A little back story.
I’m currently teaching a course dealing with science and technology (in broad terms) starting with a unit on astronomy, cosmology and the big, bad universe. One theme I address is the possibility of intelligent life in the universe. I mention Giordano Bruno and the three S’s: Sci-fi, SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) and Sagan (et. al.). But the best pedagogical paradigm for this stuff is the Drake Equation. Frank Drake, a pioneer in exobiology, laid out the parameters for the possibility (and probability) of contacting another sentient life form, possessing a technological civilization, somewhere in our galaxy. The equation is an exercise in odds, each variable (distribution of habitable planets and life, emergence of consciousness and technology, and, perhaps most importantly, longevity of any given civilization) exploring an important factor in the overall idea.
Even given the 100 or so billion stars in our galaxy, the odds are generally long.
Which is why it’s silly to me when someone seeing a few unexplained lights in the Christmas night sky around Nanaimo becomes the pretext for a discussion about intelligent life in the universe.
Admittedly, I saw the witnesses on the local news and they seemed…Credible. Yet, untrained observers often think they see strange lights in the sky (heck, the most commonly seen UFO is the planet Venus), and as Jung ably argued, there’s something in the collective unconscious that strongly linked these “observations” to “flying saucers” in the atomic age. Of course, the aliens were us.
Actual encounter with extraterrestrials, if it ever comes, will not be of the “little green men” variety. More likely a brief moment of communication picked up from a distant (and in all probability, long since dead) alien civilization. Good thing, since they are also liable to be completely incomprehensible, scary and something we wouldn’t want on our doorstep…
Still, I think, perhaps overly optimistically, that 2010 will be the year we discover we’re not alone.
This fact alone would change everything.
December 31, 2009 at 9:18 am |
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December 31, 2009 at 10:21 am |
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December 31, 2009 at 11:47 am |
Interesting post, S! I am reading a book called Phantoms In the Brain which has a rather fascinating neurological explanation of why some people report seeing UFOs. Since you mention science and tech, this may be one angle you may find of interest.
December 31, 2009 at 11:50 am |
You obviously haven’t read any of the five major UFO studies and know nothing about “Blue Book, Special Report #14″. These beings have been around much longer than mankind by possibly billions of years. What do you think, assuming we survive, we will have for technology in a mere few thousand years then multiply that by a factor of 10 at least. Hence the term quantum technology.
December 31, 2009 at 12:44 pm |
Shefaly: Thanks for the recommendation. Indeed, the neurological dimension you note here is fascinating and generally under-explored.
NTK: I haven’t read “Special Report #14″ and the term quantum technology evokes different ideas for me (i.e. quantum computing), but I’m a historian of science. Might I suggest you take a closer look at the Drake Equation. It deals centrally with the idea that advanced technological societies don’t live long. That they develop the ability to communicate beyond their own planet and soon after end up destroying it.
Beyond this, we have to assume a certain limitation in technology based on what we know about the universe. Sure, any sufficiently advanced civilization’s technology starts to look like magic. But isn’t the speed of light also the speed of light?
Anyway, why would some incredibly advanced group of alien “magicians” decide to float around over Nanaimo and not make their presence known more ubiquitously?
It just doesn’t add up…
December 31, 2009 at 2:10 pm |
Curious story. I’ve got a problem of running the mysterious through the anthroprocentric metaphysical centrifuge first. Social necessity seems to determine most of what remains. In a case like this, the sad residue resembles a sort of Easter Island statue phenomenon. ‘God’ is failing us, and so the only other thing that would attest to an outside influence for the better would be intelligent life (or perhaps just life, assuming intelligence is a matter of degree – after again, turning on the AMC). Contact with extraterrestrials would radically augment every single ethical, epistemological and ontological idea we’ve ever had. Permits the ‘open system’, instead of us having to pretend with our god-wars.
I’ve chosen to suspend disbelief of contact, as proof doesn’t seem to matter in a universe (multiverse?) that we can only understand as infinite – imagination is enough. By that, I don’t mean to say we’ve met any aliens (AMC again: we’re not actually too much of a cosmic event to grant inspection for those with galaxy spanning capabilities to come check out – collectively we’d have little to offer them other than ‘brown people go BOOM’ and ‘wouldn’t it be crazy if we had sex and tape it!?’) No, simply thinking of ourselves as someone else’s aliens should be enough.. allowing the multiplicity of our world/cosmos at the same time as unifying our terribly sad and lonely and destructive monkey-troupe individualism.
Sorry to spew on about this, but it’s so interesting. Of all the people who wouldn’t want us to know about aliens are those with vested interests in remaining powerful. This is to say, the inspection of authority inevitably enters into any discussion about extra-terrestrials.
Awesome post!
December 31, 2009 at 2:11 pm |
I didn’t know you were an optimist. ;-)
December 31, 2009 at 2:31 pm |
ps: http://www.magicdragon.com/EmeraldCity/extraterrestrials/alien.html
December 31, 2009 at 3:23 pm |
Marmalade: You point powerfully to the sociological dimension of this conundrum…Indeed their are probably intense ethical and political issues involved. But maybe all that just doesn’t matter. Of course, the whole fascination with UFOs is a reflection of the desire to believe that maybe we do matter. Somehow. Great link too, BTW.
nursemyra: Neither did I. ;)
January 1, 2010 at 1:34 pm |
A bit tangential, but I’ve slowly been reading a marvelous book called Orthodoxy by GK Chesterton. It’s changed some about how I think of science & technology, impressive that it was written almost a century ago.
I think that Chesterton would be quite a fan of modern sci-fi, but as an informal response to SETI & Sagan, he might have offered these words, from Chapter 4 of Orthodoxy (http://www.leaderu.com/cyber/books/orthodoxy/ch4.html):
“But the expansion of which I speak was much more evil than all this. I have remarked that the materialist, like the madman, is in prison; in the prison of one thought. These people seemed to think it singularly inspiring to keep on saying that the prison was very large. The size of this scientific universe gave one no novelty, no relief. The cosmos went on for ever, but not in its wildest constellation could there be anything really interesting; anything, for instance, such as forgiveness or free will. The grandeur or infinity of the secret of its cosmos added nothing to it. It was like telling a prisoner in Reading gaol that he would be glad to hear that the gaol now covered half the county. The warder would have nothing to show the man except more and more long corridors of stone lit by ghastly lights and empty of all that is human. So these expanders of the universe had nothing to show us except more and more infinite corridors of space lit by ghastly suns and empty of all that is divine.”
January 1, 2010 at 5:49 pm |
kerrjac: Love the Chesterton quote! Awesome. Chesterton was something of an iconoclast — a “Catholic” rebel. I remember reading a rather persuasive argument against eugenics he penned in the 1920s. A great novelist, too.