AND-WHY NOT?-WE MIGHT BE HORRIFIC. A REIMAGINED UFO UPDATE.
In the Terry Bisson short story, "They're Made Out Of Meat," originally published in OMNI in 1991, two aliens sit around having a baffled conversation about the strange life-forms they've been studying in the course of their survey of the universe-human beings.
"They're made of meat?" one alien asks the other.
"That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?" answers the second. The notion of meat capable of building machines strikes the two aliens as patently absurd; they are too entirely entrenched in their own physiology to comprehend the fleshy bipeds they've been abducting and probing in their reconnaissance vessels. "How can meat make a machine?" the aliens wonder aloud. Sentient meat-no, it's simply out of the question. Thinking meat? Dreaming meat? There must be something they're missing.
It's a classic story, often reproduced, and, as a thought experiment, particularly timeless. How might we, as a species, appear to an extraterrestrial intelligence? After all, we have our own ideas about what aliens look like, and tell each other campfire stories about little green men, or skinny, spooky grey ones with almond-shaped eyes, aliens which-in spite of their superficial differences-are largely humanoid. It's likely than aliens would approach us in a similarly short-sighted manner. It's difficult to separate the whole sensorial apparatus from the consciousness it encases. The special value of science fiction often lies in a writer's capacity to divorce themselves completely from the entire human trip, to imagine things ostensibly beyond our capacity to imagine. Bisson's aliens are so repulsed by the idea of meat communicating with meat by flapping its meaty orifices around that they mark our entire planet as unread and move on, looking for "real" intelligence, like conscious clouds of dust and gas. You might scoff, but anytime we discount the possibility of life taking such an extremely bizarre form, we're no better than Bisson's small-minded aliens.
This Tumblr thread, which has been making the rounds online, suggests a similar thought experiment: imagine a science-fiction story where humans, instead of being the victims of marauding aliens or Kaiju monsters tearing out of the ocean, are actually the scary ones? In a sense, this is obvious. We've done more harm to our planet in our relatively minuscule window of history than any other species in the entire geological record, happily chewing up its resources without any consideration of our own descendants, let alone the long-term health of the biome. But this works on a cosmic scale, too.
If we ever do manage to get off this rock and start exploring other planets, and if we happened to come across extraterrestrial life sensitive to our particular stew of bodily fluids, we wouldn't be a species-we'd be a plague. It would be the New World all over again. "HUMANS CAN PROJECT BIOWEAPONS FROM ALMOST EVERY ORIFICE ON THEIR BODY," jokes Tumblr user mikhailvladimirovich, DO NOT INHALE." Further, there's no telling if the touch of our skin might not be corrosive, the timbre of our vocalizations horrifically strident, or our bodily odors fatally toxic.
We're also maddeningly relentless predators; as comedian Louis C.K. says, we don't fully appreciate the fact that we are out of the food chain. We eat and drink poisons for kicks, enslave other animals for amusement, regenerate torn muscles to grow stronger, enact genocide over slight differences in opinion, and multiply at incredible rates. We're scary, impulsive, ruthless creatures that have overpowered our planet and might presumably, someday, overpower others.
Don't buy it? Consider this incredible apocalypse map of the world, dotted with hundreds of ecological catastrophes and mysterious biohazards. Or, while we're at it, read Tim Barribeau's feature on "OMNI Reboot "this week, "The Waste Lands," which details in loving detail some of the places on Earth we've rendered completely uninhabitable with our fearsome intra-alien warmongering. But you don't really need me to tell you that we're "homo terribilis". The proof is all around you.
Aliens are the pure other-by definition. The idea of being adbucted by UFOs in the traditional sense is frightening, above all, because of its inscrutability. What do they "want"? The fundamental and specifically uncanny dread of alienness is rarely depicted effectively in science fiction. Octavia Butler did it well in her novel "Dawn", which is about an alien race called the Oankali. The Oankali are ugly-covered in thousands of wormlike tentacles that serve as sensory organs-but it's not their ugliness that's repulsive. It's their shocking "difference". Upon first meeting an Oankali, humans panic, lose consciousness, and self-mutilate. They literally cannot bring themselves to move any closer to the aliens, or even look directly at them. It takes days of perpetually terrified cohabitation, with the humans pushed to the brink of psychic collapse, for any communication to occur. Of course, the Oankali think they look just fine. It's the disconnect which creates the fear.
All of this is to say that as we gaze outwards into the cosmos, we should consider not just our profound insignificance, as is the custom for such activities, but the very real possibility that we are an ugly and despised race of aliens-if not objectively, then at least relative to whoever might be gazing back. It's a pretty effective form of meditation.
As Carl Sagan, with his usual grace, wrote in "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space", "our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves." Sure. But what if, like the aliens in Bisson's wonderful and oft-cited story, the rest of the universe finds us disgusting, cruel, sinister, and frankly hard to take seriously-I mean, what if it doesn't "want" to save us from ourselves? Of course, there's always the possibility that this is all just a fever dream from a slowly festering hunk of steak.
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