“God is always with us even through the storms.. “
Finally here we are at the end of 20 Centuries alone, our greatest fear realised. We are shivering in our new found isolation as the reality dawns that there really is no one out there. For eons human beings have found comfort in a cornucopia of gods who have slowly become more distant and evanescent, until now when they have finally slowly evaporated into the myths of former ages.
Surely no-one really believes that, for example, the Bible is the actual word of god, since we now know who wrote it – the Gospels were written not by disciples or eyewitnesses but by Romans a century after the death of Jesus. As initially the Age of Enlightenment, followed by the observational and predictive nature of science engulfed us, we lost our pagan belief in the supernatural. The initial reasons for our pagan beliefs were swept away piece by piece: the world is round, there is an invisible force called gravity, we are all related, invisible germs do exist, we are a speck on the edge of the universe and amazingly E = mc2. Just as our notion of the universe has expanded, so the gods have inevitably been placed further away. We may not find them for sometime. In my lifetime god was initially living behind a cloud just up there, then perhaps in another dimension or time immemorial, now he is way out beyond the big bang. This is so far away as to be meaningless and certainly not the nearby bearded grandfather figure we initially invented to help soothe our troubled souls.
God Creates Adam, Sistine Chapel 1508 by Michelangelo
Yet the nebulous desire for some sort of supernatural relationship is buried deep in our psyche, as evidenced by our positing of external spiritual influences in nearly all historical societies. Recent times have seen the supplanting of supernatural forces, whether they be ghosts, spirits or gods, with a fresh look to the heavens for salvation. There must be something out there, and we attempt to will it into existence through science fiction. The near universal popularity of Star Wars ($27 billion income) and Star Trek (by 1972 it was being syndicated in 60 countries) demonstrates the contemporary desire to meet an alien, to have a family, to not be alone.
By doing away with our gods and their self-appointed agents we have lost some comfort and certainty in our lives, yet the benefits of freedom from the savagery of the Old Testament and hell-fire damnation are myriad. In the harsh light of our modern scientific reality, there has been a more realistic look at our own behaviour and the mutual responsibilities to our isolated planet, which should eventually have a positive outcome.
Science currently tells us there must, by the law of probability, be more life in the universe. An example of this is the Drake equation, which gives an estimate of the number of civilisations in our galaxy. Since we have yet to find extraterrestrial life we are confronting a new universal existential anxiety: Fear Of No Aliens or FONA. This is not a new idea, but a contemporary restatement of the eternal conundrum “Why are we here?”, which our historical myths and religions have claimed to answer for many centuries. Now if we can’t find those pesky aliens, we will invent them, we are used to doing that. Perhaps it may be better to “unask” the question as some eastern philosophies do.
NASA Mars Spirit Rover Photograph 2008
Once recognised FONA can be seen coursing through our culture in many different guises, from the medieval fear of a godless world to our adoption of the Gaia hypothesis, which posits that Earth is a self-regulating system. With the decline of violence (cf. The Better Angels of Our Nature by Stephen Pinker) and the cultural opposition to xenophobia, we can finally embrace the so called alien and hence make our discovery of it more realistic.
FONA is simply the latest development in a seemingly never ending quest, a more mature yet still perplexing reaction to our perceived place in the universe. Is there anyone out there? We fervently hope so, to the point that we have already invented a panoply of anthropomorphic aliens, just as we once did with our gods. The difference is now that we recognise our own creations for what they are: science fiction. Nevertheless the emotional desire to find the alien/god/creator/teacher remains strongly within our human psyche. It looks like FONA will be with us for some time to come, maybe it always has been.
WMAP image of the universe 13.8 billion years ago, shaped by Quantum Effects
Perhaps we are here with our unique self-awareness just to strive to explore…and one day find those aliens.
“We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.”
Stephen Hawking Der Spiegel (17 October 1988)
For further information see The Fermi Paradox
Enrico Fermi (1901–1954) saw the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations, such as in the Drake equation, and the lack of evidence for such civilizations.
aka: Where is everybody? • Where are they? • The Great Silence • silentium universi
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