"YOU DON’T BELIEVE IN ALIENS… SORRY, WHAT?"

I know, I know, I’m either a religious creationist kook who thinks the world is only eight thousand years old, or… I’m an idiot who doesn’t understand that there are one billion trillion stars in the visible universe, and that with that amount of possibility, it’s not only possible that life exists on other planets, but probable. That it would be ridiculous, maybe arrogant, to think that this is it. That we are the highest form of life in the entire, vast, large, (you get the point) universe. Either way, I’m an idiot.

I can hear you now, “I mean, it’s the universe for Christ’s sake, Matty! We can’t be it! We can’t be alone here… we just can’t be!!!”

And yet, I think we are.

This is not a very popular opinion. It’s like when I tell people I don’t like The Doors, and maybe only one or two Led Zeppelin songs. Man, I get slammed for that. I always bob-and-weave with the whole, “I like the Stones though. I like all of their songs.” It doesn’t do much. I’m an instant nobody who doesn’t know music from a fart.

I mean, look how cool these guys are:

And… let’s start by saying that I’m not a scientist. One might say that I barely graduated high school. Or you could put it in other words, that I’d passed within a .01 notch of not passing… or that I had a 1.8 GPA or something like that. The point is, I’m no expert.

But are aliens really science, anyhow? Can we conceive of an alien in a way that would fit in some sort of scientific model? A + B = Alien? The answer is no. We can’t. There’s too many factors to the building blocks of life itself. We fail to see all the things that have to take place for there to be life at all. I think we just want it to be true. It makes life more interesting. That there’s little smart green guys visiting and watching us, and occasionally abducting us.

There’s documentaries about hidden military rooms filled with crashed spacecraft, and damaged aliens. There’s videos of something going way faster than it should be, with guys who are way smarter than most of us commenting on it. So… it must be true. Is that it? Or is it that it should be true?

So here’s the thought process behind it. There was a Big Bang — let’s just cut to stars, planets, galaxies being formed. Then, for some reason, something that was made from that stuff that made the planet was formed, and then evolved into these things that could build crafts and travel millions and millions of miles. And not only that, they all seem to want to come here. And fly around. And crash… and probe.

How close is the most reasonable planet that could possibly contain life? I’ve seen estimates of like 4.7 light years away. That’s traveling at the speed of light. Currently our spacecraft reach speeds of up to 10 miles per second. Light travels at 186,282.397 miles per second. I get it, we have a ways to go.

Those aliens though, they got that speed of light thing down. They can travel millions and millions of miles across space, and can probably even fold time somehow, because who wants to spend hundreds of years flying through space to get to that one planet, with those guys on it, and then somehow friggin crash. They can travel through space, but for some reason the minute they get here, they just turn dumb. Like they didn’t have their shit together. I can see one alien saying to the dumb alien:

"Great, Gork, you fucked us. You had one job. We came a hundred million miles at the speed of light and you crashed us, and now we can’t leave, and they’re going to hold us prisoner in some lab in the desert and probe us.”

But you’re saying the aliens can defy one of the laws of the universe (as we see it), which is: nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. I hear you. Maybe they can bend space time. Maybe use a wormhole. You know, be here in seconds. I think that only strengthens my point about being able to do something as incredible as travel through a wormhole, but crash when you get there.

“What happened, Gork?” “I dunno, I figured all that other shit out, but I wasn’t counting on that flock of birds that got sucked into the radioactive core. I think we’re fucked.”

Don’t act like you don’t think there’s aliens in some desert lab that crash landed back in the 50’s. I know you do. “But that was the 50’s,” you say, “Aliens are smarter now than back then.”

And evidently, the ones that don’t crash, like to play chicken with pilots.

“Ya, Gork! I think he saw us! Go man! Go! Hahaha! I think we’re losing him! Stupid humans! Let’s cruise some backwoods podunk shit-holes and see if we can find someone to probe.”

