The Accidental Drive By Theory and Its Conception
My perception of society is that it's not particularly pleasant; strangers will not automatically love you, you will not constantly get your way, and at times it may appear that society is conspiring against you. Friends and family can act as buffers against the "slings and arrows" of society, but more often you have no choice but to marshal your personal strengths and dare to perform using your very own safety net.
That's a realistic yet not unkind notion of the callousness of human society which mirrors my view of the universe - it is an enormously complex and completely autonomous entity that considers you the random human, if it considers you at all, as a very small speck at best and while not intending to run roughshod over you at any given occasion, just might. Likely by accident. It won't mean to demolish you, of course, but shit happens.
During a small party at a friend's apartment a few weeks ago, the conversation turned to alien intelligence. All of the guests took a turn speculating on how an alien intelligence might view our planet and if it did show up, what its plans might be.
Many ideas were proffered amid much laughter - perhaps the aliens would just pass us by as backward and beneath their notice, with a wave of their many-fingered hands and a dismissive tsk toward our pathetic technology, which can best be expressed as the "Look! How Cool Are We - But We Have Ipods!" theory.
Then there was the less popular but no less plausible theory that alien conquerors would be interested in us from a biological standpoint and good only for dissection or anal probing, which finds expression in the "Humans As Scientific Experiments" theory.
The most bleak and no more or less credible than the others (and I admit this was my contribution) was the "Accidental Drive By Theory", where our entire universe would be inadvertently blown to smithereens by an alien with a big gun who simply couldn't aim straight. (Milky Way Galaxy completely destroyed? Oops. My bad. Quite sorry old chap.)
Since we seem to be on the verge yet again of annihilating ourselves, taking refuge in tipsy party imaginings may be frivolous.
Then again, we may only be left with a sense of humor in the end, and that's a pretty big safety net.
posted by Miliana at 7:18 PM
4 Comments:
First as to your comments on society, my immediate reaction was it's a confederacy of dunces with apologies to the original author of that phrase. Society is simply another man-made construct deemed important by unimportant people who hadn't the courage for and could not tolerate a lack of limits.
As to your Drive By Theory, I think it very apt, and enjoyed the idea we could be easily destroyed by an incompetent, inattentive alien with a hair trigger finger. Frankly, it fits well with my own belief that the Bible was written by various disgruntled and malicious scribes seeking to put a few coins in their pockets so they could have a good time on Saturday night.
As to our place in the universe, let me direct you to a terrific picture. Http:antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html.
It is a picture of Saturn and its rings, yet we (earth) are also visible - as a very tiny blue dot in the left outter ring. We are merely a grain of sand on an enormous beach and it's only our arrogance and gullibility that says we're more.
Why is it necessary to 'go' anywhere? Perhaps it is only necessary to deflate our overwhelming belief that we have a right to feel superior to something we can't understand. For all our angst and bombast, we are only a single small element within a single small element on a massive stage - a wee grain of embedded stardust.
If we were to view earth as a single cell in a massive, living entity, we would certainly not be the nucleus, the protoplasma or the mytocondria although we could be a speck of stray bacteria. Should we be destroyed by an inept alien, it could well be an event similar to leukocytes smothering an invading illness that merely jeopardizes the entire organism...sort of a cosmic medical science taking a stab in the dark.
It is the man-made mythology that we are important that makes us so dangerous. Homo loquacious is a far better designation for us than homo sapiens, because it is our rampant pomposity and verbosity that talks us into trouble when sound thinking is ignored.
I'm laughing ruefully because in suggesting a discussion of new 'values' you not only pushed my button with a loaded word, but opened the possible of a 400,000 word treatise!!!
Artificiality aside, the creation of fundamental and conscious values would be appropriate - but they wouldn't have to be new except if we all adhered to them. One simple step in that challenge would be to strike for all time the badly overused and poorly understood word 'family' from connection with the ignored word and concept of 'values.' Values are values, and whenever the norm contains a modifier, what you really have is an automatic exception and a corruption.
No matter what anyone thinks of Bill Clinton (that's a whole 'nother topic), he spoke to the American Progress Center yesterday on just this topic of values and the common good. One of his truly important points centered on the results of the Genome Project: that worldwide, it was discovered that 99.9% of everyone's DNA is exacly alike, and only one tenth of one percent contained any variation. That automatically makes humanity a member of one big family. The built in problem, of course, is that in their assumption of a single truth, most people get hung up on that .01% to the detriment of all of us.
Perhaps the significance is already with us, but ignored due to our misplaced arrogance. We ARE all alike, and want the same things. Why then should not any other cosmic life be exactly the same as we are? Accepting such a premise as poitential truth both on earth and outside it would eliminate much of the worse within us, making any formalized construct of 'values' unnecessary.
I must agree somewhat with Kaz, especially with the term "family values". It's enough to raise the hackles, it is.
It is a poorly constructed catchphrase that often means nothing more than idealized, highly nostalgic notions that never existed at all in real life, just in our own minds.
We all really must grow up, posthaste. Accept the end of innocence, stop paying attention to bearded godlings in the sky, take responsibility for our actions and start being civilized human beings.
I'm much less erudite than Kaz, but I share her frustration with the state of the world. And much less optimistic than Stoic (who may disagree, but...).
I still stand by the Accidental Drive By Theory - it could happen, and probably far easier than we believe.
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