Aliens, Earthlings and the Universe

The next time you find yourself walking in the dark (power outage, grid down, headed towards robbing a house, escaping a rapist, running from the police etc) under the night sky, give a moment or two (depending on the time you have) to the sky above you and observe the shimmering points of light we call stars. Look at the moon and feel it’s cool light.  Look up and you might be unaware that you are looking through the window of planet earth’s sky, into the vast and eerily quiet universe, breathtaking in its beauty and menacingly destructive in its power. 

Before you look up, look down, feel the night breeze, hear the distant bark of a dog, meow of a cat, caw of a crow, sound of a truck trundling by, rustling of the leaves, feel the earth in motion around you, this conglomeration of ‘Beliebers’, neo Nazis, Muslims, Christians, Giants Fans, rocks, gases and liquids is a rocky planet, one of the two billion rocky planets which scientists estimate, are similar to ours. In the universe containing up 100 billion galaxies (and counting) the figure of earth like planet goes to trillions.

Now look up and think before resuming your walk that, there are a trillion or so planets out there, wouldn’t it be stupidly naïve to think that we are the only living beings who possess cognitive intelligence?  What if somebody out there, may be your age, might be looking up, at you, in the same way you are looking up at the night sky, in a random direction, may be that extra terrestrial ( alien) lies in that direction, both of you divided by the barriers of time and space. What if one day, one of those beings from another galaxy, got smart enough and devised a smart way to reach your planet. Then what would happen? What would befall your beliefs, which tell you about man being in the centre of the universe? The alien that will visit you might or might not believe in a higher deity at all. Its technology would be far far…I mean...far superior than ours and probably would be something that our minds can’t even come to grips with. Why?  Because it takes a civilization of an unimaginable power, intelligence to cross the vast intergalactic distances. It takes the light 2 million years from the nearest Andromeda galaxy to reach our planet Earth. 2 million years. 2 million years ago, the first species of apes from which us humans were to evolve appeared. So if you look up again turn your head to the north east of the sky and observe a certain compressed W pattern, the faint smudge of light on the right of the upper half of the W is your Andromeda  galaxy ( if you can’t find it , then don’t worry, most cant!).  But, bear this in mind, the light that is entering your eyes from that faint smudge of light is already two million years old, when the first of your ancestors were roaming the plains of Africa, shirtless, pant-less, headphones-less and iPod-less. Distances are vast; time is limitless, always ticking.

Coming back to our alien civilization and its assumed power, we would find this alien civilization doing scientific investigations on us in the same we do experiments on guinea pigs, rats and monkeys. The explanation of their behavior lies in our perception of whether it’s ok to conduct gruesome experiments on other living beings or not. May be the aliens who are visiting us regard us in the same way; we regard the ants or cock roaches. Perspective.

Now look around, you see that old woman, feeble on her legs, slowly crossing the road, see that unshaven 40-year-old man heading back home, bills and children’s fees on his mind, take a look at the coolly dressed teen heading to a friend’s house. Imagine how an alien arrival would affect them. When Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492 to Americas, the resulting visitation of Europeans nearly wiped off the native American-Indian tribes whose bodies didn’t have any sort of protection against the diseases that the Europeans carried with them, e.g. small pox. What diseases, what plagues would an alien visitation bring on earthlings? Ever wondered about that?

Now look at yourself and place yourself in the grand order of the universe. The ant eats a grain, the chicken eats the ant, you eat the chicken, you die, you become part of the soil, on which the grain grows and the whole process repeats itself until a giant asteroid smashes into earth and  strips it of all things living. Or what if an alien spaceship comes across our earth and destroys it not unlike ourselves destroying ant mounds or bird’s nests for no apparent reason other than fun. And all of this is just a minute event in the trillion of events happening in the universe. Nothing is special in this universe. Only if we are able to control the movements of the atoms, the spin of a galaxy, the explosion of a supernova, the movement of giant clusters of galaxies, then we can say that we might be something special. Might be.