And why all the secrecy? It’s like Jesus or Santa or something. Just come on out and say it. “I’m here.” Where are you now, Bigfoot? You see what I’m saying? If they were that interested in us (which if you believe in evolution, that they evolved too) (just much faster than we did) (or they were relatively older because their planet became a planet sooner) why hide? Wouldn’t you roll up and say,

“Hey you un-evolved little bitches. Get your shit together.” Or, “We exist, you can stop looking, just sit back, relax, and enjoy your probing. Someone evolved before us, and probed us too.”

I just don’t buy the whole mysteriousness of it all. And who’s to say the aliens have that much time on their hands to be flying from galaxy to galaxy to probe stuff. I mean, I would if I could, but still.

But here’s where the alien wheels really fall off for me. This place can seem mundane. I mean a constant Groundhog Day in some ways. You wake up, shower, coffee, job you hate, home, tv, bed, repeat. That’s a truncated version, but most likely accurate. There’s that light out there, and it’s hot sometimes, but you can’t look directly at it, it’s orange, or something, and then it gets dark because it goes away, and it gets colder when it’s dark, and sometimes there’s this glowing thing up there that we landed on at some point, but other than that, what’s on Netflix?

So in that lifeless shuffle along to the grave, we fail to recognize all the causes for life. I think I heard the Dali Lama say something to the effect of, “The causes of death are many, the causes of life are few.” I don’t often disagree with the Lama, but on this one thing, I think he may have been drunk when he said it. I think the causes of life are fucking many and if you take one out, you get a rock with some mud on it.

Without a magnetic field, how would the Sun’s radiation feel? Or that shiny moon thingy that looks like a sliver sometimes, could we really have life on Earth without tides? No. Or if we were just a little closer to the Sun? Burn up I think. Or a little farther? Frozen. What about all of the different protective layers that protect us? Troposphere. Stratosphere. Mesosphere. Thermosphere. Ionosphere. Exosphere. That’s a lot of spheres, and if you take one out? You get that rock, with mud. If you’re lucky. But what about the ozone layer? Sort of need that. We get a tiny five degree worldwide temperature increase and shit starts going bananas, let alone lose one of our precious spheres.

Life as we know it needs a few things: Got water? Sure if a comet slams into you, they think. Oxygen? Nitrogen? Carbon? Got all that? Need that. How about too much carbon dioxide or sulfuric acid like Venus? Yeah, kooks back in the day saw green on Venus and thought it was plants. Nope, that was excited oxygen. Whatever that is. Like I said, I just eked by with a 1.8 GPA.

Think about the volcanic activity that happened billions of years ago and how that affected our atmosphere. And all of the conditions that are harmful to life, but just enough so that things evolved and became stronger, and not dead. You need hardship for evolution. Just not too hard. So whatever planet those aliens came from, must have been just right.

What about the rate at which the Earth spins in relation to the Sun’s exposure to it? Or tectonic plate shifts? Or weather patterns? Take that out? Take any out and you get the rock with mud. If you’re lucky.

Life doesn’t have to exist.

It’s not something that springs out of a concoction wherever and whenever the ingredients are placed together. Life is not necessary. Look at all the species of plants, bacteria, insects, viruses, mammals, the races of humans, the things that fly, the things that swim, how much difference there is… and that all had to take place to create us. The things that could imagine an alien in the first place.

I don’t think I’m arrogant for not believing that there’s aliens or that we are the highest form of life and maybe the only life in the universe. I think it’s the opposite. I think it’s knee shaking humility in the sight of creation itself. And the wonder that there is anything at all. Whether god did it, or something just banged, it’s all pretty much the same to me.

Because if you think that this is it, that this is the manifestation of the most beautiful place the universe has to offer, that it’s not out there somewhere else, that we are the most incredible creation ever to exist and ever will, maybe we’d treat the planet differently. Maybe we’d treat each other better.