Researchers out of Oxford published a paper several months ago, Dissolving the Fermi Paradox, which attempts to confirm what many, including myself, have feared: that extraterrestrial sentient life does not exist, and not only in our galaxy, but in the universe itself. We should have heard them by now, we should have detected a trail, evidence of some kind. But it’s not there. We may very well be alone, in the infinite void. It’s almost impossible to approach the almost Lovecraftian strangeness of the idea. Better that we turn back to our phones and ignore it. And the absurdity reaches greater proportions when it’s realized that, here we are, alone on a watery blue dot in a vacuum devoid of life, slaughtering, enslaving, and otherwise lording it over others at every opportunity. Is there any picture more pathetic than that? U.S.-made missiles obliterating other people’s children of our species that happen to reside in poor-as-dirt Yemen, on a rock floating in an empty auditorium that has no Creator and has no purpose nor end. And so I marvel at the depravity of our species. But then I listen to this:
Did any other species in this universe produce anything close to Johnson’s masterpiece before extinguishing itself in an orgy of totalitarianism and genocide? Were there any equals to Heifetz or Paganini that arose before their alien governments ripped apart hydrogen atoms over their cities? Will ears in another galaxy, ten billion years from now, hear Cliffs of Dover? Or will we be the only witness? If we govern, regulate, or nuke ourselves to death, at least let the record show that when we were here, that we reached closer to an absolute concept of beauty than anywhere else. That seems to be the tragedy of our race, that, in the midst of the wanton acts of self destruction, Freud’s death drive on a planetary scale, some of us are able to produce art, music, and culture of incomparable beauty.
The idea that we are alone in the universe has a postscript: We are the beginning of life in the universe. The universe in not old, but young, and we are the first explorers, the first creators, the first engineers of other forms of life. And what appears to be an inevitable self-destruction of our species is just a phase that we will soon outgrow, as we evolve into something more.
