This Unholy Mess

Here we go again. The question of whether we are alone in the universe comes roaring back each time there is a spate of new “sightings” of alien spacecraft, or when we receive a new government report on such sightings by military pilots, or, as is the case now, when conspiracy theories are all the rage in America and no one want to miss a chance to include a few about visitors from outer space. Are the little green people here now? Are they going to do terrible things to us? Enslave us? Enlighten us? Make us all learn to play contract bridge? Such questions are raised alongside other more serious ones, such as: Is there a national security risk involved?
By the way, they’re not UFOs anymore. In official government circles, that acronym has been retired, replaced by “UAP,” Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, a reference that government leaders hope will distance them from those who insist they were abducted by space aliens and forced either to undergo implants of various kinds, or have kinky sex with them. Or maybe something else. I can’t keep track.
The arguments for and against the existence of intelligent extra-terrestrial life have been around for a long time. But the discussion has shifted recently, now that we know–thanks to the Webb telescope–there are roughly two trillion galaxies in the universe, each of which contains an estimated average of a hundred billion stars. Crunching those kinds of numbers, we are told by some of the people crazy enough to specialize in probability theory that there is indeed a decent chance that the vastness of the cosmos contains planets with intelligent life forms (among which we generously include ourselves, despite so much evidence to the contrary).
So it has become not a question of whether but rather when we have contact with them. It’s just a space/time issue. If it has not already happened, how long will it take us to fuel our spacecraft with proper quantities of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, or whatever? Or when will we have incontrovertible proof that our alien buddies found that fuel far sooner and have visited us?
Now for the sad part. The issue is not whether such contact is possible or inevitable, but more the weirdness of our current obsessive hunger for proof of contact with these superior beings, however shaky and anecdotal that proof might be. It’s a kind of cosmic transference that pushes our hopes and fears away from ourselves and onto the little green people. If they are benevolent, they will be the force that propels us out of the morass of war, climate change chaos, and micro-plastics poisoning that we have created for ourselves. As a malign force, their lust for interstellar domination will unite humans in a Wellsian War of the Worlds against them. Either way, our species can luxuriate in one of our favorite, potentially fatal delusions: looking to a force outside ourselves to decisively influence our fate. The obsession with visitors from another world allows us to dodge the naked truth of our situation: in the end we have only ourselves to rely on to make a better world, only ourselves to blame if we don’t.
Whether or when the cosmic shakedown takes place, it seems obvious that the best move for human beings now is to worry a little less about extra-terrestrials and more about our terrestrial home. How are we doing on that score? It’s a good question, posed most often by those who hold that no super-intelligent extra-terrestrial will come near this planet–mess that it is–for fear of getting some of it on their shoes.
Our fate is surely more bound up in how able we are to be responsible custodians of our planet than in speculation about space aliens who might show up on our doorstep. The opportunity to preserve for future human beings this world of heart-stopping wonders is something real, that can be furthered now, and not a conjectural proposition about the detection of alien spacecraft. Not that we shouldn’t be aware of the possibility of interstellar guests, but boy, is it going to be a bad joke if we are committing irreversible planetary suicide just at the moment when visitors come knocking, possibly unaware that their footwear will be ruined.