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7 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
I keep imagining some alien post grad students passing around a bong (whatever passes for a bong on their world!) filled with some alien weed, and giggling: "Oh man, are we playing with the heads of those monkeys!"
4. We’re Made Out of Meat
From the Nebula Award-nominated short story, “They’re Made Out of Meat” by Terry Bisson:
"They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"Meat. They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"There's no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."
"That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?"
"They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."
"So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."
"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."
"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."
"I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in that sector and they're made out of meat."
A little while later:
"They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"
"Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."
"I thought you just told me they used radio."
"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat, it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."
"Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"
"Officially or unofficially?"
"Both."
"Officially, we are required to contact, welcome and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in this quadrant of the Universe, without prejudice, fear or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing."
"I was hoping you would say that."
"It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"
"I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say? 'Hello, meat. How's it going?'
--from the OP
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Intelligent species, advanced enough for interstellar travel and contact, either didn't evolve as "meat" or did so so long ago that they consider us to be primitively icky.
I like it because it's very funny--not so much because I think it's true. I mean, if we ourselves found intelligence in something that was icky, we probably wouldn't let that get in the way of communicating with it. Still, it's funny to look at ourselves as other very alien beings might look at us. I'm reminded of the Star Trek: Next Generation episode "Home Soil," in which the Enterprise crew discover life as a collective intelligence that developed in small crystals (on a planet that a Federation science team has been trying to terraform--the "crystals" start resisting; the terraforming project has been destroying them). When communication is finally established with this crystal intelligence, the crystal intelligence describes human beings as "ugly bags of mostly water."
LOL!
Are we "icky"? Or, are we unworthy of being asked to join Galactic Civilization, because we are destroying our planet, or because we spawn whackos with arsenals of high powered weapons who randomly kill innocent people, or because we have highly armed governments that routinely wage war and slaughter hundreds of thousands of intelligent beings (ourselves), or because we can't stop killing elephants, dolphins and other intelligent fellow critters?
I don't favor that "weird" hypothesis--that we are unworthy--flawed, or not sufficiently advanced, to be contacted. I think that intelligent life is pervasive in our galaxy and in the universe. Intelligence is as inevitable a development of the evolving universe as is the creation of planets, stars, solar systems and galaxies. Intelligence cannot be unique, just as our planet cannot be, and never was, unique.
And the more we learn about the universe, the less unique do we become. With the truly astonishing explosion of information about our galaxy and the universe, in just the last ten years alone--for instance, the discovery of thousands of exoplanets (planets outside of our solar system, around other stars), in just a very modest section of our own galaxy near Earth--it is very difficult for us to take it all in--to absorb the meaning of these staggering discoveries and our immensely more detailed view of the universe, and to fit our own existence and our own intelligence into this much bigger and better picture of what is.
It is only in the last century that we discovered other galaxies--billions of them, containing billions and billions of stars. It is only over the last ten years that we have discovered water nearly everywhere we look in our own solar system. It is only very recently that the Big Bang/Inflation theory has been pretty much confirmed. Advances in astronomy, and all other sciences, and advances in technology, have been staggering in recent years. The mind reels! It is mind-boggling even for literate, progressive people, let alone for the many among us who are barely literate or who cling, in panic, to what they consider "biblical" certitudes.
So, it is very difficult to think about the Fermi Paradox ("Where is everybody?"
. I get the feeling that even these "weird" solutions don't scratch the surface of what is. All of "what is" and where we fit into all of "what is" may be a paradox in itself--not the paradox of "where is everybody?" but a never-before-thought-of paradox of space-time or gravitational lensing or fractals (our brains, the universe) or "strings" or "dark matter." For instance, the question may not be "where is everybody?" but "why have we FORGOTTEN everybody?".
Weird theories Nos. 1 and 8 are attractive: that we may be in a galactic zoo--a protected "wild" area, where intelligence has been noticed as in development, and advanced civilizations have forbidden interference here. Or, that "we can't read the signs"--other civilizations are using technology that we don't yet have. (The truth may be a combination of these two.) Interesting ideas, but somehow not adequate.
I had never heard of No. 11, regarding gamma-ray bursts exterminating many nascent alien civilizations, but, as the universe evolves with fewer of these bursts, civilizations can NOW start flourishing and contacting each other. Have to think about that one (and more information is needed). I doubt No. 7 ("All Aliens are Homebodies"
, because, obviously, alien civilizations would have had to travel outward and make contact in order to learn from experience that home is best (that contact is dangerous). The key is "all." We're talking four hundred billion stars in our galaxy and billions and billions of other galaxies. How can "all" potential aliens in our unimaginably VAST universe make such a decision? Also, any that did would likely leave traces of themselves (just as we did with Voyager, only more so, with who knows how many feelers out into the universe before they decided to stay home?).
I think we need to learn much MORE about the universe (microcosm and macrocosm) and about ourselves before we can address the Fermi Paradox. It's kind of a silly question in a way--"where is everybody?"--when we've only just recently discovered exoplanets. Our technology--dramatically advancing though it is, from our perspective--is clearly not up to contacting other intelligent beings. And why they haven't contacted us may be, a) a matter of the speed of light (the vastness of the time-space between us and them; or some twist to it that we haven't yet realized--for instance, if time-space is a spiral, contact may be periodic with diminishing intensity), or b) they have contacted us but we are not yet capable of understanding their communications (for instance, if advanced alien civilizations develop telepathy, which trumps the limits of the speed of light, they may be sending messages to our sleeping minds via dreams, and they are the ones who are puzzled by the lack of communication back, because we don't know how to do it.)
Well, now I'm just speculating, too, on the basis of too little information. It's fun to do. But I'm just saying that we don't know enough--not nearly enough--to ask this question ("where is everybody?"
. It is a premature question. Fun as it is.
