What's Out There?

What’s out there?

My space-obsessed four and three quarter year old might ask me that soon, so I better have an answer.

At the moment he’s happy to copy his ten and a half year old brother and stick with “What’s in Uranus?” for laughs. (Although he does actually want to know what’s in Uranus, too.)

Recently, I have been replaced by Professor Brian Cox on bedtime story reading duties.

Instead of me reading simple kids' books on space until he falls asleep, Prof. Cox narrates stories on YouTube about black holes, space-time elasticity and Fermi’s Paradox. It’s fascinating, and sends the little one off to sleep at least as efficiently as me reading to him.

I admit that while I was aware of Fermi’s Paradox, I hadn’t quite cottoned on to its significance.

That, in answer the the question “What’s out there?” there’s an unimaginably vast number of planets, stars, galaxies, etc., in an even more unimaginably vast and mostly empty space. And in spite of this vastness, there’s absolutely zero evidence (so far) of any kind of life at all other than here on our tiny, tiny speck of Earth. We’re alone.

Echoing Carl Sagan, Prof. Cox was quite poetic about it and described it as the Universe taking millions of years to come up with just the right conditions for an unbroken chain of evolutionary life to emerge that has an awareness of itself.

And that the Universe is a frighteningly violent place so it’s quite miraculous that we haven’t (yet) been smashed or fried in some astronomical event. In fact, we look odds-on to smash or fry ourselves first right here, right now.

Our evolutionarily advantageous over-confidence will inevitably lead us to self-destruction, as surely as boom leads to bust, as we ignore climate warnings from our wise elders, wage war on our brothers and our sisters, and repeatedly fail to think of the children.

We’re wedded to screens and technology as life passes us by. Doom-scribing, scrolling and trolling, when we should be out there talking to our neighbours, being the change we want to see in the ‘hood, and showing some fucking solidarity with each other. We’re not all perfect, we can all say and do the wrong things, even hold the wrong beliefs.

Identity politics has much to answer for, but the answer isn’t to dismiss people’s lived experiences. Each to their own, and everyone must be able to live their lives as they want to while not harming others. But when someone expresses themselves in ways that cause hurt or offense, piling on and ostracising them often just deepens divisions.

Instead, we need to find ways to acknowledge everyone’s feelings and guide each other toward mutual understanding. This isn’t easy, especially online, but it’s essential if we want to build real solidarity.

Because the point is that the people who want to colonize Mars, or make “their” country great again, or spend billions on war when our elders are dying in hospital corridors, are not on our side. If we could find ways to stick together, however we identify as individuals, we could challenge these concentrations of power and wealth.

I feel certain that if everyone had a decent home with enough food, meaningful and/or well paid work, and enough free time to pursue leisure interests with friends and family, then very few people would give a flying fuck about what pronouns people prefer, or if someone moved from one “country” to “another”.

Maybe then we can leave a planet that’s still inhabitable for our children.

Of course, it’s also possible that we are not alone. It’s possible that aliens are among us, badly disguised as awkward, orange humans, or owls, or neutrinos.

Who knows?