Now, I usually don’t claim to be an astrophysicist. Wait….no, I NEVER claim to be an astrophysicist. I mildly keep up with breakthroughs, read some books about it, and have been watching breathlessly, along with many others, to see the new discoveries of the James Webb telescope. I also admittedly have gotten a bit of schadenfreude to see so many scientific facts be upturned (or at the least, very heavily modified) in so brief a time.
Scientific thought is predicated upon coming up with an idea, figuring out stable ways to test an idea, and then we cling to the results until another experiment has an outcome that changes it. In practice, however, sometimes we become wedded to scientific facts that hang around a while, and have a bit of cognitive dissonance when those ideas are disrupted. That’s the human bit of us having it out with reality, and it’s to be expected.
Many truisms over time have been tossed out, and we adopt new truisms to take their place. But nothing is static, and all things change. Particularly in the scientific fields, as we get better technology and imaging, these disruptions still occur. For example, many people say that time travel is impossible; I assume that we just haven’t figured it out yet, and that at some point we will. It’s supposed to be impossible to travel past light speed, yet via quantum entanglement photons have been teleported 300 miles away in space. Nuclear materials can glow via the Chernikov effect, which is electrons traveling faster than light. We haven’t even figured out a unified theory of physics, the Big Theory of Everything (or Big TOE as I think of it), that explains both quantum and astrophysics. So sometimes, when people speak in absolutisms, it frustrates me.
Over the last few years, there has been an uptick in official UFO sightings. Many of them are drones or balloons, or even our old favorite, Venus. But, there is a sizable portion of them that…aren’t. They don’t have a rational explanation yet, and are being further explored. These phenomena have reignited our classic debate, “Are we alone in the Universe?”. And I’ve heard a very short-sighted theory that that answer is: YES. I just can’t buy that. With BILLIONS of stars out there, we truly believe we are unique enough to make that assumption? I understand that we can only see snippets of time; our telescopic portals into the past can only see the far distant things that reach us millions or billions of years later, traveling at the speed of light from that distant star or galaxy. But as good as the James Webb telescope is, I still feel like we are making vast assumptions with our little human minds, while staring at a small section of the universe through an empty paper towel roll, and assuming that we have it all figured out. For real this time. And that’s the best we can do, but sometimes we have a hard time admitting that it’s not omniscience.
The idea that there is no other life in the entire universe feels myopic. We make assumptions that life requires what most earth life requires to live, though the deep sea thermal vent ecospheres have proven even life on earth doesn’t require those assumed needs. I am inclined to believe that we don’t even know what we don’t know, and the discordance between the tiny and the large having laws that don’t match in the universe, is just the tiniest edge of things that don’t fit into our earthbound rules.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Douglas Adams had a particularly beautiful idea of a certain form of alien life in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. One of the alien species he came up with was a Hooloovoo, a “super-intelligent shade of the color blue”. That idea of life is just so, well, ALIEN from us, that I think it just might fit. That’s the closest we have come, in my opinion, to being in the ballpark of what life could be like. And we have a lot further to go.
This all brings me to, finally, the point. In fiction, we see all sorts of encounters with intelligent alien life. Abductions, galactic senates, bugs, grey men, reptiles, blue indigenous people being saved once again by poorly masked White Saviors in boring, overdrawn motion capture Ferngully knockoffs by James Cameron…the sky is, literally, the limit. But I found the most convincing illustration of it in the book I just finished: Roadside Picnic by the Russian brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, written in 1971. Clearly that was when Russia was still the USSR, which adds an extra frisson of interest to the themes of the novel. Heavy spoilers to follow, but the book HAS been out since its release in 1972, so I don’t feel to badly about it.
The concept here is that earth has been visited by aliens; they touched down in 6 areas, called The Zones, in an event known as The Visit. If this were a modern hollywood version of the story, those 6 zones would be communication portals setup to tell us universal truths: That we are unique because as a species we are capable of great goodness and great evil, that we serve a larger purpose, that the universe is waiting to welcome us.
