contact

Something that strikes you is that for more than half a century, scientists absolutely believed in aliens. They existed, in our own solar system, and without any doubt. It was not a matter of speculation, but one of certainty, and the only thing left to do was to go out and meet them – not even find them. Scientists believed that a simple trip to Mars would do the trick. We have not been to Mars yet, but only in the seventies did people realize that Martians did not exist. Till then, they went on living their lives under the impression that a close neighbor had life.




Now we know for sure that life does not exist anywhere else in the Solar System, and probably never did. We also know that contact with life anywhere else, without the said life being intelligent will be impossible for the foreseeable future because of the limitations of technology. In fact, there is considerably doubt that it will ever be possible at all because of the limitations of physics. Even in the eventuality of intelligent extraterrestrials making contact, the interaction will span atleast most of a quarter of a century, and about as long to get mutual feedback. Our only hope is the existence of wormholes as we currently understand them – but no one really wants to purposely put themselves in a black hole, and there really isn’t one around.




So basically, we are alone.




Now, the common conscience is still a little excited about the existence of extraterrestrials, but we all believe that contact will be a wonderful thing, bringing about huge changes in our manner of thinking, our cultures, our technologies and if the more hare-brained and far fetched theorists are to be believed, our sex lives. The fact that we are not alone will probably not really change how we live our lives all that differently.




Because believing in God is more or like believing in Aliens, we do so without a shred of evidence. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and therefore we all will keep wondering – but ninety five percent of this goddamned planet believes in some kind of a God or another, and this fact does not make them abnormal human beings.



For the same reasons, I don’t think contact will really change us.