Alien Life

Alien Life

by Marco M. Pardi

“Another circumstance tormented me in those days: that no one resembled me and that I resembled no one else. ‘I am alone and they are every one,’ I thought – and pondered.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky. 1821-1881. Notes from the underground. 1864.

All comments are greatly appreciated and will receive a response.

When Armstrong stepped onto the Moon it was indeed a “great leap for Mankind.” Apparently, it was also a great leap for social science. A few years after that historic landing I was attending yet another national social science conference where I was a featured speaker. Looking at the Program for other talks I might find interesting I saw one to be presented by a well known sociologist who, for this event anyway, billed himself as an “Exo-Sociologist” I wondered, What in the world is that? (I couldn’t resist that) Unfortunately, our presentations were concurrent so I missed his. But, having wrestled with the linguistics issue of communicating with off-world visitors I long since wondered how anyone could seriously propose an ethnology/ethnography of an off-world species, especially one capable of visiting us.

Of course, the interest in such adventures was nothing new. Science fiction from the 1940’s onward was dominated by imaginative literature characterizing alien civilizations, usually as a means of highlighting faults in our own. In the ’50’s I was a fan of Flash Gordon, usually sympathizing with the Emperor Ming over Gordon and his mundane companions. The film industry was not far behind, usually depicting aliens as creatures far too clumsy and brutish to have developed, much less piloted inter-stellar craft.

“Respectable” literature also got in on the action. Life Magazine and its competitors occasionally published articles on “alien life” heavily illustrated with “artists’ renderings” of what we might encounter on other planets. No matter the renderings looked like Aubrey Beardsley met H. P. Lovecraft. They were there to sell magazines. One evening when I was at dinner with the heir to the Coles Newspaper Empire, including Look Magazine (his young bride was a friend of mine), I asked about their coverage. “It sells”.

More recently we are treated to ongoing television series such as Ancient Aliens, proposing that Humanity arose not through Natural Selection among higher Primates, but from deliberate manipulation of Primate genes by highly advanced space visitors. These programs take advantage of a fundamental principle in logic: Proving something didn’t happen is usually far more difficult than proving something did. Therefore, the shows continually pose ideas in the form of questions, not factual statements, and answer their own questions with “researchers think so”. The term “researcher” is presumed to carry infallibility among us pedestrians.

I am not at all against the idea that alien life exists. In fact, I think the conceit that our planet’s life forms are the only ones in the universe is untenable. But then, what of these other forms? For too long we assumed that life elsewhere had to model life here. This meant presumptively ruling out planets without environments which match ours. Then we began to discover the life forms we never thought possible, extremophiles which exist here in abundance in places so toxic, or so hot, or so cold as to almost instantly kill the life forms we see daily around us. We are only now aware of the thick bacterial blanket surrounding the Earth in the highest reaches of the atmosphere.

But skeptics would challenge the presence of intelligence within these species, holding fast to the self awarded title Homo sapiens – Man the wise. Yet even our definition of intelligence, and who or what can or cannot have it is changing. I have earlier written that Ray Kurzweil, a leader in the growing A.I. – Artificial Intelligence — movement, told us years ago the Singularity, the threshold beyond which no human mind can refute or verify a conclusion reached by a computer, is near. I would say, for me it’s already here. And I’m just using a desktop.

The growing awareness of A.I. has given new strength to the decades old position that life can also be silicon based, not just carbon based as we have known it. I’ve known several women who were largely silicone based, though I don’t think that’s what A.I. science had in mind. At least two of these women suffered bilateral implant encapsulation. The tissue surrounding the implants seized and hardened, leaving them looking like the front bumpers on a 1950’s Cadillac, and feeling the same way. Did I say, largely? When the poor dears tried sleeping face down their heads swung freely.

The issue re-surfacing with A.I. is that for all our scientific history we have been married to the idea of evolution as biological, and biological as carbon based. Now, as we go through our daily routines wearing Smartwatches with more computing power than the massive computer banks which sent Armstrong to the Moon, we are forced to reevaluate our concept of intelligence and who or what can carry it. Yes, computers can replicate themselves, and have been able to for years: Reproduction? Yes, computers can take in new information and purge outdated or useless information: Respiration? And now computers can process information and produce never before seen outcomes: Creativity? We are seeing the ability of computers to produce “offspring” which can exceed the parent generation’s capabilities on the order of several magnitudes: Evolution?

Again, the skeptics speak up saying these acts are not acts of volition; there is no personhood devising and driving them. Unsaid, however, is the unresolved issue of what constitutes personhood. No one has yet explained consciousness. And only a fool takes the road marked Free Will. Quantum computers already exist, leaving us to guess at their motivation just as we look at someone’s actions and joke about the “Darwin Awards”.

In one of his recent books the physicist Michio Kaku proposed a series of graduated stages for the development of intelligent life capable of inter-stellar travel and therefore contact with us. Of course, the existence of life forms with such intelligence and the willingness to visit us do not necessarily go together. But, to be kind, let’s assume for the moment some such adventurers, on a Jurassic Park like vacation, do visit us. I suspect they would view us much as we view roaches: an example of evolutionary success but with the built in limitations attendant upon being the most self-destructive species while at the same time being the Apex Parasite on the planet. Our attempt to develop an ethnology/ethnography of our visitors would parallel a roach’s attempt to understand why we stomped it.

Does intelligence have to appear in a human form for us to accept it as intelligence? Apparently. We still are taught that humans stand apart from “dumb animals”. I’ve written much on that so will not reprise it here. By the way, if the reader falls back on “dumb” as meaning without speech I would point to the recent decades of realization that many other species of non-humans, even plants, have sophisticated communications systems even at dialectical levels. It’s we who have long been too dumb to perceive them.

Does intelligence have to have feelings in order to function? Can a purely intelligent being act in ethical ways, or are ethics the expressions of loosely defined sentiments?

But here’s an open secret. Open because it’s all around us and always has been. Secret because even though in plain sight many people neither see nor understand it. Alien life is all around us. This is increasingly apparent since the rise of “populism”, the old wine in new bottles, to twist a saying. It is the world wide rise of Fascism disguised as what the people want. In the 1950’s a popular tobacco advertising theme was something like “100.000 people can’t be wrong”. Eventually, we came to realize 100,000 people can be wrong.

Especially in the recent United States, but also spreading through Europe human societies are fracturing into competing tribes. Adjust the focal length of the microscope and see that this phenomenon extends down to the familial level as well. Americans remembered the Civil War as “brother against brother” and swore to never let it happen again. I’m not asking for a show of hands, but I’m guessing some readers have found themselves in never-before-so-tense familial gatherings over the recent holidays, if they attended those gatherings at all. And so we now look at each other and see carbon based biological units in human form, therefore presumably intelligent, and wonder if this other thinks and feels like us, or is so unintelligent as to value all those things we know to be absolutely and fundamentally wrong.

“My gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.”¹

Is this the statement of an intelligent being? 

Talking recently with someone who frequently visits along the U.S./Mexican border they cited an area in the U.S. and said it was full of illegal aliens. I asked, “How do you know they are illegal? By their looks?” No answer.

Well, Dear Reader, I hope you have been stimulated to comment. Now I need to step into the bathroom and comment to the alien life in the mirror. In the immortal words of Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

1. The gut quote above is by Donald Trump. But, you knew that.