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The frustrating thing about assessing the threat of
alien invaders is that it is a science without a subject. Over a
century of ruminating and we're still pretty much where we started.
At the beginning of the 20th century no one had ever seen
any sort of extraterrestrial life. We didn't have much
more to guide us than our knowledge of Earth biology and related
sciences and deductions about how such might work on other planets.
Today, with all our advances in the life sciences, physics, and
astronomy, we are still exactly where we were. True, we
have thousands of depictions of what we think intelligent beings from
space would be like and many of these are quite sophisticated, but
even the best share with the worst one thing: they are based on
nothing more than speculation.
Indeed, our ideas about what beings on other
worlds might be like tells us more about ourselves than about them;
particularly about the writer's assumptions about whether or not there
is a God or not, whether life ultimately arises from a conscious will
or due to mindless physical processes, and whether reason is a
miniature reflection of divine thought or something that comes with
the brain like juice in a roast beef.
If we can't settle even these major differences,
small wonder we can't agree as to whether or not they have ray guns.
So what will the potential Invader from the Stars
look like? |
