Taking Aliens Seriously
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy"
It is one of the things that you might admit to your friend under your breath, or come up with as a response to an awkward party icebreaker when asked to solicit your least cool or most unpopular opinion. It has been the premise of untold movies and books, from E.T to Arrival and and a million others. It has been the province of starry eyed dreamers and muttering conspiracy theorists, and when it shows up in culture is given the dubious moniker of ‘science fiction,’ acknowledging it to be a strange hybrid of the respectable and the fantastic, a reasonable conjecture parading in fantastic drag.
I’m thinking, of course, about the belief that we are not alone in the universe, and that Earth’s story is not the only plot on offer. There are many versions of this conviction, from a full-fledged belief in higher civilizations and other dimensions to more circumspect conjectures about veins of subterranean streams crisscrossing distant planets. If anyone is out there, wouldn’t we already have found them? But if we haven’t found them, does that necessarily mean they aren’t out there?
The search for other life, or its search for us, has often seemed like the space race’s crazy cousin. If reaching the moon and brushing up against the galaxy’s outer limits showed that we could touch the face of God and not expect anyone to walk in on us, then beaming radio signals into the vastness illustrated that we hoped someone would. Thinkers as diverse as Hannah Arendt and Ross Douthat have seen in the moon landing a hinge of human history, a test case for what could be achieved.
Arendt worried that in conquering the moon, humanity would lose sight of itself from its own galactic vantage point, lost in its own technological magnificence: “under these circumstances, speech and everyday language would indeed be no longer a meaningful utterance that transcends behavior even if it only expresses it, and it would much better be replaced by the extreme and in itself meaningless formalism of mathematical signs.” Douthat was more sanguine, seeing in Neil Armstrong’s footprint the final stride between a retreat into decadence and narrower, terrestrial ambitions. More than fifty years ago, Norman Lamm, one of America’s most prominent rabbis acknowledged that “the existence of rational, sentient beings on a planet other than earth is no longer a fantastic, remote possibility conjectured by imaginative and unrealistic minds.”
If for a long time the burden of proof seemed squarely on the shoulders of those “imaginative and unrealistic minds” who argued for aliens, the paradigm seems to be shifting away from restraint and towards Roswell. Noted Harvard physics professor Avi Loeb published a book arguing that all things considered the most reasonable explanation for unidentified flying objects was that they were crafted by alien hands. Pundits like Ezra Klein began publishing pieces that would have been more at home on Reddit a decade ago. In an interview with James Corden, former President Barack Obama admitted “What is true, and I'm actually being serious here, is that there is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don't know exactly what they are.” The creator of the X-Files has weighed in, naturally, although to express a fair amount of skepticism.
The most dramatic development in this UFO friendly moment was the release on Friday of a report authored by the Department of Defense and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence following a December a 2020 budget stipulation that the government furnish its best explanation for 144 unexplained aerial events, most of them spotted by Air Force and Coast Guard personnel. Of these incidents, the report found a compelling explanation for only one. While it did not make the affirmative case for alien life, it did not explicitly rule it out. We don’t know far more than we do.
Even if the needle moves just a little bit on this question, I think it is an exciting development. Arendt worried about a planet-eye view of our condition, because she wanted us to be in the political scrum. But in a time of tribalism and polarized smugness, when Twitter can feel like an awfully claustrophobic shouting match without end, how wonderful to be able to set our sights a little bit higher. When people on all sides are so sure of everything, it might be salutary to be tossed into a position of galactic uncertainty. Would there be any greater confirmation of the wonder and wildness of our journey as a species than to discover that our soliloquy is actually a duet?
Thinking about UFOs out there also might train us to think about the blurry things closer to home. Living with doubt is not just a problem for the telescope: it yields fruit under the microscope as well. To cultivate (un)knowing is to live inside complexity, to be acutely aware of how each one of us is a cosmos that no one will ever fully explore, least of all ourselves. It means taking leaps of faith, bucking assumptions, and remaining wide open to wonder: gazing into eyes that reflect your own, lingering with minds that challenge yours. It paints summer nights when it can be difficult to separate the horizon from the shore, and the farthest star from the lighthouse guiding you home.
Have a great week,
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