by Pamela Grundy

Created on: March 14, 2008   Last Updated: March 19, 2008

Are we ready for contact with alien beings from outer space? Chances are we are as ready as we will ever be. The problem with this question is that it implies a first contact similar to what happens in the movies: "The Day Day the Earth Stood Still," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," or even "Independence Day." In these films and countless others, we first become aware of the aliens, then we attempt to communicate with the aliens, and then we react to the aliens, for good or ill. In truth we may not even recognize a truly alien species, either because of the limitations of our own organs of perception, or our lack of imagination regarding what alien life might look like.

Let's look at an example right here on Earth.

It takes about five seconds for events that happen in a snail's environment to register in a snail's small brain. For a snail, this is plenty fast enough. Not much goes on in the world of a snail, and what does go on there, goes on very slowly. Now suppose that a human being, regarding this slow-moving snail with some minor curiosity, were to pick up the snail and move it forward a foot just for the hell of it. By the time the snail realized its environment had changed, it would already be somewhere new ans unfamiliar. It would seem to the snail as though it was instantly transported through space for no apparent reason. That's because the snail doesn't need an awareness that includes human beings picking it up and moving it around, and so it doesn't have such an awareness.

Taking a snail's eye view of the whole situation, do you think the snail would be able to shift its attention away from the greenery right in front of it, look up, see the human being, and then say to itself, "Oh no, not another human being messing around again! Damn them!" Probably not. Instead what the snail would have (assuming it was a very reflective snail) is what alien abductees often claim to have: a chunk of missing time with no explanation for it.

A competing theory about extraterrestrial life states that there is no good reason to assume alien beings would NOT be very much like us. In this view, several assumptions are made: 1) that life evolves in a similar way wherever it appears, 2) that human beings are always at the top of this evolutionary food chain, and therefore 3) we would not expect to find anything intelligent that looked much different from ourselves. I find this argument unimaginative and unconvincing. For example, even if that biological reasoning is sound (and I think that it isn't), the theory that intelligent life always will be similar to human life assumes shared cultural constructs such as time, language, and social interaction that we don't even share between species right here on earth. (I.E. Our friend the snail.)

Physics is getting more and more bizarre with each passing day, as anyone who has dabbled in quantum theory knows. Some very reputable physicists now believe that the universe is not three-dimensional, or even four-dimensional, but multi-dimensional, a concept I confess is as intellectually overwhelming for me as human interference is for garden pests. For all I know, an alien life form could be observing me typing this essay at this very moment.

I wonder if It understands MS Vista?

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