Voice From a Sky

Voice From a Sky

Looking at the stars olways makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why, I ask myself, shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? (Vincent Van Gogh).

The world is nearly all parceled out, and what there is left of it is being divided up,, conquered, and colonized. To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far. (Cecil Rhodes, Las Will and Testament, 1902).

We are quite sure that if there were other intelligent beings in the universe, we will be able to communicate with them. They will be probably older than we, possibly wiser. They would send us libraries of complex information and there would be a widespread anticipation of imminent secular revelation.

Wonder is the basis of worship (Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, 1833-34). Image by © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

The extraterrestrials are likely to be far ahead of us, certainly more than a few hundred years farther along – perhaps thousands of years ahead of us, or even millions.

What would beings who are thousands of years ahead of us be capable of? Or millions? The artifacts of a sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial civilization would be indistinguishable from magic.

We can pose no threat to them whatever. They have nothing to fear from us, and that will be true for a very long time. This is no confrontation between Greeks and Trojans, who were evenly matched. This is no science-fiction move where beings from different planets fight with similar weapons. If they wish to destroy us, they can certainly do so with or without our cooperation…