childhood myths, of course, but the opposite: the cozy delusion that we are the Robinson Crusoe of the universe instead of a relatively self-destructive crazy spinster cousin on the edge of town that never gets invited to the dance, not even asked to serve drinks. When they come see us, the visitors come as evolutionary biologists, not suitors. It's insulting. We should try to clean ourselves up a little more. Frankly though, I think they secretly like us. We're the girl they don't take out in public, admit they don't even know, but then they sneak into our window at three in the morning and roofie us. And here we are, their illegitimate children.
For us the equivalent might mean if we found weird, small bugs on Mars and so sent earth bug ambassadors in little ships with tiny proclamations and gifts for the space bug president --this is what the bug skeptics would need to see to believe in space visitors. If we just scooped some bugs up and brought them aboard our human space craft for analysis, took them home, or tagged and released them, then the space bug skeptics back on the Martian surface would still dismiss the existence of alien life for lack of evidence; after all, their space bug SETI program has been sending out sophisticated insect calls with the power to reach several feet outside the atmosphere, so where are the bug ambassadors?
Pzzzzzt!?
------------
Where indeed? Thanks.
YO! I TOTALLY DIDN'T WRITE THIS LAST BIT, IT JUST APPEARED! CRYPTIC!! THANKS BUGGY!
No comments:
Post a Comment