On the NASA Voyager mission in 1977, Carl Sagan curated content for a golden record that was affixed to the space probe, which would eventually reach interstellar space. Hoping to share some details about our celestial neighborhood and the human experience, Sagan chose the material for the record should any spacefaring alien species intercept the probe.
This week, I engaged in an absurd conversation with someone who posited that sending messages like those Sagan built was a potentially disastrous idea. While the dialogue was open-minded and respectful (proof that’s still possible on the internet), the other person based his belief on the idea that any intelligent alien life would invariably come to destroy our Earth and enslave its people.
The assumption that said visitors will only be hostile seems as far-fetched as the idea itself.
That said, I believe that we are not alone in this universe. Even if intelligent life is a rare find—and our own Earth may suggest that it is—the odds are that such lifeforms exist on at least one of the billions of worlds that spin within our own galaxy, not to mention the trillions of other galaxies spread across space and time.
However, with so much distance between these worlds, the odds against stumbling on intelligent neighborhoods are literally astronomical.
First, our own perception of intelligence can only be judged against mankind and other species on this Earth. Because we believe we are the most intelligent beings on this planet, we rightly search the stars for similarly intelligent life.
If the race that attempts to contact us really is more advanced than we are, who are we to say they would still resort to the primitive concept of hostility that we know all too well and have, in fact, ‘perfected’ over our relatively short time span? Then again, alien races such as the ones postulated, may look at us the way we look at amoebas.
What if our spacefaring neighbors are simply looking to make interplanetary friends? Should we be suspicious of that notion and reject it outright, or should we “come in peace?”
With all this hypothetical supposition, you may wonder whether I had a relevant topic in mind. While that question should always be warranted with me, I do have something in mind.
The conversation in question arose because of another primitive human emotion—fear.
We fear that extraterrestrial species will become hostile if they discover our planetary home. Whether or not it is warranted, fear is a natural emotion in the face of the unknown.
The fear of those who do not look like us, think like us, worship like us, or vote like us works its slimy tentacles through every facet of our public life. If, like the Jedi from Star Wars insist, fear leads to hate, one can postulate where this will lead us as a species. We seem to be at war one with another based on ideology or preferred political candidates, or at least that’s what certain politicians would like us to believe.
Fear makes human beings do things we normally would not do, but whether or not it is natural, Christians should agree that fear is a sin. After all, in the Holy Bible you can read a different “fear not” quote every day of the year. That phrase is written in the good book 365 times.
“Nothing in life is to be feared,” Physicist Marie Curie noted, “it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”
Perhaps if we look at differences of opinion or appearance as merely that and forget the rest, we will be lest predisposed to fear. [Insert political group here] is not out to destroy America. LGBTQ people are not shoving anything down our throats, and immigrants are not involved in a wide-ranging conspiracy to overthrow our culture. Black and brown Americans are not trying to assert dominance or to burn cities. These people are our friends and neighbors. Demonizing and painting these groups as the enemy only exacerbates the ugly rhetoric that dominates public discourse in this era.
Defeating fear, while not easy, may ultimately come down to understanding.
Franklin D. Roosevelt famously offered this pertinent advice: “First of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
We can’t hope for a brighter future if we are constantly looking over our shoulders at those perceived threats that we believe seek to trip us up. Sprinters don’t look back at the runners behind them because doing so would likely end in a defeat administered by those same opponents.
We obviously do not need to fear an alien invasion since there is currently no evidence that one is forthcoming. Instead of looking to the stars for new frontiers of terror, we should reflect on our own understanding that we seek to instill on one another. Fear is a dark and primitive poison that eats away at reason, but we can rise above it if we listen and learn.