When will humans stop lying to themselves?
When asked what makes us different from animals, one usually points out our ability to be self-aware. While statistically remarkable, there are several cases in which we are not the only ones to possess the rare trait.
You might reply with the notion that we have imagination. Perhaps, given the lack of definition to any painting from even the smartest of animals. But that’s hardly a demonstration of actual imagination. We can’t really be sure. Not yet. It’s conceivable that animals can have an imagination, albeit one very limited in contrast to humans.
No, it’s not our imagination, self-awareness, ability to reason, or our ability to abstract. Don’t even get me started on our handiness with tools, or use of language.
We, humans, are the best at rationalizing our world and our actions in it. Moreover, we are the only ones who over-rationalize to the point where we can simultaneously lie to others and believe our own lies.
You may know that, in 1977, NASA launched two space probes, Voyager I and Voyager II. These probes are the furthest human-made objects away from Earth, Voyager I having the most distance. In 2013, Voyager I entered interstellar space. That’s really far away. Approximately 535,097,200,000 football fields, judging by how far away the probe was back in 2015, according to NASA.
Both of the Voyager probes contain “golden records”, holding a variety of music and photos representing humanity, or at least a particular segment of humanity’s view of itself. Foolishly, we also included instructions on where Earth is located, but I’ll get back to that later.
The official reason for sending these records along with the probes was for the benefit of extraterrestrials, and for future humans to rediscover them. Then again, maybe we were also insecure about our own annihilation, and what better way to preserve an echo of humanity than to send it out into space where it will be safe from all humans.
What do the golden records really say about us?
The music included by Beethoven, Chuck Berry, etc., and the folk music are all well and good on their own. What value this would have to extraterrestrials beyond confusion, I don’t know. Maybe our collective consciousness is a lot like a single human who just likes the idea of being noticed by someone else.
Photos sent with the records seem to suggest a harmless race of people who love building structures, observing(and eating) lower lifeforms, and picking cotton.
All of this media we’re sending out to extraterrestrials is really our own perception of our best selves. Naturally, we want to look good on camera, and for space bastards that want to enslave or eat us. Nevertheless, it’s lying by omission, and worse yet, we all believe the lie.
We believe that humanity is about fine music, happy families, and good food. People look at things like the golden record and take pride in what humanity has to accomplish, and look forward to a future where Klingons and humans can cooperate.
What we should have done is included some photos of warfare, mushroom clouds, the holocaust, gang fights, human exploitation, vomit porn, torture, genocide… all that stuff we do all the time that we pretend we don’t. If we’re going to give aliens or future humans a good idea of what we’re about, shan’t we offer forth both our best and our worst?
Except we’re embarrassed of ourselves, and we tell ourselves our achievements are great, and we look out into the stars in search of people like we are — the same way we once saw faces in nature in the sky, and called those “gods”. Our narcissism is so strong that we don’t even need reflections, and we just see ourselves in everything wherever we go. All I have to say is we’ll be damn lucky if aliens are even half like the ones you see on Star Trek.
There’s this saying that a deal predicated on a lie can only go downhill. If you were an extraterrestrial and you discovered humanity was lying to you, how would that make you feel? I, for one, would slowly back away and never return.
We’ll be fortunate if an alien life form can “feel” at all besides hungry. For all we know, the predominant life forms in the universe are just big blobs that consume solar systems like plankton in a cosmic ocean. But our hubris made us send out a beacon that not only signals nearby intelligent life, but we included a map on how to find us. Fortunately, it has later turned out to be woefully inaccurate.
How advanced can we really be if we wouldn’t even accept photos of naked humans to be included on the Voyager probes? Advanced enough to annihilate ourselves and possibly others if they are unlucky.
People like to dream that there is life out there in the universe, and they rationalize this by counting the numbers of stars, concluding that “there must be life out there.” This is despite having only one known instance of life occurring anywhere, and a single occurrence makes a statistical probability not. We don’t really have any idea how common life really is, no matter how much we can hope based on the nature of carbon or the number of Earth-like planets there are.
Perhaps there is life out there, or at least was. What if there’s an intrinsic nature to “life” that limits it to its own destruction? After all, have you ever known of a civilization that lasted forever? Humans in general haven’t been around that long in the grand scheme of things, and countless other species have come and gone due to causes both known and unknown.
Maybe life only ever gets smart enough to know how to blow itself up, and manages to do so inevitably through lack of planetary unity or mere error. Our own civilization has seen some close calls to threatening its own existence, and nuclear weapons haven’t even been around for 100 years. Not long ago, a Norwegian rocket set off a false alarm in Russia that came strikingly close to throwing us into a third world war, but this time with total devastation and fallout. It was fortunate that they realized the trajectory in time to call off any response that had been activated via Boris Yeltsin’s “nuclear briefcase.”
There’s so much space between planets and Earth-like planets have existed long enough that perhaps self-destruction by dangerous knowledge occurs 99.9% of the time.
Even if we don’t destroy ourselves, it’s questionable whether or not we’ll even resemble ourselves in 100 years from now. With advances in genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and robotics, if we are still around in any capacity, it’s possible we might not have the same desires and needs of the humans now who look out into the stars.
The possibility of building our own realities in a digital realm seems much, much closer than contacting extraterrestrials in any meaningful way. Once a human consciousness can be uploaded into a computer, which can provide a superior reality to that of the outside world, what need is there for the human condition? If one could time travel to around 500 years from now, they may see a planet completely devoid of humans, or so it seems. Robots might be in our place, but if you could life in a reality free from all of the things we lie to ourselves about(and omitted from the Voyager probes), why would you ever want to leave? Moreover, if the nature of this existence resulted in immortality, why ever procreate more humans? If a computer-generated reality can provide limitless happiness, why bother exploring space?
Our existence, or the destruction thereof, may come down to when we become ghosts living in machines –– free of desire, curiosity, hatred, and all the real things that make us who we are.
At the very least, maybe we’ll have learned to live in the truth and to not kid ourselves.
