Life

December 31, 1996
(last edited on April 7, 2006)

When we first began to reach for the stars, we hurtled small unmanned probes, continuously playing a recorded message of peace and conveying some small idea of what the inhabitants of our beautiful planet were like. We searched from our front doorstep, sending out envoys that would take decades just to leave our own solar system and embark on a journey into the great unexplored mass of the galaxy. It would take many millennia for our message to reach the nearest star, and should anyone ever find it, by that time it would probably be one of the few surviving remnants of our once-flourishing civilization. Knowing that, we continued to send several of these testimonies of our culture space-ward, for we wanted to talk.

Later on, politics and the bureaucratic mentality silenced the voice of the idealistic few who saw the value of realizing that the universe did not revolve around our planet, as the theologians once claimed; the money was better spent elsewhere. Soon, however, the governments saw the possibility to do what they had come to do best; to fight, not with weapons, but with money and prestige, and quickly a race was born to establish a national presence in space. They raced with a fervor, not to proclaim our planet’s presence in the universe, but to fly the flag of their own nation-states above the flags of their enemies.

In the midst of this, the scientists and futurists reveled, for finally there was an opportunity to leave the nest and venture out into the great frontier. We wanted to explore, and that we did, placing manned capsules on our satellite and throwing craft that had never before been dreamed of into orbit. One or two small space stations followed, and the dream burned fiercely, but it quickly was snuffed out; after the glory of walking on the nearest planetary body that had so long been the object of contemplation for philosophers and scientists alike, the pinch of the purse strings came. Only one of the nation-states maintained the economic viability to pursue the dream of the stars, as other great powers collapsed in upon themselves. The people of that viable nation soon grew away from the vision, as things back home needed more attention. A few mentionings were made of someday visiting the nearest planet, but nothing was ever fulfilled. The dream was dead, the wars were over, the weapons weren’t needed, and the space explorers were no longer exploited as chess pieces.

Technology had progressed to the point where huge radio dishes, several kilometers in diameter, could be constructed; several were, and they were pointed towards the heavens, the last remnants of the exploration spirit. They tuned into the “watering hole,” a twenty-one centimeter hydrogen line frequency, searching for the transmissions of other intelligent life-forms throughout the galaxy. We wanted to listen. We were met with silence. We knew that the search would be a long one, and that the chances of us being deaf in the midst of a loud roar were so great that not hearing did not mean that there was nothing to hear; nevertheless, the silence was only broken by the static discharge of the plug being pulled. The money was needed elsewhere.

Fortunately, a small grass-roots organization rose like a phoenix from the ashes, attempting to keep the dream alive. With a small cadre of amateur dish users and a few minutes on the larger riggings during the off hours, we managed to prolong the search; ultimately, however, the silence disheartened even these hearty arm-chair explorers, and our spinning, shining blue oasis in the stars soon fell deaf. The dream was dead.

Centuries later, one of our scientists stood gazing out into the bluish-red cast of the atmosphere of the nearest planet, circling the nearest star, that we knew to support life. It was a monumental discovery, proving beyond all doubt that life was a robust process, and not a fluke, as some believed, or proof of the existence of the Prime Motivator, as others maintained. The galaxy could be a veritable playground of inter-cultural dialogue.

It went beyond just life, however. Here was intelligent life, fully sentient; the first of its kind, save for our own culture, that we had ever encountered. The people of this planet had already discovered that primitive life could exist elsewhere; on their red neighbor, once active as this planet had once been active, these people had once found the building blocks of what made them possible. Yet it never made any impact on the people of this newly-rediscovered planet, once called “Earth,” when there were still “Earthers” around to call it that.

Had we not received one of their probes, centuries after the “Hu-mans” had sent it into the stars, we would never have known to travel to what was once thought of as an unremarkable star; ironically, their “New Galactic Catalogue” said about as much of our sun as ours had erroneously said about theirs. Indeed, had we not intercepted their probe, we probably would have never even resumed our own space exploration program.

Here was a totally new culture to be understood. To our scientists; biologists, psychologists, chemists, engineers; everything we knew no longer applied, and no standards we had ever thought of as the societal norm were valid. It was, in the truest sense, what the humans had called a “Zen” experience, and perhaps the philosophers would be better prepared to contemplate something so enormous and complex as another planet’s society. Perhaps only the philosophers could understand why an intelligent society would choose to remain isolated on one planet, scarcely even making it to their own moon, choosing rather to believe in superstition and myth. It was as if their people were walking in a crowd, but bundled so completely that they could not see or feel the many around them; occasionally, they would detect a bump or push in the crowd, and immediately would concoct some explanation to rationalize it away. They chose to believe they were alone, that life could only exist on their planet. Even that they did not truly believe, or could not have; they did not take the care they should have to protect their “unique” world, and now here it was, a planet full of ghosts, a sad testimony to whatever space-faring civilization would happen to discover this once prosperous world. What made it all the more sad was that our own culture once found itself on that same destructive road.

Perhaps it was only the philosophers that could save our own society, now. The discovery of an ancient culture that once existed in the galaxy changed everything; we were no longer unique, and the implications to our religious and social ideas were staggering. But the discovery had all ready been made. The only way to go now was star-ward.