And Now, the News For Goldfish

I'm okay with the possibility that human supremacy in the Universe shouldn't be taken for granted. Are you?

Sometimes a joke is the best explanation, so I made this:

UFOs. UAPs. Who knows? I certainly don’t. If I knew for certain, I’d probably freak out. But as I’ve been writing science fiction stories for a while, it’s been ingrained in my mind to consider every possibility…

That much-hyped “UFO report” was one big meh, wasn’t it? The issue remains unresolved.

But what if the “impossible” happened?

What if something truly alien appeared in the world as undeniable, public proof that we’re not alone in the Universe, and that “it” was clearly far superior to Homo Sapiens in technological level and intelligence?

I recommend the blog Unintended Consequences, which has an intriguing article on that particular subject: “Unintended UAPs.”

Alexander Wendt wrote a paper back in 2008 titled “Sovereignty and the UFO,” in which he made an unusual claim: Our entire modern society is based on the unspoken agreement that humans are the closest thing to a “higher authority” we’ll ever get. There’s nothing that can “whup” us as a species - or so we assume - and therefore the very possibility of alien intelligence in our world must remain an abstract concept, never a physical, tangible reality.

I’m not saying this proves there’s a “UFO cover-up.” A cover-up would imply acceptance of a known fact. It’s probably more like a human psychological weakness - we can’t see what we really, deep down, don’t want to see.

Remember that line in the old movie Planet of the Apes?

Of course there has to be something better, somewhere in a cosmos so vast, so old. (There might very well also be something even worse.) Unfortunately, we cannot prove with thought experiments what a vastly superior intelligence might do if it found us.

The best I can do - and I admit it’s not much - is to reason by analogy: We humans visit the zoo out of curiosity, not cruelty. Hence, if there were aliens so intelligent that we were like chimps compared to them, they might study us out of curiosity or even for entertainment.

(I assume here that they’d be too civilized to conduct cruel experiments, or that there aren’t “juvenile delinquent” aliens willing to torment Earthlings for fun, the way humans would tease an animal, or that they wouldn’t keep us as pets.)

The scenario in the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still is that paternalistic aliens arrive to “judge” humanity. I think this is dumb. Seriously: Who in their right mind goes to the zoo and starts criticizing the chimps for their behavior?

(Then again, what if the hypothetical aliens were self-important jerks? Why do we assume that higher intelligence always leads to superior ethics?)

How would human civilization fare if we all knew that superior aliens were constantly present, like some vast, ominous shadow in the sky, perhaps not “doing” things to us but obviously watching everything we do?

I suppose humans can adapt to almost any situation… though I’m not optimistic that our current self-image could survive such a demotion.

Would the same people who write and read science fiction be “uniquely prepared” for something like real contact with aliens? Well… I wrote a story on that theme, available in my short fiction collection A MAN CALLED MISTER BROWN And Other Stories .

If the impossible happened, would you freak out? (How would Neal DeGrasse Tyson react? Or the President of the U.S. ? Or the Pope, or the Ayatollah of Iran?)