Unidentified Fundamental Obsession

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Wiser through astronomy, humbler through searching our conscience, we have finally learned to embrace our mediocrity. We do not know if there are others out there--frankly, we don't know anything about these creatures whatsoever--but for the sake of decency and good galactic citizenship we know we should pay them the respect they deserve.

And yet we might be alone.

We might be the freaks of the universe, an example of what conceivably can happen when chemistry begets biology. Another possibility is that we are not alone but will never find anything with which we can make meaningful contact. The aliens might be boring, depressed, insular creatures with no imagination or verve. The aliens could be blobs of goop. The aliens could be exploring our world in 'nanoprobes,' tiny robotic craft we don't even notice--a theory suggested to me by none other than Dan Goldin, administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The aliens might dominate entire galaxies but never set foot into intergalactic space. They could be so strange-looking that when we see them we don't even recognize them as aliens. It has been suggested that the aliens are actually the animals we know in everyday life as cats.

The aliens of our age exist in an uncharted territory between science and mythology. They are not entirely imaginary and not entirely real. Perhaps we could say that they are plausibly real in a cosmic context, and increasingly questionable in smaller fragments of the universe. Their status must be reduced to highly implausible in the context of any particular cornfield or desert arroyo, and extremely implausible under your bed. In other words, when we are discussing the reality or lack of reality of aliens, it is necessary, or at least helpful, to specify location.

Of the many things that we still don't know about the universe, aliens are the biggest. I mean the biggest in the literal sense. Aliens--unless they are for some reason really small, like Goldin's nanoprobes--have the interesting quality of being more or less on our own scale of physical existence, theoretically. If you contemplate the major mysteries of nature, the questions that will keep scientists in business for decades or centuries to come, you may notice that these unknowns often involve microscopic or submicroscopic or sub-submicroscopic phenomena. The questions may sound 'large' or 'cosmic,' but the answers are likely to involve things that happen on a small scale, too small to wrap your arms around. Let me offer a short list of major unknowns facing the world of science:

1. How did the universe come into existence?
2. What is the essence of matter and energy?
3. How did life originate?
4. How is consciousness manufactured in the brain?
5. Are there intelligent beings on other worlds?

The first four questions might excite scientists, but they'd never interest Hollywood. Why? Because in each case the answer is something almost incomprehensibly small.

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