They’re coming! They’re coming!
Or not, as it happens. Did anyone see the meteor over Jo’burg on Saturday night? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af6rCf0xw8M Did anyone wonder if (or hope) it was something more exciting than a boring lump of rock (albeit a rock from space)? Was anyone really disappointed when some dry astronomer took all the romance out of it?
Of course I knew it wasn’t little green men, or little grey men, or anything like that. But for a moment I did wish that I had been one of the ones who were confused, who thought that This Was It, one of the ones who had the devil scared out of them. I have some devils to get rid of, and one of them is boring, cynical rationalism.
But what if ET had arrived in a flash on Saturday night? We would have been terribly embarrassed. It would have been a bit like having unexpected guests arrive. You smile, and invite them in for tea, but the whole time you’re worrying that they’re going to notice the huge pile of dirty laundry that you haven’t had time to deal with or die of shock if they wander into the kitchen. We’re just not ready.
Because, let’s face it, we’ve proven time and time again that we are a species with no natural talent for housework. Our planet is in a bit of a state, to put it mildly. If you believe Hamlet, and, well, God, we are the paragon of animals, we have dominion over all the Earth. Maybe Hamlet was pretending to be mad at that point in the play, I can never remember. But it is increasingly obvious that we aren’t qualified for the job of managing the planet, and that God should never have bothered to hire a middleman.
So what would we have to show off to our extraterrestrial visitors? I suppose we would have to start with the natural beauty of the planet, the bits we haven’t chopped down or built over yet. Thankfully there is still plenty to see, as long as the visitors don’t start asking too many questions, like why there seems to be smoke rising from the edges of the rainforests, or why some coral reefs seems so ghostly and deserted.
Then we’ll show them the places we live. I’m sure every planet has its fair share of bad architects, so there’s no reason to be embarrassed by most of it. They may even be impressed by what we have achieved, the way we have transformed our landscape to suit our needs, how we’ve made our concrete mark. Again, I hope they don’t ask questions about what was here before, what happened to whoever and whatever lived here before us.
And then they will want to see more. We can show them ancient sites. They’re good enough for earth tourists, I’m sure they’re good enough for ET. We can show them ruins that are being swallowed by deserts, and abandoned monuments in South America. We can show them how vain ancient rulers were in building monuments to their egos, and how much money and manpower were spent on temples to silly, primitive gods. And we will hope that they don’t ask why those civilisations failed, and how we are so different.
I hope they don’t come.
But maybe I am making that obvious mistake, thinking that we are the only life forms in the universe who have got it so wrong. It’s rather new age and shoo wah to think that someone Out There has all the answers. William S Burroughs wrote, ”We are like water creatures looking up at the land and air and wondering how we can survive in that alien medium. The water we live in is Time. That alien medium we glimpse beyond time is Space. And that is where we are going”, assuming that the answers were all beyond us. Maybe there is some point there, or maybe he just should have laid off the heroin for a while.
Carl Sagan has a formula for working out how many planets support life, how many of those have intelligent life, and how many have achieved civilisation comparable with or more advanced than ours. He stops there, when I feel that he should have included the next steps: the number that have achieved civilisation comparable with or more advanced than ours and then messed up, and even those that have messed up and then come to, backtracked and reversed the situation before it is too late.
Because those are the ones I would like to meet.