Unidentified Fundamental Obsession

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Astronomers say the night sky is full of stars that may have planets, which in turn might harbor life. The UFO heretics push this official story a bit further, populating it with creatures of their own devising. They also assume that some subset of mysterious aerial phenomena is the result of an alien presence. They see and report things they cannot explain, so many, in fact, that the Air Force spent 22 years investigating the phenomenon, notably through Project Blue Book, before finally giving up in 1969.

Some of us are crazier than others, but we're all searchers. We're all scientists of a sort. Even if you don't buy into the invasion scenario, it's hard to go through life without pausing to wonder what's out there. On a dark, moonless night, the stars explode upon our consciousness, challenging us to figure out the significance of all that brilliance. We find ourselves asking big questions: Why does the universe exist? What's the point of it? Why are we here at all? It's almost as though we don't really know who we are in the immensity of space.

The Copernican principle holds that there is nothing special about our place in the universe. We now know we are an ordinary world in orbit around an ordinary star in an ordinary galaxy that is but one of perhaps 50 billion galaxies. As the 'known universe' has grown in size during the 20th century--its expanse redrawn as new and better telescopes reveal ever more distant structures--we have fully absorbed the notion that Earth is but a speck, a smudge, an insignificant granule in the brain-hammering enormousness of space.

To deal with this existential crisis we develop stories. We are storytellers by nature. The stories we tell the most passionately are those that deal with our relationship to the gods and other entities with powers beyond the mortal sphere. Those stories have been forever changed by modern science. Astronomy in particular has altered the narrative, or at least its scale. No longer must we account merely for the beings that live in the sky or under the earth or in a heavenly sphere that surrounds our planet. We have to account for all the forces in a universe vast beyond imagination. We are told that there may be other universes outside our own, similarly huge. We have to wrestle with cosmologies that blow our minds.

There are people who are at peace with our demotion from the center of the universe. They feel that an awareness of our true place in the universe will counter some of the worst human vanities. Anthropocentrism has had nasty applications in everyday life, from destruction of the environment to exploitation of animals to repression of people whom those in power regarded as less human than themselves. Anthropocentrism is a kind of cosmic bigotry. It is now far more fashionable to embrace an extreme counteranthropocentrism, in which humans are not terribly special in any way at all.

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