But here we are, engaged in petty battles and schemes when we should be engaging in exploring the universe.  The modern age owes its existence to Columbus and his peer’s dedication to exploration.  And until and unless we find a way to restrain our incessant plotting and scheming against each other and set out to explore the worlds beyond our planet, then we might just usher ourselves into a new age of exploration an age of new scientific understanding, reason and cultural revolution.

Did we misunderstood the Devil ?

A question came into my mind and I need to answer it. Where do all these villains come from? Voldemort, Darth Vader, Shafqat Cheema, Hitler, Stalin, Nixon, how do they become the persons they are? Is it entirely their own fault? Wrong choices as we are often led to believe. Or, does the fault lies with the society in which those people grow up. Or, does the blame lies on both parties.

Evil has been there. Ever since man decided to be inquisitive. Curious of either knowledge, wealth or the opposite sex. They say that curiosity killed the cat but in Adam’s example, curiosity spawned advanced civilizations.

The many quests to explain the advent of evil and villainy represents mankind’s effort to make sense of the universal dichotomy, i.e. yin and yang, good and evil, black and white, left and right. But there is a flaw to this dichotomy. Enter Relativity.

What may be construed as something bad in one culture might be completely acceptable in another culture. For example, kissing a woman in public is considered scandalous and unethical in Asian cultures, while in western civilization its part of their daily life. An interesting observation that I have made in my studies is that the culture of a civilization in which a religion occurs, enormously affects that religion. Case study for this observation would be the concept of male female social interaction and dressing norms in Islam and Christianity. The sacredness of the cow in Hinduism, which actually started out with the fact realized by the ancient Indians that the cow was an extremely useful, and a hardy animal for ploughing fields and thus eating it would a waste of resource, hence it was declared sacred.

So here lies the grand flaw. Who decides what is right and wrong. Dare I say God? But who’s God? Christianity’s God? Jewish Yahweh, Muslim Allah or Hindu Brahma. Greek Zeus or the Norse Odin? In the end of it all we achieve is a debate about who’s Deity is the right one.

But getting back to villainy, I think that villains are not evil but misfits in a society. But what makes them misfits in the society? Societal actions or their own decisions?

We are what our society makes us. Before falling in love with Jane, Tarzan always thought that his mom was a gorilla. Some tribes in Papua New Guinea still engage in cannibalism whereas in the rest of the world cannibalism is seen with utter revulsion. So people living in different cultures always think that their own culture is just and right.

But what about the villains? Growing up in our society where a convict becomes a president, can you blame a teenager for becoming a robber? Who has he to idolize? The Quaid? Who is often grossly misrepresented? Each party and faction molds his image to suit its own interests? Dare I say Bibi Aka Shaheed Rani? Who before her death was just acquitted of all the corruption cases through the infamous NRO? Should they idolize ‘Dactar Amir Liaquat’? Or should they idolize Rehman Malik?

As time passes by we consign the memories of Arfa Karim and Dr. Abdus Salam to our national dustbin of memories, we should ask ourselves aren’t we collectively responsible for helping people like Zardari and Rehman Malik rise to power?

But, should we put all the blame on the society then? Critics would argue that an adult is fully capable of making his own decisions, but how can he make the equation work when all the factors of equations come from only one set of inputs (so-called evil inputs).

May be, according to the villain, what he does is right according to him and that doesn’t sit too well with the society. He’s like an outsider, a misunderstood person. Perhaps villainy is like looking at the same thing from two different angles. The Dalai Lama is a terrorist to communist china while he is a spiritual superstar for others. We can’t really decide what villainy is. I know this is a hard thing to say but I think (only think) that evil itself is relative.

I think one of the many doors in the universal hall of mysteries needs to be unlocked. Whether it would be a good revelation or the end of all things, we call moral. I don’t know. I just don’t know.

Forgive my blabbering...Couldn’t help but share them.