This aint’ that story. Instead, in a far more interesting turn of events, the aliens dropped into the Zones, and left. We assume. I mean, we never even saw them. Instead, in a similar vein to HP Lovecraft’s masterpiece the Color Out Of Space, these regions are permanently altered regions of the earth that have odd artifacts left in them, and the aliens themselves passed through without even saying hello. Inside the Zones, strange artifacts are found that challenge space and time around them; they have incomprehensible uses, but as we do, humans in the regions around them have found these curious objects have extended life on the black market. In the towns bordering the Zones, a healthy smuggling market has flourished, fueled by the discoveries of the looters (called “stalkers”) who are brave, or foolish, enough to foray into the Zones to retrieve them.
The book is written in a very Russian style. It’s written with the opposite of the “info-dumping” that is so common in current fiction. We only uncover the truth of what has happened by tangential exposition from the main characters, who are Stalkers that live near one of the Zones. They are just blue collar humans, regular people trying to live in unreal circumstances, who stumble upon philosophical truths along the way. Again, it felt very Russian in this way.
The story takes place 20-30 years after The Visit, and we see how the world has changed. Some of the things left behind have been found to be useful to us; for example, there has been an energy revolution, and cars are now driven with adaptations of this alien technology. But as one of the characters says, any purpose that these items have, that we have found, feels like monkeys cracking nuts with sledgehammers. It’s not the items’ true purpose, but the aliens are so far beyond us mentally that we aren’t even close to truly ascertaining what their technology harnessed. We find that there are different theories about what The Visit was for; some believe it was to leave us puzzle pieces to assemble, so that when they return we can prove that we have passed the mental test required to join their number. Others believe that they are silently and invisibly infiltrating humanity. But the theory that seems to be most true, and the one the book is named after, is that we were just a way stop on their way to somewhere more important, so far beneath their notice that they didn’t bother to say hello. They essentially had a “roadside picnic”, where they adjusted their path on Earth, and left the refuse of what they didn’t need when they continued. From the book:
“A picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around... Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind... And of course, the usual mess—apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow.”
Their trash was so much more advanced than us that decades later we still couldn’t understand it (the mental image I had was from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, of the monkeys in front of the monolith); and perhaps they were right to do so.
This concept of alien interaction absolutely fascinates me. I take no solace in the idea that we are the cold, lonely intelligent life in the universe; on earth we are special, but in terms of the universe that’s a pretty inflated view of ourselves to take. It just doesn’t ring true. But this idea, that aliens are so far beyond us that we only knew of their existence because they tossed their soda cans and banana peels out the window as they passed, and they happened to hit us….this feels right. And fascinating. And unlike anything else I’d ever read.
The sparse ways in which we are exposed to the truths of The Visit and The Zones, against the backdrop of family life, the grind of making ends meet, the struggles with substances and other baser desires and encounters between police, felt so real. Inside the zone, the breadcrumbs we are given describe a place in which mysterious phenomena is haphazardly sprinkled among the abandoned Pripyat-like relics of abandoned human civilization. When the The Visit happened, plagues broke out in nearby areas. Even decades later, there are “bug traps”, concentrations of gravity that are invisible, but suck people in without a trace. There are “happy ghosts”, areas of heat shimmer-like movement that burn people to a crisp. “Hell slime”, a blue slime with blue flames that devours people and transforms anything near it into more slime. Then there are “empties”, copper disks that hover 6 inches apart, that can’t be pushed together or taken apart, that on rare occasions have a blue substance between them. The “golden sphere”, a large golden ball rumored to grant wishes. Additionally, the Zones distort reality and perception for anyone in them, and permanently affect the offspring born of those who spend time in it…even raise the dead. And for those nearby, they aren’t allowed to immigrate due to “bad luck” that seems to follow them.
The fantastic nature of the discoveries, with the simple human portrayals of how they are handled, feels so true and accurate. No matter what incredible advances we witness, our human nature absorbs it and continues on. That holds true for disasters and the sublime. One of the ideas a couple characters discuss is the nature and point of intelligence. As one posit has it, “Intelligence is the ability to harness the powers of the surrounding world without destroying the said world.” In this modern time in which we both feel on the brink of breakthroughs and the precipice of doom, this feels even more poignant. This is a book that I will keep in my reread pile, and continue to mull over for years to come.