I recently read an article in that bastion of journalistic integrity, you know, The New York Times, that detailed some extraordinarily exciting discoveries made by some slick astronomers concerning a cosmological phenomenon called "exoplanets." (Whew ... that was quite a mouthful. I should have a job with the Sociology department.)
Well, I won't bore you with the scientific details of the article, mostly because I didn't understand them. However, the gist of article was this: astronomers may have new evidence for the existence of many planets orbiting stars outside the domain of our happy-go-lucky solar system.
Needless to say, aficionados of the possibility of extraterrestrial life should be sufficiently enthused by this announcement. After all, the more planets there are out there, the more likely one of them is to be populated with alien life, right?
However, to paraphrase a friend of mine in Panarchy, my previous statement was loaded with "sketch." Philosophers and physicists alike have for years argued that ours could very well be the only life-bearing planet in the whole big fat universe -- a rather jaunty thought, isn't it?
But let's not throw the baby out of the cart and into the frying pan just yet. The possibility of extraterrestrial life has always piqued our desires in some deep-seated, Freudio-Jungo-Lacanian ways. Many of you may have seen "Independence Day" or "Mars Attacks!" in the past year, and while these were both fatuous pieces of zero-IQ tripe, let's play amateur structuralist for a moment, and analyze how these films might have reflected the subtle underpinnings of the current cultural zeitgeist. (Yes, I should definitely be working for the Sociology department.)
In both of these films an alien presence came to our planet, and proceeded to attempt to annihilate us like so much cogency in the average Pearl Jam lyric. The underlying structure? Well, Americans like disaster movies. But consider this: in nearly every alien-themed film ever made, the aliens are either a beneficent panacea, offering humanity the possibility of having all of its ails immediately cured, or a supernatural terror, devastating humanity with their incomprehensible and unbelievably advanced alien technology. Isn't our curiosity and longing where extraterrestrial life is concerned really an innate desire to transcend our tedious earthly existences, to be exposed to something outside the parameters of consciousness' inescapable ennui? (Forget about Sociology; I'm going to have become a Professor of Rhetoric or something -- this is just too much fun.)
But aliens have more than this mere uber-ontological appeal -- think of all the people who are consumed by Roswell conspiracy theories. As the popularity of "The X-Files" attests, many Americans don't trust their government, and extraterrestrial life emerges as the consummate meta-narrative of our government's byzantine machinations -- the aliens really have been out there all along, and the same government that brought us the IRS and J. Edgar Hoover has been covering it up! A more lucid thinker might observe that, considering the well-documented evidence of our government's sickening policies of cover-up concerning, among others, Asian-Americans during World War II and Native Americans for the past three hundred some-odd years, we have reasons more verifiable than Roswell to be suspicious of our government, but why let our discussion get rational now? We're just getting warmed up.
And remember, it isn't just crackpots and idle movie fans who are intrigued by the alien question -- the eminent astronomer Carl Sagan devoted his life to its study (funny, though, how he was outlived by Jeane Dixon). I, for one, am both an idle movie fan and a crackpot, and would be most excited by our first true contact with extraterrestrial life. For one thing, such an event might nip in the bud the anthrocentrism that has dominated too much Western philosophy and religion since time immemorial. Maybe if we stop seeing ourselves as the be-all, end-all of creation, we'll start to curb our ongoing plunder of the planet's natural resources at the expense of any species that gets in our way. (Oops ... maybe Environmental Studies is the department for me after all.)
But still, when you get right down to it, none of us may even live to see our first encounter with extraterrestrial life, exoplanets and so forth aside. So what conclusion may we draw from our discussion of the alien question and its cultural and historical significance in terms of scientific and philosophical parameters?
Well, none, really, but what else is new?
