Why people care about aliens

As those clear, 7-year-old eyes stared up at me at one of our pub­lic pro­grams at Perkins Obser­va­tory, I knew I was in trou­ble. “Why don’t you talk more about aliens?” he said.

Here is the answer I gave him: “We know a lot about the stars and plan­ets. We don’t know much about aliens. We don’t even know if there ARE any aliens. I like to talk about the things we know some­thing about.”

Here is the answer I wanted to give:

Humans care about aliens because we feel so alone in a vast and nearly empty cos­mos. A speck of light hov­ers brightly on the starry dome, so close, it seems, that if we had a lad­der long enough we could almost touch it.

Yet the uni­verse is large beyond our imag­in­ing. Given the cur­rent level of tech­nol­ogy, tril­lions of dol­lars and many gen­er­a­tions would be expended before we ever got there. Our intel­li­gence has not reached the level that we can go to these places. Even a sim­ple star is beyond our reach.

So we hope that those places can come to us in the form of far more intel­li­gent races. If those beings are good, they will solve our prob­lems on Earth. If they are evil, they will unite us in the quest to defeat them, and in that unity, we will solve our prob­lems on our own.

We live on a tiny island sur­rounded by vast oceans of space. We have nei­ther boat nor radio that will bridge the great deep, and we are, at the core of our being, afraid of being alone. Aliens of any moral stripe pro­vide a great deal of comfort.

The trou­ble is that we are also ratio­nal beings. We know that many of our fel­low humans want us the believe what they believe. We are bom­barded by clever requests to buy into all man­ner of com­mer­cial, moral, social and intel­lec­tual mes­sages. We know that the con­se­quences of believ­ing an untruth can be cat­a­strophic to our men­tal, phys­i­cal, and polit­i­cal well-being.

We want some sim­ple truth to solve our prob­lems, but so many peo­ple want us to believe things for their own ben­e­fit that we are afraid of them and their ideas.

If we are smart, we develop a healthy skep­ti­cism about ideas. We won­der if a cer­tain soft drink is really the choice of the new gen­er­a­tion or if a cer­tain per­fume will really make us more attractive.

We ask hard ques­tions about groups that draw us in with beau­ti­ful ideas and then demand our total alle­giance. Soft drink com­pa­nies and polit­i­cal cults cer­tainly want our money, but more fright­en­ingly, they want our minds.

If we are wise, we demand that the evi­dence for any propo­si­tion is com­pelling before we believe it. We try all the soft drinks care­fully before we chose a brand, and we ought to eval­u­ate care­fully ideas before we let them absorb our lives.

I don’t know whether the uni­verse is pop­u­lated with intel­li­gent civ­i­liza­tions or whether they have vis­ited us. The evi­dence is not com­pelling that they have, and we will never be able to prove the neg­a­tive propo­si­tion that such intel­li­gences don’t exist.

I pre­fer to spend my ever-decreasing time on our planet talk­ing about the mir­a­cles that we know, and here is one of them:

As I stared into those clear, 7-year-old eyes, I real­ized that a mind, full of promise, exists behind them. We have dis­cov­ered an intel­li­gent race in the uni­verse, and it is us. We are not alone in all this vast­ness. We have each other. We must nur­ture the intel­li­gence of the next gen­er­a­tion — and the one after that.

We must show them the glory and rich­ness of their uni­verse and their place in it. In those eyes — and not in some vis­i­tor from beyond — is our great­est hope and our most promis­ing escape from the unspo­ken fears that haunt our lives.

Tom Burns is the direc­tor of Perkins Obser­va­tory. He can be reached at tlburns@owu.edu.

Posted by Tom Burns on Mar 4 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.